A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Almondine
To her, the scent and the memory of him were one. Where it lay strongest, the distant past came to her as if that morning: Taking a dead sparrow from her jaws, before she knew to hide such things. Guiding her to the floor, bending her knee until the arthritis made it stick, his palm hotsided on her ribs to measure her breaths and know where the pain began. And to comfort her. That had been the week before he went away.
He was gone, she knew this, but something of him clung to the baseboards. At times the floor quivered under his footstep. She stood then and nosed into the kitchen and the bathroom and the bedroom-especially the closet-her intention to press her ruff against his hand, run it along his thigh, feel the heat of his body through the fabric.
Places, times, weather-all these drew him up inside her. Rain, especially, falling past the double doors of the kennel, where he’d waited through so many storms, each drop throwing a dozen replicas into the air as it struck the waterlogged earth. And where the rising and falling water met, something like an expectation formed, a place where he might appear and pass in long strides, silent and gestureless. For she was not without her own selfish desires: to hold things motionless, to measure herself against them and find herself present, to know that she was alive precisely because he needn’t acknowledge her in casual passing; that utter constancy might prevail if she attended the world so carefully. And if not constancy, then only those changes she desired, not those that sapped her, undefined her.
And so she searched. She’d watched his casket lowered into the ground, a box, man-made, no more like him than the trees that swayed under the winter wind. To assign him an identity outside the world was not in her thinking. The fence line where he walked and the bed where he slept-that was where he lived, and they remembered him.
Yet he was gone. She knew it most keenly in the diminishment of her own self. In her life, she’d been nourished and sustained by certain things, him being one of them, Trudy another, and Edgar, the third and most important, but it was really the three of them together, intersecting in her, for each of them powered her heart a different way. Each of them bore different responsibilities to her and with her and required different things from her, and her day was the fulfillment of those responsibilities. She could not imagine that portion of her would never return. With her it was not hope, or wistful thoughts-it was her sense of being alive that thinned by the proportion of her spirit devoted to him.
"ory of Edgar Sawtelle"
As spring came on, his scent about the place began to fade. She stopped looking for him. Whole days she slept beside his chair, as the sunlight drifted from eastern-slant to western-slant, moving only to ease the weight of her bones against the floor.
And Trudy and Edgar, encapsulated in mourning, somehow forgot to care for one another, let alone her. Or if they knew, their grief and heartache overwhelmed them. Anyway, there was so little they might have done, save to bring out a shirt of his to lie on, perhaps walk with her along the fence line, where fragments of time had snagged and hung. But if they noticed her grief, they hardly knew to do those things. And she without the language to ask.”
Source: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
“Almost 100 years after women secured the right to vote in 1920 through the 19th Amendment, we still do not have equal rights under the Constitution. My question for the GOP candidates: Do you support the Equal Rights Amendment?”
“Almost 15 with music, we have so many guitars that we developed over the years. The latest one is 'The Majesty' guitar, which I'm really proud of.”
“Almost 20 percent of the people living in Germany today have a foreign background. The problem is that Germany can't really offer foreigners an identity because the Germans hardly have a national identity themselves. That is certainly a result of Auschwitz.”
“Almost 24 million children - one in three - are likely growing up without their father involved in their lives.”
“Almost 30 years before Rwanda, before Darfur, more than 2 million people - mothers, children, babies, civilians - lost their lives as a result of the blatantly callous and unnecessary policies enacted by the leaders of the federal government of Nigeria. It's this charge that's dominated the book's Nigerian press, so far as I can see, the accusation, on the one hand, that Awolowo hatched "a diabolical policy to reduce the numbers of his enemies significantly through starvation - eliminating over two million people, mainly members of future generations.”
“Almost 4.25 lakh toilets were built in 2.62 schools nationwide in one year; this gives self-confidence that we can do what we want.”
“Almost 40% of all young adults are living with their parents. This is a 75-year high in America. Forty percent of young adults are living with their parents. I see stuff like this, and I think it's a good thing I didn't become a parent, because if that were happening to me, you wouldn't want to be my kid.”
“Almost 400 years ago, Shakespeare was portraying adolescents in a very similar light to the light that we portray them in today - but today we try to understand their behavior in terms of the underlying changes that are going on in their brain.”
“Almost 60,000 average Americans had the courage to go out and charge those beaches on Normandy, to drop out of airplanes who knows where, and take on the battle for freedom. Average Americans, the very Americans that our government now and this president does not trust to make a decision on your health care plan. Those Americans risked everything so they could make that decision on their health care plan.”
“Almost 70 per cent of your fitness battle is won the day you realise what your body needs and when. I've made my own diets, and I decide for myself what works for me.”
“Almost 70 years have gone by, and I've still got that feeling when I write... Writing, for me, is still it. It has always been the basis of everything I do. I'm a writer who performs, not a performer who writes. I love the act of writing. It's still a thrill for me.”
“Almost a century has passed since Japan first entered the world community by concluding a treaty of amity with the United States of America in 1854.”
“Almost a quarter of our planet is a single mountain range and we didn't enter it until after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the moon. So we went to the moon, played golf up there, before we went to the largest feature on our own planet.”
“Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those who we cannot resemble.”
“Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.”
Source: The Rambler
“Almost all accidents and injuries happen when an individual is not being present and not paying attention to what they are doing.”
Source: The Four Seasons Way of Life:: Ancient Wisdom for Healing and Personal Growth
“almost all American writers tend to overwrite, to tell too much. I get the disillusioned feeling that novels, today, are sold by the pound, like groceries. It actually takes a great deal more discipline to be able to leave out rather than to throw in everything. This means that you have to say in one sentence precisely what you mean, instead of saying sort of what you kind of mean in hundreds of sentences and hoping the sum total will add up.”
“Almost all Americans would recognize Anchorage, because Anchorage is that part of any city where the city has burst its seams and extruded Colonel Sanders.”
Source: The Second John McPhee Reader
“Almost all arguments are needless because the two ideas being fought over are both broken ideas that stem from a faulty system that’s poisoned by money and power. If you take away money from the equation, people would find that most of the broken ideas and labels they argue over would instantly evaporate. It would behoove humanity to focus on addressing the root issue to solve the myriad of problems stemming from it, and many a root’s problem is money. Money is the main problem that’s holding us back from advancing as a civilization. Well, if you want to be exact, the main problem is the mindset of those who govern, regulate, and influence this planet, which is mostly done with money. So humanity’s mindset is the main problem, and I say ‘humanity’s mindset’ instead of the elite’s mindset because those who govern and regulate the world disseminate their skewed mindset to the common man like an infection, so it also becomes the common man’s mindset. But money is the main problematic tool that those with the skewed mindset who govern and regulate the world utilize to fulfill their agendas.”
Source: The Beasts of Success
“Almost all arguments for skepticism make reference to seemingly ridiculous possibilities—we are being deceived by an evil demon, life is just a dream, we are brains in vats. You might propose psychoanalysis, rather than philosophical reflection, for anyone who worries about these possibilities.”
“Almost all aspects of life are engineered at the molecular level, and without understanding molecules we can only have a very sketchy understanding of life itself.”
“Almost all change is evolutionary, not revolutionary... expectations always travel at higher speeds.”
Source: Mind Set!: Reset Your Thinking and See the Future
“Almost all Christians being wretchedly enslaved to blindness and ignorance, which the priests are so far from preventing or removing, that they blacken the darkness, and promote the delusion: wisely foreseeing that the people (like cows, which never give down their milk so well as when they are gently stroked), would part with less if they knew more.”
Source: In Praise of Folly
“Almost all countries have natural dividing lines, and when ethnic and religious partition occurs in one country, it'll soon happen elsewhere.”
“Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.”
“Almost all doctrinal error is really truth perverted. Truth wrongly divided. Truth disproportionately held and taught.”
Source: Sovereignty of God
“Almost all education has a political motive.”
Source: The basic writings of Bertrand Russell, 1903-1959
“Almost all education has a political motive: it aims at strengthening some group, national or religious or even social, in the competition with other groups. It is this motive, in the main, which determines the subjects taught, the knowledge offered and the knowledge withheld, and also decides what mental habits the pupils are expected to acquire. Hardly anything is done to foster the inward growth of mind and spirit; in fact, those who have had the most education are very often atrophied in their mental and spiritual life.”
“Almost all Europe, for many centuries, was inundated with blood, which was shed at the direct instigation or with the full approval of the ecclesiastical authorities.”
Source: History of the rise and influence of the spirit of rationalism in Europe
“Almost all exploits are simple mistakes.”
“Almost all fear is fear of the unknown. Therefore, what's the remedy? To become acquainted with the things you fear.”
Source: Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words
“Almost all first ladies have had tremendous power on personnel issues, whether the public realized it or not, whether it was Barbara Bush or Nancy Reagan or whoever.”
“Almost all good businesses engage in 'pain today, gain tomorrow' activities.”
“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.”
Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something-anything-down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft-you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft-you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.”
“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.”
“Almost all government starts at a very local level at some point.”
“Almost all great painters in old age arrive at the same kind of broad, simplified style, as if they wanted to summarise the whole of their experience in a few strokes and blobs of colour.”
“Almost all great writers have as their motif, more or less disguised, the passage from childhood to maturity, the clash between the thrill of expectation and the disillusioning knowledge of truth. 'Lost Illusion' is the undisclosed title of every novel.”
“Almost all gun control legislation is constitutionally fine. And, if the court is right, then fundamentalism does not justify the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms.”
“Almost all hard cultures have some ritual focused on voluntary self-denial, such as Ramadan, Lent, or the Fast of the Firstborn. The question is, why? Why do cultures that practice something that makes membership less pleasant historically outcompete cultures that encourage people to indulge in whatever they want? This question becomes more pointed when we look at how common it is for pop cultures to emotionally reward people for succumbing to their base desires, as is seen in pop culture outputs like the Intuitive Eating Movement, which entails telling people they are being healthy by eating whatever they want whenever they want in an age in which we’re surrounded with an abundance of foods that are designed to be highly addictive. Movements telling people to indulge in their immediate desires have been around since the ancient Greeks. These movements resurface during every civilization’s brief golden age and only seem to be successful in the short run. While the pop cultures that produce them consistently die, stodgy hard cultures persist. Why?”
Source: The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models
“Almost all heroism is designed to make you inert by placing it in a context that you can't possibly act on.”
“Almost all human affairs are tedious. Everything is too long. Visits, dinners, concerts, plays, speeches, pleadings, essays, sermons, are too long. Pleasure and business labor equally under this defect, or, as I should rather say, this fatal super-abundance.”
Source: Companions of My Solitude
“Almost all human societies or organisms are held together partly by outside pressures, or fear of a real or fancied danger.”
Source: This kind of peace
“Almost all important questions are important precisely because they are not susceptible to quantitative answer.”
“Almost all institutions own a lot more art than they can ever show, much of it revealing for its timeliness, genius, or sheer weirdness.”
“Almost all Iraqis with any previous experience in the intelligence business are Sunni Arab, increasing the risk of penetration of the new intelligence apparatus by the insurgency.”
“Almost all learning happens in spite of fear, because to learn something you have to explore something new and that is usually something that is frightening. If you are willing to face something that is frightening, you can garter something of value.”
“Almost all life depends on probabilities.”