I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“I had this wild thought that he was the only one in all this chaos who was just like me, and that was comforting and profound all at once.”
Source: Dreamland
“I had this wonderful career and thought I would retire as a teacher.”
“I had this wonderful, supportive mother who didn't get mad because of all the earth mucking up my bed. She just said they'd die - they needed the earth.”
“I had thoroughly internalized the notion that usefulness was the only metric of whether something had value. A carabiner was useful. A multitool was useful. Schedules were useful, as were cages and bars. Tranquilizer darts were regrettable but useful. A flower could be useful but only because it might provide food or diversion for a bird or animal, not because it was beautiful. Its beauty was incidental and easily dismissed. But then Sailor arrived, and I realized that even the smallest sliver of beauty matters and can be useful. Not because it makes a difference on some cosmic level, but because it quiets our restless hearts for a moment. It whispers to us that joy is still possible.”
Source: The Island of Last Things
“I had those kind of parents where I watched all of these very sophisticated movies: 'Five Easy Pieces', 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.'”
“I had thought a good mother would not elicit such comments, but now I see that a good mother is required to somehow absorb all this ugliness and find a way to fall back in love with her child the next day.”
Source: Glitter and Glue
“I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.”
Source: The Interpretation of Dreams
“I had thought about forgiveness more and more...I knew it wasn't a light that could be switched on in an instant-it grew day by day, week by week, month by month-but something was changing inside me now during the hours when I sat alone and tried to calm my feelings. A seed had been sown, and I sensed that, just as I'd once faced a choice about whether to use violence on the night when I stared at the gun, I know had another choice: to remain trapped in the bitterness of the past or to find peace in the present.”
Source: War Child: A Child Soldier's Story
“I had thought about it so often - too often, to the point where it had distorted my sense of time.”
Source: Norwegian Wood
“I had thought comics could only be one thing, and that was what mainstream comics were selling us. And the undergrounders proved anything you had in your head, as long as you had the skill to put it down on paper, was fair game. And I started filling sketchbooks with my own comics.”
“I had thought everyone in the electronic world would be so laid back, but there's as many cliques and prejudices as any other world.”
“I had thought Felicity dangerous a moment ago, when she felt powerful. I was wrong. Wounded and powerless, she is more dangerous than I could imagine.”
Source: A Great and Terrible Beauty
“I had thought fermentation was controlled death. Left alone, a head of cabbage molds and decomposes. It becomes rotten, inedible. But when brined and stored, the course of its decay is altered. Sugars are broken down to produce lactic acid, which protects it from spoiling. Carbon dioxide is released and the brine acidifies. It ages. Its color and texture transmute. Its flavor becomes tarter, more pungent. It exists in time and transforms. So it is not quite controlled death, because it enjoys a new life altogether.
The memories I had stored, I could not let fester. Could not let trauma infiltrate and spread, to spoil and render them useless. They were moments to be tended. The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me. So that I could pass it on someday. The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me, in my every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.”
Source: Crying in H Mart
“I had thought, foolishly, that knowledge could survive anything. That memory, if carefully preserved, would always endure, but now I saw the brutal truth. It wasn’t fire or war or overt violence that erased a people; it was forgetting. Quiet, systemic forgetting.”
Source: The Heir of Ash and Thunder
“I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel... I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.”
“I had thought I would hate being First Lady... I loved it.”
Source: The times of my life
“I had thought it childish to cling to my past, but my naivete had been thinking you needed to move on from losing the people you loved and who had loved you. Those people formed you as a person- you didn't grow past them, you built up from the foundations they'd given you.”
Source: The Golden Princess
“I had thought joy to be rather synonymous with happiness, but it seems now to be far less vulnerable than happiness. Joy seems to be a part of an unconditional wish to live, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences and expectations. Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole, and to show up to meet with whatever is there. It has a kind of invincibility that attachment to any particular outcome would deny us.”
“I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.”
Source: Dept. of Speculation
“I had thought of my Ancestors as ancient, with a history of torment etched on their weathered faces. But these were children, ranging in age from five harvests to fifteen, with gleaming faces and vigorous frames. I didn’t understand their youth. I understood only that they had been in the world before I came to it, and that they now belonged to some other place.”
Source: Yonder
“I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist.”
“I had thought peace was a place where there was no turbulence or fear. Where there were no highs and lows and where happiness was found in the calm at the center. But at that moment, I finally realized peace wasn’t about avoiding things. It was about making the choice to live life with all its chaos around you, and in the midst of it all, having calm in your heart.”
Source: The Baller
“I had thought sex was to breach new ground, despite terror, that as long as the world did not see us, Its rules did not apply. The rules, they were already inside us.”
Source: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
“I had thought that by giving myself so fully to a single fantasy, by indulging in it without restraint or hesitation, I would be cured of all fantasies, able to put them from my mind and go back to living a normal life, or to the image at least of how I imagined a normal life should be. The effect, however, was quite the opposite. Having freed myself from the fear of committing an act I had previously seen as taboo, I had not banished fantasy in general from my mind, but rather had fuelled it. Other, darker fantasies began to haunt me, more daring fantasies, more exciting and lascivious.”
Source: The Erotic Notebooks
“I had thought that growing up's consolation was that you could escape from the arbitrariness of things, that somehow one acquired more control. Now you had two numbers until you were ninety-nine. And it wasn't true. Growing up was just more of the same but taller. What happened was all luck. There was no logic.”
“I had thought that I would stop in 2017, but my coach has told me to stop saying that as I may continue into 2018. I'm not thinking about it at the moment.”
“I had thought that if I kept myself busy, time would move faster, but no matter what I did, every second felt like an hour.”
Source: On Two Feet and Wings
“I had thought that my being would collapse when I gifted my soul', said Neville. 'Why is it then that I still breathe, and feel, and move?' 'Because,' said Mary, 'when you gift something wholly and completely and unhesitatingly it returns to you doublefold.”
Source: The Crippled Angel
“I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.”
“I had thought the second sight was a dream, or a vision, a sudden rush of breath. I had thought that the truth might step into my hut, like a ghost, and say its name--that I might find it, if I sought it. But, I was wrong.
You will know it, in time...
I knew it, now. And I knew it was a feeling--deep, in the chest, or in more than the chest. It was a feeling in the bones, in the womb, in the soul.”
Source: Corrag
“I had thought your return would be akin to gaining a strong arm, but I see now I have been blessed with an overgrown fingernail.”
Source: Body Traitor's History
“I had thought, in my blindness, that the great things were the easiest to do, but now I see that drudgery is an inseparable part of everything worth while, and the more worth while it is, the more drudgery is involved.”
Source: Master of the Vineyard
“I had thousands of books in my house and never found anything I wanted to read. I would stare at the shelves of books like a hungry person staring into an open refrigerator and wait for something to speak to me. But nothing ever spoke.”
Source: The Book of the Most Precious Substance
“I had three children while doing a show, as demanding as 'Good Morning America,' so this is - you know, it's almost like I'm less daunted about motherhood, and parenting at this point in time. And I think I'm just much more fit and healthy than I was 20-years-ago.”
“I had three choices: to conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; to pay a tribute, a bribe. I chose the third solution by writing The Long Winter.”
“I had three goals and all of them were met.”
“I had three influential teachers. The first was Uta Hagen. The second two, Bobby Lewis and my late husband, Charles Kakatsakis, were both from the Actors Studio.”
“I had three jobs in college. The best day of my life was when I paid off my student loans, on my own.”
“I had three jobs my junior and senior year of high school. I worked for the gas station and worked for a pizza place.”
“I had three points I wanted to make. That not everybody in Hollywood is on the left, that Obama has broken a lot of promises he made when he took office, and that the people should feel free to get rid of any politician who's not doing a good job. But I didn't make up my mind exactly what I was going to say until I said it.”
“I had three sessions of chemotherapy so it was really tough, it was hard to go through it. But while I was going through my treatment, I was always motivated that I was going to come back and play for India. I think that's what kept me going and got me through.”
“I had three stages of knowing Wellington Mara. He was my boss for a long time and he was a father figure. And finally, as we got older, he was my friend.”
“I had three weeks of prep on 'Wolfman,' a ridiculously inadequate amount of time to try to bring together the fractured and scattered pieces of the production. I had taken the job mostly because I had a cash flow problem, the only time in my career I've ever let finances enter into the decision process.”
“I had thrown my body in for art... I had thrown myself into this game for art. You know, I was not a very good artist. But this was, like, one thing I could do. (On being photographed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at Duchamp's 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art.)”
“I had time to form one last thought before my mind emptied itself of all things: She will know how to fix me.”
Source: Where You End
“I had to abandon free market principles in order to save the free market system.”
“I had to accept that I was an alcoholic, that was the main thing. I think you've got to. But I try not say that I'm an alcoholic. I prefer to say that it's a disease I've got.”
“I had to accept the fact that sometimes things happen that are out of our hands.”
“I had to act in a school play when I was about ten years old. I really didn't want to do it. But everyone had to do it so I didn't have a choice. A talent agent came and watched it and later gave me some work. It's funny because I'd always known that I wanted a movie career. I just didn't think that I would be in the movies.”
“I had to add Oguchi into the list. After all, he’s a soccer player—fittest athletes ever. At 6'4 210 pounds, he's one of the most feared men in the world's game.
I've played against a lot of massive defenders. And no one has Oguchi's strength. His shoulders and chest are so big that people confuse him with an NFL player. He can move anyone in the game with one arm, including the best strikers in the world. Guys absolutely fear him.”