A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“All my heart is yours, sir: it belongs to you; and with you it would remain, were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence forever.”
Source: The Bronte Sisters: Three Novels: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
“All my heroes, I guess, like John Wayne and all those guys, they drank and they smoked and did all the manly things. It was expected of you. And now abstinence in all kinds of forms is a part of living. It's a pretty - I don't smoke anymore, I quit that 42 years ago”
“All my high school papers were written in the rare book room.”
“All my houses are isolated. Many is the time I just stay home alone.”
“All my humor is based upon destruction and despair.”
“All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.”
“All my ideas had been wrong. Schizophrenia wasn't a split personality. It was a brain disease, a chemical imbalance. People with schizophrenia did hallucinate. They heard voices commanding them to do things. They heard voices talking about them. Sometimes they had delusions, like that they were the Prophet Elijah, or Moses. People with schizophrenia were very sick. Mostly the disease started in people who were very young, just starting their lives. Sometimes drugs helped get their hallucinations under control. Sometimes drugs didn't help at all. Very often people with schizophrenia didn't get better. Some of them spent their whole lives in institutions.”
Source: The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness
“All my images are self-portraits, even when I'm not in them.”
“All my important decisions are made for me by my subconscious. My frontal lobes are just kidding themselves that they decide anything at all. All they do is think up reasons for the decisions that are already made.”
“All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.”
“All my inspiration comes from life. That's how it never stops, in a way.”
“All my instincts are one way, and all the facts are the other, and I much fear that British juries have not yet attained that pitch of intelligence when they will give the preference to my theories over Lestrade's facts.”
Source: The Adventure of the Norwood Builder - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story
“All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.”
Source: Girl, Interrupted
“All my interesting stories are from before I was on television. Nothing interesting has happened to me since then. Maybe it's because the most interesting thing in my life is the show and that's on telly.”
“All my internal women and children wanted to create greatness. They held my spiritual bones wherever I was, all that time.”
Source: In the midst of the womb
“All my jewelry has stories.”
“All my jobs have been with food in one way or another since 1948. My parents were in the hotel business, and I just loved the warm hearted people who worked so hard with such good humor.”
“All my joys resemble more a momentary intoxication than the real gold of happiness. It was all but an illusion.”
“All my kids love superheroes, but my middle daughter in particular is obsessed with Wonder Woman and Batgirl.”
“All my knowledge comes from research.”
“All my laurels you have riven away, and my roses; yet in spite of you, there is one crown I bear away with me... One thing without stain, unspotted from the world, in spite of doom mine own! And that is... my white plume.”
“All my legitimate jobs were embarrassing. I used to be stock boy at an Odd-Lot, making $35 a day.”
“All my lies are only wishes / I know I would die if I could come back new.”
“All my life
I have been restless--
I have felt there is something
more wonderful than gloss--
than wholeness--
than staying at home.”
Source: The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays
“All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.”
“All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on the black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates,. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel....Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay.”
Source: The Thirteenth Tale
“All my life as an artist I have asked myself: What pushes me continually to make sculpture? I have found the answer. art is an action against death. It is a denial of death.”
“All my life chocolate has made me ill. I don't know if I'm allergic or what, but even the smallest amount leaves me with a blinding headache. Eventually, I learned to stay away from it, but as a child I refused to be left out. The brownies were eaten, and when the pounding began I would blame the grape juice or my mother's cigarette smoke or the tightness of my glasses—anything but the chocolate.”
Source: Dress Your Family In Corduroy And Denim
“All my life has been about proving myself.”
“All my life," he said, "I have been strangely, vividly conscious of another region—not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind—where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires, the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust in the balance”
Source: The Willows
“All my life, I ain't understand shit about what was going on. A thing just happen, then something else happen, then something else, an so on, and half the time nothing making any sense. But Dan say it is all part of a scheme of some sort, and the best way we can get along is figure out how we fit into the scheme, and then try to stick to our place. Somehow knowing this, things get a good bit clearer for me.”
“All my life I been doin' what people tell me to do. Now, I'm telling them.”
“All my life I been waitin' for I been prayin' for, for the people to say that we don't want to fight no more. They'll be no more wars and our children will play, one day.”
“All my life I believed I became an athlete through my own determination, but it's impossible to think that being descended from slaves hasn't left an imprint through the generations.”
“All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.”
“All my life, I'd been accustomed to thinking of life as things that moved: rabbits, dogs, fish, other people. Life that mattered had been life like me, life that breathed and bled, life that ate and slept. I'd been aware of that other layer of life, of the still but living things that supported it all, but I'd thought of it as the lower layer, as the less important stratum of life. Empty prairie was for plowing or grazing; land that was too poor for farming or cattle was wasteland. I'd never lived near a forest like this, but when I'd come to one, I'd understood why it existed. The trees were to be taken for lumber. The land had to be cleared to become useful. The idea that forest or prairie or even wasteland should be left as it was had never occurred to me. What good was land until it was tamed? What good was a piece of earth that did not grow wheat or fruit or grass for cattle? The value of every bit of land I'd ever trodden, I'd reckoned in terms of how it could benefit a man. Now I saw it with the eyes of a forest mage. Here life balanced as it had for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Sunlight and water were all that was required for the trees to grow. The trees made the food that fed not only whatever moving creatures might venture through this territory, but also became the food that replenished the soil when their leaves fell to rot back into earth. This working system was as refined and precise as any piece of clockwork ever engineered by man. It worked perfectly.”
Source: Renegade's Magic
“All my life I’d been the solid one. The dependable one. The one that laughed in the face of danger—not because I wasn’t frightened, but because you either laughed or cried, and I was sick and tired of being weak. Was it still bravery if you felt you had no choice?”
Source: Hunt Me! I Crave the Chase
“All my life I'd heard people tell their black boys and black girls to "be twice as good", which is to say "accept half as much". [...] This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile.”
Source: Between the World and Me
“All my life I dreamed of an apartment in Paris where I could cook, and now I have one, on the Left Bank.”
“All my life I dreamed of having someone think I was beautiful.”
“All my life I had a rapport with black caddies.”
“All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.”
“All my life I had believed that unless I was perfect I would not be loved.”
Source: Prime Time (Enhanced Edition): Love, health, sex, fitness, friendship, spirit; Making the most of all of your life
“All my life I had feared imprisonment, the nun's cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people.”
Source: Seven novels and other short stories
“All my life I had feared to-morrow, until I decided to have faith and to live to-day in courage.”
Source: A Fortune to Share
“All my life I had lived on the presumption that there was no existence beyond... flesh, the moment of being alive... then nothing. I had searched in superstition... But there was nothing. Then I heard the sound of my own life leaving me. It was so... tender. I regretted that I had paid it no attention. Then I believed in the wisdom of what other men had found before me... I saw that those simple things might be true... I never wanted to believe in them because it was better to fight my own battle. You can believe in something without compromising the burden of your own existence.”
“All my life I had thought that if you worked hard you would be rewarded. If you worked your ass off, there would be some reward for you. But now I knew that the reward was just the chance to work your ass off.”
“All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my uncles. I had to fight my brothers. Girl, child ain't safe in a family of men, but I ain't never thought I had to fight in my own house. I loves Harpo. God knows I do. But I'll kill him dead before I let him beat me.”
“All my life I have always known I was born to greatness.”
“All my life I have arrived early only to find myself standing self-consciously on a corner, outside a door, in an empty room, but the closer I get to death the earlier I arrive, the longer I am content to wait, perhaps to give myself the false sensation that there is too much time rather than not enough.”
Source: Great House: A Novel