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I Quotes

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All I Quotes

“I am saying there are women in the Senate, there are women in governorships, there are women in statewide office, there are women in the House, and I do think we can't ignore the fact that we have had the first woman ever win a nomination of a major party and the first woman ever winning the popular vote. So I think the table is set for a woman in the near future. I really do.”

“I am scared about what Julian has to say, and what he will choose, and where he will go. But I am terrified by what I want: for him, and worst of all, from him. Because I do want. I’m not even sure what, exactly, but the want is there, just like the hate and anger were there before. But this is not a tower. It is an endless, tunneling pit; it drives deep, and opens a hole inside me.”

“I am scared of snapping. That something, some random day, it will simply make ‘click’ in my mind and all of the sudden I will absolutely lose my mind. In other words having gazed into the abyss for too long. Go completely and totally insane! How does one decent into madness? What makes one click so all of the sudden life is upside down and people don’t know themselves anymore?”

“I am scared of the photo studio. I am scared of the telephone. Scared of anything outside our apartment. Scared of the people in their big fur hats. Scared of the snow. Scared of the cold. Scared of the heat. Scared of the ceiling fan at which I would point one tragic finger and start weeping. Scared of any height higher than my sickbed. Scared of Uncle Electric Current. "Why was I so scared of everything?" I ask my mother nearly forty years later. "Because you were born a Jewish person," she says.”

“I am scared to even say this out loud, because I worry that having confessed this fragility, you now know where to punch. I know that if I am hit where I am earnest, I will never recover. It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us. But mostly, I think I'm just scared that if I show the world my belly, it will devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism and hide behind the great walls of irony and only glimpse beauty with my back turned to it through the claude glass. But I want to be earnest, even if it's embarrassing. The photographer Alec Soth has said, "to me, the most beautiful thing is vulnerability. I would go a step further and argue that you cannot see the beauty which is enough unless you make yourself vulnerable to it." So I try to turn toward that scattered light, belly out and I tell myself, "this doesn't look like a picture, and it doesn't look like a god. It is a sunset, and it is beautiful." And this whole thing you've been doing where nothing gets five stars because nothing is perfect, that's bullshit. So much is perfect. Starting with this.”

“I am secretive. Always have been. And one way that secrecy manifested in my early life was that I was adept at juggling multiple social realities: I could get by no problem in many social arenas (including that of high school), but also felt alienated and totally uninspired by everything that happened there.”

“I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience…”

“I am seeking whatever is painful in my body, whatever is joyful. While seeking, I may never find myself. While seeking, I have no idea what form I may take or whether anyone, including myself, will ever like what I write. Most of writing feels like walking in the dark. I'm reminded of what Donald Barthelme said: The writer is that person who, embarking upon her task, does not know what to do.”

“I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage. Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.”