I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Instead I just let the silence stretch out between us. It's the only adequate response to what he just told me, the only that does the tragedy any justice instead of patching it hastily and moving on.”
“Instead, I'll think of new words, and then I'll follow them.”
Source: A Ghost in the Throat
“Instead I opened a new subdivision in my life. 'Booze and hopes of fornication' it was called, and it was right next to 'insight and sincerity', separated only by a minor garden-fence-like change of personality.”
“Instead, I opened my eyes to find the thing in front of my face, wafting dead horse breath across my chin and up my nose, its mouth like a gaping maw; its eyes, two giant wormholes, twisting and bending with some apparitional substance that could have been space and time if I’d known anything about physics.”
Source: 1:32 P.M.
“Instead I ought to be grateful to Him who never owed me anything for having been so generous to me, rather than think that He deprived me of those things or has taken away from me whatever He did not give me.”
“Instead I recommend to young people to seek work for what they will learn, more than what they will earn. Look down the road at what; skills they want to acquire before choosing a specific profession and before getting trapped in the "Rat Race.”
“Instead, I think of my husband hunting in the foothills surrounded by fog, walking on tawny rocks and smoky green lichen, like we did in our early days of marriage when we wandered in the country on our dog sled, unrushed, unhurried, filled, and content.”
Source: Sivulliq: Ancestor
“Instead, I think when you set out on your own you create yourself.”
Source: Wander Love: Lessons, Tips & Inspiration from a Solo Traveller
“Instead, I thought about the word profile and what a weird double meaning it had. We say we’re looking at a person’s profile online, or say a newspaper is writing a profile on someone, and we assume it’s the whole them we’re seeing. But when a photographer takes a picture of a profile, you’re only seeing half the face. Like with Sparrow, whoever he was. It’s never the way you would remember seeing them. You never remember someone in profile. You remember them looking you in the eye, or talking to you. You remember an image that the subject could never see in a mirror, because you are the mirror. A profile, photographically, is perpendicular to the person you know.”
Source: Every You, Every Me
“Instead I was stooping behind a damp rock – not a very large one, either – and deciding whether it would be better to make a run for it, or to phone for help. Well done me. If anyone from the Secret Service is reading this, I should be back on the job market any day now, so give me a call.”
Source: A Little Bit Witchy
“Instead I will say, "Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths." These are worth it. These are what I have come for.”
Source: Good Bones and Simple Murders
“Instead, incest occurs in families where there is a great deal of emotional isolation, secrecy, neediness, stress, and lack of respect. In many ways incest can be viewed as part of a total family breakdown. But it is the aggressor and the aggressor alone who commits the sexual violence.”
Source: Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life
“Instead, it is because we have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures, and, at the same time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of - as Kathi Weeks has so concisely put it - "a life," and that, in turn, means that furtive consumer pleasures are the only ones we have time to afford.”
Source: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
“Instead, it is more advantageous to consciously come to an awareness of what you perceived as love and understand the deeper lesson, which is attached to your growth, the growth that is ultimately meant to bring you to a place of wholeness.”
Source: Learning To Love: And The Power of Sacred Sexual Spiritual Partnerships
“Instead it is the Church hierarchy that is rather teaching congregation to be afraid of darkness, instead of teaching them to go with light to overcome darkness.”
“Instead it yanks on a worm wiggling in the loosened soil. Its feathers shimmer in the morning sunlight, a malignant green on black as it tosses its beak back, devouring the worm, and then it cocks its head to stare at her, its eyes funereal and questioning.”
Source: An Untold Want
“Instead of "I love you," it would be better to say "I am love-I am the embodiment of Pure Love." Remove the I and you, and you will find that there is only Love. It is as if Love is imprisoned between the I and you. Remove the I and you, for they are unreal; they are self-imposed walls that don't exist. The gulf between I and you is the ego. When the ego is removed the distance disappears and the I and you also disappear. They merge to become one - and that is Love.”
“Instead of 'counterrevolutionaries,' liberals' opponents are called 'haters,' 'those who seek to divide us,' 'tea baggers,' and 'right-wing hate groups.' Meanwhile, conservatives call liberals 'liberals'-and that makes them testy.”
“Instead of 'watching the thinker,' you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.”
Source: Practicing the Power of Now: Essential Teachings, Meditations, and Exercises from the Power of Now
“Instead of 200, what if man's pre-flood IQ was a thousand? Everyone was smarter, bigger, and lived longer. But what if animals had IQs of a hundred? Maybe interspecies communication was the norm, unlike now where only weirdos like me talk to cats, dogs, and ducks.”
Source: Powdered Saxophone Music
“Instead of a book, what if we're actually writing (or not writing) in the margins of our lives? What if our lives are books? What is the sign of our presence? Are we pressing into the margins our interpretations and questions? Are we circling offending verbs and drawing furious arrows to the margin where we scrawl "irony," "frustration," "voiceless," "unfair!" Or do we simply turn the pages, passively receiving what's given, furiously disagreeing but remaining silent about it?”
Source: Life Is a Verb: 37 Days to Wake Up, Be Mindful, and Live Intentionally
“Instead of a bottom-line based on money and power, we need a new bottom-line that defines productivity and creativity as where corporations, governments, schools, public institutions, and social practices are judged as efficient, rational and productive not only to the extent they maximize money and power, but to the extent they maximize love and caring, ethical and ecological sensitivity, and our capacities to respond with awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation.”
“Instead of a bucket list Someday Challenge™ wants you to create your Someday Slate™, a list of the things that you have promised yourself to do, things that you planned to do someday! Completing your Someday Slate™ will get you started on finally living your passion now.”
“Instead of a bumbling and inefficient tool of society, the radical [libertarian] sees the State itself, in its very nature, as coercive, exploitative, parasitic, and hence profoundly antisocial. The State is, and always has been, the great single enemy of the human race, its liberty, happiness, and progress.”
“Instead of a criminal or a drug addict, I was looking at a boy—just a boy.”
Source: Take Me Tomorrow
“Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen, not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Tempestuous as the sea, and stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me and despair!”
“Instead of a dial tone, smooth jazz greeted my ear.
What the Horror?”
Source: Don't Date the Haunted
“Instead of a feeling, think of love as an action. The feeling of love comes and goes on a whim; you can’t control it. But the action of love is something you can do, regardless of how you are feeling.”
“Instead of a handsome man about to tear my clothes off, a wheel of Camembert sits on the bed beside me. Dawn’s light streams through the window for one final knife to my gut.
Sighing, I lean back and have to laugh.
“This is what I get for taking a cheese man to bed.”
Source: Why Cheese?
“Instead of a homeland I hold the metamorphoses of the world.”
“Instead of a man of peace and love, I have become a man of violence and revenge.”
“Instead of a mass movement saying 'No, we don't want [police],' the mass movement is saying 'How do we reform them? How do we hold a couple of them accountable?' The conversation should be: 'Why are they even here?'
There are obviously many of us who have had that conversation, but it hasn't been the popular dialogue. Why do the police even exist? What are their origins? Many of us understand that their original task was to patrol slaves. Many of us understand that the first sheriff's department patrolled the US-Mexico border. That's not the public discourse. This has everything to do with the position that they've played in the last thirty years. It's also deeply rooted in anti-Black racism. The idea of not having police scares people. People say, 'What are we going to do with criminals?' by which they mean 'What are we going to do with Black people?'
I believe we should abolish the police. I think they are extremely dangerous and will continue to be. That doesn't mean I don't believe in police reform...We do have to deal with the current crisis in the short term. That's important. We have to have solutions for people's real-life problems, and we have to allow people to decide what those solutions are. We also have to create a vision that's much bigger than the one we have right now.
I was talking to one of the organizers in Ferguson. I said to her, this work is bigger than us. It's bigger than Black people. It's bigger than humans. This is a planetary crisis. If we don't solve it or at least set up a system that can help solve it, I don't think we'll survive.”
“Instead of a national curriculum for education, what is really needed is an individual curriculum for every child”
“Instead of a pentagon, you have a lot of people that are trained in bridging the difference between nations. The pentagon would serve as an intermediate organization to bridge the difference between cultures.”
“Instead of a permit system or regulations, the Forest Service needs to reduce worldwide population growth to limit the number of visitors to wilderness.”
“Instead of a perpetual and perfect measure of the divine will, the fragments of the Koran were produced at the discretion of Mahomet; each revelation is suited to the emergencies of his policy or passion; and all contradiction is removed by the saving maxim that any text of Scripture is abrogated or modified by any subsequent passage.”
Source: The History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire. By Edward Gibbon, Esq. Printed From The Edition In Twelve Volumes. With An Introductory Memoir Of The Author, By William Youngman
“Instead of a president who boycotts Prime Minister Netanyahu, imagine a president who stands unapologetically with the nation of Israel.”
“Instead of a President whom he'd never see and or representatives he'd never meet, the peasant had a single lord. This lord was a local master whom he knew by sight even though he had no television or newspaper. This proximity allowed for an organic familiarity between ruler and ruled. They were not "on a first name basis," of course, but they were acquainted in the sense that they could be rightly considered "neighbors," even if they were not equals. This organic familiarity meant that the peasant paid his taxes in person, complained in person, and if need be he hung the lord from a local tree in person.”
Source: The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought
“Instead of a relaxing bubble bath, I had a front-row seat to an impromptu striptease. By my ridiculously gorgeous fucking hot fake boyfriend.
The polite thing to do would be to close my eyes. Or yell out to announce my presence. Probably both. But I wasn't feeling very polite right now, so instead, I resurfaced and craned my neck to get a better look. Should have said something the minute he walked into the bathroom. I'd just wait this out--- it would be over in a few minutes.
Then he slipped out of those snug boxers, and my heart nearly stopped.
With his back facing me, he stepped into the shower, still oblivious that I was hidden in the corner bathtub, unable to take my eyes off him. Turning the faucet on, he drenched himself under the stream of hot water, before picking up my shampoo bottle, sniffing it, then squeezing out a generous amount. His hands worked methodically, kneading and massaging the shampoo all over his hair. Next, he pumped out blobs of my soap onto his hands, rubbing them together before lathering it all over his body. First on his neck, then on his arms, then on his back, followed by his chest.
This wasn't just your normal, everyday, run-of-the-mill striptease. It was a real-life porn movie, and I was enjoying it too much to tear my gaze away. He stretched his neck, trying to get water onto his left side, and turned around, giving me a full-length, uncensored, breathtaking view of a gloriously naked Alec.
So. Very. Naked.
His hands kept working, rubbing the soap on his stomach, then down his thighs, all around his legs and backside, making showering look so sexy like it was nobody's business.
That was when my mouth decided to betray my brain, producing a low, breathy sigh I'd never, ever heard before in my whole life, alerting him to my presence. Startled, he looked up and locked eyes with mine.
Wet, naked Alec Mackenzie caught me watching him rub soap all over his body.”
Source: Salty, Spiced, and a Little Bit Nice
“Instead of a river, God often gives us a brook, which may be running today and dried up tomorrow. Why? To teach us not to rest in our blessings, but in the blesser Himself.”
“Instead of a trail of fire roaring through, hose people get small candles steadily lighting the way home until death do they part, and only the young are stupid enough to think that those two old people, him gimping, her squinting, are not in love.”
“Instead of a weak and vacillating Government, a single, purposeful, energetic personality is ruling today.”
“Instead of accepting what James Baldwin called the "lie of whiteness," many people in lots of different fields and movement activities have tried to productively make it into a problem. When did (some) people come to define themselves as white? In what conditions? How does the lie of whiteness get reproduced? What are its costs politically, morally and culturally?”
“Instead of acting in court, I decided to act onstage.”
“Instead of adding forms where nothing existed, I would recollect the fragments I'd left behind. If I left something in every city I've ever lived, with every person I've ever loved, at every building I've ever called home, then I would go looking.”
Source: Home Remedies
“Instead of adjusting students to docile membership in whatever group they happen to be placed, we should equip them to cope with their environment, not be adjusted to it, to be willing to stand alone, if necessary, for what is right and true.”
Source: Is intelligence important?
“Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation. A few very far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.”
“Instead of agonizing about the things you can't change, why don't you try working on the things you can change”
Source: Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie
“Instead of allowing ourselves to be led and trapped by our feelings, we should let them disappear as soon as they form, like letters drawn on water with a finger.”
“Instead of allowing time to pass away, make time for what could be achieved.”