H Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with H. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“How could he say, look, I've tried not to fancy you since you first took your coat off in this office. I try not to give names to what I feel for you, because I already know it's too much, and I want peace from the shit that love brings in its wake. I want to be alone, and unburdened, and free.
But I don't want you to be with anyone else. I don't want some other bastard to persuade you into a second marriage. I like knowing the possibility's there, for us to, maybe . . .
Except, it'll go wrong, of course, because it always goes wrong, because if I were the type for permanence, I'd already be married. And when it goes wrong, I'll lose you for good, and this thing we've built together, which is literally the only good part of my life, my vocation, my pride, my greatest achievement, will be forever fucked, because I won't find anyone I enjoy running things with, the way I enjoy running them with you, and everything afterward will be tainted by the memory of you.
If only she could come inside his head and see what was there, Strike thought, she'd understand that she occupied a unique place in his thoughts and in his affections. He felt he owed her that information, but was afraid that saying it might move this conversation into territory from which it would be difficult to retreat.
But from second to second, sitting here, now with more than half a bottle of neat whisky inside him, a different spirit seemed to move inside him, asking himself for the first time whether determined solitude was what he really wanted, for evermore.”
Source: Troubled Blood
“How could Hillary clinton not come off as human! I mean, even Nurse Ratched was human. I don't think people are interested in 30 years of the past, and I don't get this notion of change-maker.”
“How could Hochschild go so wrong? He was highly motivated from the start to “find” a genocide because, as he notes, his project began by reading the American humorist Mark Twain’s claim that eight to ten million people had died in the EIC. But no scholar has ever made such a charge. His source was a chapter by the Belgian ethnographer Jan Vansina, citing his own work on population declines in the entirety of central Africa throughout the 19th century that included only what became the northern areas of the EIC. In any case, Vansina’s own source was a Harvard study of 1928 that quoted a 1919 Belgian claim that “in some areas” population had fallen by half, but quoted it in order to assert that it was almost certainly false.”
Source: King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.
“How could homosexuals possibly srew up the sanctity of marriage any worse than heterosexuals?”
“How could I accept the fact that, after having been conquered— soul, body and brain—by this irrevocable, indissoluble and martyrizing love, I would have to immediately give it up? Madness! This love was a part of me, like my own flesh; it had taken the place of my blood and marrow; it possessed me entirely; it was I! To separate me from it meant to separate me from myself; it meant to kill me. Worse still! It meant the extravagant nightmare that my head was in Ceylon, my feet in China, separated by abysses of ocean, and that I would continue to live in these two stumps which could never be reunited!”
Source: The Torture Garden
“How could I admit that the All-American Girl's force field of stoicism and self-reliance and do-unto-others-and-keep-smiling wasn't working, wasn't keeping pain and shame and powerlessness away?
From a young age I had learned to get over - to cover my tracks emotionally, to hide or ignore my problems in the belief that they were mine alone to solve. So when exhilarating transgressions required getting over on authority figures, I knew how to do it. I was a great bluffer. And when common, everyday survival in prison required getting over, I could do that too. This is what was approvingly described by my fellow prisoners as 'street-smarts,' as in 'You wouldn't think it to look at her, but Piper's got street-smarts.”
Source: Orange Is the New Black
“How could I alone have invented it or imagined it in my dream? Could my petty heart and fickle, trivial mind have risen to such a revelation of truth?”
Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
“How could I ask for a better friend? Someone who gives me a backup plan. Instead of someone who makes me the backup plan.”
“How could I balance the promise of America with the truth of the United States?”
“How could I be anything but a dissenter? Who wants the opinion of a group?”
“How could I be out there and not do anything?”
“How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.”
“How could I be so immature to think you could replace the missing elements in me. How extremely lazy of me.”
“How could I be so wrong? The stag was right---we can't trust any other humans. How can you ever trust someone who wants to eat you?”
Source: The Last Wild
“How could I be sure of these teeangers' national origin? Was I using names of origin to give them a place instead, when it was clear that they were moving toward a new language?”
“How could I bear a crown of gold when the Lord bears a crown of thorns? And bears it for me!”
“How could I bear it if something or someone ever hurt this child? I was suddenly cognizant that there were innumerable ways that my world could be shattered now - ways I'd never imagined. I could count the number of minutes my daughter had been alive, and already I glimpsed that love holds in itself the seeds of great suffering.”
Source: Ruined
“How could I castrate my mind--neuter it!--and build up a resistance to know what was mine from what was everyone else's, and finally be in the world in my own way? That endless capacity for empathy--which you have to really kill in order to act freely, to know your own desires!”
Source: How Should a Person Be?
“How could I choose someone who would force me to give up my own small reach for meaning? I chose myself, and without consolation.”
Source: The Invention of Wings: A Novel (Original Publisher's Edition-No Annotations)
“How could I determine if his friendship request was sincere? Yet his declaration in the kitchen had seemed heartfelt and authentic. I wanted to believe him, but I also couldn't afford to. My heart would be obliterated when we broke up if I went ahead and gave in to my desire to be loved for who I was.”
Source: The Love Script
“How could I do it, how could a person go that low? And I understand your question, to which I reply, Are you kidding? That's nothing. I'd been much lower than that. And I expected to see myself do worse.”
Source: Jesus' Son: Stories
“How could I ever be lonely when I am with my own best self.”
Source: The Alien
“How could I ever forget that beautiful place?
Barbados — you bathed my first dreams in pure salt water
and tinted my skin with your powerful sun.
I love you.”
“How could I ever have considered marrying him? One year as his wife, and I'd have become one of those abject, quaking women who look at their husbands when someone asks them a question. I've always despised that type, but I see how it happens now.”
Source: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
“How could I ever have doubted that the Holocaust - the systematic murder of millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and trade unionists - happened? Simply, because I needed to. If you wanted to (dis)believe something in it, eventually you will.”
Source: HATE: My Life In The British Far Right
“How could I ever love anything else, once having been loved of thee? I can’t comprehend thy logic, Father of lies. Both ends against the middle. Like a two-headed serpent devouring itself. Christ. What canst thou hope maintain?”
Lucifer smiled only and into the sadness of that smile Kit knew the answer. “Oh. For the love of God.”
Source: Hell and Earth
“How could I ever question your love? Your trust? Your word? When you have my heart.”
Source: A touch of ruin (Hades x Persephone Book 2)
“How could I expect her to understand if I couldn’t explain it? It was not a secret that I struggled with anger at times in my life, and I didn’t want anyone misinterpreting my motives for tracking this kid. I had a gut feeling and nothing more.”
Source: No Winter Lasts Forever
“How could I expect more from the universe when I didn't appreciate what I already had?”
Source: Simple Abundance
“How could I explain in words my craving for freedom, that longing for anonymity, the need to distance myself from everything I knew in my universe?”
Source: The Shooting Star
“How could I explain that it was not all playacting? That I felt more of the male spirit within me than the female - a fierceness that whittled me down to a sharpened spear of ambition. And as a boy, I was applauded, not punished, for such raw energy. It was not beaten out of me for my own good, or worn away by women's chores.”
Source: Eon: Dragoneye Reborn
“How could I explain to this girl what Will and I had been to each other,
the way I felt that no person in the world had ever understood me like he did or ever would again?
How could she understand that losing him was like having a hole shot straight through me, a painful, constant reminder, an absence I could never fill?”
Source: Me Before You
“How could I explain why I'd acted that way? How could I explain how scary it was, to find out that I needed her so much? Was I supposed to tell her how she'd changed everything? Like how U hadn't even realized how bad I felt until she'd made it better, just by looking at me. Like how I thought she was awesome, bad-ass ninja, and what I hated was the fact that I knew I couldn't protect her, when that's all I wanted to do. How could I explain, without sounding like a complete asshole, that I was so afraid of losing her I pushed her away?
I couldn't.”
Source: Heroes 'Til Curfew
“How could I fail to be a lone wolf, and an uncouth hermit, as I did not share one of its aims nor understand one of its pleasures?”
Source: Steppenwolf: A Novel
“How could I feel so miserable in the midst of such splendor? The question flashed through me all at once, not waiting for words to express it. The answer came more slowly: No one makes you angry. Anger, like love, is something you choose. Stunned, I sat down in the middle of the field I'd been walking through. I knew I needed to look within myself, let go of my anger and have a quiet talk with God.”
Source: Lessons in Living
“How could I get up there and say, 'People, we've got to do better,' when I was the poster child for everything that was wrong? I've always believed leaders don't ask others to do what they're unwilling to do.”
“How could I go on my travels without that sweet soul waiting at home for my letters?”
Source: Top Girls
“How could I have been a wife, a mother and a singer? Who takes care of the piccolini when you go around the world? Your children would not call you Mama, but Renata.”
“How could I have been anyone other than me?”
“How could I have been so blind as to want a soul? It was laughable now, to think that a soul could live inside me without being tainted by the centuries of blood and evil and death.
The voices agreed, laughing at me, mocking my quest. I didn’t deserve a soul; I didn’t deserve happiness, or peace. Why should I get my happy ending, when I’d left a swath of horror and destruction behind me wherever I went?”
Source: The Iron Knight
“How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”
Source: The Blind Assassin
“How could I have been so stupid to ignore everything I’d had in my life? The color red alone was worth kingdoms.”
“How could I have been the valedictorian, the smartest, and never known Harlem existed? As a result, I began a lifelong learning experience, because I could not accept what the party line was with education - that these people want to live like this, these people don't have ambition, they don't want to work. You know, all the usual bullshit.”
“How could I have ever been ashamed of loving Dante Quintana?”
Source: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
“How could I have ever for a moment believed I wasn't in love with him?”
Source: Anna and the French Kiss
“How could I have ever thought she was what was wrong in my life? She was the only thing that made any sense, and when she was broken and hurting, so was I.”
Source: Veiled Innocence
“How could I have kept out this incredible fiction? That's when it all started for me. I was, and still am, a HUGE Star Trek fan. "Songs Of The Ocean" is my tribute to this great story, and it's based on the Star Trek IV movie, the one in which they go back in time. [The Voyage Home ; It's the one where they bring a pair of whales to the future -ed.]”
“How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?”
“How could I have known then, there are no rules, no expectations, no rising to the occasion. When you learn news like this, there is only falling.”
Source: Clap When You Land
“How could I have let myself believe, even for a second, that single thirty-something life would be an endless buffet of opportunities when I know it is, at best, small plates.”
Source: Good Material