A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“And yet I would not freely exchange my science for those of my fellow laureates. They are forever confined in their professional discussions to the small numbers of their fellow scientists.”
“And yet if all of it hadn't happened, would we still be us? Or is the miracle of our relationship the result of a precise combination of tragedies that broke us both so completely we collided? We became something entirely new?”
“And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.”
“And yet, if I had seemed unmovable or appeared to be standing firm in the path that was the only life I had ever known, nature is truly an unstoppable force and would eventually have its say”
Source: An Immovable Object
“And yet in a funny way our lack of success led to our breakthrough; because, since we could not get a cell line off the shelf doing what we wanted, we were forced to construct it. And the original experiment ... developed into a method for the production of hybridomas ... [which] was of more importance than our original purpose.”
“And yet, in a sense, in choosing to be deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have in a sense really chosen the good.”
Source: A Clockwork Orange
“And yet, in all of his efforts to understand the Mirror, his great mystery, his attempts to prove logic had failed again and again.
Tests and theories and science—these things were his bread and butter—and they were meaningless now, in the face of mystery.”
Source: The Paragon
“And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of the scaffolding, "Darling, let me dip into it," to a young servant-maid who holds up a dish of ragout under the pergola, happy to serve it to the umbrella-maker who is celebrating a successful transaction, a white lace parasol bought to display at the races by a great lady in love with an officer who has smiled at her taking the last jump, happy man, and still happier his horse, flying over the obstacles, seeing a francolin flying in the sky, happy bird freed from its cage by a painter happy at having painted it feather by feather, speckled with red and yellow in the illumination of that page in the volume where the philosopher says: "Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.”
Source: Invisible Cities
“And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion. And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?”
Source: Lord Jim
“And yet it bewildered him that people truly believed capitalism to be about making things or providing services at a profit. He found it extraordinary how most people disliked speculators but thought of them as peripheral, as harmless bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. They fail to recognize the very opposite is true, […] that enterprise long ago became a bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. That, in reality, workers, inventors and managers resemble driftwood buffeted hither and thither on a manic torrent of runaway finance.”
Source: Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
“And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.”
Source: Cat's Eye
“And yet, it's not the going up that scares me, but the coming down. It's the misstep, the feeling of not being able to catch myself.”
Source: The Holiday Switch
“And yet it's probably this moment that I will have loved the most, the one when I accepted the fact that life is just as it appears to me now, quietly heart-breaking.”
Source: Bonjour Tristesse / A Certain Smile
“And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us of time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.”
Source: The Sense of an Ending
“And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.”
“And yet, it was still a performance. Odin and I both knew it. It was a kind of play, a dream of how things might have been if he and I had been capable of trusting each other for a change. And so we hunted, and sang, and laughed, and told heavily edited stories of the good old days, while each of us watched the other and wondered when the knife would fall.”
“And yet Jane still couldn't help feeling sorry for the anticyclonic. That mutant left-handed runt of the liter... the poor damned giant evil beautiful thing...”
Source: Heavy Weather
“And yet knowing all these mistakes were yours, beautifully yours, and you came out the better for it... the boy I left behind well on his way to becoming an extraordinary man and an extraordinary king." Merlin smiled. "If only from your choice of princess alone.”
Source: The Last Ever After
“And yet leaving the room, she did not leave me, for we were mysteriously linked together during the next hours. When Tib left 405 she'd gone outside to walk on the boardwalk. After a while she stepped down onto the sand where she could walk right at the water's edge. She walked for a long, long time. The sun sank lower in the winter sky. Facing south as she was, her eyes began to be bothered by it. Tib has always been extremely light-sensitive, choosing chairs that looked away from windows and so forth. She started to turn around and head north with her back to the sun when a sentence popped into her mind with the force of a command.
"Look neither to the right nor to the left, but only straight ahead."
But straight ahead was the dazzling sun. She walked on a little farther, squinting her eyes. It was getting late. She was a long way from the hotel by now. The meeting in Room 405 must be over, she thought: I would be looking for her. But each time she started to turn around and retrace her steps, the extraordinary words reappeared in her mind.
"Neither right or left. Only straight ahead."
The sun was lower still. Glittering on the waves, glaring straight into her eyes. And still Tib walked on, into the blinding light...”
Source: They Speak with Other Tongues: A Skeptic Investigates This Life-Changing Gift
“And yet . . .looking here at this bottle which by its number signalized the day when Colonel Freeleigh had stumbled and fallen six feet into the earth, Douglas could not find so much as a gram of dark sediment, not a speck of the great flouring buffalo dust, not a flake of sulphur from the guns at Shiloh . . .”
Source: Dandelion Wine
“And yet,” Magnus said, “during that year, they are man and wife.”
Matthew looked up, his green eyes flashing. “And during that year, I will do nothing. What kind of person do you think I am?”
Source: Chain of Gold
“And yet many of us do it without families," Nynaeve said. "Without love, without passion beyond our own particular interests. So even while we try to guide the world, we separate ourselves from it.We risk arrogance, Egwene. We always assume we know best, but risk making ourselves unable to fathom the people we claim to serve.”
Source: Towers of Midnight
“And yet more bright
Shines out the Julian star,
As moon outglows each lesser light.
[Lat., Micat inter omnes
Iulium sidus, velut inter ignes
Luna minores.]”
“And yet my life seemed to be just one big mass of people. I would never ask some people in for tea to fill up time. I just never would do it. Whenever I seemed to have a quiet hole, I would paint. That was what I would choose to do to fill up the time.”
“And yet my life started here and stopped here one summer long ago, in this house, which no longer exists, in this decade, which slipped away so fast, with this never love that altered everything but went nowhere.”
Source: Enigma Variations
“And yet my, not only my faith, but my experience has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy. That that mapping is insufficient. That the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence, or a novel, or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism.”
“And yet, no joy is ever unalloyed,
and worry worms its way into delight”
“And yet not a dream, but a mighty reality- a glimpse of the higher life, the broader possibilities of humanity, which is granted to the man who, amid the rush and roar of living, pauses four short years to learn what living means”
“And yet now and then he let himself steal a glance at her. Lovely dark colors of her skin, hair, and eyes. We are half-baked compared to them. Allowed out of the kiln before we were fully done. The old aboriginal myth; the truth, there.”
Source: The Man in the High Castle
“And yet on that bench at Jacobacci, I was glad I had left everyone else behind. Although this was a town with a main street and a railway station, and people with dogs and electric lights it was near enough to the end of the earth to give me the impression that I was a solitary explorer in a strange land. That illusion (which was an illusion in the South Pole and at the headwaters of the Nile) was enough of a satisfaction to me to make me want to go forward.”
Source: The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas
“And yet on the other hand unless warinesse be us'd, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image, but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye.”
“And yet one arrives somehow, finds himself loosening the hooks of her dress in a strange bedroom-- feels the autumn dropping its silk and linen leaves about her ankles. The tawdry veined body emerges twisted upon itself like a winter wind.”
Source: Selected poems
“And yet one can't forever stand on the shore; at some point, even if filled with indecision, skepticism, reservation and doubt, you either jump in or concede that life is forever elsewhere.”
“And yet one cannot face death without reflecting on questions of religious faith, or the lack of it, and on matters of morality, or its absence. For instance, I wonder whether doctors here are discouraged from talking about death with their patients by the strictly scientific and secular nature of the way our medicine is taught and practiced.”
Source: Dying: A Memoir
“And yet one carries the sins of his forebears as one carries their features in his face. One bears their blood, and their honor or their blight.”
“And yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered, because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply.”
“And yet, out of the blue, a tender moment would erupt so suddenly between us that the words I longed to tell him would almost slip out of my mouth.”
Source: Call Me by Your Name
“And yet Praecursoris is not punished the same way, only because it is not practical, and he is needed for breeding?”
Source: His Majesty's Dragon
“And yet rapid change brings chaos as well as progress.”
Source: The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
“And yet Rebecca felt that it was hard to tell whether the secret algorithms of Big Data did not so much reveal you to yourself as they tried to dictate to you what you were to be. To accept that the machines knew you better than you knew yourself involved a kind of silent assent: you liked the things Big Data told you you were likely to like, and you loved the people it said you were likely to love. To believe entirely in the data entailed a slight diminishment of the self, small but crucial and, perhaps, irreversible.”
Source: Version Control
“And yet self-knowledge is thought by some not so easy. Who knows, my dear sir, but for a time you may have taken yourself for somebody else? Stranger things have happened.”
Source: The Confidence-man: His Masquerade
“And yet shall Love himself be heard,Though long deferred, though long deferred:O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred:Music is Love in search of a word.”
Source: Poems of Sidney Lanier
“And yet she could not forgive herself. Even as an adult, she wished only that she could go back and change things: the ungainly things she’d worn, the insecurity she’d felt, all the innocent mistakes she made.”
“And yet she loved to learn. This almost unnatural passion saved her that night (...)”
Source: Vita Nostra
“And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on.”
Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns
“And yet she was content to pair off with this dull young adventurer in the tarnished lace! It was, he supposed, the sort of thing to be expected of a sex that all philosophy had taught him to regard as the maddest part of a mad species.”
Source: Scaramouche
“and yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had love and been loved back. she was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. a mother. a person of consequence at last.”
Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns
“And yet something had changed, since it was back to my cell that I went to wait for the next day . . . as if familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent.”
“And yet sometimes it seems to me I am there, among the incriminated scenes, tottering under the attributes peculiar to the lords of creation ... Yes, more than once I almost took myself for the other, all but suffered after his fashion, the space of an instant.”
Source: Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable
“And yet still I worried. I like being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry is yet another side effect of dying.”
Source: The John Green Collection