I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone and can be made as offensive as a brickbat.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes.”
Source: Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis
“It was a fatal omission of Boldwood's that he had never once told her she was beautiful.”
Source: Far From the Madding Crowd
“It was a favorite expression of Theophrastus that time was the most valuable thing that a man could spend.”
“It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered, before the adverse hosts could meet. A wide, and, apparently, an impervious boundary of forests, severed the possessions of the hostile provinces of France and England. The hardy colonist, and the trained European who fought at his side, frequently expended months in struggling against the rapids of the streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the mountains, in quest of an opportunity to exhibit their courage in a more martial conflict.”
“It was a feeling which stayed with him after he got back home to his terrace house on the Kristianstad road. When he had finished his dinner and played with his children for a while, he went out with the dog. Martinsson lived in the neighbourhood, so he decided to stop by and tell he and Noren had seen. The dog was a Labrador bitch and Martinsson had asked recently if he could join the waiting list for puppies.”
Source: The White Lioness
“It was a few days later I came out to Hollywood for a screen test, and so did a lot of other people. So, I really didn't think I would get it. I was definitely the one that was least likely to get it, because everyone else was an already established star.”
“It was a few minutes before Helena could stop panting. She dared not read any further, or she’d crash through the connecting door and ravish Hastings—and she was far from sure how she felt about him.
-- As she was reading the manuscript of The Bride of Larkspear”
Source: Tempting the Bride
“It was a figure of a whale, with a white triangle that was supposed to be its spray. The spray moved up and down above the blowhole. On top of the spray sat a black-haired woman.”
Source: Whirligig
“It was a figure painting class, where you had a model, and [Robert von Neumann ] would wander around and he'd come up behind someone and say, "Well, what are you trying to do?" And if you told him what you were trying to do, he would then proceed to discuss this with you and suggest things that you might look at and ways in which you could improve what you were attempting to do, etc - never worked on your painting, never touched your painting but talked extensively about what you were trying to do.”
“It was a film [The Lost World], and it's a sequel at the same time. The first shot on the first day was from the sequel to the movie they hadn't made yet. But yeah, it was a pretty amazing experience running around the jungle for that.”
“It was a film that I knew, that I had seen, that I was familiar with, but I wasn't anxious about it at any point during the screening. I snoozed twice, and this is something I couldn't have imagined that I would feel detached, as I did with this film [Certified Copy].”
“It was a fine cancer experience, as cancer experiences go.”
“It was a fine cry - loud and long - but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”
Source: Sula
“It was a fine fall morning in Paris, crisp and clear, and Benji was quite full of himself, cavorting near the fountain, playing with the children who had inexplicably materialized out of nowhere at the first whiff of a movie star. Their faces radiated and they took turns gently stroking his head. Those Benji chose to favor with a big sloppy lick exploded with laughter, and one young girl ran to her mother, screeching in French that she would never wash her face again.”
“It was a fine hat. Had a plume... Made her eyes so green..."
"Very good color---green," Bullton agreed wistfully.
"Particularly for eyes," Kit mused. "But I'm partial to hazel. Hazel is green with blue and bits of gold in it," he explained to Bullton.
"Are you, sir? Are you really partial to hazel?" Bullton solemnly wanted to know.
"Very, very partial," Kit said dreamily.”
Source: Beauty and the Spy
“It was a fine line to walk—insanity and reality. The lines were not made of rich, black charcoal, but that of a nebulous gray watercolor. The transition so vaguely defined that it might as well not even be there. And when the line was so arbitrary, I found myself lost between right and wrong.”
Source: Dark Reflections
“It was a fine meal after the Calormene fashion. I don't know whether you would have liked it or not, but Shasta did. There were lobsters, and salad, and snipe stuffed with almonds and truffles, and a complicated dish made of chicken-livers and rice and raisins and nuts, and there were cool melons and gooseberry fools and mulberry fools, and every kind of nice thing that can be made with ice. There was also a little flagon of the sort of wine that is called "white" though it is really yellow.”
Source: The Horse and His Boy
“It was a fitting animal for a priest. Cats guard the secrets of the otherworld and are liaisons with mystic realms. Protectors of esoteric knowledge, cats can open the gates through which a priest can see the future and gain insight.”
Source: Seduction
“It was a flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the vast silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing.”
Source: The Things They Carried
“It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither.”
Source: Charles Dickens's works. Charles Dickens ed. [18 vols. of a 21 vol. set. Wanting A child's history of England; Christmas stories; The mystery of Edwin Drood].
“It was a fool moon that night, and you were like a daffodil, glowing brilliantly in my arms.”
“It was a fortunate moment in history that I happened to be in. There was a confluence of the internet and all this other stuff that I was able to capitalize on.”
“It was a fortunate stroke of serendipity, to end up in a country that boasts of the top ten cancer hospitals in the world. Cancer treatment in the United States is unparalleled.”
Source: Unafraid: A survivor's quest for human connection
“It was a fossilized path: the will which had cut this gash out of these solitary places so that the blood and sap would flow there was long since dead - and dead too were the circumstances which had guided this will. A whitish and indurated scar remained, gradually gnawed away by the earth like a flesh that heals itself, yet its direction was still vaguely cut into the horizon; a language and crepuscular sign rather than a way forward - a worn-out lifeline which still vegetated through the fallow land as it does on the palm of a hand. It was so old that, since it had been constructed, the very configuration of the land must have changed imperceptibly.”
“It was a free-for-all with music when I was growing up. My mother was a huge music fanatic so I was listening to everything from country to heavy metal to Indigo Girls to Elton John. I guess when I was really young I didn't like Willie Nelson, and she obviously loved him. Now I do too, I'm so thankful to her for playing his music nonstop.”
“It was a freedom that she was still working for, because even though she'd tasted it only for a heart-beat, it had been the most exquisite heartbeat she'd ever experienced.”
Source: Crown of Midnight
“It was a Friday night, she was at a club, and a good-looking man was currently giving her the I-want-to-take-you-home-and-I-hope-I-last-longer-than-five-minutes look… and she was thinking about pie, a young adult book, and feeding her cat. She was so turning into the cat lady at twenty-seven. Sweet.”
“It was a friendly kiss, impulsive and generous and light-hearted, but I let myself believe that it was more.”
Source: Shantaram
“It was a frightening metaphor for what the United States was becoming – a Titanic of rich, proud dimwits heading for the iceberg of anti-colonialist backlash.”
Source: The Desert Warrior
“It was a fruit we had never seen before, larger than an apple, about the size of a grapefruit. It was round and yellow like the leaves of a neglected book.”
Source: The Hidden Light of Objects
“It was a frying-pan-to-the-face moment for me where I had to get humble and really cherish it. I was really sad when [Numbers] was over. I'll just say that. Really sad.”
“It was a fucking miracle, you know? Some kind of insane, inter-dimensional voodoo shit worked in my favor.”
Source: Moments to Spare
“It was a full moon and, shining on all the snow, it made everything almost as bright as day -- only the shadows were rather confusing.”
Source: The Chronicles of Narnia Vol I: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
“It was a full Spears album, apparently, and each song was as ridiculous as the one before. They were catchy, yes, but so was the plague.”
Source: Dance With Me
“It was a full-time job that paid like a part-time job.”
Source: A Wedding Thing
“It was a fun job but I'd never claim Busted was anything other than a pop band.”
“It was a fun ride. I've enjoyed my time on the ice and I've enjoyed more and more people getting interested in the game of hockey.”
“It was a funny thing, how fear made him look so much younger, how it rounded his eyes and erased the cruel grimace of his sneer so that he looked, just for an instant, like the boy she'd first met at Sinegard.”
Source: The Burning God
“It was a game for children, nothing more than impossible dreams and fantasies. And yet, isn't that often how the future is created? In the minds of children and dreamers?”
Source: Batman: Gates of Gotham
“It was a game we should have won. We lost it because we thought we were going to win it. But then again, I thought that there was no way we were going to get a result there.”
“It was a garden, a walled garden. Overgrown but with beautiful bones visible still. Someone had cared for this garden once. The remains of two paths snaked back and forth, intertwined like the lacing on an Irish dancing shoe. Fruit trees had been espaliered around the sides, and wires zigzagged from the top of one wall to the top of another. Hungry, wisteria branches had woven themselves around to form a sort of canopy.
Against the southern wall, an ancient and knobbled tree was growing. Cassandra went closer. It was the apple tree, she realized, the one whose bough had reached over the wall. She lifted her hand to touch one of the golden fruit. The tree was about sixteen feet high and shaped like the Japanese bonsai plant Nell had given Cassandra for her twelfth birthday.”
Source: The Forgotten Garden
“It was a gaze that held the comfort of familiarity. There was no mystery, no enigmatic depth, but unrestrained length, the length of years—the laughter of childhood games and Christmas carols of home— lining its pathways with simple, yet easily overlooked, understanding.”
Source: The Rose and the Sword
“It was a generation growing in its disillusionment about the deepening recession and the backroom handshakes and greedy deals for private little pots of gold that created the largest financial meltdown since the Great Depression. As heirs to the throne, we all knew, of course, how bad the economy was, and our dreams, the ones we were told were all right to dream, were teetering gradually toward disintegration. However, on that night, everyone seemed physically at ease and exempt from life’s worries with final exams over and bar class a distant dream with a week before the first lecture, and as I looked around at the jubilant faces and loud voices, if you listened carefully enough you could almost hear the culmination of three years in the breath of the night gasp in an exultant sigh as if to say, “Law school was over at last!”
Source: Minor Snobs
“It was a gentle hum of quiet that he enjoyed as if it was the first time.”
Source: Shoal: A Thanet Writers Anthology
“It was a gentler kiss than she would have imagined. Less of a fever dream and more of a secret. A whispered dangerous thing that might escape if he was too reckless.”
Source: A Curse for True Love
“It was a genuine revelation, you see," said Aimée to the baron. "They can be killed. The real assholes can be killed.”
Source: Fatale
“It was a gift to get to be accountable and not a punishment.”
Source: Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
“It was a gift. What did I do with it? Life didn't accumulate as I'd once imagined. I graduated from boarding school, two years of college. Persisted through the blank decade in Los Angeles. I buried first my mother, then my father. His hair gone wispy as a child's. I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge.”
Source: The Girls
“It was a gift, something you can't teach. His hands looked like they were born to have a golf club in them.”