I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“In restaurants across America we see Latino workers in the kitchen who are being paid substandard wages. The saddest thing to me is that if we think about these workers, these are the people with the least access to good food. Yet they're often suffering from the highest rates of obesity and diet-related illnesses.”
“In restaurants where they serve frog's legs, what do they do with the rest of the frog? Do they just throw it away? You never see "frog torsos" on the menu. Is there actually a garbage can full of frog bodies in the alley? I wouldn't want to be a homeless guy looking for an unfinished cheeseburger and open the lid on that”
Source: Napalm & Silly Putty
“In restoring a house one must first realize its period, feel its personality and try to bring out its good points.”
“In restoring man from evil sovereignty, we must cheat.”
“In result of that weird interview, the numbness of my soul was for a moment resolved. And no wonder! I had actually seen the agent of fate. I had palpated the very flesh of fate--and its padded shoulder. A brilliant and monstrous mutation had suddenly taken place, and here was the instrument. Within the intricacies of the pattern (hurrying housewife, slippery pavement, a pest of a dog, steep grade, big car, baboon at its wheel), I could dimly distinguish my own vile contribution. Had I not been such a fool--or such an intuitive genius--to preserve that journal, fluids produced by vindictive anger and hot shame would not have blinded Charlotte in her dash to the mailbox. But even had they blinded her, still nothing might have happened, had not precise fate, that synchronizing phantom, mixed within its alembic the car and the dog and the sun and the shade and the wet and the weak and the strong and the stone.”
Source: Lolita
“In retailing, the formula happens to be a basic liking for human beings, plus integrity, plus industry, plus the ability to see the other fellow's point of view.”
“In retirement, only money and symptoms are consequential.”
“In retirement, the passage of time seems accelerated. Nothing warns us of its flight. It is a wave which never murmurs, because there is no obstacle to its flow.”
“In retrospect, crappy chemicals in my brain were working overtime, driving me to destroy myself, like that thing that makes lemmings throw them¬selves over a cliff.”
Source: You're Never Weird on the Internet
“In retrospect Hank I don't know why I spent four years writing this book when I could have just made a hit sing-a-ma-jig album.”
“In retrospect, he looked back on the events that had drawn them together and believed with all his heart that an invisible hand had moved him and her about like pieces on a chessboard, aligning their positions, manipulating incidents, bringing them inexorably to a collision point. Fate? The Almighty? Alex didn’t know, nor did he care to guess. All that mattered was this moment and the feeling that it was wonderfully and perfectly right.”
Source: Annie's Song
“In retrospect, I came to Nagasaki for the regenerative properties. The second atomic bomb blast so many years ago, which had swept up most of the city in a plutonium cloud, had made the city radioactively peace-loving. Reversing the usual cycle that turns victim into perpetrator, the people who stepped from the rubble filled their hearts with a fervent devotion to peace in all its forms.
In my mind's eye I see them: wounded and dying, their lungs filled with ash and smoke. The ash sits there for some time, and when they exhale, miraculously, something akin to love comes out.”
Source: The Ghosts of Nagasaki
“In retrospect I can see that my desire to create abstractions has become more and more radical. Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what's behind something.”
“In retrospect, I didn’t really want to be a slut. What I wanted and needed was a therapist who would consent to fucking me, but I doubted my parents’ insurance would have covered that. I had a lot to figure out for myself and I did that by making poor decisions that summer. If some wise, authoritative adult could simply have explained why I wanted to do these things and then done some with me, I think I would have refrained from most of my sexual misadventures...”
Source: Between Kay and You: A Bisexual Girl's Cumming-of-Age Confession
“In retrospect, I'm not sure why I considered unexpected beer a problem, but the place was smoky and not especially welcoming, and Iris was in the mood for tonkatsu but couldn't find any on the menu. She flipped through for a while and then said, "I want that."
"Looks good to me," I said. It was some kind of chicken on a stick. When I ordered it, the waiter asked if we wanted shio or tare. This much I could understand. Shio is salt; tare is a rich, sweet sauce made from reduced soy sauce, mirin, and simmered chicken parts. It's a common choice in yakitori places; tare is the safe option, since anything tastes good with sweetened soy sauce. Salt is for when you really want to see what the grill master can do.
Here we went with tare. Soon the waiter brought two skewers, each loaded up winy, glistening bites of chicken. We each took a bite and shared an astonished stare: this was the best chicken we'd ever tasted, and we had absolutely no idea what chicken part we were eating.
Later we figured out that it was bonjiri (sometimes written bonchiri). In English, it's called chicken tail or, more memorably, the Pope's Nose, a fatty gland usually discarded when prepping a chicken for Western-style cooking. We ordered two more plates of the stuff.
Yakitori is a beak-to-tail approach to chicken. OK, not literally beaks, but common choices at a yakitori place include thigh meat, breast meat, wings, heart, liver, and cartilage. The true test of a yakitori cook, I think, is chicken skin. To thread the skin onto skewers at the proper density and then grill it until juicy but neither overcooked (dry and crusty) or undercooked (unspeakable) requires serious skill.”
Source: Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo
“In retrospect, I suppose it might be difficult to develop early as a girl. Guys talking to your chest rather than your face is one thing. Then you’re also surrounded by a bunch of girls with pre- adolescent bodies who wrongly think that no breasts and no ass are a good thing. Plus, if you own your sexuality at all as a teen girl you’re a slut with a capital S. God, I’m glad those days are over. Not like adulthood is void of sexist platitudes, it’s just easier to talk about. In high school, though, if you call someone out on their shit you get bullied. It’s really a horrible time in life. Honestly, I don’t even know why there is an entire genre of books dedicated to it.”
Source: Ann, Not Annie
“In retrospect, I thought Natalie had been rationing sex out as if it were currency, which made me angry. Relationships meant not holding back pleasure from your partner, right? But she had. Now I knew why she’d doled out her favors to me. She was the neighborhood doorknob, the bicycle my friends rode.”
“In retrospect, I would have to recommend against epiphanies. They are difficult on an emotional level, and they also sometimes move you to foolish and inopportune acts, which was what happened in my case.”
Source: Sir Apropos of Nothing
“In retrospect I would say from Donald Duck I have learned more about life than from all the schools I ever attended.”
“In retrospect I wrote things about my life and my family's existence, I realized that it was a frighteningly harsh way to make a living. And I used to say that they were slowly dying trying to make a living.”
“In retrospect it always seems to work out that you can look back on something that was a disaster and find some gems in there.”
“In retrospect it is scarcely believable that insulting letters passing between obscure people in a small town should result in four assize trials and two Court of Criminal Appeal hearings, and claim the time of a distinguished Scotland Yard officer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the senior Treasury Counsel.”
Source: The Littlehampton Libels: A Miscarriage of Justice and a Mystery about Words in 1920s England
“In retrospect, it was easy to want to sleep with someone whose laundry I did not have to fold.”
“In retrospect, it was silly to think that the experience of traveling in space could be approximated by a repurposed walk-in freezer. To find out what would happen to a man alone in the cosmos, at some point you just had to lob one up there.”
Source: Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
“In retrospect, that was the moment I realized my ignorance was going to exacerbate whatever the problem was, and that I had to prescribe myself some kind of medical education, at least as it pertained to my situation.”
Source: Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women's Pain
“In retrospect there were failures enough to go around. There were failures before the storm and failures after the storm.”
“In retrospect, with thankfulness, celebrate those who amplified your prospects for success.”
Source: The Gift of Thanksgiving
“In retrospect, all revolutions seem inevitable. Beforehand, all revolutions seem impossible.”
“In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.”
Source: A twentieth century testimony
“In retrospect, each of the steps toward this abyss seemed irrevocable, and yet they had all been so small!”
“In retrospect, everything is finite, but prospectively, there are infinite possibilities. I guess that's what makes life hopeful.”
“In retrospect, golf for me was an apparent attempt to emulate the person I looked up to more than anyone: my father. He was instrumental in helping me develop the drive to achieve, but his role, as well as my mother's, was one of support and guidance, not interference.”
“In retrospect, I can see that President Brezhnev was quite proud of the limited agreement that he had concluded in Vladivostok; and to have a new American president come in and say, "That is not good enough - let's do much more, and do it quite rapidly," took him by surprise.”
“In retrospect, I think a lot of '80s fashion shoots are the ones that look the most modern. The fitness-based ones that are really minimal. It's clean, healthy, t-shirt, beach hair... it's athleisure.”
“In retrospect, I think it's a plus, because now we've been able to go back and spend extra time on each of those episodes and make them better.”
“In retrospect, I think maybe Audrey Hepburn was going to talk to me about doing something for UNICEF. I was so overwhelmed to just even be in her presence and I was very young, but it was really special and unforgettable.”
“In retrospect, I think that I've been given quite a few scripts over the years that had dark elements to them but most of them took place in the countryside with a haunted house. I think I've probably had that script about six to 10 times over the past few years. Or it was something to do with the supernatural.”
“In retrospect, I went to Jane Fonda for literally everything. During Mermaids, we were staying in the same building, so she was right upstairs from me. I was in my first relationship, so I got all sorts of advice. She became famous in her late teens.”
“In retrospect, I'm really shocked at how far I put my heart out there on the line with 'Prima Donna'. I seem to have this knack for being able to accomplish that.”
“In retrospect, it seems like everything in my life led to me becoming a writer. I just didn't realise it at the time.”
“In retrospect, it's ridiculous that anyone saw me as a fashion icon, since all I was trying to do was to dumb down my middle-class look by messing with my hair. Throughout the eighties I was invariably half-sure and half-confident about whatever it was I wore…Still, I've always believed—still do—that the radical is far more interesting when it looks benign and ordinary on the outside.”
Source: Girl in a Band
“In retrospect, of course I regret calling them (Charlton fans) morons. Imbeciles would have been more appropriate.”
“In retrospect, our triumphs could as easily have happened to someone else; but our defeats are uniquely our own.”
“In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.”
Source: Outrageous acts and everyday rebellions
“In retrospect, the Millennium marked only a moment in time. It was the events of September 11 that marked a turning point in history, where we confront the dangers of the future and assess the choices facing humankind.”
“In retrospect, the past seems not one existence with a continuous flow of years and events that follow each other in logical sequence, but a life periodically dividing into entirely separate compartments. Change of surroundings, interests, pursuits, has made it seem actually more like different incarnations.”
Source: The Fabric of Memory
“In return for financial support will advocate admission of Jews to England; This however impossible while Charles living. Charles cannot be executed without trial on adequate grounds for which do not presently exist. Therefore advise that Charles be assassinated, but will have nothing to do with arrangements for procuring an assassin, though willing to help in his escape. [King Charles I was in prison at the time].”
“In return for their faithful service, they would receive Red Army food rations, which amounted to a generous ladle, twice daily, from a cauldron into which all appropriated food was thrown. The stew boiled twenty-four hours a day, a fatty broth of onions, roosters, rabbits, dead horse, turnips - whatever they happened on in the course of their collecting forays - the Red Army essentially lived off the countryside.”
Source: Night Soldiers
“In return, Giovanni told me that empathizing Italians say L'ho provato sulla mia pelle, which means 'I have experienced that on my own skin.' Meaning, I have also been burned or scarred in this way, and I know exactly what you're going through.”
Source: Eat, Pray, Love
“In return, Joe taught Jay more about the garden. Slowly the boy learned to tell lavender from rosemary from hyssop from sage. He learned to taste soil- a pinch between the finger and thumb slipped under the tongue, like a man testing fine tobacco- to determine its acidity. He learned how to calm a headache with crushed lavender, or a stomachache with peppermint. He learned to prepare skullcap tea and chamomile to aid sleep. He learned to plant marigolds in the potato patch to discourage parasites and to pick nettles from the top to make ale and to fork the sign against the evil eye if ever a magpie flew past.”
Source: Blackberry Wine