A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days.”
“AND what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days; Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune, And over it softly her warm ear lays; Whether we look, or whether we listen, We hear life murmur, or see it glisten.”
Source: The Vision of Sir Launfal And Other Poems by James Russell Lowell, Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Julian W. Abernethy, PH.D.
“And what is that religion that sanctions, even by its silence, all that is embraced in the 'Peculiar Institution'? If there can be any thing more diametrically opposed to the religion of Jesus, than the working of this soul-killing system - which is as truly sanctioned by the religion of America as are her minsters and churches - we wish to be shown where it can be found.”
“And what is the great thing that the stage does? It cultivates the imagination. And . . . the imagination constitutes the great difference between human beings. . . . The imagination is the mother of pity, the mother of generosity, the mother of every possible virtue. It is by the imagination that you are enabled to put yourself in the place of another.”
Source: The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll
“And what is the greatest number? Number one.”
“And what is the joy of Christ? The joy and delight which springs forever in His great heart, from feeling that He is forever doing good; from loving all, and living for all; from knowing that if not all, yet millions on millions are grateful to Him, and will be forever.”
Source: The Good News of God: Easyread Large Bold Edition
“And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.”
“And what is the problem? It is the old problem of the anxious searcher - the mythic in the interior castle, the poet-pilgrim in a dark wood not sure how to proceed. Which way is the right way?”
“And what is the reaction of the British politcal class? Well the Lib Dems, still think that the Euro is a success! I don't quiet think where Cleggy gets this from, I don't know. Prehaps he is cosidering an alternative career, as a stand up comedian, once he's out of politics.”
“And what is the religion of many persons but a kind of demonism that delights in human sacrifices and causes them to look with horror on the greatest part of mankind? Plutarch, it is well known, has observed very justly that it is better not to believe in a god than to believe him to be a capricious and malevolent being.”
Source: The Correspondence of Richard Price: February 1786-February 1791
“And what is the Republican solution to these outrageous [racial] inequalities? There isn't one. And that's the point. Denying racism is the new racism. To not acknowledge those statistics, to think of that as a 'black problem' and not an American problem. To believe, as a majority of FOX viewers do, that reverse-racism is a bigger problem than racism, that's racist.”
“And what is the right woman, the right man? Someone who wants to go in the same direction as you do, someone who is compatible with your views and your values-- emotionally, physically, economically, spiritually.”
“And what is the Scientific Community doing about these problems, young people? THEY'RE CLONING SHEEP. Great! Just what we need! Sheep that look MORE ALIKE than they already do! Thanks a lot, Scientific Community!”
“And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldnt it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men.”
Source: We the Living
“And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?”
Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
“And what is the value of this sexual object to men, since it is they who form her, use her, and give her what value she has? The pioneering male masochist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who spent most of his life bullying bewildered women into wearing furs and halfheartedly whipping him, candidly wrote in his diary that “my cruel ideal woman is for me simply the instrument by which I terrorise myself.” The nature of the act does not change the nature of the act: the female is the instrument; the male is the center of sensibility and power. Roland Barthes, with himself as the lover, essentially endorses the same view of the object’s value and purpose: “Enough that, in a flash, I should see the other in the guise of an inert object, like a kind of stuffed doll, for me to shift my desire from this annulled object to my desire itself; it is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool.”
Source: Pornography: men possessing women
“And what is the very essence of poetry if it is not this 'metaphorical language'-this marking of the before unapprehended relations of things?”
Source: Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning
“And what is this? I asked the earth, and it answered me, “I am not He”; and whatsoever are in it confessed the same. I asked the sea and the deeps, and the living creeping things, and they answered, “We are not thy God, seek above us.” I asked the moving air; and the whole air with his inhabitants answered, “Anaximenes was deceived, I am not God. “ I asked the heavens, sun, moon, stars, “Nor (say they) are we the God whom thou seekest.” And I replied unto all the things which encompass the door of my flesh: “Ye have told me of my God, that ye are not He; tell me something of Him.” And they cried out with a loud voice, “He made us. “ My questioning them, was my thoughts on them: and their form of beauty gave the answer.”
Source: Confessions
“And what is true education? It is awakening a love for truth; giving a just sense of duty; opening the eyes of the soul to the great purpose and end of life. It is not so much giving words, as thoughts; or mere maxims, as living principles. It is not teaching to be honest, because 'honesty is the best policy'; but because it is right. It is teaching the individual to love the good, for the sake of the good; to be virtuous in action because one is so in heart; to love and serve God supremely, not from fear, but from delight in his perfect character.”
“And what is true of a shop-keeper is true of a shop-keeping nation.”
“And what is writ is writ - / Would it were worthier!”
Source: CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE
“And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!”
Source: My Name is Mina
“And what is your name?" Caroline asked him.
He smiled up at her, a little impishly. "I guess Bianca's name for me will work. Call me Bear."
"Bear?" Caroline repeated, doubtfully.
"I think it would be best right now," he said simply. "For all of us."
"You aren't running from anything?" she asked directly.
"No, I guess you could say something is running from me. The law would be on my side, ma'am, if I could get them involved. For now, I'm doing all I can.”
Source: Our Christmas Bear
“And what is your name going to be?" Ms. Isle asks me as we are ending our session. "You need to think of a stage name. Something that will set you apart. A name that will cause the judges to sit up and think, now she is someone special!"
I shrug. “I don’t want to be anyone else. I’m just Brooke.”
“Be aware, everyone else is coming up with a stage name. That’s part of picking out your brand. Just Brooke isn’t going to get any attention.”
“Maybe not," I agree. "But my singing will!”
Source: Just Brooke
“And what it depends on, of course, is whether the story itself is worth the ethical compromise it requires and whether the competition is onto the story.”
“And what kind of habitation pleases God? What must our natures be like before he can feel at home within us? He asks nothing but a pure heart and a single mind. He asks no rich paneling, no rugs from the Orient, no art treasures from afar. He desires but sincerity, transparency, humility, and love. He will see to the rest.”
“And what lesson can we draw from Volantene history? If you want to conquer the world, you best have dragons.”
Source: A Dance with Dragons: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book Five
“And what lights the sun? Its own fire. And the sun goes on, day after day, burning and burning. The sun and time. The sun and time and burning. Burning. The river bobbled him along gently. Burning. The sun and every clock on the earth. It all came together and became a single thing in his mind. After a long time of floating on the land and a short time of floating in the river he knew why he must never burn again in his life.”
Source: Fahrenheit 451
“And what looks dark in the distance may brighten as I draw near.”
“And what made these heart-to-hearts possible--you might even say what made the whole friendship possible during that time--was this understanding we had that anything we told each other during these moments would be treated with careful respect: that we'd honor confidences, and that no matter how much we rowed, we wouldn't use against each other anything we'd talked about during those sessions.”
Source: Never Let Me Go
“And what makes me happy now has changed as well... Its one thing to play in a bar or at a biker festival, and hear a guy who's been drinking beer all day come up and tell you how good you are. For a long time in your life that will make you happy.”
“And what makes the whites who have these middle-class values have those values? Where did they get it? They didn't have these same values four hundred years, five hundred years ago.”
“And what makes you think they won't kill you?”
“And what makes you think they won't kill you?"
"Because I am one of them.”
Source: The Silver Eyes
“And what marvelous things there are for which to be grateful in God's great Creation!”
Source: Words I Have Lived
“And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now.”
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
“and what might seem to be a series of unfortunate events may in fact be the first steps of a journey.”
“And what more could I possibly ask as an artist than that your most precious visions, however rare, assume sometimes the forms of my images.”
“And what more should I say since it expels the whole host of the virtues from the chamber of the human heart and introduces every barbarous vice as if the bolts of the doors were pulled out.”
Source: Book of Gomorrah: An Eleventh-Century Treatise against Clerical Homosexual Practices
“And what most people don't understand is the bulk of business in this country is small business.”
“And what movies we saw! All the actors and actresses whose photographs I collected, with their look of eternity! Their radiance, their eyes, their faces, their voices, the suavity of their movements! Their clothes! Even in prison movies, the stars shone in their prison clothes as if tailors had accompanied them in their downfall.”
Source: Borrowed Finery: A Memoir
“And what my constitutional values are are wholly irrelevant to the job, and so neither you nor anyone else will know what they are.”
“And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.”
Source: A Lion Among Men
“And what, O Queen, are those things that are dear to a man? Are they not bubbles? Is not ambition but an endless ladder by which no height is ever climbed till the last unreachable rung is mounted? For height leads on to height, and there is not resting-place among them, and rung doth grow upon rung, and there is no limit to the number.”
Source: She
“And what of all these spices? They're worth a pretty fortune." She waves a juddering arm across the table, at the tins and glass jars and earthenware pots. All at once a shaft of thin northern light swoops over them, jolting them into luminous life: bubbled glass jars of briny green peppercorns, salted capers, gleaming vanilla pods, rusted cinnamon sticks, all leaping and glinting. The sudden startling beauty of it, the palette of hues--ocher, terra-cotta, shades of earth and sand and grass---the pale trembling light. All thoughts of running a boardinghouse vanish.
I reach for a jar, lift its cork lid. The scent of bark, earth, roots, sky. And for a second I am somewhere else. "The mysterious scent of a secret kingdom," I murmur. The jar contains little pellets, brown, spherical, unexotic. How marvelous that something so plain can have such an enthralling perfume, I think.
"Oh, Miss Eliza. Always the poetess! It's only allspice." Cook gives a wan smile and gestures at the ceiling, where long bunches of herbs hang from a rack. Rosemary, tansy, sage, nettles, woodruff. "And what of these? All summer I was collecting these and they still ain't properly dry."
"May I lower it?" Not waiting for an answer I wind down the rack until the drying herbs are directly in front of me---a farmyard sweetness, a woody sappy scent, the smell of bruised apples and ripe earth and crushed ferns.”
Source: Miss Eliza's English Kitchen
“And what of failure?"
He shrugged."The consequence of not succeesing.Remember what Homer said.Circumstances rule men,not men circumstances.”
“And what of her captors? Did they really think her so frail and helpless that darkness, some rope, and a perversion of blacksmithery would be sufficient to hold the daughter of Pabla la Presica and Alexact?”
“And what of my extended family-birds, beasts, and reptiles? They too have drowned. Every single thing I value in life has been destroyed. And I am allowed no explanation? I am to suffer hell without any account from heaven? In that case, what is the purpose of reason, Richard Parker? Is it no more than to shine at practicalities-the getting of food, clothing and shelter? Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch? (pg. 98)”
Source: Life of Pi
“And what of my wrath, Lord Stark?”
Source: A Game of Thrones
“And what of regrets? I shall live with them. I shall accept my regrets as part of my life, to be numbered among my self-inflicted wounds. But I will not endlessly gaze at them. I shall allow the memories to prod me into doing better with those still living. And I shall allow them to sharpen the vision and intensify the hope for that Great Day coming when we can all throw ourselves into each other's arms and say, "I'm sorry."”