I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“I thought of a remark . . . that the United States is like a 'gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.' Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”
Source: The Grand Alliance
“I thought of all that worked dark pits
Of war, and died
Digging the rock where Death reputes
Peace lies indeed.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Wilfred Owen (Illustrated)
“I thought of all the different kinds of love in the world. I could think of ten without even trying. The way parents love their kids, the way you love a puppy or chocolate ice cream or home or your favorite book or your sister. Or your uncle. There's those kinds of love and then there's the other kind. The falling kind.”
“I thought of all the hardships and people that I had lost in the past few days alone, but, most of all, I thought of how I didn't regret any of it.”
Source: November Snow
“I thought of all the magazine article I'd read on mothers who worked and constantly felt guilty about leaving their children with someone else. I had trained myself to read pieces like that and silently say to myself, 'See how lucky you are?' But it had been gnawing at the inside, that part that didn't fit, that I never let myself even think about. After all, wasn't it a worse kind of guilt to be with your child and to know that you wanted to be anywhere but there?”
Source: Harvesting the Heart: A Novel
“I thought of all the others who had tried to tie her to the ground and failed. So I resisted showing her the songs and poems I had written, knowing that too much truth can ruin a thing. And if that meant she wasn't entirely mine, what of it? I would be the one she could always return to without fear of recrimination or question. So I did not try to win her and contented myself with playing a beautiful game. But there was always a part of me that hoped for more, and so there was a part of me that was always a fool.”
“I thought of all the places I'd been and all the places I hadn't, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far-drifting ash and hostile immensities, connections missed, things lost and never found.”
Source: The Goldfinch
“I thought of all the summer evenings I'd spent sitting in the chairs under the trees beside the trailer, reading books that helped me escape Creek View, at least for a little while. Magical kingdoms, Russian love triangles, and the March sisters couldn't have been further away from the trailer park.”
Source: I'll Meet You There
“I thought of all the times we'd been together, how I kept coming closer, then retreating, while he stayed right where he was. A constant in a world where few, if any, really existed.”
Source: What Happened to Goodbye
“I thought of all those heroines of fiction who looked pretty when they cried, and what a contrast I must make with a blotched and swollen face, and red rims to my eyes.”
“I thought of America as this crazy, happy, exciting place where everybody's rich and there's stuff everywhere. Compared to Pakistan, it's not untrue.”
“I thought of another moral, more down to earth and concrete, and I believe that every militant chemist can confirm it: that one must distrust the almost-the-same […], the practically identical, the approximate, the or-even, all surrogates, and all patchwork. The differences can be small, but they can lead to radically different consequences…”
Source: The periodic table
“I thought of betrayal and how it came so easily - in a word, a glance, a gesture.”
“I thought of Bobby, of the last look he had given me, and at that moment I understood one of the differences between man and cat: man knows he's going to die, so he can get ready and be willing, even eager, to go. A cat knows the end is near, but that's all. He can't accept death: he can't trust in it; cats are perhaps too metaphysical an entity to need to believe in the idea of a beyond; a cat is his own god and man his creation.”
“I thought of breaking down the door, but there's nothing left to say. That Chevy four by four says it all, sitting in my place.”
“I thought of Care Work as a community in your pocket when you have no crip friends or you are all alone, as so often we are. I have written or co-created nine books, but it wasn't until my fourth book that I started writing unapologetically about disability. It still felt like a risk. As a friend once said, "Everyone wants to write the poem that makes people go "yeah!" and pump their fist at the performance." So much of the time when I'd tried to write, or read poetry about being disabled, about being chronically ill, the opposite happened: instead of wild clapping and screaming, I got met with awkward silence, the nervous laughter, the "I'm not sure if it's OK to laugh," the #SadFace. If you wanted to be the best, to have people love your work, too often if felt like too much of a risk to write and perform crip work.
I was able to finally take that risk and write and perform and publish disabled poems in Bodymap, my third book of poetry, because of the collective work in disability justice writing and performance. Because of Sins Invalid and individual disabled BIPOC writers, because there was starting to be a movement of disabled writers and creators, queer and of color, who were creating space to do our work. I could believe there was an audience who was hungry for the work, and I got it. Without that, my writing would have stayed in my journal, stayed in the drafts that didn't make it into the books I published.”
Source: The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs
“I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy, The sleepless soul that perished in his pride; Of him who walked in glory and in joy, Following his plough, along the mountain-side. By our own spirits we are deified; We Poets in our youth begin in gladness, But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.”
“I thought of collaborating with other people which still might happen at this point. It might not. I was just trying to break the cycle because I had gotten to a point where I was definitely sure that I was on the wrong track after about 16 years.”
“I thought of drugs and sex and partying as essential tenets of a well-enjoyed life. I had no idea it was possible to expect or rely too much on them. It was
beyond my understanding that drugs or relationships could meet a need one day and leave me in want the next. Yet the more I had each of these things, the more I realized it wasn’t that they over-promised and under-delivered, it was that they were completely incapable of delivering or doing what I desired them to do.”
Source: Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose
“I thought of Emily's legs hanging down as Mother carried her. I thought about the empty look on her face as Mother hugged her. I thought about never being able to play in the forest alone, or make a friend, or spend more than a few minutes by myself. I thought about not having even the privacy of my own bed at night. I thought, for the first time in a long time, about how those things had made me feel, when Mother slept with me. But to Lilith I said, "She doesn't know how good she's got it," and for a moment she and I were united once more in our disdain for our little sister, our parent's favorite, who couldn't understand how lucky she was.”
Source: The Lost Girls
“I thought of Emmett Till, and when the bus driver ordered me to move to the back, I just couldn’t move.”
“I thought of fleeting satisfaction, of happiness, of romance, of perfect silver screen moments shared with a companion, and of perfect blue movie moments too. Yet I had never stopped to wonder whether that one companion might satisfy me completely, having assumed always that there would be another to follow who would touch a different chord in me, who would bring me a different pleasure, and that with all of them taken together I would create for myself a mosaic of experiences that gave me everything that I wanted to experience in the course of my life; everything that I wanted to feel, to enjoy.”
Source: The Erotic Notebooks
“I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him. [- Nick Carroway]”
“I thought of God as being able to talk big and write *very* small.”
Source: The Child Buyer
“I thought of him as a beautiful deer in the forest that made this world a better place simply by existing; I didn't need it in my living room hanging off the wall.”
Source: Kissing Is the Easy Part
“I thought of him more than I, which caused me to take myself for granted. That’s what was dangerous about the situation. And I knew. I just didn’t understand how to handle it.”
“I thought of how in less than twelve months I had survived homelessness and joblessness in one of the toughest cities on earth.”
Source: Still Me
“I thought of how many places there are in the world that belong in this way to someone, who has it in his blood beyond anyone else's understanding.”
Source: Selected Works: Translated from the Italian and with an Introd. by R. W. Flint
“I thought of how proud he was when he took the marks- cutting the skin of his throat in a long slash and then packing it with ashes until keloid scars rose up. He called it his second smile.”
Source: Red Glove
“I thought of human beings, as far back as I had read, of our deeds and didoes. According to some scientists, we were born to forever crawl in swamps, but for some not yet explained reason, we decided to stand erect and, despite gravity's pull and push, to remain standing. We, carnivorous beings, decided not to eat our brothers and sisters but to try to respect them. And further, to try to love them.”
Source: A Song Flung Up to Heaven
“I thought of inviting you to my other club but you know how it is. Lunching there is a useful way of reminding people that you're still alive, but the members will come up and congratulate you on the fact.”
Source: Original Sin
“I thought of Joel Silver. He never changes. He's sort of the unmoving, unchanging rock of Gibraltar in the otherwise-shifting world of Hollywood. He's the same as he always was. He looks the same, talks the same, has the same enthusiasm.”
“I thought of killing myself but soon decided that I could always try MIT and then kill myself later if it was that bad but that I couldn't commit suicide and then try MIT afterwards. The two operations, suicide and going to MIT, don't commute.”
“I thought of life as a self-made riot, an experiment in chaos and fun. There were, after all, no endings, just beginnings, endless possibilities, no wrong turnings, just turnings meandering about in the village of life.”
“I thought of love as a game. It is not a game. It is more serious than death.”
Source: Vampires, Scones, and Edmund Herondale
“I thought of my father's wisdom, as though it were buried in a box under a tree. As in the old song - a gold box with a silver pin. Some day I should be grown up, and I should dig up the box and turn the pin.”
“I thought of my mom, sitting on the sofa on a rainy Saturday afternoon, watching cable reruns of her favorite Little House on the Prairie series. Sometimes she'd cry. She would hold onto a tissue, and she would sob as she sat there on the couch. I asked her once why she was crying. She told me it was because the show made her happy.”
Source: Upside Down in a Laura Ingalls Town
“I thought of my mother (...). Freud wrote that no man is secure in the love of his mother can ever be a failure. Well, I had been busy proving that theory wrong.”
Source: Men in Black
“I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple.”
Source: White Oleander
“I thought of my mother, her life taken by a man who, if not a literal beast nonetheless, someone shaped by the shape of someone else's pain, who only knew to take that pain and try to give it to someone else, thinking it would take the pain away from himself.”
Source: White Horse
“I thought of my new uncertainty: How long can I live with ALS?
I thought: "Don't search for answers. Live the question."
Enjoy life more because of the uncertainty, not less.”
“I thought of my parents as heads on Easter Island, and it took moving two miles away to realise they had been people all along.”
Source: The Rachel Incident
“I thought of my river, the Afon-Lwydd, that my father had fished in youth, with rod and line for the leaping salmon under the drooping alders. The alders, he said, that fringed the banks ten deep, planted by the wind of the mountains. But no salmon leap in the river now, for it is black with furnace washings and slag, and the great silver fish have been beaten back to the sea or gasped out of their lives on sands of coal. No alders stand now for thy have been chopped as fuel for the cold blast. Even the mountains are shells, groaning in their hollows of emptiness, trembling to the arrows of the pit-props in their sides, bellowing down the old workings that collapse in unseen dust five hundred feet below. Plundered is my country, violated, raped.”
Source: Rape of the Fair Country
“I thought of my sweet little girl and her chubby cheeks, big brown eyes and long brown hair with bangs that constantly needed trimming. She was all that really mattered in this world, and I could not keep moping over some guy who came in and out of my life faster than a season of American Idol.”
Source: Spilled Perfume: A Memoir
“I thought of myself as a global citizen.”
“I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.”
“I thought of myself as an atheist until I realized it was a belief, too. It's a shame everything has to have a label. I feel that if I was figuratively dropped on the Earth and there was a political line, I would be just left of center. The difference for me is that conservatives are more interested in property values and rights and free markets, and liberals are more interested in human rights. In the end, there are people who don't fit into the marketplace and are not equipped. I believe the government should step in where the free market fails.”
“I thought of myself as kind of an anarchist all my whole adult life, from the days when I was 15 or 16.”
“I thought of myself as part of the general filmmaking effort. And as my scope broadened, I began to think about directing. I wanted to be the guy who got to say whether the dress is red or blue.”
“I thought of myself mixing the fragrance of a certain day – the heavy musk of the hillside after the rain with the lightness of fresh blossoms doused in the downpour. I thought of each little bottle as the essence of a happy day or a sad one. I mixed the scent of a lonely moment – sandalwood and bergamot lingering over a rich, peppery base.”
Source: The Secret Mandarin