A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“At birth the Devil touched my tongue.”
Source: Dorothy Parker in Her Own Words
“At birth we are red-faced, round, intense, pure. The crimson fire of universal consciousness burns in us. Gradually, however, we are devoured by our parents, gulped by schools, chewed up by peers, swallowed by social institutions, wolfed by bad habits, and gnawed by age; and by that time we have been digested, cow style, in those six stomachs, we emerge a single disgusting shade of brown. The lesson of the beet, then, is this: hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once you’re brown, you’ll find that you’re blue. As blue as indigo. And you know what that means, Indigo. Indigoing. Indigone.”
Source: Jitterbug Perfume
“At birth we are very much like a new hard drive - no viruses, no bad information, no crap that's been downloaded into it yet. It's what we feed into that hard drive that starts the corruption of the files.”
Source: The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star
“At birth we become elements to entity, upon death the entity reverts to elements.”
Source: The Humanitarian Dictator
“At birth we become elements to entity,
upon death the entity reverts to elements.
Make sure to make your trip mean something,
more reason to transcend foolish containments.”
Source: The Humanitarian Dictator
“At birth we begin to discover that shapes, sounds, lights, and textures have meaning. Long before we learn to talk, sounds and images form the world we live in. All our lives, that world is more immediate than words and difficult to articulate. Photography, reflecting those images with uncanny accuracy, evokes their associations and our instant conviction. The art of the photographer lies in using those connotations, as a poet uses the connotations of words and a musician the tonal connotations of sounds.”
“At birth your parents give you a name which they like. A real name is the one which doesn’t have any meaning behind it. If it does then you represent a thing and not a person.”
“At birth, the child leaves a person - his mother's womb - and this makes him independent of her bodily functions. The baby is next endowed with an urge, or need, to face the out world and to absorb it. We might say that he is born with 'the psychology of world conquest.' By absorbing what he finds about him, he forms his own personality.”
“At birth, we are like cartilage - soft, flexible tissue. By the same natural process by which cartilage becomes hard bone, the soft, tender heart of an innocent child can become hardened by the circumstances into which she is born.”
“At birth, we emerge from dream soup. At death, we sink back into dream soup. In between soups, there is a crossing of dry land. Life is a portage.”
Source: Jitterbug Perfume
“At Blackwater Pond
At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled
after a night of rain.
I dip my cupped hands. I drink
a long time. It tastes
like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold
into my body, waking the bones. I hear them
deep inside me, whispering
oh what is that beautiful thing
that just happened?”
Source: New and Selected Poems, Volume One
“At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled after a night of rain. I dip my cupped hands. I drink a long time. It tastes like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold into my body, waking the bones. I hear them deep inside me, whispering oh what is that beautiful thing that just happened?”
Source: New and Selected Poems, Volume One
“At Bloomington, Indiana, I was invited to listen to music written in quarter tones for four harps and voices. I had to go out to be sick.”
“At boarding school you had to wear your name across your chest and your back, and obviously I had a pretty funny name. It wasn't Brown or Smith or Hughes.”
“At boarding schools of every description, the relaxation of the junior boys is mischief; and of the senior, vice.”
Source: A Vindication of the Rights of Men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution
“At books, or work, or healthy play,
Let all my years be passed;
That I may give for every day
A good account at last.”
“At Boston University, I motivated negatively, and I found that although it can work at first, by the end of the year everyone is dying for the year to end and you have lost them. The last two years at BU, I motivated positively and got much better results.”
“At bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.”
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
“At bottom are only two pure forms of legislation - productive and redistributive.”
“At bottom each “exact” science is, and must be speculative, and its chief tool of research, too rarely used with both courage and judgement, is the regulated imagination.”
“At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.”
Source: The Philosophy of Nietzsche
“At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.”
“At bottom is the best soil to sow and grow something new again. In that sense, hitting bottom, while extremely painful, is also the sowing ground.”
“At bottom the world isn't a joke. We only joke about it to avoid an issue with someone, to let someone know that we know he's there with his questions; to disarm him by seeming to have heard and done justice to his side of the standing argument.”
Source: The Letters of Robert Frost
“At bottom, antipsychiatry is still psychiatry. And it doesn't really address itself to women's problems.”
“At bottom, every state regards another as a gang of robbers who will fall upon it as soon as there is an opportunity.”
Source: Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays
“At bottom, I mean profoundly at bottom, the FBI has nothing to do with Communism, it has nothing to do with catching criminals, it has nothing to do with the Mafia, the syndicate, it has nothing to do with trust-busting, it has nothing to do with interstate commerce, it has nothing to do with anything but serving as a church for the mediocre. A high church for the true mediocre.”
“At bottom, I'm a cheerful person.”
“At bottom, no real object is unpoetical, if the poet knows how to use it properly.”
Source: Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann
“At bottom, textual criticism for virtually all other ancient literature relies on creative conjectures, or imaginative guesses, at reconstructing the wording of the original. Not so with the New Testament.”
“At bottom, the battle has been waged on moral grounds. The country has debated whether a society for which the dignity of the individual is the supreme value can, without a fundamental inconsistency, follow the practice of deliberately putting one of its members to death.”
“At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”
“At bottom, the whole concern of religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe.”
Source: The Varieties of Religious Experience
“At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.”
“At Bramasole, the first secret spot that draws me outside is a stump and board bench on a high terrace overlooking the lake and valley. Before I sit down, I must bang the board against a tree to knock off all the ants. Then I'm happy. With a stunted oak tree for shelter and a never-ending view, I am hidden. No one knows where I am. The nine-year-old's thrill of the hideout under the hydrangea comes back: My mother is calling me and I am not answering.”
Source: Bringing Tuscany Home: Sensuous Style From the Heart of Italy
“At breakfast, and while they were packing the few remaining articles, he showed his weariness from the night's effort so unmistakably that Tess was on the point of revealing all that had happened; but the reflection that it would anger him, grieve him, stultify him, to know that he had instinctively manifested a fondness for her of which his common sense did not approve, that his inclination had comrpromised his dignity when reason slept, again deterred her. It was too much like laughing at a man when sober for his erratic deeds during intoxication.
It just crossed her mind, too, that he might have a faint recollection of his tender vagary and was disinclined to allude to it from a conviction that she would take amatory advantage of the opportunity it gave her of appealing to him anew not to go.
...When Tess had passed over the crest of the hill he turned to go his own way, and hardly knew that he loved her still.”
Source: Tess of the D'urbervilles
“At breakfast!' said Louise in an awed voice. 'A man who can read poetry at breakfast would be capable of anything.”
Source: Madam, Will You Talk?
“At Calvary, God accepted his own unbreakable terms of justice.”
“At Calvary, there was a great healing transfer where the responsibility for healing was switched from God giving it, to you receiving it.”
“At Cambridge, it was the weirdest culture. Everyone pretended they didn't do any work, yet it was so competitive.”
“At Cambridge, you have to kiss the vice-chancellor's fingers. But I missed out on that, 'cause I was doing a matinee. I don't want to kiss a strange man's fingers anyway.”
“At Camp Don Bosco, there were Bibles all over the place, mostly 1970s hippie versions like Good News for Modern Man. They had groovy titles like The Word or The Way, and translated the Bible into “contemporary English,” which meant Saul yelling at Jonathan, “You son of a bitch!” (I Samuel 20:30). Awesome! The King James version gave this verse as “Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman,” which was bogus in comparison. Maybe these translations went a bit far. I recall one of the Bibles translating the inscription over the cross, “INRI” (Iesus Nazaremus Rex Iudaeorum), as “SSDD” (Same Shit Different Day), and another describing the Last Supper — the night before Jesus’ death, a death he freely accepted — where Jesus breaks the bread, gives it to his disciples, and says, “It’s better to burn out than fade away,” but these memories could be deceptive.”
Source: Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time
“At Cana, [Mary] gave Him as a Savior to sinners; on the Cross He gave her as a refuge to sinners.”
“At Car and Driver, we were convinced that the automobile, as we knew and loved it, was as dead as the passenger pigeon. Ralph Nader was at full cry, ringing his tocsin of automobile doom into the brains of the public, convincing them that the lump of chrome and iron in the driveway was as lethal as a dose of Strontium 90 or a blast from a Viet Cong AK-47.”
“At Cardozo, study of law is part of a larger culture. You can get a law degree and make a good living, but it is best that you do that having studied the discipline for its own inherent merit, because you love studying.”
“At Carnegie Hall the Preservation Hall Jazz Band showed how easily it could hop from era to era. It could work like a rhythm-and-blues horn section or a tightly arranged little big band if need be, but it could also switch back into the polyphonic glories of vintage New Orleans jazz, in which nearly every instrument seems to improvise around the tune at the same time.”
“At Casablanca we did 'Midnight Express,' 'Flashdance,' and 'The Deep.' My willingness for risk has always been my strength.”
“At CBS, I’m in your house. I’m mindful of that. When I do standup, you’re in my home and I can say what I want to.”
“At certain crucial moments - an emergency or an opportunity - one must act first and think later.”
Source: A Boy's Own Story: Picador Classic
“At certain historic moments, grandparents took on childrearing responsibilities. In many cultures, they still do. Chinese grandparents who are able to retire at 55 are seen all over Beijing bouncing grandbabies. In the United States, we can't afford to retire at 55.”