I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“I could see people all around me, but I almost felt like nobody could see me. I heard a train go by, rumbling down the tracks, drawing a thick line between the world and my experience. I was getting cold again.”
Source: Breasts and Eggs
“I could see that Bukka was born to be a bluesman, and I wondered if the same was true of me. I worried that I didn't have his talent - or the talent of someone like Blind Lemon or T-Bone. I felt something beautiful inside Bukka's soul. Even if I didn't follow his style, I was moved by his sincerity. He loved telling stories, and used his blues to tell them. His blues was the book of his life. He sang about his rough times and fast time and loving times and angry times. He'd entertain at a party for two hundred people with the same enthusiasm as a party for twenty. Bukka gave it his all. His music had a consistency I admired. Like all the great bluesmen, he said, I am what I am. I wondered if I could be that steady and strong.”
Source: Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B.B. King
“I could see that everything I had identified as really me, was not really me, but was just a pattern of strategies to avoid some kind of abyss or emptiness.”
“I could see that making judgments about people so that they are tried and sentenced in your head, without asking them for their perspective, is both unethical and unproductive. So I learned to love real integrity and to despise the lack of it.”
“I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”
“I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I just knew I would be ok. I somehow left that tunnel not only different, but stronger.”
“I could see the longing in your eyes.”
Source: Listening for Lions
“I could see the path but my destination was lost. It was December but I lived in September. The day ended but I hoped for the light. I died but I waited for life.”
Source: Hang My Heart on the Shadows of Light: A Novel
“I could see the reflection of all the horrible things he was responsible for flicker across his eyes like a tv screen. He didn't have to say anything after that. I knew I was fucked.”
Source: Neighborhood Watch: Short Stories
“I could see the reflection of the moon on the water’s surface, tantalisingly teasing me forward, that was my target … swimming towards the moon and freedom. I could smell the brine and sense the power of the mass I was in, it engulfed me, yet I was one with it.”
Source: Psycho Steve
“I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn’t particularly want money. I didn’t know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn’t have to do anything. The thought of being something didn’t only appall me, it sickened me. The thought of being a lawyer or a councilman or an engineer, anything like that, seemed impossible to me. To get married, to have children, to get trapped in the family structure. To go someplace to work every day and to return. It was impossible. To do things, simple things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Mother’s Day … was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep.”
Source: Ham On Rye
“I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn't particularly want money. I didn't know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn't have to do anything. The thought of being something didn't only appall me, it sickened me. The thought of being a lawyer or a councilman or an engineer, anything like that, seemed impossible to me. To get married, to have children, to get trapped in the family structure. To go someplace to work every day and to return. It was impossible. To do things, simple things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor, Mother's Day . . . was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep.
My father had a master plan. He told me, "My son, each man during his lifetime should buy a house. Finally he dies and leaves that house to his son. Then his son gets his own house and dies, leaves both houses to his son. That's two houses. That son gets his own house, that's three houses . . ."
The family structure. Victory over adversity through the family. He believed in it. Take the family, mix with God and Country, add the ten-hour day and you had what was needed.
I looked at my father, at his hands, his face, his eyebrows, and I knew that this man had nothing to do with me. He was a stranger. My mother was non-existent. I was cursed. Looking at my father I saw nothing but indecent dullness. Worse, he was even more afraid to fail than most others. Centuries of peasant blood and peasant training. The Chinaski bloodline had been thinned by a series of peasant-servants who had surrendered their real lives for fractional and illusionary gains. Not a man in line who said, "I don't want a house, I want a thousand houses, now!"
He had sent me to that rich high school hoping that the ruler's attitude would rub off on me as I watched the rich boys screech up in their cream-colored coupes and pick up the girls in bright dresses. Instead I learned that the poor usually stay poor. That the young rich smell the stink of the poor and learn to find it a bit amusing. They had to laugh, otherwise it would be too terrifying. They'd learned that, through the centuries. I would never forgive the girls for getting into those cream-colored coupes with the laughing boys. They couldn't help it, of course, yet you always think, maybe . . . But no, there weren't any maybes. Wealth meant victory and victory was the only reality.
What woman chooses to live with a dishwasher?”
Source: Ham On Rye
“I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn't particularly want money. I didn't know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn't have to do anything. The thought of being something didn't only appall me, it sickened me . . . To do things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Mother's Day . . . was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep.”
“i could see the veins through your skin like a map to inside you. how could skin be that thin? i was so afraid you might drop and break. i stopped breathing so you wouldn't.”
Source: Wasteland
“I could see the works just living in reproductions. The work lives on like fantasy. Some live even better as just an image.”
“I could see the world under golden skies of confetti.”
Source: In the Land of Boxes
“I could see their faces then, and the army became what it really was: forty thousand men—they were young men mostly, lots of them even younger than myself, and I was nineteen just two weeks before—out on their first march in the crazy weather of early April, going from Mississippi into Tennessee where the Union army was camped between two creeks with its back to a river, inviting destruction.”
Source: Shiloh
“I could see what was ahead of me, I knew what was behind me, so I welcomed whatever would come to us.”
Source: The journey
“I could see why Archimedes got all excited. There was nothing finer than the feeling that came rushing through you when it clicked and you suddenly understood something that had puzzled you. It made you think it just might be possible to get a handle on this old world after all.”
Source: Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel
“I could see why she felt attracted to Sam K. Barrows. Birds of a feather, or rather lizards of a scale.”
Source: We Can Build You
“I could see why someone would want to make a website about me, and my quotes. They are all gold. How many people have written, directed AND starred in their own movies. I just don't know why they would want to put words into my mouth, I mean I did write, direct AND star in a critically acclaimed movie.”
“I could sell used battery acid and make it fly.”
“I could send myself right back to the day that I wrote "Angel Of The Morning," how it felt. I had a buzz through me that morning that was so powerful. I knew I had done something that meant something, because of that feeling. It wasn't a question of whether other people liked it ... I loved it. To me, it had to be one of the most important love stories of all time.”
“I could send you a bone with a file in it, only you'd eat it.”
“I could sense him gathering a false hindsight that afternoon in the Place des Vosges, shaping a retrospective narrative, the thing a person tells himself about fate, about how everything had seemed fated, when the only evidence of this fate is how things went.”
Source: Creation Lake
“I could serve coffee using my rear as a ledge.”
“I could set the world on fire and call it rain”
“I could settle down into a state of equable low spirits, and resign myself to coffee.”
Source: David Copperfield
“I could settle for being a man, or I could struggle to become a human being.”
“I could shave my head and wear a sackcloth and still get a whole lot of ghostly wrong numbers. Makes me wonder if there’s some kind of ghost-necro porn industry down there. ~Jaime Vegas”
“I could shoot you in the foot."
"Please do. At least then I wouldn't have to endure this sock humiliation any longer.”
Source: New Moon
“I could shove this swizzle stick through his heart, Min thought. She wouldn’t do it, of course. The stick was plastic and not nearly pointed enough on the end. Also people didn’t do things like that in Southern Ohio. A sawed-off shotgun, that was the ticket.”
Source: Bet Me
“I could shove this swizzle stick through his heart, Min thought. She would'nt do it, of course. The stick was plastic and not nearly pointed enough on the end.”
“I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”
Source: Life and Letters of Charles Darwin: the Evolution
“I could show him [...].
That he could run to me, rather than away.
And my arms would be open, always.
Just for him.”
Source: If Only In Our Dreams
“I could show how largely our laws and customs are based upon the laws of Moses and the teachings of Christ; how constantly the Bible is appealed to as the guide of life and the authority in questions of morals... Add a volume of unofficial declaration to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.”
“I could show you a picture right now where I look like something from The Hills Have Eyes. Talk about an awkward stage. Puberty was not good at all.”
“I could simply
kill you now,
get it over with,
who would
know the difference?
I could easily
kick you in, stove you
under, for all those times,
mean on gin,
you rammed words
into my belly. (p. 52)”
“I could simply share with you the treasures I've uncovered. But I'd rather give you the treasure map.”
Source: Mercy like Morning: Discovering Truth in Seasons of Waiting
“I could sing and play as well. I've got some brothers; one of them is the drummer in the band. They're good musicians. I play for fun. They play properly. Music in general, I grew up in a house of musicians. Everybody's life has a soundtrack, I'm sitting here talking to you but there are horns beeping outside. I know I'm in New York. That's an element in the film as well. How strong that sense can be.”
“I could sing in English before I could understand it because I phonetically learned it from the musicals.”
“I could sing you a thousand and one doo-wop songs. I love the simplicity in that music. It's not super-poetic, it's just from the heart.”
“I could sit and watch nature documentaries with Jenks and the kids the rest of the night if I wanted. And trust me, watching a dozen pixies scream as a crocodile chomped on a zebra was something not to be missed. They invariably cheered for the crocodile, not the zebra.”
“I could sit here and lie and... pretend, too, and say that I share no feelings for you. I could say that... I could say that this... love, or whatever, whatever this is, is not true. But I would be lying to myself, Caspian Marks. And more importantly, I would be lying to you.”
Source: Counting Stars
“I could sit here for the rest of my life, with my hands full of wire, building dogs out of bone. And then the crows will eat me and I will fall in to the pit and we shall all be bones together.”
Source: Nettle & Bone
“I could sit here in the tribunes and watch Michelle Kwan skate for hours.”
“I could sit right here and have a 15-minute conversation with somebody and change their whole life.”
“I could sit there and eat pasta all day long and not worry about it when I was younger, and now I really have to focus on making sure I set a good example for my kids.”
“I could sit toe to toe at a potato table with anybody.”
“I could smack her, punch her in the face, but then I see what she can't hide from me. I've seen it before-the desperation, the agony, the need to find a reason to go on, and the inability to find it.”
Source: Aimee