A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“After a stroke we can re-learn how to talk, because by practicing we can establish different pathways in the brain, circumnavigating the damaged part.”
“After a stronghold has been made of the bones, it is covered with flesh and blood, and there dwell in it old age and death, pride and deceit.”
“After a study of some forty years and more of the great religions of the world, I find none so perfect, none so scientific, none so philosophic, and none so spiritual as the great religion known by the name of Hinduism. The more you know it, the more you will love it; the more you try to understand it, the more deeply you will value it”
Source: The Relativity of Hindu Ethics
“After a subsequent interview at Brooklyn Poly, I was hired, and life as a fully independent researcher began.”
“After a supper of navy beans, I sat on my threshold and gazed off toward the volcanic mountains. I had been close to them today. The Chilikadrotna River showed me the beautiful fish and I returned them to her. I thought of the sights I had seen. The price was physical toll. Money does little good back here. It could not buy the fit feeling that surged through my arms and shoulders. It could not buy the feeling of accomplishment. I had been my own tour guide, and my own power had been my transportation. This great big country was my playground, and I could afford the price it demanded.”
Source: First Wilderness: My Quest in the Territory of Alaska
“After a taste of a Scot, you'll never look elsewhere again."
A brunette smiled seductively, "That's quite a boast."
"I'm quite a man.”
Source: Darkest Flame: Part 3
“After a theatre run, it took me a long time to start drinking again during the day.”
“After a thousand years pass, it builds its own funeral pyre, lining it with cinnamon, myrrh and cassia. Climbing to a rest on the very top, it examines the world all throughout the night with the ability to see true good and evil. When the sun rises the next morning, with great sorrow for all that it sees, it sings a haunting song. As it sings, the heat of the sun ignites the expensive spices and the Phoenix dies in the flames.
But the Phoenix is not remarkable for its feathers or flames. It is most revered for its ability to climb from its own funeral pyre, from the very ashes of its old charred body, as a brand new life ready to live again once more. Life after life, it goes through this cycle. It absorbs human sorrow, only to rise from death to do it all again. It never wearies, it never tires. It never questions its fate. Some say that the Phoenix is real, that it exists somewhere out there in the mountains of Arabia, elusive and mysterious. Others say that the Phoenix is only a wish made by desperate humans to believe in the continuance of life.
But I know a secret.
We are the Phoenix.”
Source: Every Last Kiss
“After a Time
After a time, all losses are the same.
One more thing lost is one thing less to lose;
And we go stripped at last the way we came.
Though we shall probe, time and again, our shame,
Who lack the wit to keep or to refuse,
After a time, all losses are the same.
No wit, no luck can beat a losing game;
Good fortune is a reassuring ruse:
And we go stripped at last the way we came.
Rage as we will for what we think to claim,
Nothing so much as this bare thought subdues:
After a time, all losses are the same.
The sense of treachery--the want, the blame--
Goes in the end, whether or not we choose,
And we go stripped at last the way we came.
So we, who would go raging, will go tame
When what we have we can no longer use:
After a time, all losses are the same;
And we go stripped at last the way we came.”
“After a time he fell asleep, and some unsteady fairies had to climb over him on their way home from an orgy.”
Source: Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy) (Annotated Edition)
“After a time I found that I could almost listen to the silence, which had a dimension all of its own. I started to attend to its strange and beautiful texture, which of course, it was impossible to express in words. I discovered that I felt at home and alive in the silence, which compelled me to enter my interior world and around there. Without the distraction of constant conversation, the words on the page began to speak directly to my inner self. They were no long expressing ideas that were simply interesting intellectually, but were talking directly to my own yearning and perplexity.”
“After a time I saw what I believed, at the time, to be a radio relay station located out on a desolate sand spit near Villa Bens. It was only later that I found out that it was Castelo de Tarfaya, a small fortification on the North African coast. Tarfaya was occupied by the British in 1882, when they established a trading post, called Casa del Mar. It is now considered the Southern part of Morocco.
In the early ‘20s, the French pioneering aviation company, Aéropostale, built a landing strip in this desert, for its mail delivery service. By 1925 their route was extended to Dakar, where the mail was transferred onto steam ships bound for Brazil. A monument now stands in Tarfaya, to honor the air carrier and its pilots as well as the French aviator and author Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry better known as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
As a newly acclaimed author in the literary world. “Night Flight,” or “Vol de nuit,” was the first of Saint-Exupéry’s literary works and won him the prix Femina, a French literary prize created in 1904. The novel was based on his experiences as an early mail pilot and the director of the “Aeroposta Argentina airline,” in South America. Antoine is also known for his narrative “The Little Prince” and his aviation writings, including the lyrical 1939 “Wind, Sand and Stars” which is Saint-Exupéry’s 1939, memoir of his experiences as a postal pilot. It tells how on the week following Christmas in 1935, he and his mechanic amazingly survived a crash in the Sahara desert. The two men suffered dehydration in the extreme desert heat before a local Bedouin, riding his camel, discovered them “just in the nick of time,” to save their lives. His biographies divulge numerous affairs, most notably with the Frenchwoman Hélène de Vogüé, known as “Nelly” and referred to as “Madame de B.”
“After a time some of the hedge knights and men-at-arms amongst his rabble began to paint images of the “Cock o’ the Moon” on their shields, and a brisk trade grew up in clubs, pendants, and staffs carved to resemble Moon’s member.”
Source: Fire & Blood
“After a time, though, Inman found that he had left the book and was simply forming the topography of home in his head. Cold Mountain, all its ridges and coves and watercourses. Pigeon River, Little East Fork, Sorrell Cove, Deep Gap, Fire Scald Ridge. He knew their names and said them to himself like the words of spells and incantations to ward off the things one fears most.”
Source: Cold Mountain
“After a time, civil servants tend to become no longer servants and no longer civil.”
“After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. It is not logical, but is often true.”
“After a time," said old Mathers disregarding me, "I mercifully perceived the errors of my ways and the unhappy destination I would reach unless I mended them. I retired from the world in order to try to comprehend it and to find out why it becomes more unsavoury as the years accumulate on a man's body. What do you think I discovered at the end of my meditations?" I felt pleased again. He was now questioning me. "What?" "That No is a better word than Yes," he replied.”
Source: The Third Policeman (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
“After a tongue has once got the knack of lying, it is not to be imagined how impossible almost it is to reclaim it. Whence it comes to pass, that we see some men, who are otherwise very honest, so subject to this vice.”
“After a tragedy, a farce. Philosophy enters into her power, and the earth returns under one's feet.”
Source: All Things are Possible
“After a tragedy, I think God gives us a period of numbing as a kind of grace. Perhaps he knows our small minds, given so easily to false hope, couldn't handle the full brunt of reality.”
Source: A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
“After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment.”
Source: Trauma and recovery
“After a truly good meal, an outstanding cigar is still the most satisfying after-dinner activity that doesn't involve two human beings.”
“After a universal silence, Leo was the first to speak. “Did anyone else notice—” “Yes,” Catherine said. “What do you make of it?” “I haven’t decided yet.” Leo frowned and took a sip of port. “He’s not someone I would pair Bea with.” “Whom would you pair her with?” “Hanged if I know,” Leo said. “Someone with similar interests. The local veterinarian, perhaps?” “He’s eighty-three years old and deaf,” Catherine said. “They would never argue,” Leo pointed out.”
Source: Love in the Afternoon
“After a victim is made to participate in an act of evil, the people in charge put a lot of energy into convincing the child or adult that he or she is evil and a perpetrator rather than a victim.p324”
Source: Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse
“After a war life catches desperately at passing hints of normalcy like vines entwining a hollow twig.”
Source: Collected Poems
“After a war, after a concentration camp, I find it's not too difficult to be happy.”
“After a war, the silencing of arms is not enough. Peace means respecting all rights. You can't respect one of them and violate the others. When a society doesn't respect the rights of its citizens, it undermines peace and leads it back to war.”
“After a week of the contained chaos that is my job, I need some solitary running time. On Sundays, I can unwind and reconnect with the natural world.”
“After a week, it's better. I miss her. I mourn her. But some peace has returned. She had been so unattainable - so young, so much a citizen of a different era - that it is hard to feel fully deprived.”
“After a while excuses lose their worth and their meaning”
“After a while he played with the pencil and the paper again and was delighted when he discovered how to make a mark with the one on the other. Various noises continued outside, but he didn't know whether they were real or not. He then talked to his table for a week to see how it would react.”
Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five
“After a while Heebie's tentative tail swishes and cautious sniffs around her cheeks. Dina shifted to her side so Heebie could crawl into the curve of her lap, kneading Dina's belly with her sharp little claws.
"What are you baking today, Madame Heebie?" Dina sniffed, tickling the cat under her chin as she kneaded. She liked to imagine Heebie in a little baker's hat and had once even tried knitting one--- but Heebie had hissed when Dina had tried to dress her in it. She wasn't sure how long she stayed there, petting Heebie's soft black fur, but slowly the pain in her chest started to loosen, as if gentle fingers were prying open a stiff knot thread by thread. It wasn't gone, but it was a little quieter for now.”
Source: Best Hex Ever
“After a while I got hungry and went to the kitchen. There was nothing to eat. I drank another beer and looked again, and found half a loaf of whole wheat bread behind the beer in the back of the refrigerator...”
Source: Mortal Stakes
“After a while, I realized that I was not alone in this matter. There were many among us who had experienced similar problems in other prisons. Most of them were broken for similar reasons, had lost their enthusiasm, and were spending their days like me. Among us, those who were most broken were those who, like me, had entered the struggle attaching exaggerated romantic meanings to the revolution but realized that the revolution they imagined was not what it turned out to be.”
Source: Yoldaşını Öldürmek
“After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can't bring back anything to life.”
“After a while I thought it didn't make any sense to use a pick. It's kind of like typing with one finger on each hand instead of using all your fingers.”
“After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.”
“After a while in marriage, it doesn't work anymore. There is something missing, there is something wrong. There are few marriages that stay alive forever. We like something, and after a while, we hate what we used to love.”
“After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels.”
Source: The Shadow Of The Wind
“After a while it sort of began to rain, which is to say that it was the kind of rain that never comes to a decision about whether it's actually raining or not. Driving in it, you would never have been certain whether or not to turn on your wipers.”
Source: Anansi Boys
“After a while Mary said, “Zsadist?”
“Yeah?”
“What are those markings?”
His frowned and flicked his eyes over to her, thinking, as if she didn’t know? But then . . . well, she had been a human. Maybe she didn’t. “They’re slave bands. I was . . . a slave.”
“Did it hurt when they were put on you?”
“Yes.”
“Did the same person who cut your face give them to you?”
“No, my owner’s hellren did that. My owner . . . she put the bands on me. He was the one who cut my face.”
“How long were you a slave?”
“A hundred years.”
“How did you get free?”
“Phury. Phury got me out. That’s how he lost his leg.”
“Were you hurt while you were a slave?”
Z swallowed hard. “Yes.”
“Do you still think about it?”
“Yes.” He looked down at his hands, which suddenly were in pain for some reason. Oh, right. He’d made two
fists and was squeezing them so tightly his fingers were about to snap off at the knuckles.
“Does slavery still happen?”
“No. Wrath outlawed it. As a mating gift to me and Bella.”
“What kind of slave were you?”
Zsadist shut his eyes. Ah, yes, the question he didn’t want to answer. For a while it was all he could do to force himself to stay in the chair. But then, in a falsely level voice, he said,
“I was a blood slave. I was used by a female for blood.”
The quiet after he spoke bore down on him, a tangible weight.
“Zsadist? Can I put my hand on your back?”
His head did something that was evidently a nod, because Mary’s gentle palm came down lightly on his
shoulder blade. She moved it in a slow, easy circle.
“Those are the right answers,” she said. “All of them.”
He had to blink fast as the fire in the furnace’s window became blurry. “You think?” he said hoarsely.
“No. I know.”
Source: Father Mine
“After a while of getting jerked around, you realize what the business is really made up of.”
“After a while, Rhys lifted his chest enough to take my right hand. To examine the tattoos inked there. He kissed one of the whorls of near-black blue ink.
His throat bobbed. 'I missed you. Every second, every breath. Not just this,' he said, shifting his hips for emphasis and dragging a groan from deep in my throat, 'but... talking to you. Laughing with you. I missed having you in my bed, but missed having you as my friend even more.”
Source: A Court of Wings and Ruin
“After a while, San Lang said softly, “Something like saving the world, it really doesn’t matter how you do it. But, although brave, it’s foolish.” “Yeah,” Xie Lian agreed. Hua Cheng continued, “Although foolish, it’s brave.”
Source: Heaven Official's Blessing
“After a while some of the houseguests at Big Brother can become a little bit high maintenance so they're going to find everything to be irritating. We don't really try to show it on the show. How interesting is that? But we can make a funny story out of it when they complain, complain, complain.”
“After a while the business end of writing takes too much of the writing time. Better to pay someone ten percent and find that you're still more than ten percent ahead in the end. Which is true. My present agent says that he always feels that a good agent during the course of a year should earn back for his client at least the ten percent he takes by way of commission, so the client's really nothing out. And what he should ideally do is make him more money than the ten percent.”
“After a while, the human caretakers called the chimpanzees to the feeding building and most of them left the place where the body lay, with the exception of two females, mother and daughter, who remained next to the corpse. The mother, who had had an especially close relationship with the deceased, carefully examined his face and then grabbed a grass stem and began to clean his teeth. She spent several minutes engaged in this task, all the while remaining under her daughter’s attentive gaze.”
Source: Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death
“After a while the middle-aged person who lives in her head begins to talk to her soul, the kid.”
Source: Joe Jones
“After a while the press of business in the province put an end to our philosophizing, and I returned with increased determination to my plans to fly to the Moon.”
“After a while, the rhythm of his breath slackens and deepens, and he rolls away, towards the ghostly hands of his alarm clock.”
Source: Her