A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“As usual, Terpsichore, whom the girls called Ree, could not keep still. She twisted back and forth, moving her arms as if they were blowing in the wind. Mnemosyne's fierce little dancer had learned to perform before she learned to walk and had gracefully glided through life ever since. Terpsichore's energy and enthusiasm annoyed her sisters, but where was the fun in creating a family that always got along?”
Source: Bemused
“As usual, the deed was less daunting than the thought of it.”
Source: Buddha, Vol. 3: Devadatta
“As usual, the fickle, unreasoning world took Muff Potter to its bosom and fondled him as lavishly as it had abused him before. But that sort of conduct is to the world's credit; therefore it is not well to find fault with it.”
Source: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
“As usual, there was a story behind the story, and that is where the truth was hidden.”
Source: Beyond All Recognition
“As usual, in every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.”
Source: Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development
“As usual, it occurred to me that words were the only thing that could possibly save me from this situation. This was a characteristic misunderstanding on my part. When action was needed, I was absorbed in words; for words proceeded with such difficulty from my mouth that I was intent on them and forgot all about action. It seemed to me that actions, which are dazzling, varied things, must always be accompanied by equally dazzling and equally varied words.”
Source: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
“As usual, my mind is spinning in circles...is it me? Am I making mountains out of molehills? Being too analytical? Worrying about nothing? Being emotional?”
“As usual, my timing is bizarrely good.”
“As usual, nature's imagination far surpasses our own, as we have seen from the other theories which are subtle and deep.”
Source: The Quotable Feynman
“As usual, no one's ever around when you need them.”
“As usual, the note occupied less than a page and included neither salutation nor closing, Uncle Hal's opinion being that since the letter had a direction upon it, the intended recipient was obvious, the seal indicated plainly who had written it, and he did not waste his time in writing to fools.”
Source: An Echo in the Bone: A Novel
“As usual, the people who are poorest - the blacks, Hispanics and disabled people - are going to suffer more than anyone else under the [Barack] Obama administration.”
“As usual, the sock yarns have no idea what is going on.”
“As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot.”
“As usurpation is the exercise of power which another has a right to, so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to.”
Source: The Second Treatise of Civil Government
“As usurpation is the exercise of power, which another hath a right to; so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which no body can have a right to. And this is making use of the power any one has in his hands, not for the good of those who are under it, but for his own private separate advantage. When the governor, however intitled, makes not the law, but his will, the rule; and his commands and actions are not directed to the preservation of the properties of his people, but the satisfaction of his own ambition, revenge, covetousness, or any other irregular passion.”
Source: Second Treatise of Government
“As Uta Hagen would say, there's the representational actor and the presentational actor. My sister [Maggie Gyllenhaal] came up to me recently after she saw this movie, Southpaw, the movie I did, and she thought there was this exploration of that type of presentation, and a bit of representation as well, if I could be totally honest, where she was deeply moved.”
“As utterly improbable as it sounds, could my pain in some sense not be my pain at all? In fact, could it be that my pain is the agent that heals the pain of another in ways that their own pain never could?”
“As utterly irrational as it might seem, the greed within me has the most limited vision I can possibly imagine as it has eyes only for the few things it doesn’t have, and it is completely blind to all the many remarkable things that it does.”
“As V headed to the door, he wanted to lay down a minefield of triggers in the guy's brain, forge all sorts of neuropathways so that if the bastard thought of Jane sexually he'd feel dread or nausea or maybe burst into tears like a total sissy. After all, adverse impulse training was a godsend when it came to deprogramming.”
“As Val jumped down onto the litter-strewn concrete after them, she thought how insane it was to follow two people she didn't know into the bowels of the subway, but instead of being afraid, she felt glad. She would make all her own decisions now, even if they were ruinous ones. It was the same pleasurable feeling as tearing a piece of paper into tiny, tiny pieces.”
Source: Valiant
“As value investors, our business is to buy bargains that financial market theory says do not exist. We've delivered great returns to our clients for a quarter century-a dollar invested at inception in our largest fund is now worth over 94 dollars, a 20% net compound return. We have achieved this not by incurring high risk as financial theory would suggest, but by deliberately avoiding or hedging the risks that we identified.”
“As variable as flu is, HIV makes flu look like the Rock of Gibraltar. The virus that causes AIDS is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted.”
“As Venus within Eros does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness. We may think he does, but when he is brought to the test it proves otherwise... For it is the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms.”
“As vezes eu queria ter morrido no carro com a Kerry. Acho que teria sido mais fácil para a minha mãe. Ela teria a chance de começar do zero.”
“As vezes, nosso corpo deveria mostrar mais as coisas que nos machucam, as histórias que mantemos escondidas dentro de nós.”
Source: Love Letters to the Dead
“As Vice President one of the things I spend time on is the continuity of government; that's the main reason I'm here is a back up for the President if anything happens to him.”
“As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.”
Source: Religion for Atheists: A non-believer's guide to the uses of religion
“As Vida always said, the best way through bullshit was to wade in, hold your nose with one hand and a grenade in the other, and cut straight to it.”
Source: The Darkest Legacy
“As Violet and Klaus Baudelaire stood, still in their nightgown and pajamas, backstage at Count Olaf’s theater, they were of two minds, a phrase which here means “they felt two different ways at the same time.” On one hand, they were of course filled with dread.
…
On the other hand, however, they were fascinated, as they had never been backstage at a theatrical production and there was so much to see.”
Source: The Bad Beginning
“As Violet, Klaus, and Sunny looked down at the dark lake and thought about their new lives with Aunt Josephine, they experienced a fear themselves, and even a worldwide expert on fear would have difficulty saying whether this was a rational fear or an irrational fear. The Baudelaires’ fear was that misfortune would soon befall them. On one hand, this was an irrational fear, because Aunt Josephine seemed like a good person, and Count Olaf was nowhere to be seen. But on the other hand, the Baudelaires had experienced so many terrible things that it seemed rational to think that another catastrophe was just around the corner.”
Source: The Wide Window
“As Virginia Woolf argues in her 1929 feminist manifesto, A Room of One’s Own, this imbalance should not come as a surprise. Woolf would agree that solitude is a prerequisite for original and creative thought, but she would then add that women had been systematically denied both the literal and figurative room of their own in which to cultivate this state. To Woolf, in other words, solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence.”
Source: Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
“As virtue is necessary in a republic, and honor in a monarchy, fear is what is required in a despotism. As for virtue, it is not at all necessary, and honor would be dangerous there.”
“As virtuous men pass mildly away, and whisper to their souls to go, whilst some of their sad friends do say, the breath goes now, and some say no.”
“As Vivacity is the Gift of Women, Gravity is that of Men.”
“As vivid as it may appear to us, our experience of the passage of time does not need to reflect a fundamental aspect of reality.”
Source: Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
“As vocabulary is reduced , so are the number of feelings you can express, the number of events you can describe, the number of the things you can identify! Not only understanding is limited, but also experience. Man grows by language. Whenever he limits language he retrogresses!”
Source: Plague of Angels
“As vozes confluíram num só mesmo cângrito de vida e horror.”
Source: Caro Jovem Adulto
“As várias formas hodiernas de dissolução do matrimónio, como as uniões livres e o "matrimónio de prova", até ao pseudomatrimónio entre pessoas do mesmo sexo, são, pelo contrário, expressões de uma liberdade anárquica que se faz passar indevidamente por verdadeira libertação do homem. Uma tal pseudoliberdade funda-se numa banalização do corpo que inevitavelmente inclui a banalização do homem. O seu pressuposto é que o homem pode fazer de si o que quer: o seu corpo torna-se assim numa coisa secundária, manipulável sob o ponto de vista humano, a ser utilizado como se deseja. O libertinismo, que se faz passar por descoberta do corpo e do seu valor, é na realidade um dualismo que torna o corpo desprezível, colocando-o por assim dizer fora do ser autêntico e da dignidade da pessoa.”
“As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.”
Source: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
“As Wade Clark Roof noted in his study, the 'weightlessness' of contemporary belief in God is a reality...for religious liberals and many evangelicals.”
“As Walt Whitman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbor multitudes within us. And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle. There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behavior. As a result, you can accomplish the strange feats of arguing with yourself, cursing at yourself, and cajoling yourself to do something - feats that modern computers simply do not do.”
“As Walt Whitman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbour multitudes within us. And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle. There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behaviour.”
“As Walter Scott showed, one could preserve the most intense passion for Caledonia stern and wild, one's own, one's native land, while rejoicing in the triumphs of the British armed forces over Napoleon and expressing devout loyalty to the Hanovarian dynasty, which, despite the madness of George III and the profligacy of his son and heir, had come to represent for Britons not only the virtues of sturdy monarchy under the sublime Constitution, but, most improbably, family values.”
Source: Irish Pages, Vol. 12, No. 2: Scotland
“As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases.”
Source: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
“As WArden Lawes once said of convicts, no man can be called a failure until he has tried something he really likes, and fails at it.”
Source: Best of Sydney J. Harris
“As warriors, as humanitarians, they've taught me that without courage, compassion falters, and that without compassion, courage has no direction.”
Source: The Heart and the Fist: The education of a humanitarian, the making of a Navy SEAL
“As wars come and go, my soldier stays eternal”
“As was demonstrated back in 2012, [Barack] Obama was thought to be in big trouble after that first debate, and he wasn't, was he? That first debate didn't end up hurting Barack Obama at all, did it? I know he had incumbancy on his side, but still. He was horrible that first debate. It didn't matter because there were two more, and there are two more here.”
“As was his custom, Han stood propped against the wall, looking as ruthless as possible.”