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I Quotes

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All I Quotes

“I spent so much of my life reading about spirituality and reading about neuroscience and trying different meditation practices. It's a really big part of my life. But it's sometimes hard to talk about. There are so many people in the world who don't live in Southern California and don't spend their time meditating.”

“I spent so much time thinking about regret. Regret and its accompanying conviction that there is a perfect, placid life, one's own alternate existence, pristine and simple, existing in a neighboring reality in which certain turns in the road were never set upon. And it isn't true. Any of it. I knew that. I had learned it. But it is an irresistible fantasy, if only because it implies we have some control over our fates.”

“I spent ten years in the private sector, actually learning how business works. I'm the governor of Ohio, and I inherited a state that was on the brink of dying. And we turned it all around with jobs and balanced budgets and rising credit and tax cuts, and the state is unified, and people have hope again in Ohio.”

“I spent that night lying next to her in the cool of a summer breeze. I watched her drift and dream next to me, while I harnessed the weight of a thousand feelings alongside her. Her face glowed as she slept, as if she could not be any happier. Something profound happened that night, and I did not know what it was. All I knew was that something had changed. It was in the way she gazed at me, in the way her fingers would seek out the comfort of my hands. In retrospect, maybe it was that she had fallen in love for the first time, even though she had yet to say so. But as with all things beautiful, words merely got in the way. So, I didn’t care for them. I felt it in her presence that what we shared went beyond the effable, beyond what could be written about. It was the infinite space between the unspoken I-love-yous that resounded so clearly all around us. When the gods finally lit the stars for the night, and the moon had slipped into oblivion, I watched little rays of starlight twirl in full-bodied color on her celestial face. I wanted to stretch out my hands and caress her, to take hold of her and say, “Where you go, I will go, and where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God my God.” Like Jacob wrestling that terrible angel, I, too, wanted to grasp her—if only for a temporal second—so that I could encounter the divine. But I dared not disturb what was sacred, so I let her sleep.”

“I spent that night sat on his bed peeling the burnt skin off his back in huge white sheets. Most nights we would watch through the bedroom window as the drunks went past. One night a group was outside and had turned violent. Which wasn’t unusual but this night Alan shouted out of the window “that’s enough lads! Leave him!” They didn’t listen. He shouted again this time towards the house but with the window still open “Pat bring the shotgun!” They vanished. We didn’t even own a shotgun. We did own a blank firing six shooter pistol though. I don’t know why.”

“I spent the '80s in the Soviet Union and when I came to America it was '89 and I was in an immigrant bubble and we didn't have MTV or cable, so I kind of discovered the '80s when I was already older, maybe in college. And I continued to have this romantic obsession with all those films and there's this sound I hear in my head and it's kind of this bittersweet romantic, dark sound.”

“I spent the beginning of my focus on activism by doing what most everyone else was doing; blaming other people and institutions. Don’t like the war? Let’s blame the president, congress, or lobbyists. Don’t like ecological disregard? Let’s blame this or that corrupt corporation or some regulatory body for poor performance. Don’t like being poor and socially immobile? Let’s blame government coercion and interference in this free market utopia everyone keeps talking about. The sobering truth of the matter is that the only thing to blame is the dynamic, causal unfolding of system expression itself on the cultural level. In other words, none of us create or do anything in isolation – it’s impossible. We are system-bound both physically and psychologically; a continuum. Therefore our view of causality with respect to societal change can only be truly productive if we seek and source the most relevant sociological influences we can and begin to alter those effects from the root causes.”

“I spent the better part of a week trying to figure out how to organize these stacks of 30 years of conversations and dialogues. I finally began clustering them in these different categories, and I ended up with the ones you listed.It's interesting to me the kinds of questions I haven't been called to wrestle with. For example, I don't know what this says, but I'm not asked a lot of political questions.”

“I spent the first few years of my life in a smallish community in Queens. Back in those early days, kids could roam the streets with relatively little supervision and one place I visited frequently was the local library. This particular branch was little more than a storefront but to me it was an alternative universe where I could explore my interests and receive kind, informative answers to my questions from the wonderful librarians.”

“I spent the first years working in Jordan trying to learn as much as I could about what was taking place in the country, about where there were gaps in the development process that needed attention. Inevitably, there were certain common denominators which are fairly common to all developing societies, perhaps to all societies: that quality education be accessible to everyone, not just a limited elite few; the sustainable conservation of natural resources; the full engagement of women in national development; and the value of cross-cultural exchange and understanding to international relations.”