I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“I had left graduate school, determined that I wasn't going to do anything else to "save the world" until I understood how I could get at the underlying causes of deepening suffering. To do that, I had to start by admitting that I didn't know.”
“I had left home (like all Jewish girls) in order to eat pork and take birth control pills. When I first shared an intimate evening with my husband, I was swept away by the passion (so dormant inside myself) of a long and tortured existence. The physical cravings I had tried so hard to deny, finally and ultimately sated ... But enough about the pork.”
“I had left myself no one to confine in, no one who would feel any sympathy for what I'd done. And after all that, he was in love with someone else. I screwed my eyes shut and presses my head down hard into the pillow. I thought of the night before, when he told me that he wanted me, how it felt then. Just admit it, I thought. He doesn't love you. That's what hurts.”
Source: Conversations with Friends
“I had left the cellar filled with ardent hope. A child had died there. She began life again as an adult. I wanted someone else to be glad I was alive. But men were interested in no one but themselves, and the sun caressed my thin arms and pale face with as much indifference as if I had been a blade of grass.”
Source: I Am Fifteen—and I Don't Want to Die
“I had left the visible, physical blue at the door, outside, in the street. The real blue was inside, the blue of the profundity of space, the blue of my kingdom, of our kingdom!.. ..the immaterialisation of blue, the coloured space that can not be seen but which we impregnate ourselves with.”
“I had lesser friends who would pretend to be interested in a night of catching up and then morph into giggly backstabbers at the first whiff of Polo Aftershave--woman who were lightning fast with the put-down joke or dismissive wave, whatever it took to seem more pretty or witty or larger chested to the nighly swarm of male barflies.”
Source: Sammy's Hill
“I had let down my shields, that was the problem. The crazy inside Dad had infected me, weakened me so that when Finn smiled, I'd been vulnerable. I'd dropped my shields and let myself pretend that somebody like Finn would want to be with somebody like me.”
Source: The Impossible Knife of Memory
“I had let my digust with teaching ruin my love of literature.”
“I had let them make me weak. Bent to it like some wild horse broken to the bit.”
Source: A Court of Mist and Fury
“I had let want in, opened the door ever so slightly. But want without the belief you can get what you want is pointless. You have to hope, so I let that in too. You have to. To want things and go for them and believe, even in impossible situations...Hope was what you had when you had nothing else. Hope was the perfect shiny top on the Christmas tree, the glowing halo of every wish, the endless beacon of a lighthouse bringing tormented ships home at last.”
Source: The Six Rules of Maybe
“I had lied so much lately that I was honestly surprised my pants weren't literally made of fire.”
“I had lied to myself from the very beginning, deceived myself into believing that I was being fanciful and overly imaginative. Surely such monstrosities only existed in nightmares? Yet I had lived through a nightmare these past months, and that was no dream at all.
I was still fighting against the awful truth, not wanting to give in, searching my mind for a logical explanation—but there was none. And the most horrible realization of all was that I had known, somewhere deep inside, ever since the day I first set eyes on Vladec Salei.
Plague carrier.
Living death.
Drainer of life.
The phrasing did not matter. No euphemism could strike fear into the hearts of men the way that single word could.
Vampire.
And for me, the uninitiated, that single word meant death.”
Source: Corcitura
“I had liked him for all the wrong reasons.”
Source: Flipped
“I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost.”
“I had listened to Joe Turner. When they'd book Joe there, I'd play the blues behind him.”
“I had literally the time of my life, and thought, "Wow. Television doesn't seem to be as crazy as it was when I was a kid." The dream for me was always to be in the movies, you know. But when this came along, I read the first script and I thought, "Oh, my gosh. This is incredible."”
“I had literary interests my whole life. I decided at the age of five I was going to be a writer. So I had done a great deal of reading. I suppose I was more at home in Greenwich Village than, say, any of classmates from Warsaw High School. But in any case, it was an overwhelming experience for me. It took me some time to begin to assimilate it.”
“I had little talent for happiness.”
Source: I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader
“I had lived a charmed life, and then I lost a beautiful woman I loved with all my heart.”
“I had lived all of my youthful dreams, but I couldn't think of many adult ones. I finally realized that we don't have many dreams for adults because, historically, people have always died much younger than they do today.”
“I had lived in fear of the fabled terrifying visions that assail chronic drinkers, but which had not yet attacked me.”
“I had lived in France before graduate school, but because of Spain, I had a lot of the characters go and spend a good bit of time in Spain.”
“I had lived in New York since 1996, sometimes in the worst neighborhoods, without even locking my door half the time.”
“I had lived my entire life making choices based on my perception of my mother's happiness. But after all that time, I was starting to understand that chasing her expectations would be a never-ending cycle; that bar would be set higher and higher each time. I would end up emotionally and physically deflated whenever I tried to fit into her definition of success. Trying to keep her happy left me unhappy with my life choices. I finally realized that I would not be able to fulfill my destiny if I was too busy trying to live my life for others. It was time to let go of her goals for me and start to make some of my own.”
Source: A Beautiful Mind, A Beautiful Life: The Bubz Guide to Being Unstoppable
“I had lived my life before in accordance with the poverty and itinerancy of my childhood, sliding in and out of other people’s leases, never expecting to stay very long and tolerating circumstances that strike me now as completely absurd.”
“I had lived through four revolutions on three continents. Whether in Iran, West Africa, or Haiti, all shared common characteristics, and all taught me lessons about dictators and authoritarians and their hunger to consolidate power and obtain, or at least convey legitimacy. That quest for legitimacy played out in a host of ways. One was the desire to manipulate, control, or discredit media. A relentless distortion of reality numbs a country’s populace to outrage and weakens its ability to discern truth from fiction. Another way dictators sought to secure power and legitimacy was by co-opting the power of the state, its military, law enforcement, and judicial systems, to carry out personal goals and vendettas rather than the nation’s needs. Still, another was by undermining dissent, questioning the validity of opposition, and refusing to honor public will, up to and including threatening or preventing the peaceful transfer of power.”
Source: Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump
“I had lived within the confines of familiar social mores, not overthinking the consequences of my choice of name in a future I could not foresee. I didn’t get to pick any of my names, but I could decide what I, the person who bore the name, did with them.”
Source: Rewriting My Happily Ever After: A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery
“I had long ago determined that I would devote my life to literary scholarship. Not, let me emphasise, the dry-as-dust scholarship of academe, the crushing orthodoxy to be found in universities, but rather the recondite scholarship that is a journey into the unknown. I refer, chiefly, to those dead authors whose works savour of the uncanny and the marvellous, authors whose unique perspectives are beyond the self-stultifying purview of the modern critical mania for so-called realism. For my part I chose the mysteries, and the hierophant of mystery was an obscure author called Arthur Machen.”
Source: The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales
“I had long ago discovered that when a word or formula refused to come to mind the best thing for it was to think of something else: tigers for instance or oatmeal. Then when the fugitive word was least expecting it I would suddenly turn the full blaze of my attention back onto it catching the culprit in the beam of my mental torch before it could sneak off again into the darkness.”
Source: A Red Herring Without Mustard: A Flavia de Luce Novel
“I had long ago learned that when you are the giant, alien visitor to a remote and foreign culture it is sort of your job to become an object of ridicule. It’s the least you can do, really, as a polite guest.”
Source: Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage
“I had long hair since I was 17 years old. It was time for me to let go. I hated being the guy at the wedding in a suit with a ponytail.”
“I had long hair when I was a teenager.”
“I had long periods where I couldn't make things happen, and then periods of enormous good luck. I guess the trick is to keep going in the periods when you're not lucky, when your stars are not aligned.”
“I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel.”
Source: In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)
“I had long since insisted upon interpreting the things that Fate forced me to do as victories of my own will and intelligence, and now this bad habit had grown into a sort of frenzied arrogance. In the nature of what I was calling my intelligence there was a touch of something illegitimate, a touch of the sham pretender who has been placed on the throne by some freak chance. This dolt of a usurper could not foresee the revenge that would inevitably be wreaked upon his stupid despotism.”
“I had long since wished that they would have been born with a dictionary sized how-to guide in my placenta. It would have been custom printed for each child by God. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. I’d been forced to walk through the minefield of parenthood feeling like I was blindfolded and hopping on one leg. Surely my kids should understand that I was trying to know what I was doing, but the verdict still seemed out at the moment.”
“I had long wondered," Lan said to Tam. "About the man who had given Rand that heron-marked blade. I wondered if he had truly earned it. Now I know." Lan raised his own sword in salute.”
“I had longed for this. To fall asleep in his warmth, to feel that our time together for once was unlimited.”
Source: Thirst for Salt
“I had longed to be a butterfly, and I was one at last. I attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polkaed and schoisched with a step peculiar to myself - and the kangaroo.”
“I had longed to come home but now that I was there, it wasn't much fun. Home wasn't the same if I couldn't sleep in my own bedroom or use the bathroom by myself. I felt like a stranger in those familiar rooms.”
Source: Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio
“I had looked at him and the surrounding noise faded away and time seemed to come to a standstill. And in that moment of crystal clear clarity, I had known with unwavering certainty that whatever beckoned in the future, he was going to figure in it. Our destinies were irrevocably intertwined. It was not rational, it was electrifying.”
Source: The Sunshine Time - Season 1 Episode 1
“I had looked forward
to old age as a time
of quietness, a time to draw
my horizons about me,
to watch memories ripening
in the sunlight of a walled garden.
But there is the void
over my head and the distance
within that the tireless signals
come from. And astronaut
on impossible journeys
to the far side of the self
I return with messages
I cannot decipher.”
“I had looked forward so eagerly to leaving the horrible place, yet when my release came and I knew that God's sunlight was to be free for me again, there was a certain pain in leaving”
Source: Ten Days in a Mad-House
“I had lost all respect for my husband. I came to expect nothing from him and nothing is what I got.”
Source: GAMES COMPULSIVE GAMBLERS and WE PLAY Second Edition
“I had lost confidence and a sense of self. Who am I? Am I a person who cowers in fear at the back of a spin class, avoiding everyone’s gaze? This uncertainty about who I am, this confusion over where I truly was in the time line of my illness and recovery, was ultimately the deeper source of the shame. A part of my soul believed that I would never be myself, the carefree, confident Susannah, again.”
Source: Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
“I had lost faith in biography.”
“I had lost her. My love. My Celia. My soul mate. The woman whose love I’d spent my life earning. Simply gone. Irrevocably and forever.”
Source: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
“I had lost her. My love. My Celia. My soul mate. The woman whose love I'd spent my life earning.
Simply gone.
Irrevocably forever.
And the devastating luxury of panic overtook me again.”
Source: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
“I had lost my connection with the universal energy and gained in its place precognition, visions, and a healing gift I could not control.”
Source: Dangerously Divine
“I had lost my mind and fallen into my heart.”
Source: Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives