I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“I remembered attending one of Dr. Kerry's lectures, which he had begun by writing, "Who writes history?" on the blackboard. I remembered how strange the question had seemed to me then. My idea of a historian was not human; it was of someone like my father, more prophet than man, whose visions of the past, like those of the future, could not be questioned, or even augmented. Now, as I passed through King's college, in the shadow of the enormous chapel, my old diffidence seemed almost funny. Who writes history? I thought. I do.”
Source: Educated
“I remembered back to leo's burial and holding your hand. I was eleven and you were six, your hand soft and small in mine. As the vicar said 'in sure and certain hope of the resurrection of eternal life' you turned to me, 'I don't want sure and certain hope I want sure and certain Bee.”
Source: Sister
“I remembered during puberty, through the anorexic mists of intermittent menstrual cycles, that man, my father, lifting Shirley's nightdress over her head and asking her in his mocking way to choose what colour condom she wanted. 'Red or yellow?' Which did she choose? I can't remember. Perhaps she alternated. Perhaps there were other colours. It didn't happen once. It happened again and again. I had no power to stop it. That man, my father, had some control over me. I was drugged by the black silence in that big house, the vile whiff of aftershave, the crushing torment of inevitability. My father fucked Shirley using red or yellow condoms and it was those condoms that brought it all to an end. It was my last realization of the day; any more would have been too much to contemplate.
That time when my mother had found used condoms in bedroom, he had admitted, after a pointless burst my father's of denial, that he had been going to prostitutes. That was no doubt true but I can't imagine clients take used condoms away with them; prostitutes would surely get rid of the things. No. My father kept those used condoms as a prize. He was fucking his fourteen-year-old-daughter. He was proud of it.
Rebecca welled up with tears. Poor thing, she kept saying. Poor thing.”
Source: Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
“I remembered every moment between us, and every moment felt more precious as time passed.”
Source: Death Before Daylight
“I remembered from movies and TV that a human being striking a window could cause it to shatter, but the glass was too strong or I was too weak. My body didn't do much anymore when I put it to things. I didn't even make much noise pounding my fist against the glass: the ones that turned to look dismissed me almost before they had swiveled their heads. I might have been a painting of a hysterical female, paused in motion and screaming decoratively. But my throat was going raw, and my hands hurt dully.”
Source: You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
“I remembered getting the script for the auditions [of Aladdin], I had asked someone there if improvs were allowed, and he said everyone is sticking to the script. I said to myself that they are either going to love me or hate me. I was crossing out lines and throwing in my own lines. I went into the room and started doing things. They were like, "This boy is nuts! We should keep him." That's how it all came about.”
“I remembered his laugh, like a flock of crows taking off”
Source: Shiver
“I remembered how tough it was getting black people in large tenements to come together to build a playground. The enemy was not the Klan by the inside-outside lock that racism and classism had on the minds of the people: It operated from the inside through self-hate and self-doubt, and from the outside through the police, carnivorous landlords, and the welfare system.”
Source: Unfinished Agenda: Urban Politics in the Era of Black Power
“I remembered. I had thrown it away all those years ago when I closed the lid of my piano and walked away. Music had been the largest line that tethered me to my pain and the first of the lines I killed to ease the hurt.”
Source: Broken
“I remembered Ignifex's smirk and his confident words: I can wait all I want and still have you.
And I thought, Here is one thing he isn't getting. Standing on my toes, I kissed Shade on the lips.
It was just a bump of my face against his. Despite Aunt Telomache's lecture, I had no idea how long to prolong a kiss, and his lips startled me, foreign and cool as glass. But then he caught me under the chin and gently kissed my mouth open. Though his lips were still cool, his breath was warm; as he kissed me. I breathed in time to him, until I felt like my body was only a breath of air mixing with his.”
Source: Cruel Beauty
“I remembered learning from my favorite professor at Belmont to “surround yourself with people who are better than you,” and I was now living that mantra.”
Source: Loved
“I remembered lying there in my wet panties, going, “What do I do now?” Jason was asleep, but even if he hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have told him what had happened. I was convinced I’d never have heard the end of it. “Wet the bed like a baby!” he’d cry. Well, knowing Jason, he probably wouldn’t have said any such thing. But in my feverish four-year-old brain, I was convinced he wouldn’t want to be my friend anymore if he knew I was a bed wetter. Also, of course, it would come up every time I beat him at anything: “Well, okay, maybe you’re better at Candy Land, but at least I’m not a bed wetter.”
Source: How to Be Popular
“I remembered my days and nights of sunshine and starshine, where life was all a wild sweet wonder, a spiritual paradise of unselfish adventure and ethical romance. And I saw before me, ever blazing and burning, the Holy Grail.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Jack London (Illustrated)
“I remembered my little brother, Allyn, had appeared so innocent and angelic when he slept--similar to Kerrick. It must be a survival tactic. If Allyn hadn't looked so sweet, we would have killed him while he slept. He had been pure evil when he was awake--similar to Kerrick.”
“I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write. But starvation, unfortunately, didn't improve art. It only hindered it. A man's soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax.”
“I remembered my question! Did you find a partner?”
“I remembered my school days when we used to rejoice when exams got over, unaware that many others were still on their way, tougher ones. Life is no different.”
“I remembered Nahadoth's lips on my throat and fought to suppress a shudder, only half succeeding. Death as a consequence of lying with a god wasn't something I had considered, but it did not surprise me. A mortal man's strength had its limits. He spent himself and slept. He could be a good lover, but even his best skills were only guesswork - for every caress that sent a woman's head into the clouds, he might try ten that brought her back to earth.”
“I remembered only the good and loveable things about him, not the wretchedness he caused me, and the dope, and the resentments and silence and the half-crazy outbursts. I remembered his smell and the colour of his eyes and his head thrown back to laugh; these things were a second away, in time, but the others I dredged up dutifully, knowing that I must, for the sake of truth and sanity, try to keep a balance.”
Source: Monkey Grip
“I remembered Owen telling me how music had saved him in Phoenix, that it drowned everything out, and it was the same for me now. As long as I had something to listen to, I could blur the things I didn't want to think about, if not block them out completely.”
Source: Just Listen
“I remembered reading in a hard-boiled detective novel that if you drink in the same place two nights in a row, the bartender and waiters will remember your face.”
Source: In the Miso Soup
“I remembered reading somewhere that if you smile at something, it automatically makes you happier.”
Source: Better Off Friends
“I remembered Robyn telling me the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and how they'd survived: when the King chucked them in the furnace and an angel or someone went in with them. The furnace blazed all around them but they didn't burn.
And it did calm me. I don't know if it was Robyn or an angel or even God himself was in the boot, but I was starting to suspect that whenever I wanted God, he was there. Only not necessarily in the form I wanted, or doing what I wanted...In the pitch of the black boot I clung to the image of a fiery furnace, and it wasn't the furnace or Hell either.”
Source: The Night is for Hunting
“I remembered running away here as a teenager, with the first love of my life, and coming-to outside the next morning. The girl and the money were both gone, and she’d written a Dear John letter on my left hand in red biro.”
Source: The Smiling Man
“I remembered seeing it and it was this metallic turbine and I thought it was beautiful. I had never been in a power plant before, but I felt, without being overly dramatic, compelled to make photographs of this for myself.”
“I remembered some lines from the papers: our nuclear stations are absolutely safe, we could build one on Red Square, they're safer than samovars. They're like stars and we'll "light" the whole earth with them.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“I remembered something my first partner had told me. Never wrestle with a pig, Lindsay. You both get dirty. The pig likes it.”
Source: 1st to Die
“I remembered something somebody had once said to me. It's okay. Everyday is freshly ground.”
Source: Fragile Things
“I remembered something. There's a man. He is bald and wears a short sleeve shirt. And somehow, he is important to me... I think his name is... Homer.”
“I remembered standing in the middle of the street in front of The Crooked Bookshelf, filled with the certainty of a future. I had heard the wolves howling behind the house and remembered how glad I had been to be human.”
Source: Shiver Series (Shiver, Linger, Forever, Sinner)
“I remembered suddenly that Aspen had always been this way. He sacrificed sleep for me, he risked getting caught out after curfew for me, he scrounged together pennies for me. Aspen's generosity was harder to see because it wasn't as grand as Maxon's, but the heart behind what he gave was so much bigger.”
“I remembered that Beethoven's symphonies had sometimes been given names... they should have call [the Fifth] the Vampire, because it simply refused to lie down and die.”
Source: The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag
“I remembered that I was supposed to be banned from education, which explained why Timothy never asked me for an alternative interpretation of that notorious verse. That meant being deprived of the pleasures of carrying stacks of books, smelling the aroma of fresh paper, writing, adding clarity to academic concepts, and thinking and speaking academically.”
Source: The Reformation
“I remembered that it was masculine gestures that aroused me.”
Source: In the Cut
“I remembered that once, as a child, I was filled with wonder, that I had marveled at tri-folded science projects, encyclopedias, and road atlases. I left much of that wonder somewhere back in Baltimore. Now I had the privilege of welcoming it back like a long-lost friend, though our reunion was laced with grief; I mourned over all the years that were lost. The mourning continues. Even today, from time to time, I find myself on beaches watching six-year-olds learn to surf, or at colleges listening to sophomores slip from English to Italian, or at cafés seeing young poets flip though "The Waste Land," or listening to the radio where economists explain economic things that I could've explored in my lost years, mourning, hoping that I and all my wonder, my long-lost friend, have not yet run out of time, though I know that we all run out of time, and some of us run out of it faster.”
Source: We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
“I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitments, awaited those who had the courage to go forth into it's expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst it's perils.”
Source: Jane Eyre
“I remembered that throughout my growing up and education and pursuing my dreams and desires, going into acting, and, of course, getting through Yale University and on and on and on, that being average, being mediocre was not an option that you should be proud of.”
“I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.”
Source: An Excerpt from The Ocean at the End of the Lane: Chapters 1 - 3
“I remembered the 500 people that lived on a reserve outside my little town, behind a big fence.”
“I remembered the fox. One runs the risk of crying a bit if one allows oneself to be tamed.”
“I remembered the hotel drinks with the married man, when he'd eagerly asked me if I wanted children. And now here was this man, neurotically lying about his age. I'd spent a lot of my life being cautioned to avoid being a certain kind of woman: needy, desperate, hungry for commitment and babies, terrified of my age. Only now was it starting to occur to me that these female clichés had all been created by men, and perhaps, like many writers, they'd simply been describing themselves and projecting their worst characteristics.”
Source: No One Tells You This
“I remembered the last time Annabeth and I had parted ways, when she'd given me a kiss for luck in Mount St. Helens. This time, all I got was the hat.”
Source: Percy Jackson: The Complete Series
“I remembered the last time Emily and I had tried looking ourselves up as a joke. Her top result had been some sort of beauty blogger on YouTube and mine had been a porn star. We had laughed ourselves silly over it. Now, when I looked up my name, the first page of results was actually all me.”
Source: She Who Rises
“I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita... "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”
“I remembered the malangs of Shah Jamal, the dirty, shirtless renouncers with ratty beards and dreads and bare chests covered in necklaces of prayer beads, throwing around their arms in Charlie Manson dances and whipping out their old ID cards to say look, I used to be someone and now I'm no one, I'm so lost in Allah that I've thrown away the whole world. Would that qualify them as Sufis? I didin't know how to measure it. Whether the malangs were Sufi saints or just drugged-out bums didn't really matter. The lesson I took from them was that you're never disqualified from loving Allah, never. And I could see again that what I went through was nothing new, not even anything special in the history of Islam, not a clashing of East and West; it was always there. And that made me feel more Muslim than ever, because fuck it all, CNN, this is Islam too.”
Source: Journey to the End of Islam
“I remembered the man I'd fallen for after my father died. I'd hardly known him, but it didn't matter. I'd recruited him to serve my loss, made him everything I needed.”
Source: H is for Hawk
“I remembered the moment I read a novel for the first time.
The texture of the soft paper touching my fingertips. The black letters blooming on a white field. The texture of the page I folded with my hands.
「 It isn’t important to read the letters. The important thing is where the letters lead you. 」
My mother, who loved books, used to say this. At least for me, it wasn’t just a saying.
The gaps in the black print. My own little snow garden lay in between the letters. This space, which was too small for someone to go into, was a perfect place for a child who liked to hide. Every time a pleasant sound was heard, the letters stacked up like snow.
In it, I became a hero. I had adventures, loved and dreamt. Thus, I read, read and read again.
I remembered the first time I was about to finish a book. It was like being deprived of the world.
The protagonist and supporting characters walked off with the sentence ‘They lived happily ever after’ and I was left alone at the end of the story. In my vanity and sense of betrayal, my young self struggled because I couldn’t stand the loneliness.
「This… is the end? 」
Perhaps it was similar to learning about death. For the first time, I realized that something was finite.”
Source: 전지적 독자 시점 1 [Jeonjijeog Dogja Sijeom 1]
“I remembered the moment I read a novel for the first time. The texture of the soft paper touching my fingertips. The black letters blooming on a white field. The texture of the page I folded with my hands.
「 It isn't important to read the letters. The important thing is where the letters lead you. 」
My mother, who loved books, used to say this. At least for me, it wasn't just a saying.
The gaps in the black print. My own little snow garden lay in between the letters. This space, which was too small for someone to go into, was a perfect place for a child who liked to hide. Every time a pleasant sound was heard, the letters stacked up like snow.
In it, I became a hero. I had adventures, loved and dreamt. Thus, I read, read and read again.
I remembered the first time I was about to finish a book. It was like being deprived of the world.
The protagonist and supporting characters walked off with the sentence 'They lived happily ever after' and I was left alone at the end of the story. In my vanity and sense of betrayal, my young self struggled because I couldn't stand the loneliness.
「 This… is the end? 」
Perhaps it was similar to learning about death. For the first time, I realized that something was finite.
My mother said, 「This is the end. 」
「There isn't anything that comes next? 」
「There is no 'next'. 」
My mother was cold as she told me a brutal truth.
「 However, just because it is the end doesn't mean you've seen the whole story. 」
Then she gave me wise advice.
「 Yes? 」
「 Read it again. 」
Reread the finished story. As a child, I didn't know what this meant.
「 Why read a story I already know? 」
「 If you read it again, it will definitely be a different story. 」
「…I don't want to. 」
I was stubborn because I was afraid of feeling the deprivation again. Then my mother said, 「 Do you want to read it together? 」
Thus, I learnt to read again. At first, I only saw the main character's position. The second reading showed the position of the supporting character and the third reading showed the position of the enemy.
The story changed every time I read it. The story was over but it wasn't over. The story wouldn't end unless the reader gave up on the story.
I still thought about it often. What if my mother had said something else at that time?
All fiction was fake and it would just be a loss of my life if I read it.
Would I then have a lot of friends? What if I didn't study hard, wasn't bullied and didn't run away from the reality given to me?
Sparks appeared in the air and the flowing memories were broken.
「 Kim Dokja. You look relaxed. 」”
“i remembered the myth about Andromeda and how she had been chained to a rock by her own parents as a sacrifice to a sea monster. Maybe she'd gotten too many F's on her report card or something.”
Source: The Sea of Monsters
“I remembered the old doctor, - "It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot." I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.”
Source: Heart of Darkness