I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“I once had a dream; human was a chosen beast,
domesticated by God to manage the planet earth.”
Source: Master of Stupidity
“I once had a dreams of becoming a beautiful poet, but upon an unfortunate series of events some of those dreams dashed and divided like a million stars in the night sky that I wished on over and over again, sparkling and broken. But I didn't really mind, because I knew that it takes getting everything you ever wanted, and then losing it to know what true freedom is.”
“I once had a friend who did the hair for sci-fi movies, and after a particularly bad break-up I stupidly went to her salon and told her she could do anything she liked. She dyed the bottom cherry red and the top peroxide blonde.”
“I once had a garden filled with flowers that grew only on dark thoughts, but they needed constant attention and one day I decided I had better things to do.”
“I once had a girl, or should I say she once had me.”
Source: The Songs of John Lennon: The Beatles Years
“I once had a large gay following, but I ducked into an alleyway and lost him.”
“I once had a leather jacket that got ruined in the rain. Why does moisture ruin leather? Aren't cows outside a lot of the time? When it's raining, do cows go up to the farmhouse, "Let us in! We're all wearing leather! Open the door! We're going to ruin the whole outfit here!"”
“I once had a letter from a man who asked to do something very weird. He told me he wanted to sit on my shoulders and for me to then walk around his town to raise money for charity. He described himself as being 6ft and I was thinking, 'I'm only 5ft 4in, and you want to sit on my shoulders?' How bizarre.”
“I once had a lot of hatred, mainly toward my father, an alcoholic.”
“I once had a man break up with me. He said I was using him because right after making love I would weigh myself.”
“I once had a mind of quicksand,
That dragged ideas into its depths,
Inhaling specks of sunlight,
Every time I drew a breath,
But the world thought me a hazard,
When every word I spoke, I meant,
So around me they put caution tape,
And filled me with cement.”
“I once had a patient who used to practice the most horrible tortures on himself, and when I asked him why he did such things, he said, 'Why before the world does them.' I asked him then, 'Why not wait and see what the world will do?' and he said, 'Don't you see? It always come at last, but this way at least I am master of my own destruction.”
Source: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden: A Novel
“I once had a patient who was convinced that his head was full of sea water and a crab lived inside. When I asked him what happened to his brain he told me that aliens had sucked it out with a drinking straw.
"It is better this way," he insisted. "Now there's more room for the crab.”
Source: Shatter
“I once had a problem ... so I tried group sex. Now I have a new problem - who to thank.”
“I once had a published written debate with a religious apologist who, after I had argued the standard line that the idea of a loving and merciful deity is inconsistent with the fact of natural evil, said this meant his god was not all-powerful, and therefore was not to blame because it could not stop natural evil from occuring. This is a different tack from the more robust one that says natural evil is a response to humanity's moral evil. What this latter view in effect argues is that because of (say) Hitler's wrongdoings, thousands of babies deserve to be drowned in tsunamis.”
Source: The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism
“I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.”
“I once had a thousand desires. But in my one desire to know you all else melted away.”
“I once had a young musician come to me and say that he wanted to be a professional musician. I asked him to write his list. When he came back to me, the three things in his life he most wanted were: to be paid for his music; to travel around the world; to meet new people. We came to the decision, after thinking really creatively, that if he got a job on a cruise ship, he would fulfill those goals.”
“I once had an editor advise me, as I was revising one of my early novels, to add more characters. I played around with the idea. As soon as I'd decided a few fresh faces and give them something to do, I realized that what my editor had really asked for was more plot. Ding. More characters equals more action.”
“I once had an extraordinary experience with former prime minister Ted Heath. Both of his eyes, including the whites, turned jet black and I seemed to be looking into two black holes.”
“I once had been in the middle of a mass chaos and terrible riots.
There, I witnessed how men were truly such as beasts unleashed.”
Source: My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
“I once had dinner with Madonna and I wasn't nervous but within about a minute I found myself talking about underwear.”
“I once had every hope,’ he says. ‘The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it's just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink inside, down and down to a little point of light, preserving one's solitary soul like a flame under a glass. The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain – the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in a man's eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives? Last week the people were rioting in York. Why would they not, with wheat so scarce, and twice the price of last year? I must stir up the justices to make examples, I suppose, otherwise the whole of the north will be out with billhooks and pikes, and who will they slaughter but each other? I truly believe I should be a better man if the weather were better. I should be a better man if I lived in a commonwealth where the sun shone and the citizens were rich and free. If only that were true, Master More, you wouldn't have to pray for me nearly as hard as you do.”
Source: Wolf Hall
“I once had half a cup [of coffee], twenty years ago, and I'm still working it off.”
“I once had someone say to me in an interview, 'You are more ugly on the screen than in real life.'”
“I once had that exact same thought about Josh, and look at me now: It's like a million years have gone by and he's just a memory to me.”
Source: P.S. I Still Love You
“I once had the nerve to ask Picasso the question, 'What is art?' He answered, 'Art is a lie which makes us see the truth.”
“I once heard a Chicago-area pastor put it this way: we don't need more Americans bowing down to the Democrat donkey or the Republican elephant. We need more Americans bowing down to the Lion of Judah.”
Source: God Less America: Real Stories From the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values
“I once heard a group of boys say “she is always smiling” when describing a girl from our school. I
don’t know who the girl was, but I wish I was her.”
Source: Fireflies
“I once heard a learned man say, "Every evil has its remedy, except folly. To reprimand an obstinate fool or to preach to a dolt is like writing upon the water. Christ healed the blind, the halt, the palsied, and the leprous. But the fool He could not cure."”
“I once heard a man say he knew there was a God, he just didn't think he needed Him. It is nice to take care of yourself and be independent, but it is also nice to know that you have a resource to rely on in times of need. If you are used to fending entirely for yourself, then when a catastrophe occurs you will expend a lot of energy looking for help at a time when you need your energy looking for help at a time when you need your energy for creative work.”
“I once heard a pastor say that when it comes to the sins of our fathers, we either repeat or repent.”
“I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to go to church no more.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“I once heard a spiritual man say that he was not so much astonished at the things done by a soul in mortal sin as at the things not done by it. May God, in his mercy, deliver us from such great evil, for there is nothing in the whole of our lives that so thoroughly deserves to be called evil as this, since it brings endless and eternal evils in its train.”
Source: The Interior Castle
“I once heard a theologian remark that in the Gospels people approached Jesus with a question 183 times whereas he replied with a direct answer only three times. Instead, he responded with a different question, a story, or some other indirection. Evidently Jesus wants us to work out answers on our own, using the principles that he taught and lived.”
Source: Prayer Participant's Guide: Six Sessions on Our Relationship with God
“I once heard a wise man say there are no perfect men. Only perfect intentions.”
“I once heard a woman laugh at that most tragic moment in all drama, the off-stage shot in "The Wild Duck," and I afterward had her killed, so there will be no more of that out of her.”
Source: No Poems
“I once heard a woman who'd lost her dog say that she felt as though a color were suddenly missing from her world: the dog had introduced to her field of vision some previously unavailable hue, and without the dog, that color was gone. That seemed to capture the experience of loving a dog with eminent simplicity. I'd amend it only slightly and say that if we are open to what they have to give us, dogs can introduce us to several colors, with names like wildness and nurturance and trust and joy.”
“I once heard a woman who had lost her dog say that she felt as though a color were suddenly missing from her world: the dog had introduced to her field of vision some previously unavailable hue and without a dog, that color was gone. That seemed to capture the experience of loving a dog with eminent simplicity. I'd amend it only slightly and say that if we are open to what they have to give, dogs can introduce us to several colors with names like wildness, nurturance, trust and joy.”
“I once heard an exec say, "If you don't ask for it, we can't give it to you." We can't go through our lives just being grateful for everything.”
“I once heard [Gerald] Feinberg suggest that many of Manhattan's 1970s social problems could be solved by forbidding anyone who earned less than, say, $10,000 per year to live there. It had not occurred to him, apparently, that this excluded many of the people who worked at the university.”
Source: My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance
“I once heard my mother tell my sister love only comes at a price, there's no way around it. You give up parts of yourself for love, she said. If that's true, I thought, the cost of our love had risen. And despite wanting to be as real to you as you were to me, I couldn't afford us any longer. We were beyond my means.”
Source: The Love We Share Without Knowing
“I once heard of a class teacher who’d punish every student wearing a blue shirt whenever a student wearing blue shirt had committed a mistake. I thought that was pretty bad. I then heard of a class teacher who’d punish every student wearing a blue shirt whenever someone in blue shirt committed a mistake somewhere else. Clearly, the worst is not a reality.”
“I once heard of a murderer who propped his two victims up against a chess board in sporting attitudes and was able to get as far as Seattle before his crime was discovered.”
Source: The Athletic Benchley: 105 Exercises from the Detroit Athletic Club News
“I once heard of a young man whose mind was taken up day and night with thoughts of the Castle, he neglected everything else, people feared for his ordinary faculty of reason since all his faculties were always up at the Castle, but in the end it turned out that it wasn't actually the Castle he was thinking of but only the daughter of a scullery maid at the offices, he got her, and then all was fine again.”
Source: The castle
“I once heard Pema Chodron explain that no emotion lasts longer than 90 seconds. You heard that right: no emotion we feel lasts longer than a minute and a half if we let it run its course without interference. Emotions, the result of chemical response to a thought, appear, intensify, de-intensify, and subside: and they do this in less time than it takes to microwave a frozen burrito. What prolongs them isn’t emotional wiring gone awry but the stories we lay on top of them that keep our brains dumping more of those chemicals into our system. A prolonged emotional experience is the result of the stories we keep alive in our heads.”
Source: Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol
“I once heard some idiot on the radio saying that all great art has suffering as its dominant theme, and that the greatest artists are only able to create because they suffer immensely in their own lives. What a bunch of bullshit. Look at Van Gogh's paintings: there's as much joy in them as there is pain. Suffering is only a single color, and by itself it's boring.”
Source: Leave Myself Behind
“I once heard somebody say that God had closed a door on an opportunity they had hoped for. But I've always wondered if when we want to do something that we know is right and good, God places that desire deep in our hearts because He wants it for us and it honors Him. Maybe there are times when we think a door has been closed and, instead of misinterpreting the circumstances, God wants us to kick it down. Or perhaps just sit outside of it long enough until somebody tells us we can come in.”
“I once heard someone doing a karaoke version of my song. That was pretty funny.”
“I once heard someone on a bus say that this guy had gotten under her skin. And it struck me as a remarkable thought - that someone would affect you so deeply they'd always be a part of you.”