A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“As I went out of the room Lila started in her half-sleep, she whispered: "Watch me until I fall asleep. Watch me always, even when you leave Naples. That way I'll know that you see me and I'm at peace.”
“As I went through 'This Progress,' one of two performance pieces by Tino Sehgal that transform Frank Lloyd Wright's emptied-out spiral into a dreamy Socratic-purgatorial journey, the museum literally fell away. I was suspended in some weird nonspace.”
“As I went through the city by day
I saw shadows in sunlight;
But in the night I saw everywhere
Stars within the darkness.”
Source: Irradiations Sand and Spray
“As I went to college, I went into radio and television. Now I suppose most people think that's one step ahead of basket weaving as a major in college, but it was part of the journalism department.”
“As I went to stand up, I felt a tiny point of pressure on my back.
"Don't move," Kasey whispered.
I stayed bent over.
"Drop the knife," she said.
"Excuse me, I'm using it," I said.
She swallowed hard. "For what?"
"Mom and Dad. You."
The pressure on my back increased. "Drop it, Alexis."
Drop it? Like I was a bad dog running around with a sock in my mouth.
"How long will this take?" I asked, setting the knife on the floor. "I'm in the middle of something."
Get in the bathroom," she said.
The faster I indulged her, the faster it would be over with. So I walked into the bathroom. She followed, kicking the knife toward the end of the hallway and flipping on the bathroom light.
"What's this all about, Kasey?" I asked, turning around. At the sight of my face, she gasped, and the point of the fireplace poker she was holding wavered in her hands. I realized a second too late that I'd missed my chance to grab it and smash it into the side of her head.
"What's happening to you?" she whispered.
I glanced in the mirror. The darkness had begun to spread from my mouth and eyes. It leached out in inky puddles with thin tendrils of black snaking out in delicate feathery patterns.
What's happening to me? What was she talking about?
"So you have a pointy stick," I said. "Big deal. get out of my way."
"What are you going to do?" I sneered.
"Poke me?"
'I'll hit you, Lexi." Her face was stony. "As hard as I have to."
Whatever. I'm really not in the mood.
"Can we talk about this in the morning?" I asked. After I kill you?
"No," her eyes hardened. "Get your toothbrush."
"What?"
"Pick up your toothbrush, and stick it down your throat."
"Kasey-"
"Do it," she said.
"Ugh, fine. You're sick, you know that?"
"Get in the tub."
"Happy?"
I stuck the toothbrush into my throat. Instantly, I gagged and doubled over.
"Do it again," she said.
"God Kasey," I cried. Stabbing people was one thing. But making them barf- that was just disturbing.”
Source: From Bad to Cursed
“As I went walking I saw a sign there And on the sign it said "No Trespassing." But on the other side it didn't say nothing, That side was made for you and me. This land is your land, this land is my land From California to the New York island From the Redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters This land was made for you and me.”
“As I went walking That ribbon of highway I saw above me The endless skyway I saw below me The lonesome valley This land was made for you and me.”
“As I wish for you dreams that will soothe your soul, dreams that will whisper of secrets untold. I wish for you dreams that will capture your life, dreams so spectacular and bright you can know no strife. I wish for you my child, a dream as brilliant as sunrise, and warm as it's gentle rays. But most of all precious one, I dream for you, of many peaceful days.”
“As I witness the dead of beloved ones, it makes be become more conscious that life indeed has an end.”
Source: Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind
“As I woke up this morning, and I opened my eyes,
I am very grateful to see another sunrise”
“As I work among my flowers, I find myself talking to them, reasoning and remonstrating with them, and adoring them as if they were human beings. Much laughter I provoke among my friends by so doing, but that is of no consequence. We are on such good terms, my flowers and I.”
Source: An Island Garden
“As I work day after day, inspirations from different places go into the work. It's combination, but it's also comparative. I'll be reading two books at the same time that are totally different [and] then have two stories mix together.”
“As I work in the afternoon on committing to paper some of my morning's thoughts, I find myself just about to close on the knotty question of whether or not I believe in God. In fact I am about to type, 'I do not believe in God', when the sky goes black as ink, there is a thunderclap and a huge crash of thunder and a downpour of epic proportions. I never do complete the sentence.”
“As I work over clauses and commas, I understand that rhythm and cadence have little connection to import, but they should carry the reader on a pleasurable journey. Sentences can be long, three or more complete clauses dancing together, or two clauses with one leaning on the other, or an added phrase of only a few syllables. Sentences and paragraphs are as various as human beings.”
Source: Essays After Eighty
“As I worked on projects which fulfilled a real human need forces were working through me which amazed me. I would often go to sleep with an apparently insoluble problem. When I woke the answer was there. Why, then, should we who believe in Christ be so surprised at what God can do with a willing man in a laboratory? Some things must be baffling to the critic who has never been born again.”
“As I worked to explain how to avoid bad strategy, I began to see that one cannot really evaluate or criticize a strategy unless there is a fairly clear statement of the problem the strategy is trying to solve.”
“As I would learn later in life, money makes you extremely handsome.”
Source: How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It
“As I would learn later on, developed countries will always welcome the Einsteins of this world -- those individuals whose talents are already recognized and deemed to have value. This welcome doesn't usually extend to the poor and uneducated people seeking to enter the country. But the truth, supported by the facts of history and the richness of immigrant contribution to America's distinction in the world, is that the most entrepreneurial, innovative, motivated citizen is the one who has been given an opportunity and wants to repay the debt.”
Source: Becoming Dr. Q: My Journey from Migrant Farm Worker to Brain Surgeon
“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.”
“As I would see it, Birthday offers chance to remember the snapshot of blamelessness, learning and revising botches without having any dread of coming up short. Fill this Day with adoration, satisfaction, joy, more with the decisions you like to furnish, stuff you like to eat, places you wish to visit, outfits you revere to wear, meet individuals that issue to you most. Its your day, and it enables you to do everything which makes this day noteworthy. Have Great Birthday festivities!!!”
“As I would soon learn myself, cleaning up what a parent leaves behind stirs up dust, both literal and metaphorical. It dredges up memories. You feel like you're a kid again, poking around in your parents' closet, only this time there's no chance of getting in trouble, so you don't have to be so sure that everything gets put back exactly where it was before you did your poking around. Still, you hope to find something, or maybe you fear finding something, that will completely change your conception of the parent you thought you knew.”
“As I wouldn't wear a costume, I couldn't imagine him wanting to wear one. And seeing that the greater part of my wardrobe is black (It's a sensible colour. It goes with anything. Well, anything black)[...].”
Source: The Absolute Sandman
“As I wound my way up the mountain, the road began to perform multiple switchbacks like a snake in motion. I had to carefully maneuver through the 180-degree switchbacks at walking speed with one leg dangling off the side of the bike for balance or support, as needed. The road became steeper as it clung to the mountainside like a creeper vine. It was no more that twelve feet wide…
Higher and higher the road went, but I didn’t look over the edge until I came to a switchback where I had to stop the bike to walk it through the curve. When I stood with the bike between my legs, I saw that I was less than five feet from what had to be an eight hundred-foot drop-off. There were no guardrails.”
Source: Driving Toward Destiny
“As I write in 2012 we certainly do not believe that it is over yet, and the worst may be yet to come. Efforts by governments to solve the underlying problems responsible for the crisis have still not gotten very far, and the 'stress tests' that governments have used to encourage optimism about our financial institutions were of questionable thoroughness.”
Source: Finance and the Good Society
“As I write, in early July 2025, threatening plumes of smoke sweep across the horizon. Dava Moor, twelve miles from Laikenbuie Ecology Trust, is on fire. The wildfire currently spans over nine miles. As well as the terrible impact on local people, I grieve for the animals. Endangered northern damselflies and white-faced darters live in lochs now surrounded by flames. Never has it felt more pressing to restore health to our habitats and increase Scotland's resilience to climate change.”
Source: Reforesting Scotland 72: Autumn/Winter 2025
“As I write in my book, there is a misnomer that destroying another person's position is an effective and practical way to negotiate.”
“As I write in the book, I do not regret either of my votes for President [Barack] Obama, nor my support of him when he ran for the Senate before that. I get excited as I ever did when I see that black man on Air Force One. But I won't settle for symbolism, and our President's record should be open for analysis.”
“As I write, there rises somewhere in my head that queer and very pleasant sense of something which I want to write; my own point of view...”
Source: A Writer's Diary
“As I write these recollections of women who survived, I hope my readers are taking careful note of why they did.
They screamed.
They fought.
They slammed doors in a stranger's face.
They ran.
They doubted glib stories.
They spotted flaws in those stories.
They were lucky enough to have someone step up and protect them.”
Source: The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story
“As I write these words, it occurs to me that the story is in fact a timely one, in that it demonstrates the evils which a science left to itself may inflict upon an unsuspecting mankind”
Source: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes
“As I write this entry, I touch a saber-tooth tiger skull in my office. Without stars there could be no skulls”
Source: The Physics Book: From the Big Bang to Quantum Resurrection, 250 Milestones in the History of Physics
“As I write this, we are in an especially divisive era in American politics. There are questions about who holds power, who abuses it, who profits from it, and at what cost to our democracy. It is a time of questions about what makes us American, of shifting identities, inclusion and exclusion, protest, civil and human rights, the strength of our compassion versus the weakness of our fears, and the seductive lure of a mythic "great" past that never was versus the need for the consciousness and responsibility necessary if we are truly to live up to the rich promise of "We the People."
We are a country built by immigrants, dreams, daring, and opportunity.
We are a country built by the horrors of slavery and genocide, the injustice of racism and exclusion. These realities exist side by side. It is our past and present. The future is unwritten.
This is a book about ghosts.
For we live in a haunted house.”
Source: Before the Devil Breaks You
“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”
“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only 'doing their duty'”
Source: Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays
“As I write, I am struggling with the ghost of someone I loved and lost. I now understand more fully the difficulties you were going through, and I realize how painful it must have been for you to move on.”
“As I write, invariably I encounter more questions and answer those as I go.”
“As I write, Johnny Rotten's first moments in "Anarchy in the U.K." - a rolling earthquake of a laugh, a buried shout, then hoary words somehow stripped of all claptrap and set down in the city streets - I AM AN ANTICHRIST - Remain as powerful as anything I know. Listening to the record today - listening to the way Johnny Rotten tears at his lines, and then hurls the pieces at the world; recalling the all-consuming smile he produced as he sang - my back stiffens; I pull away even as my scalp begins to sweat.”
“As I write, Kim Beazley has the numbers and the game looks over.”
“As I write, snow is falling outside my Maine window, and indoors all around me half a hundred garden catalogues are in bloom.”
“As I write, there is a craze for what is called psychoanalysis, or the cure of diseases by explaining to the patient what is the matter with him: an excellent plan if you happen to know what is the matter with him, especially when the explanation is that there is nothing the matter with him.”
Source: The Critical Shaw: On Literature
“As I wrote 'The Christmas Lamp' I realized that tradition is priceless, whether you have a small family, a large family, or no family.
Tradition doesn't have to be logical; it only has to emphasize the light of Christ and his everlasting love.”
Source: The Christmas Lamp: A Novella
“As I wrote at Lake City Community College in the mid-90s there were a great many things I could only discuss with the help of literary devices – allusion, allegory, metaphor. And now... I'm just like... "Well, stepdad drank himself to death." May you all find a way to write what you now cannot write.”
Source: Some Books Are Not For Sale
“As I wrote, despite the malicious craft practiced by Hochschild and others, I am glad that an extensive documentary record of the EIC and of European colonies more generally survives, not that I expect any honest use of them in our current moral panic. Hochschild was merely an early entry into a genre that has since blossomed into an industry of scholars who “interrogate” the archives to cough up evidence of the evils of the West. There is of course no such documentary record of the horrific conditions the Europeans replaced, and in any case most Western readers would not buy a book on endemic venereal disease in Africa or stool disputes among the Kuba. A salacious tale on the Belgian king and his mistresses torturing black people to pay for their follies? Now you’re talking!”
Source: The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
“As I wrote earlier, I see every human being as an eccentric to one degree or another. This can be true only if our assumption that there is a standard for normality is wrong. And I believe it is wrong. The human race is at the apex of all life-forms because, no matter how strenuously sociologist and politicians and others of their persuasion insist on defining our species into interest groups and factions and classes and tribes, the better to control us, in truth our greatest strength is in the uniqueness of each of us. Einstein, in his genius, can reveal to us much about the workings of the universe, and a child with Down syndrome can teach us, by his or her profound gentleness and humility, how urgently this troubled world needs kindness. Everyone has something to contribute.”
“As I wrote in Sensual Lifestyle, your sensuality is supposed to be your GPS. Nonetheless, while sensuality is a perfect navigation system, it does not provide reasons or rationale for why it engages or not. It is simply the intelligence that works for the pleasure and satisfaction of its own.”
“As I wrote more I became more critical of myself and I think that you have to be your harshest judge. I don't ever believe that what I write is my best work. I always think that I can hone it. I can always think that I can make it a little bit better.”
“As I wrote Working toward Whiteness, I came to see one historic task on the New Deal - and one in which it succeeded - as the fostering of fuller U.S. citizenship among immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and their kids. But this very achievement separated poorer and often despised immigrant workers from Europe and workers of color in unprecedented ways.”
“As I'm getting older a lot of my friends I used to go out and party with, they're all dead. The fact that I've been through that, I'm not proud of the fact that I've been through all that, but it's part of my journey. I'm lucky to be alive. I'm lucky to be playing music.”
“As I'm getting older, I want to make sure every film I do really counts.”
“As I'm getting older, I'm getting funkier. So that's what I'm wearing. Funky shoes.”