I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“I had ancestors who were slave-holders, which is a difficult piece of family history to say the least. In a recent New York Times article on the subject of modern attitudes toward our slave-holding past, the writer noted that we all want to be from "innocent origins." I _know_ I'm not. Then again, I suspect most of us are not.”
“I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya.”
“I had another idea of getting a traveling medicine wagon with a dropdown side and traveling around England. That might sound crazy to you, but over there it's so rural you can do it. Just drop down the side and play through big battery amps and mixers and it can all be as temporary or as permanent as I want it to be.”
“I had another reason for seeking Him, for trying to espy His face, a professional one. God and literature are conflated in my mind. Why this is, I’m not sure. Perhaps because great books seem heavensent. Perhaps because I know that each nove is a puny but very valiant attempt at godlike behavior. Perhaps because there is no difference between the finest poetry and most transcendent mysticism. Perhaps because writers like Thomas Merton, who are able to enter the realm of the spirit and come away with fine, lucid prose. Perhaps because of more secular writers, like John Steinbeck, whose every passage, it seems to me, peals with religiousity and faith. It once occured to me that literature — all art really — is either talking to people about God, or talking to God about people.”
Source: The Boy on the Back of the Turtle: Seeking God, Quince Marmalade, and the Fabled Albatross on Darwin's Islands
“I had another run-in with the neighbor.
They complained about my music being too loud at three in the morning. When they asked why I was blasting it, I said because silence makes my thoughts too loud and nobody wants that.
I am hoping they dedicate a whole section of the neighborhood watch list to me.”
“I had arranged a birthday party for him and my children, who are all Aquarians. Instead, we got married. I ran out of excuses. It was just us and my children.”
“I had arranged samples of the ginger shrimp balls on a large tray. Toasted bread cut into small cubes hid a juicy center made of minced shrimp and ginger: bite-size, golden hors d'oeuvres with an addictive crunch.”
Source: Natalie Tan's Book of Luck & Fortune
“I had arrived at the airport one hour early so that, in accordance with airline procedures, I could stand around.”
Source: Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down
“I had arrived with a thirst for adventure, adventure of any description. I was a stupid 23-year‑old boy looking for trouble. What trouble looked like, I had no idea.”
“I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.”
“I had artistic classical training, and when you learn the classics for so many years, you might gain audacity, power and confidence to subvert everything. I am like the originals buffoons. I love the rules because I can break them.”
“I had artists that refused to work on Chappie if they were working on a design that actually said Denel on the side of the thing. But anyway, it's the blurring of fiction and reality that was appealing and I certainly did not want them to be in the movie and not be themselves.”
“I had as lief have been myself alone.”
Source: An index to the remarkable passages and words made use of by Shakespeare
“I had as many doubts as anyone else. Standing on the starting line, we're all cowards.”
“I had as much influence over Loneliness as it had over me! I can see that now. No one can help how they feel so I was stuck with Loneliness. But I had a choice. I could let Loneliness consume me for the rest of my life, give in to it and let it control me like a puppet… or I could fight back. When it would whisper in my ear and tell me to lash out at those I loved, to push them away, I’d say no. When it tried to keep me lonely I would hold it at arm’s length and… it would listen.”
Source: All That She Can See
“I had as well be killed running as die standing”
Source: The Complete Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass
“I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened.”
Source: A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition
“I had asked her for help, and she had sent me to the lions. I knew that she was trying to save her little girl, but sometimes mothers with the best intentions kill their daughters all the same.”
Source: A Certain Slant of Light
“I had asked him many times why he stayed, and he always said the same thing: “Because I love you, and I wanted to, and I knew you were in there.” No matter how damaged I had been, he had loved me enough to still see me somewhere inside.”
Source: Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
“I had aspirations to do different things with my life. I wanted to play soccer. I wanted to be a lawyer. Serendipity.”
“I had assessed the Desoto Solar Farm as only having a few honest workers on site.”
“I had assumed [her] bravado was masking deep pain and suffering. But as we sat in that hospital room, I realized [her] bravado wasn't masking her pain. It was because of it. She would fight. Always and forever.”
Source: The Lion Women of Tehran
“I had assumed that a boy who loved me so intensely was full of happiness, love, and light so that he was free of his own demons and pain.
My assumption was entirely wrong.”
Source: With a Reckless Abandon
“I had assumed that Bush's seemingly inflexible policy to support Sharon was for political reasons of his getting elected. But as to whether he really believes his actions are going to hasten the day of the final conflict, I do not know.”
“I had assumed that I would age with all my friends growing old around me, dying off very gradually one by one. And here was a plague that cut them off so early.”
“I had assumed that the Earth, the spirit of the Earth, noticed exceptions-those who wantonly damage it and those who do not. But the Earth is wise. It has given itself into the keeping of all, and all are therefore accountable.”
Source: The Alice Walker Collection: Non-Fiction
“I had assumed the way to eat better was to find the perfect plan that would finally stop the inner battle—to quiet the noise, to eliminate the stress, and to simply know what to eat. But here’s what I discovered: Real intimacy and real growth require tension.”
Source: Eating 2.0: How to Eat Confidently in an Ultraprocessed World
“I had asthma when I was a kid, asthma so bad that it would turn into pneumonia and I almost died several times. Nobody knew why back then, but now it's obvious.”
“I had at one point this rather depressing image of some alien culture seeing the death of this planet - coming down in their spaceships and sniffing around; finding all our skeletons sitting around our TV sets and trying to work out why our end came before its time and they come to the conclusion that we amused ourselves to death.”
“I had at some point the epiphany that if I wanted to be a writer, maybe I should stop thinking about writing, or stop writing about writing, and actually write.”
“I had auditioned for 'Saturday Night Live' two or three times before and never really saw myself there. I looked up to Belushi and Bill Murray and Aykroyd and I never saw myself as in their world.”
“I had bad days on the field. But I didn't take them home with me. I left them in a bar along the way home.”
“I had bags of energy as a kid.”
“I had bags under my eyes from working nonstop and my hair needed a cut two months ago, straddling the line between a tousled mane and an almost man-bun. Not that I would ever collect my hair in an elastic. That was almost as unacceptable as making country music.”
Source: Midnight Blue
“I had basically the same stigma that Bo Derek did -- being created by a Svengali -- which took me a long time to overcome.”
“I had battered down seas, dispelled storms. Surely coming clean about my feelings was an easier task.”
Source: The Never Tilting World
“I had beaten her until now, fairly or not, and I would not feel alone when I died. I would not die alone. It was all I could ask for.”
Source: A Court of Thorns and Roses
“I had beautiful wavy hair and a waxed moustache.”
“I had become a devotee to a religion of my own creation. Its most integral ritual was maintaining a precise calm especially when angry, when hurt, when terrified.”
Source: Friday Black
“I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered and caught the light. Fool's gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood's rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide.”
Source: The Moor's last sigh
“I had become a perfect fake human, saying the stupid and pointless things that humans say to each other all day long.”
Source: Dearly Devoted Dexter
“I had become an atheist at the age of thirteen, when atomic bombs were dropped on Japan.”
“I had become an expert at not doing any work; the more I got away with it, the more my behavior was enabled.”
Source: We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story
“I had become conscious of my physicality, aware of my presence and open to the ugly truths of the world. At the age of thirteen, I realised that there was a danger in innocence and beauty, and I could not live with both.”
“I had become Harry Potter. Except I was thirteen and not magic, and my destiny, whatever it was, held no profound purpose.”
Source: Breakable
“I had become increasingly concerned in recent years about the lack of civics education in our nation's schools. In recent years, the schools have stopped teaching it. And it's unfortunate.”
“I had become so quiet and so small in the grass by the pond that I was barely noticeable, hardly there... I sat there watching their living room shining out of the dark beside the pond. It looked like a fairy tale functioning happily in the post-World War II gothic of America before television crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity... Anyway, I just kept getting smaller and smaller beside the pond, more and more unnoticed in the darkening summer grass until I disappeared into the 32 years that have passed since then.”
“I had become the music and the fire and the night, and there was nothing that could slow me down.”
“I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst.”
Source: Hitch 22: A Memoir
“I had become very good by then at smiling and saying nothing at all.”
Source: Still Me