I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“I had spent dozens of hours studying the photographs as though if I stared at them long enough and longingly enough I would, by some sort of osmosis, be transported into their clear, pure silence.”
Source: The Secret History
“I had spent many years before I was 31 hearing people tell me, Oh Man, you're so funny, you need to be in television. But that and a quarter won't get you on a bus.”
“I had spent many years pursuing excellence, because that is what classical music is all about... Now it was dedicated to freedom, and that was far more important.”
“I had spent months wishing I had more free time. Now that I had it, I found the city was not a friendly place without money to burn.”
Source: Still Me
“I had spent my childhood and the better part of my early adulthood trying to understand my mother. She had been an extraordinarily difficult person, spiteful and full of rage, with a temper that could flare, seemingly out of nowhere, scorching everything and everyone who got in its way. [pp. 40-41]”
“I had spent my entire career not wanting to talk about weight, not wanting to deal with it, wanting to be an actor first.”
“I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity.”
Source: The Wall (Intimacy) and Other Stories
“I had spent my whole life feeling homesick. The only difference between the two of us was that I didn't know what or where home was.”
“I had spent over 10 years in sports, and there's such a natural crossover between entertainment and sports. It's more common to have both of those in your arsenal.”
“I had spent so much time floundering beneath the weight of regret, thinking that if I had done something differently, he might still be alive. But I suppose all of us are doomed to think this way. We are, after all, the stars of our own stories.”
Source: The Midnights
“I had spent some time in the outback, but to meet Aboriginals and work with them was wonderful. It gave me a great appreciation of how tough life is and about the indomitable spirit that the Aboriginal people have always possessed.”
“I had spent ten miserable years looking for her...”
“I had spent the day
friendless, lonely and sad,
a stranger to myself.
After drowning the day
on the sea shore,
I walked back
to my empty house
on the deserted street.
The moment
I opened the door,
the book on my table
flipped its pages
and said:
"Friend,
Where were you
for so long?”
“I had spent the whole of my savings ... on a suit for the wedding - a remarkable piece of apparel with lapels that had been modelled on the tail fins of a 1957 Coupe de Ville and trousers so copiously flared that when I walked you didn't see my legs move.”
Source: Neither here nor there: travels in Europe
“I had spent time in New York, where I loved the idea that theater could be done up in tiny little rooms rather than for lots of money on a big stage, and be tied to ordinary life.”
“I had spent years thinking about one thing while I was doing another. I had, in fact, prided myself on being able to do two things at once.”
“I had spent years working in radio at different stations in Toronto; I wasn't in the stage company of Second City.”
“I had spindly little ankles, and growing up in Canada, I couldn't skate. I was no good at any sports so was very much a pariah through those adolescent years.”
“I had spoken about the dogma of Faith being under attack even from within the Church, and I had made reference to some examples of Church teachings which were losing acceptance among many "Protestantized" Catholics. One of the seminarians of this group brought that point up again and told me that he, for one, did not believe in what I had said was the Church's teaching. It was enough for him to know that a certain Cardinal had said the opposite. "I follow the living magisterium," this seminarian told me!
I could hardly believe my own eyes and ears. This was a seminarian who was preparing to become a priest to say only the traditional Latin Mass, and who had supposedly had a traditional seminary formation. As best I could tell from the discussion that followed, the superior of the group shared this seminarian's understanding of the Church's Magisterium - basically, that a "magisterial teaching" is whatever happens to be the latest word from Vatican officials, no matter how contradictory this might be to the prior constant and defined teachings of the Church!”
Source: Crucial Truths to Save Your Soul
“I had starred in more than 30 successful films, six in a row directed by Cecil B. De Mille.”
“I had starred in TV movies without much artistic value. They gave me a certain range. I knew that I was going to continue my studies, but I wanted to try something else on the side. I wanted to see what would come of it.”
“I had started acting when I was 7, and I was always wrong. I would always get to the very end [of the audition], but I wasn't a perfect package of one thing. I wasn't a cliche, and it always worked against me. I wasn't pretty enough to play the popular girl, I wasn't mousy enough to be the mousy girl. Then there was a TV show that Toni Collette was starring in. And when a role to play a girl who was struggling with identity came, I thought: "Oh, this is what I was supposed to do. Everything's leading up to this moment." I was 18. I was like, "This is it." I didn't get it. And I was devastated.”
“I had started along a narrow channel beyond which events were piling up with multiplied density; I had only to seize them by the handful and throw them in the face of my competitor, who had never guessed at their existence. Once I happened to drop, almost absently, the question: 'Arsenal-Real Madrid, semifinals. Arsenal playing at home. Who wins?,' and in a moment I realized that with what seemed a casual jumble of words I had hit on an infinite reserve of new combinations among the signs which compact, opaque, uniform reality would use to disguise its monotony, and I realized that perhaps the race toward the future, the race I had been the first to foresee and desire, tended only -- through time and space -- toward a crumbling into alternatives like this, until it would dissolve in a geometry of invisible triangles and ricochets like the course of a football among the white lines of a field as I tried to imagine them, drawn at the bottom of the luminous vortex of the planetary system, deciphering the numbers marked on the chests and backs of the players at night, unrecognizable in the distance.”
Source: Cosmicomics
“I had started also studying because I wanted to learn more about power and fighting.”
“I had started at a small startup as a big-company guy. Now I was leaving a big company as a small-startup guy.”
Source: I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59
“I had started by imitating a parrot, which is unusual, in that a parrot is supposed to imitate you. By taking the initiative you allow the parrot no alternative but to be itself, which proves again that attack is often the best defence.”
Source: Dear Me
“I had started doing theater in high school, and while I was doing that, I got my manager.”
“I had started losing weight. I mean he didn't know anything about the journey that I was on at that point obviously but from my highest weight of just over 300 pounds I lost about 45 pounds.”
“I had started my love affair with Wimbledon.”
“I had started off, before I ever got an acting job, working at Robert De Niro's Tribeca Productions as a reader. I was always interested in that side of the camera.”
“I had started out with the intent to make a love story and something not so grave or so dark.So I went into this saying, "I want to do a love story, not to be seen with rose-colored glasses, but not as heavy." As it turned out, it surprised me the place where it led actually was something so painful. I identified so much with them that I experienced a lot of that suffering as well.”
“I had started to desire power, because what I now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what I called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some universal storyteller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage.”
Source: Transit
“I had started to feel that somewhere in the second half of the 20th century, the idea of page-turning as a good thing had been lost. You were getting books that were the equivalent of absolutely beautifully prepared dishes of food that didn't taste like anything much.”
“I had started to wonder if maybe my life wouldn't always hold so much pain if I could just find the courage to let it go.”
“I had started working in television but it did not pay that much. I was 27, renting this little one-bed flat in Shepherd's Bush, West London, with a bathroom so small only someone of my size could actually get in it.”
“I had stepped into his arms, showing him my raw, broken heart.”
Source: The Truth About Forever
“I had still never read one of the Bond books when the movie Dr. No came out.”
“I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree.”
Source: Autobiographies: The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats
“I had stood beside my father's light, I had held Aeetes in my arms, and my bed was heaped with thick-woolled blankets woven by immortal hands. But it was not until that moment that I think I had ever been warm.”
Source: Circe
“I had stopped at a florist on my way to his apartment and bought myself an extravagant red rose for my buttonhole. Now I removed this and handed it to him. He took it like a botanist or morphologist given a specimen, not like a person given a flower. About six inches in length,’ he commented. ‘A convoluted red form with a linear green attachment.”
Source: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“I had stopped making figures, and then I began making images of animals in nature, which was a way to introduce the figure.”
“I had stopped painting around 2000, which I guess was when the music thing started getting pretty busy. I just didn't have enough time to pursue it properly.”
“I had stopped writing plays set in villages because they were not relevant to my experiences and I knew my English classmates wouldn't appreciate them.”
“I had stories that needed more space than the hour and a half or two hours a movie gives you.”
“I had striven all my life to win this night, and it was here, and I was this celebrated man who had amazingly little to do with me, or I with him.”
“I had strong legs that would have made me a good sumo wrestler and I used that to my advantage, but my home runs were achieved by technique.”
“I had studied Dadaism after the Second World War. What attracted me to this movement was the style its inventors used when not engaged in Dadaistic activities. It was clear, luminous, simple without being banal, precise without being narrow; it was a style adapted to the expression of thought as well as of emotion. I connected this style with the Dadaistic exercises themselves”
Source: Against Method
“I had studied history at Brown and didn't feel like doing anything with it. What does one do with a history degree besides become a historian? And the professors in school, it seemed like they were just writing books for other professors to comment on, and vice versa - it was the most self-referential, boring world you could ever imagine.”
“I had studied piano since I was 13, but I was surrounded by students who'd been playing since they were 5. I realized I was never going to be anything but mediocre.”
“I had studied the violin to a certain amount of success. At some point, I realized that I didnt really like the violin. I was only doing it because I could, and I was good at it, and everyone was encouraging me. But I didnt have a great love for it.”