I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“I had never been to Texas. Id been through Texas, but Im so glad to be back in a place thats not L.A. or New York. To talk about Dallas, to talk about there being sweet tea on the catering table, its rich and saturated in American-ness.”
“I had never been to the playoffs, and it was exciting. The fans went through the roof. They were excited about the whole team. It was great to be traded to a city like Chicago, which was a lot like Boston.”
“I had never been to war, but I knew what it was like to be prepared to face the enemy every day.
The difference was, my enemy wasn’t a faceless stranger. My enemy was someone I loved.”
Source: Enemy: A True Story of Courage, Childhood Trauma and the Cost of War
“I had never been with a woman for longer than a night, and they had always been whores. And while throughout each of these speedy encounters I tried to maintain a friendliness with the women, I knew in my heart it was false, and afterward always felt remote and caved in. I had in the last year or so given up whores entirely, thinking it best to go without rather than pantomime human closeness.”
Source: The Sisters Brothers
“I had never before been a special fan of that great comedian Phyllis Diller, but she utterly won my heart this week by sending me an envelope that, when opened, contained a torn-off square of brown-bag paper of the kind suitable for latrine duty in an ill-run correctional facility. Duly unfurled, it carried a handwritten salutation reading as follows:
Money's scarce
Times are hard
Here's your f******
Xmas card
I could not possibly improve on the sentiment, but I don't think it ought to depend on the current austerities. Isn't Christmas a moral and aesthetic nightmare whether or not the days are prosperous?”
“I had never before considered that people near me might have problems that were not caused by me. I had been created to please people. If the people around me weren't happy, I must be doing something wrong. Lynn helped me see that I lacked the power to make other people feel anything.”
Source: The Flock: The Autobiography of a Multiple Personality
“I had never before heard Mozart's "Idol mio", nor anything sung by so fine a singer as Signora Tirenza, the prima donna from Rome itself. Her astonishing voice transported me to another place of wordless emotion. All my life I had hoped to find that uplifting love that crowns some lucky spirits but evades others, however long they seek it. Would it always escape me? Or should I return home, and try even harder to nurture affection between Michael and myself?”
Source: A Taste for Nightshade
“I had never before met anyone who owned a telephone and believed in dragons.”
Source: My madness: the selected writings of Anna Kavan
“I had never before seen my friends come in beaten, their heads laid open, their noses broken, or seen them jailed for peaceably demonstrating that they wanted work. I had only known how workers lived. Now I was face to face with what our society did to workers who could get no work.”
“I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.”
“I had never before understood what "despair" meant, and I am not sure that I understand now, but I understood that year.”
Source: Goodbye To All That
“I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.”
Source: Force of circumstance
“I had never chosen anything. I had always changed my colors according to my surroundings. Nor had I ever willingly engaged in providing advice on how to evade taxes or gone along with that kind of scheme. I merely went with the flow of the moment. I was thus virtually nonexistent.”
Source: ME: A Novel
“I had never confronted my parents with the true feelings I had for them, and I had certainly never expressed the depth of my feeling for my mother, being too selfish to try when I should have.”
“I had never considered marriage, but I had an open mind, and I was to learn after a brief try at it that most open minds should be closed for repairs.”
“I had never considered using a hashtag anywhere other than on Twitter, but now I'm inspired. Text messages have always seemed a little flat to me, so the murmuring Greek chorus of a hashtag might be a perfect way to liven them up and give them a bit of dimension.”
“I had never considered what it would be like to be in love until I was in it.”
Source: High School
“I had never done a 90-minute play with no intermission, so it is a bit like you get onto the train and you don't get off until it's over - and it's over very quickly, so don't miss a moment of it. That experience is very rare and specific so don't miss a minute, because there aren't very many minutes of it.”
“I had never done a Director's Cut narration on Beaches so I did in time for the release of the DVD. It was a great visit and I do a whole-behind-the-scenes thing and I tell stories about Bette [Mudler] and Barbara Hershey and everybody and that was fun. It made me cry again.”
“I had never done a roast, but I really wanted to, because it's so different from standup.”
“I had never done any sort of yoga before, and this epiphany was a little more esoteric. I walked into the yoga room and there was a voice from my soul that said out loud, This is it! I just knew. I just knew in that moment - I couldn't even straighten my legs. I couldn't sit cross-legged on the floor. I couldn't put my legs up the wall in the most gentle, restorative yoga pose, and yet, I knew.”
“I had never done any theater in high school, which actually worked to my benefit. I didn't develop any bad habits.”
“I had never done anything with blue screen before, or prosthetics, or anything like that. Lord of the Rings was like stepping into a videogame for me. It was another world completely. But, to be honest, I basically did it so that I could have the ears. I thought they would really work with my bare head.Working with Martin Scorsese was an absolute minute-by-minute education without him ever being grandiose about it.”
“I had never done anything yet that was conventional – why should the love of my life be any different?”
Source: The Secret Mandarin
“I had never done Shakespeare before, but I don't think you can be an actor and not do it. There were moments when I thought, I'm just not going to be able to pull this off.”
“I had never done TV. I think it's a foolish medium for, most rock 'n roll music. Nobody ever comes off well on TV.”
“I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.”
Source: The Outsider
“I had never dreamt Id become an actress. It was destiny that put me in the right place at the right time and gave me the right opportunities.”
“I had never encountered a being who deliberately perpetuated fraud against himself.”
Source: To Kill a Mockingbird
“I had never engaged in remote multishrink psychoanalysis on this scale before, so it was a fascinating experience.”
“I had never even thought I'd be an actress - I was supposed to be a lawyer. But the motivation is the same: when you act, you defend a role; you have to be convincing. It's the same career.”
“I had never, ever touched someone and felt like this: like I was holding electricity inside of me.”
Source: A Very Large Expanse of Sea
“I had never examined this fear of Trinidad. I had never wished to. In my novels I had only expressed this fear; and it is only now, at the moment of writing, that I am able to attempt to examine it. I knew Trinidad to be unimportant, uncreative, cynical. The only professions were those of law and medicine, because there was no need for any other; and the most successful people were commission agents, bank managers and members of the distributive trades. Power was recognized, but dignity was allowed to no one. Every person of eminence was held to be crooked and contemptible. We lived in a society which denied itself heroes.”
Source: The Middle Passage: The Caribbean Revisited
“I had never expected that the China initiative would come to fruition in the form of a Ping-Pong team.”
“I had never expected to fall in love, but then, I'd never imagined anyone like Jess. She was one beautiful contradiction. The idea of letting someone else own my heart wasn't appealing. It sounded weak and Foolish. Something meant for the words of a song. I was wrong.”
“I had never experienced anything like it before and I don't think I have experienced anything like it since [on Ruapehu]. It was my dreams coming true in a way, and from there on I tended to become more of a doer than a dreamer.”
“I had never experienced anything like the response I got from people for Pirates of the Caribbean, where you meet a 75-year-old woman who had seen Pirates and somehow related to the character, and then five minutes later you meet a six-year-old who says, 'Oh, you're Captain Jack!' What a rush. What a gift. That was the challenge with Wonka, too--to be, in a sense, like Bugs Bunny. I find it magical that a three-year-old can be mesmerized by Bugs, but so can a 40-year-old or an 80-year-old. It's a great challenge to see if you can appeal to that huge an age range.”
“I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?”
Source: A Gate at the Stairs
“I had never felt more alive, more happy to be living in the moment. My suffering stood on the horizon, like the mountain, contrasting comfort. It stood starkly against familiarity, above old limitations, and towered over complacency. The mountains added the beauty and depth to the landscape around me. I was pushing into a totally new realm and pushing towards my dream of testing my limits. It did not feel pleasant, not in this hour, but I forced myself to run the last mile.”
Source: Training For Ultra: Ultra Running Stories From the Middle of the Pack
“I had never felt the allure of another human being this strongly, warmth and curiosity mixing to form an unspoken question in the air.”
Source: The Travis Family Series, Books 1-3: Blue-Eyed Devil, Smooth Taking Stranger and Sugar Daddy
“I had never given much thought to how I would die, but dying in the place of someone I love doesn't seem like such a bad way to go.”
“I had never given much thought to pain, to suffering. I never thought that bad things could happen to me or my family, and, as if it was a lesson, it all came at once.”
“I had never gone to college, I left school at a really early age, and all of a sudden I've got six really great friends hanging out with me every night. And we were a really tight group, and we just had an absolute blast.”
“I had never had a big opinion for myself. I had always thought I'd be a fuck up, that I'd be disappointed like always by life and people. But at this very moment, I knew it. I wasn't a good man, not well-adjusted. —Nolan”
Source: Six Years
“I had never heard anyone play like Benny Goodman and had never seen anyone like him on the stage. I realize now that what impressed me and stayed with me in memory was - the sounds he made. He played so purely. The music seemed to come from him, not just the instrument he played with such mastery.”
“I had never heard much about Nashville before coming out here, and that's why it's so surprising, because I'm the biggest enthusiast on the city of Nashville now. I'm looking for a place out here to live.”
“I had never heard of an IED until Cleve's injury. He told me that day that they could be made with marbles. When the bomb goes off, the marbles explode, glass shards shooting in every direction toward their victims. As he spoke, I imagined the innocent balls of glass I played with as a child, white with blue cat's-eyes in the center, the same shade as my mother's and my eyes. The toys wait in darkness, forced to play in a war they weren't designed for.”
Source: Alive Day: A Memoir
“I had never heard of Rumi until Robert Bly handed me this book and he said, ah, “These poems need to be released from their cages.””
“I had never held a baby in my life. I was one of those women - people would say, "Do you want to hold my baby?" and I was like "No ... "”
“I had never imagined myself doing [wrestling]. Once I came to the realization that it was a possibility, I just tried to concentrate on what I thought people would enjoy.”