I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“I began to realize that the stability I had felt all my life was actually a mix of resignation and illusion. I had resigned myself to living a life of struggle, accepting the oppressive nature of capitalism, racism, ad patriarchy as simply the way it was. I had grown not just accustomed to oppression but comfortable with it.”
Source: Are We Free Yet?: The Black Queer Guide to Divorcing America
“I began to realize that thinking itself is nothing but the process of asking and answering questions.”
Source: Awaken The Giant Within
“I began to realize that this idea of the lighter the better and the darker the worse was really - had an impact on sororities, on friendships, on all sorts of things, and it was stunning to me.”
“I began to realize that when you are at peace with your Maker you can, if not ignore human criticism, at least rise above it.”
“I began to realize what everyone in the world knows and routinely forgets: that to be loved sexually is to be loved not for one's actual self but for one's ability to arouse desire in the other...Only the thoughts in one's mind or intuitions of the spirit can attract permanently...”
Source: The Odd Woman and the City
“I began to recall my own experience when I was Mercutio’s age (late teens I decided, a year or two older than Romeo) as a pupil at a public school called Christ’s Hospital. This school is situated in the idyllic countryside of the Sussex Weald, just outside Horsham. I recalled the strange blend of raucousness and intellect amongst the cloisters, the fighting, the sport, and general sense of rebelliousness, of not wishing to seem conventional (this was the sixties); in the sixth form (we were called Grecians) the rarefied atmosphere, the assumption that of course we would go to Oxford or Cambridge; the adoption of an ascetic style, of Zen Buddhism, of baroque opera, the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, and Mahler; of Pound, Eliot and e. e. cummings. We perceived the world completely through art and culture. We were very young, very wise, and possessed of a kind of innocent cynicism. We wore yellow stockings, knee breeches, and an ankle length dark blue coat, with silver buttons. We had read Proust, we had read Evelyn Waugh, we knew what was what. There was a sense, fostered by us and by many teachers, that we were already up there with Lamb, Coleridge, and all the other great men who had been educated there. We certainly thought that we soared ‘above a common bound’. I suppose it is a process of constant mythologizing that is attempted at any public school. Tom Brown’s Schooldays is a good example. Girls were objects of both romantic and purely sexual, fantasy; beautiful, distant, mysterious, unobtainable, and, quite simply, not there. The real vessel for emotional exchange, whether sexually expressed or not, were our own intense friendships with each other. The process of my perceptions of Mercutio intermingling with my emotional memory continued intermittently, up to and including rehearsals. I am now aware that that possibly I re-constructed my memory somewhat, mythologised it even, excising what was irrelevant, emphasising what was useful, to accord with how I was beginning to see the part, and what I wanted to express with it. What I was seeing in Mercutio was his grief and pain at impending separation from Romeo, so I suppose I sensitised myself to that period of my life when male bonding was at its strongest for me.”
Source: Players of Shakespeare 2: Further Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company
“I began to refer to myself as the Hooker who won the Booker.”
Source: Mother Mary Comes to Me
“I began to reflect on Nature's eagerness to sow life everywhere, to fill the planet with it, to crowd with it the earth, the air, and the seas. Into every corner, into all forgotten things and nooks, Nature struggles to pour life, pouring life into the dead, life into life itself. That immense, overwhelming, relentless, burning ardency of Nature for the stir of life! And all these her creatures, even as these thwarted lives, what travail, what hunger and cold, what bruising and slow-killing struggle will they not endure to accomplish earth's purpose? and what conscious resolution of men can equal their impersonal, their congregate will to yield self life to the will of life universal?”
Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod
“I began to research the concept of dimensionality from the point of view of quality, and not just quantity, as a mathematician might do. Taking my clues from the theosophical use made of the Vedantic levels of reality, I identified the western notion of Energy (as someting which is effecatious by means of motion), with the idea of Time. The more comprehensive dimension 'eternity' I defined as a form of energy which is efficacious without motion. In this manner I began to establish the qualities of dimensions and open out the seemingly monolithic concept of energy.”
“I began to see all disciplines as creating a vocabulary, a set of tools for understanding human life in a particular way.”
Source: When Breath Becomes Air
“I began to see during the civil war, in that part of the states of Missouri and Kansas where the doctors were shut out, the children did not die.”
Source: Autobiography of Andrew T. Still: With a History of the Discovery and Development of the Science of Osteopathy, Together with an Account of the Founding of the American School of Osteopathy
“I began to see her mind like an old television set, one with a dial you had to change the channels. She'd gotten stuck between channels and all that was broadcasting in her mind was crackling white noise which drove her mad and scared me to death. The medicine was like turning down the volume. The channels might still be stuck but at least the set was no longer spewing the deafening static. The volume had to be lowered until the channels could work again”
Source: My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward
“I began to see her mind like an old television set, one with a dial you had to change the channels. She'd gotten stuck between channels and all that was broadcasting in her mind was crackling white noise which drove her mad and scared me to death. The medicine was like turning down the volume. The channles might still be stuck but at least the set was no longer spewing the deafening static. The volume had to be lowered until the channels could work again”
Source: My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward
“I began to see motorcyclists who had attached computer discs to their back mudflaps, because they made good reflectors. In a place called Xingwuying, locals climbed the Great Wall whenever they wanted to receive a cell phone signal.”
Source: Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip
“I began to see my body like an iPad or a car. I would drive it and demand things from it. It had no limits. It was invincible. It was to be conquered and mastered like the Earth herself.”
“I began to see my life and each breath I am given as a living prayer to God and a way to pray for others for our world.”
Source: To Heaven and Back: A Doctor's Extraordinary Account of Her Death, Heaven, Angels, and Life Again: A True Story
“I began to see myself as someone who can help others understand diversity rather than feeling like a social outcast. Ellen taught me to not care about other people's opinions. She taught me to be truthful. She taught me to be free. I began to live my life in love and complete acceptance. For the first time I had truly accepted myself.”
Source: Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain
“I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.”
Source: The Secret History
“I began to see that my problems, seen spiritually, were really my soul's plusses.”
“I began to see that Saro was speaking directly to me. Each dish an edible love letter. Succulent, bold. By the third and fourth courses I accepted that this chef who wore elf boots was making love to me and we haven’t even so much as kissed.”
Source: From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home
“I began to see that Wendy had something Tiger Lily hadn't even known she was supposed to have. Of all the things Tiger Lily had thought she might have to be for Peter-strong, brave; to be big and to keep up-she had never thought that the one thing he wanted most from her was simply to show that she believed in him, always and without fail.”
Source: Tiger Lily
“I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.”
“I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.”
Source: the bell jar
“I began to see, again and again, stories that were first confusing and second where the emotional impact was muted because the big scene came before the explanation of what was going on. There was a reverse chronological order as well as a concealment of what exactly was going on. I think often that comes out of the fear of being boring, and sometimes I think it's just an attempt to seem clever.”
“I began to speak well at a very advanced age - 15, 16, 17 years old. It was psychological: the trauma of war, my family and growing up on my own. I was more or less a street kid.”
“I began to stack my sculptures into an environment. It was natural. It was a flowing of energy.”
“I began to study again, and now for the first time really achieved an understanding of the content of the Jew Karl Marx's life effort. Only now did his Capital become really intelligible to me, and also the struggle of the Social Democracy against the national economy, which aims only to prepare the ground for the domination of truly international finance and stock exchange capital.”
Source: Mein Kampf
“I began to study marijuana in 1967... I had not yet learned that there is something very special about illicit drugs. If they don't always make the drug user behave irrationally, they certainly cause many non-users to behave that way.”
“I began to think about the extent to which nude and semi-nude female bodies are commonplace in our present day culture and how young girls might be affected. I wondered if, at some point, this bombardment of images could possibly get boring and that concealing - rather than revealing - would awaken sexual desire. I don't think that will ever be the case, of course, but I was intrigued to write a poem in which dressing was just as erotic as undressing.”
“I began to think of war, even so-called "good wars" like World War II, as corrupting everybody. Violence begetting violence. The good guys beginning to act like the bad guys. And when I studied the history of wars, it seemed to me that that was the case. Athens vs. Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. The Athenians presumably the democratic state. The Spartans the totalitarian state. But as the war went on, the Athenians began to act like the Spartans. They began committing atrocities and cruelties. So I saw this as a characteristic of war, even so-called "good wars."”
“I began to think that if you're a stutterer, it's about inhabiting silence, emptiness, and nothingness.”
“I began to think that melancholy was a dialect that only some people knew-or could even hear-and in my conversations, I sought these people out.”
“I began to think that my time had come, as the saying is.”
“I began to think that the finest modern writer was the screen actor. This was in the spirit of the Fifties where a very antiliterary literature was emerging - Kenneth Patchen and others. I kind of believed what Nietzsche said, that nothing not written in your blood is worth reading; it's just more pollution of the airwaves.”
“I began to think that there was a place for 'Footloose' to get retold again, that there was actually a more conducive political climate, an emotional climate to explore a town that has experienced a trauma and a shock, and starts overreacting.”
“I began to think the damage to our country, to us even, went so deep now that it would never fully be repaired. I realised the worst damage wasn't the bombed buildings, the burnt-out cars, the shattered windows. It wasn't even the neglected farms and the holes in the fences and the crops gone to seed. It was the damage deep inside us. Words like spirit and soul started to mean more to me now.”
Source: Burning for Revenge
“I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.”
Source: the bell jar
“I began to travel by myself, in Europe, when I was eight years old. At that age I was already on the move between India and Swizerland, Switzerland and France, France and England. Administering my own finances like an adult.”
“I began to turn my body, but he held me and laid me back onto the bed, insistently, kissing my breasts but not lingering, kissing a line down my stomach and lower. “You want me to prove to you that I want you more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life, Roses. Is that true, aye? Because I just can’t take this anymore.”
I gasped as he licked into my sensitive flesh, wetting me with his soft strokes, speaking soft words against my skin. “If you insist on doubting me, Roses, if you absolutely insist on breaking down every defense that I have with your tears and your plush, wet, ripe beauty, then that’s what I’ll have to do, lass. Is that what you want from me? Proof?”
I could only sigh a soft response, already falling, burning, wanting too much.”
Source: Highlander Claimed
“I began to understand how quickly I moved into fixing, helping and saving; often to soothe my own discomfort with someone else's pain...People are allowed to struggle. They are allowed to fail. And so am I.”
Source: Worthy Still: A Journey of Healing, Faith, and Becoming
“I began to understand my sensations, to know what I wanted, at around the age of forty - but only vaguely.”
Source: Pioneering modern painting: Cézanne & Pissarro 1865-1885
“I began to understand that 'America' in reality belonged to the whole world and not just to Americans. The idea of America had already been invented by the philosophers, the vagabonds, the dispersed of this earth, long before the Spanish ships got there. Those whom we call Americans have only rented it for a time. If they behave badly, we can discover another 'America'. The contract can be canceled at any time.”
“I began to understand that all Texas is an eternal synthesis of past and present, superimposed one upon the other. It produces a feeling of being in two places at once.”
Source: I'll take Texas
“I began to understand that I could not depend on them to provide me with affirmation and approval. To improve my relationship with my parents, I needed to change. I needed to give myself permission and approval to do what I wanted to do. If my parents couldn’t love me the way I wanted them to love me, then I would have to learn how to love myself.”
Source: Parent Yourself Again: Love Yourself the Way You Have Always Wanted to Be Loved
“I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.”
Source: Peter Camenzind: A Novel
“I began to understand that the most worthwhile obsession is an obsession that is actually independent of the object of fixation. The object is only borrowed as a pretext, a means, an environment, through which or in which the obsessed person can project his own eternal and essential hunger, thus fulfilling the requirements of death--the dissolution of the ego for something, anything, that exists independently outside of one's self. Perhaps that obsession should be controlled. At some point the most mundane catalyst, a skirt or fallen leaf, is enough to provoke a series of captivating chain reactions, while at another time much more important objects will inspire only an absurd indifference.”
“I began to understand that there were certain talkers - certain girls - whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say, but because of the delight they took in saying it. A delight in themselves, a shine on their faces, a conviction that whatever they were telling about was remarkable and that they themselves could not help but give pleasure. There might be other people - people like me - who didn't concede this, but that was their loss. And people like me would never be the audience these girls were after, anyway.”
“I began to understand the challenges that first-generation college students and students of color have in college.”
“I began to understand what it meant to make a home and just how much I had taken mine for granted”
Source: Crying in H Mart
“I began to understand with a terrible sureness that we teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.”
Source: Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem