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A Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All A Quotes

“As soon as I look up, his eyes click onto my face. The breath whooshes out of my body and everything freezes for a second, as though I’m looking at him through my camera lens, zoomed in all the way, the world pausing for that tiny span of time between the opening and closing of the shutter.”

“As soon as I moved into the house, I planted a Discovery apple tree at the foot of the garden, by the yew hedge. A gift to the Norse gods for eternal youth, but in truth a nod to the apple tree of my childhood, whose canopy shaded the patch of phlox growing underneath, whose long stems and flowers the colors of sugared almonds hid a treasure trove of fallen fruit. Discovery is a scented apple, with bright, acid flesh that does not keep well. The small, slightly flattened fruit are best eaten straight from the tree. The flesh is white as frost, flashed lightly with strawberry pink. A child's apple. It is aptly named. Brought up as I was in a world of Dairylea, Ritz Crackers and Wonderloaf, the flavor and scent of these pale fruits were my first hint that there was something more interesting out there to eat. My tree, twenty years old now, awaits the lacework of soft-green lichen that covered the branches of my parents' and, infuriatingly, phlox has so far refused to grow beneath its boughs. It is the earliest apple, ripening in August. A fruit I think of not only as the herald of the apple season, with its Michaelmas Reds and Blenheim Oranges, its Cornish Honeypins and Ribston Pippins, but as the beginning of everything.”

“As soon as I moved to New York, I experienced Hurricane Irene and then Hurricane Sandy hit me in quite a big way. I had 12 days without any electricity or any water. The thing that I realized the most from it was that we've become so dependent on technology. There's so much accessibility to information that suddenly when everything is cut off, you're completely lost, and you start asking deeper and more profound questions - how short life is, and how grateful we should be for things.”

“As soon as I open this door, I'll be free. FREE! No more goofy cats screaming in my face and eating my shoes. No more biting and scratching and chasing me down the street. Outside this door is a big, wonderful world where goofy cats don't turn into furry whirlwinds that hit me on the head with a spatula. And soon I will be a part of that world once again!”

“As soon as I opened my eyes, my vision was obscured by a large quantity of black fur, a cold, wet nose, and an enormous tongue. I was not offended at all--- quite the contrary--- and let Shadow lick my cheeks before burying my face in his neck. "Poor dear," I murmured. "There, there--- you needn't worry about me leaving you again!" He has been like this each morning since my return, but I can scarcely object. I missed him as much as he missed me, and have vowed never again to venture anywhere he cannot follow.”

“As soon as I realized that I didn't need meat to survive or to be in good health, I began to see how forlorn it all is. If only we had a different mentality about the drama of the cowboy and the range and all the rest of it. It's a very romantic notion, an entrenched part of American culture, but I've seen, for example, pigs waiting to be slaughtered, and their hysteria and panic was something I shall never forget.”

“As soon as I show that I have some good qualities, do some act of kindness in spite of insult, my color is forgotten, and I am well treated. Again, I have observed that colored men of character and intellectual ability have been treated as men should be by all, whether friends or enemies; that is to say, no prejudice of color or race has ever been manifested.”

“As soon as I start to write I'm very aware, I'm trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I'm writing - and I think that this is important for all writers - I'm trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth. I write two lines or three lines. I will immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a writer, and I'll read those lines as if I had never seen them before and as if I had never written them.”

“As soon as I started winning swimming races, I became seen and I didn't want to be seen. And not only seen but seen in a swimsuit at the exact age you are self-obsessing about your body. Someone said I had boy's shoulders. It was a stupid thing but there were lots of stupid things and you feel them all at that age. As a teenager I'd have happily been invisible. People called me "The Fish". They didn't mean it as a compliment. I was shy. It was one of the reasons why I preferred the library to the playing field. It seems a small thing, but it really helped, having that space.”

“As soon as I stopped trying to exploit my literary skills to advance my career or enhance my reputation, I found that I was opening myself to the text, could lose myself to the beauty of the words and in the wisdom of the writer. It was a kind of ekstasis, an ecstasy that was not an exotic, tranced state of consciousness but, in the literal sense of the word, a going beyond self.”

“As soon as I suspect a fine effect is being achieved by accident I lose interest. I am not interested...in unskilled labor. ...The scientific actor is an even worker. Any one may achieve on some rare occasion an outburst of genuine feeling, a gesture of imperishable beauty, a ringing accent of truth; but your scientific actor knows how he did it. He can repeat it again and again and again. He can be depended on.”

“As soon as I was born, my mom said I was humming 'When the Saints Go Marching In,' or something like that, you know? It's in the family. And in that neighborhood [Treme, in New Orleans], I think everybody in the neighborhood has some type of musical influence, even if they don't play instruments or anything. It's the way they talk to you, the way they say your name - it's all musical.”