I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“I went into the dining-room, where four covered pots of soup stood on the table, and moved over to the bookshelves to the left of the fireplace. Here I kept two or three dozen works on architecture and sculpture, and a hundred or so plain texts of the standard English and French poets, stopping chronologically well short of our own day: Mallarmé and Lord de Tabley are my most modern versifiers. I have no novelists, finding theirs a puny and piffling art, one that, even at its best, can render truthfully no more than a few minor parts of the total world it pretends to take as its field of reference. A man has only to feel some emotion, any emotion, anything differentiated at all, and spend a minute speculating how this would be rendered in a novel—not just the average novel, but the work of a Stendhal or a Proust—to grasp the pitiful inadequacy of all prose fiction to the task it sets itself. By comparison, the humblest productions of the visual arts are triumphs of portrayal, both of the matter and of the spirit, while verse—lyric verse, at least—is equidistant from fiction and life, and is autonomous.”
Source: The Green Man
“I went into the family business. To me, it was the norm and not the exception.”
“I went into the foreign service because I was interested in politics. But, in 1991, when I joined, I didn't see much of an opportunity to be involved in federal politics as a Conservative. We were at the tail end of the Brian Mulroney era. I wanted to do something non-partisan as a way of preparing for a role in our politics later.”
“I went into the gas station, said, Fill 'er up, Harry. The guy said, Regular? I said, No, put on a gorrila suit and dance like a fairy.”
“I went into the house. I put on Jimi Hendrix's 'Red House' at full volume, filled the glass to the brim with rum, without ice, and went back to the terrace. To gaze at the night and the dark sea and the night.”
“I went into the library and read about fast food and became amazed by all the stuff I didn't know. I learned that there is a whole world behind the counter that, it seemed to me, has been deliberately hidden from the public.”
“I went into the living room and looked down at my mother’s torn body and shook my head. It was surreal. I guess some people in that situation would have crumbled, some would have cried, but I’d emotionally disconnected from life a long time ago. For that, I had to thank the skeletal bitch on the floor, with her greedy rodent soul and her short-tempered ape-mate in the kitchen. If anything, her death was a belated answer to old prayers, with a bit of an unexpected mess.”
Source: Zero Day
“I went into the ministry to use the church to elicit political change according to a soft Marxist vision of wealth distribution and proletarian empowerment. Edrita [his wife] could sense that I was on a long and uncertain path. She was always more conservative than I, but she did share my basic social values and was willing at least to let me test my political follies...Whenever I read the New Testament after 1950, I was trying to read it entirely without its crucial premises of incarnation and resurrection. That required a lot of circular reasoning for me to establish what the text said. I habitually assumed that truth in religion was finally reducible to economics (with Marx) or psychosexual motives (with Freud) or self assertive power (with Nietzsche). It was truly a self-deceptive time for me, but I had no inkling of its insidious dangers.”
Source: A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir
“I went into the new year loving myself in different ways, in a different possibility. It was then that I understood things I hadn’t. It was then that I understood people I hadn’t. We work in ways where sometimes we don’t align because our intersections lead us elsewhere. We find ourselves in rapids which lead to lightning, in beds that leave us homesick. We lust after the impetuous, in hopelessness, and sometimes in the reactive.
We like things and people who are bad for us and that’s fine. It’s fine because it’s life. It happens. They exist. We exist. We all exist together in this world where nothing seems to make sense. Where everything is nothing but imaginary because it’s what we imagine it to be. Reality exists and it’s there, but life is what you make it. Your actions ask for it. How you exist is how you exist.
We take every new year and give it a theme because we’re scared of how it could be. You change in the moment, not by years. You be to become and becoming is something which frightens people. Lead by example instead of letting the example lead you. Take this new year and find yourself in people who question it because questioning is how you gain from it.”
“I went into the room and stayed with Catherine until she died. She was unconscious all the time, and it did not take her very long to die.”
Source: A Farewell to Arms
“I went into the world, threw myself into the world, and great things came out of it.”
“I went into very deep research as to what exactly that meant and how sociopaths function psychologically and within the world.”
“I went jogging up on Mulholland. In the middle of my run I had some form of asthma attack and couldn't even walk. I couldn't get a ride one block to my house. I thought I was going to die.”
“I went looking for dresses and realized there was a niche I could fill in the wedding dress market.”
“I went looking for my dreams outside of myself and discovered, it's not what the world holds for you, it's what you bring to it.”
“I went looking for trouble, and I found it.”
“I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me,will you. Stop defending yourself.”
Source: The English Patient
“I went mainstream in a major way with the song "Let's Dance." And what I found I had done was put a box around myself. It was very hard for people to see me as anything other than the person in the suit who did "Let's Dance," and it was driving me mad - because it took all my passion for experimenting away.”
“I went my direction, my direction is whatever I want to go.”
“I went my whole life without winning anything and now all of a sudden after years of hard work my dreams were coming true all at once and I didn’t know how to deal with it. It felt like the world was changing its relationship with me but I had stayed the same.”
“I went off and read the books after the audition and I read all four books in one sitting - you know - didn't wash, didn't eat, drove around with them on the steering wheel like a lunatic. I suddenly understood why my friends, who I'd thought where slightly backward, had been so addicted to these children's books. They're like crack.”
“I went off to college planning to major in math or philosophy-- of course, both those ideas are really the same idea.”
Source: Fantastic Realities: 49 Mind Journeys and a Trip to Stockholm
“I went off to college, a good, middle-class, very proper college, a Brethren institution, where two years of Bible study are required for graduation. It was a good, sound, thorough, but completely biased evaluation of the Bible, and I was delighted with it, because it helped to document my doubts; it gave me a framework within which I could be critical.My independent study continued for 20 years after this. So I do know the Bible very well from a Protestant point of view.”
“I went off to fight some battle that I'd invented inside me.”
“I went on a children's roller coaster once when I was maybe 12-or some age when I was considered a little old to be on a kiddy ride. Absolutely terrified. Thought I was going to die.”
“I went on a date once with a police officer, unbeknownst to me. I thought he was a regular guy. And when I found out that he was a police officer... I wasn't so into it. I got paranoid that I would illegally cross the street and get a ticket for jay walking.”
“I went on a diet, swore off drinking and heavy eating, and in fourteen days I had lost exactly two weeks.”
“I went on a long trip through South America with Prince Charles where I was the only journalist there - a couple of photographers but no other writers.”
“I went on a meditation retreat. In 10 or so days, I spent about a hundred hours meditating, observing 'noble silence' the whole time, and so on. This was an interesting experience, which has had some beneficial effects for me.”
“I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.”
Source: The collected letters
“I went on countless auditions. I begged my parents until I finally was allowed to be in a theatrical play when I was 13. It was the most important thing in my life”
“I went on foot because I still had feet to carry me.”
Source: The Poisonwood Bible
“I went on inactive duty in August 1945, and since I had stayed in such good shape and had played ball on military teams, I was ready to start for the Indians just two days later, against the Tigers.”
“I went on iTunes and looked at versions of Christmas songs. Everyone has done them!”
“I went on Love Island thinking I was quite headstrong but it turned out I was quite emotional.”
“I went on loving him just the same, and I could never be interested in anyone else.”
Source: Norwegian Wood
“I went on seeing him, but it was like acting in some nightmarish play.”
Source: The Nice and the Good
“I went on spouting bullshit Encouragements as Gus's parents, arm in arm, hugged each other and nodded at every word. Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.”
Source: The Fault in Our Stars
“I went on steadily trying to 'find out how to'; but I wrote two or three novels without feeling that I had made much progress. It was not until I wrote "Ethan Frome" that I suddenly felt the artisan's full control of his implements. When "Ethan Frome" first appeared I was severely criticized by the reviewers for what was considered the clumsy structure of the tale. I had pondered long on this structure, had felt its peculiar difficulties, and possible awkwardness, but could think of no alternative which would serve as well in the given case: and though I am far from thinking "Ethan Frome" my best novel, and am bored and even exasperated when I am told that it is, I am still sure that its structure is not its weak point.”
Source: A Backward Glance
“I went on television and I wouldn't say a word; I feel so stupid when I watch them again.”
“I went on the courts with just a ball and a racket and a hope...and that's all I had.”
“I went on the pill when I was 16, put on four stone... so that proved to be a very effective contraceptive.”
“I went on to Cincinnati. I had got a taste of the big cities and them bright lights. I stayed there until I was about 18 or 19 and then I went on to Detroit.”
“I went on to discover that in its deepest sense, the will is not primarily the faculty of desire for anything known, but rather, the desire for something unknown, animate desire for something that lies beyond ourselves, a longing for something we know is missing in us.”
“I went on to host a kids' program from when I was around 10 until 15. In some ways I'm a child actor.”
“I went on to spend an inordinate amount of my childhood bashfully attached to my mother's pelvis, mostly out of social anxiety, but also because I was raised, from an early age, to fear anything that posed even the mildest of threats”
Source: Everything Is Awful: And Other Observations
“I went on to write my graduate thesis on the ["Montgomery Story"] comic book itself. It was the first long-form history that was ever written about it. And it's how I found out Martin Luther King actually helped edit "Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story."”
“I went on tour in the play H.M.S. Pinafore.”
“I went on tours with [Bob] Dylan - the big one was in 1975 and called Roaring Thunder Review. I knew him well because I met him around the time he did his second album, in 1963. He recorded one of my songs called Shadows. In the 1970s, it was suggested that we do a duet, because we had the same manager, Albert Grossman, who also managed Odetta and Peter, Paul and Mary. Dylan and I respected what each other did, but I just decided not to do it.”
“I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood and had a vision of what I must have really meant with "Beat"... the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific... People began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, bugniks and finally I was called the "avatar" of all this.”
Source: The Portable Jack Kerouac