A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“At night, there was the feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal. We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a woman wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. We were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.”
Source: A Farewell to Arms
“At night, those huge, inconsolable, rapacious eyes of his are eaten up by swollen, gleaming pupil. His eyes see only appetite. These eyes open to devour the world in which he sees, nowhere, a reflection of himself; he passed through the mirror and now, henceforward, lives as if upon the other side of things.”
Source: The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories
“At night too, she puzzled the mystery of her desperate need of kindness. As other girls prayed for handsomeness in a lover, or for wealth, or for power, or for poetry, she had prayed fervently: let him be kind.”
Source: A Spy in the House of Love
“At night, touching himself, he would imagine her in every carnal detail, always determined he would see her at last, on Erzèbet Square, but always, once he was done, he would be consumed by guilt, which would not replace the fantasy, only dissipate it, and he would decide she was just an itch he could scratch away so easily without harming her or himself.”
Source: Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
“At night we are all strangers, even to ourselves.”
Source: The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
“At night we sort the energy that by day we sense.”
Source: Percipience: Outside the range of understood sense
“At night when you're asleep, self-hatred's going to creep in. And you can blame it on the devil, the one who's bed you sleep in.”
“At night, with only the bedside lamp on, I would pretend to sleep and listened to Dad’s muffled crying in the semi-darkness, wishing that I could cry like him, that I could bring Stevan back from the dead by the strength of my tears. But they were regular tears carving the same slicing-hot trails down my cheeks, and in the end, I could not summon a distinct kind of grief for Stevan. Just the same grief that has gripped mankind for centuries, which time would inevitably ebb into a notch in one’s skin or a small limp in the way one walks or a bottled memory that would only resurface some nights. And soon, you’d struggle to remember how that person talked or how that person used to occupy a customized space in your life. And you don’t want to forget, but you don’t want to remember either, and there seemed to be no place where you could just exist.”
Source: All My Lonely Islands
“At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.”
Source: The Library at Night
“At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.... The various qualities of my readings seem to permeate my every muscle, so that when I finally decide to turn off the library light, I carry into my sleep the voices and the movements of the book I've just closed.”
“At night, I love to look in the houses. When I was little, I did that much more, when I was so bored. It might be awful in those houses, of course, but I still speculate about them in a romantic way. It's the same if you are famous: you are in the light, and most people have fantasies about you, but these fantasies have nothing to do with reality.”
“At night, I open the window and ask the moon to come and press its face against mine. Breathe into me. Close the language-door and open the love-window. The moon won't use the door, only the window.”
“At night, in the garden, it occurs to you that it might have been your heart that left you as you reached the capital. Your heart might not have travelled well, closed up in its cavity, quivering and gnawing at the bars of your ribcage during the commute. It might be tracking north now, along edgelands, past spoil-heaps and stands of pylons, under motorway passes, back to the higher ground. Back to him.”
“At night, lying on your back and staring at the falling snow, it's easy to imagine oneself soaring through the stars.”
“At night, neurotics may toil not, but oh how they spin!”
Source: Aperçus: The Aphorisms of Mignon McLaughlin
“At night, never go to bed without knowing what you'll write tomorrow.”
“At night, the house thick with sleep, she would peer out her bedroom window at the trees and sky and feel the presence of a mystery. Some possibility that included her--separate from her present life and without its limitations. A secret. Riding in the car with her father, she would look out at other cars full of people she'd never seen, any one of whom she might someday meet and love, and would feel the world holding her making its secret plans.”
Source: Look at Me: A Novel
“At night, the moon, a pregnant woman, walks cautiously over the slippery heavens.”
Source: An Imagist at War: The Complete War Poems of Richard Aldington
“At night, time becomes a calm sea. It goes on for ever.”
“At night, what you see is a city, because all you see is lights. By day, it doesn't look like a city at all. The trees out-number the houses. And that's completely typical of Seattle. You can't quite tell: is it a city, is it a suburb, is the forest growing back?”
“At night, when I am alone, I call for you, and whenever my ache seems to be the greatest, you still seem to find a way to return to me.”
Source: Message in a Bottle
“At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.”
“At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.”
Source: H.P. Lovecraft's Worlds - Volume Two: Dagon and Other Tales
“At night, when the sky is full of stars and the sea is still you get the wonderful sensation that you are floating in space.”
“At night... the streets become rhythmical perspectives of glowing dotted lines, reflections hung upon them in the streets as the wistaria hangs its violet racemes on its trellis. The buildings are shimmering verticality, a gossamer veil, a festive scene-prop hanging there against the black sky to dazzle, entertain, amaze.”
“At nighttime, you just try to keep him out of jail.”
“At NIH, what tends to happen is that the proven researchers tend to get the money. New researchers, younger researchers, or people on the cutting edge don't get the money until they have gray beards.”
“At nine o'clock Mr. Shimerda lighted one of our lanterns and put on his overcoat and fur collar. He stood in the little entry hall, the lantern and his fur cap under his arm, shaking hands with us. When he took grandmother's hand, he bent over it as he always did, and said slowly, 'Good woman!' He made the sign of the cross over me, put on his cap and went off in the dark. As we turned back to the sitting-room, grandfather looked at me searchingly. 'The prayers of all good people are good,' he said quietly.”
Source: My Ántonia
“At nineteen, I knew nothing about the inner workings of my own heart, let alone the hearts of others. Still, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of how happiness and sadness worked. What I couldn't yet grasp were all the myriad phenomenon that lay in the space between happiness and sadness, how they related to each other. As a result, I often felt anxious and helpless.”
Source: First Person Singular: Stories
“At nineteen I was pretty sure I was going to be a professional soccer player. At that time I played for one of the Norwegian premier leagues. But I tore ligaments in both knees, so I started studying business administration and economics and became a financial analyst, and I worked at a brokerage firm as a stockbroker.”
“At nineteen, it seems to me, one has a right to be arrogant; time has usually not begun its stealthy and rotten subtractions. It takes away your hair and your jump-shot, according to a popular country song, but in truth it takes away a lot more than that.”
Source: The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger
“At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.”
“At no other time has Nature concentrated such a wealth of valuable nourishment into such a small space as in the cocoa bean.”
“At no period of [Michael Faraday's] unmatched career was he interested in utility. He was absorbed in disentangling the riddles of the universe, at first chemical riddles, in later periods, physical riddles. As far as he cared, the question of utility was never raised. Any suspicion of utility would have restricted his restless curiosity. In the end, utility resulted, but it was never a criterion to which his ceaseless experimentation could be subjected.”
“At no period of our political existence had we so much cause to felicitate ourselves at the prosperous and happy condition of our country.”
Source: The Writings of James Monroe: 1817-1823
“At no period of the naval history of the world, is it probable that Marines were more important than during the War of the Revolution.”
“At no point am I ever threatened by people who question who I am, or why I like the things I do, or my legitimacy. Because I know who I am very strongly, and I think that's what geek culture can reinforce.”
“At no point did I ever doubt I would be as near as anybody could be to England's Elvis Presley. Even from eight or nine years old, I thought, Well, I'll be the greatest rock star in England. I just made up my mind.”
“At no point did the [Burns] committee conclude, or even attempt to conclude, an assessment of cruelty. Yet many bodies have erroneously quoted the Burns report, stating that it clearly demonstrated that the practice of hunting wild animals with dogs caused cruelty. The report did not state that.”
“At no point do I wish to be in conflict with any man or masculine thought. It doesn't enter my consciousness. Art is anonymous. It's not competitive with men. It's a complementary contribution.”
“At no point in history has a bright young girl with plenty of food and a good constitution perished from too much learning.”
Source: The Signature of All Things
“At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control.”
Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
“At no point that day did I ever think about the politics of that crowd. Even the things that were said not resonate in the middle of that chaos, but what did resonate was the fact that thousands of Americans were attacking police officers who were simply there doing their job, and that they were there to disrupt members of Congress who were doing their jobs.”
Source: Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop's Battle for America's Soul
“At no point was my career under threat, so I always knew that I would get back into action.”
“At no point, at a very important point: that of having convinced the Indians that they can do things.”
“At no time am I a quick thinker or writer: whatever I have done in science has solely been by long pondering, patience and industry.”
Source: Autobiography and Selected Letters
“At no time and in no circumstances should a Communist place his personal interests first; he should subordinate them to the interests of the nation and of the masses. Hence, selfishness, slacking, corruption, seeking the limelight, and so on, are most contemptible, while selflessness, working with all one's energy, whole-hearted devotion to public duty, and quiet hard work will command respect.”
Source: Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (The Little Red Book) & Other Works
“At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that if suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye.”
Source: Complete Novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated Edition): Fanshawe, The Scarlet Letter with its Adaptation, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun, The Dolliver Romance, Septimius Felton, Grimshawe's Secret and Biography
“At no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it.”
Source: Confessions of a Mask
“At no time did anyone throw his cap in the air and rejoice that another painter, capable of equaling Hals at his best, had been discovered.”
Source: The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work