I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“It was difficult to imagine that a full day hadn't yet passed since we boarded the airliner in New York. I paused. Medieval man believed that one was placed beyond the touch of time, and therefore aging, while attending Mass. What, I wondered, would he have made of those hours we left up in the sky? I would not change my watch until I gave the matter more thought.”
Source: All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well
“It was difficult to know what was worse: being in a hospital where nothing worked and nobody cared, or being alone on an isolated ranch hundreds of miles from decent medical care.”
Source: A Match to the Heart: One Woman's Story of Being Struck By Lightning
“It was difficult to know where to find comfort, especially since I could no longer medicate myself with my oldest and deepest fantasy: that someday in the future a magical person would show up, fall in love with me, and fix everything.
Nobody would be showing up now.
There would be no fixing of anything.”
Source: All the Way to the River
“It was difficult to point these folks out, to put them on trial. How could one dislike a nice person? They said all the right things. Some people like David even went to the extent of being self-deprecating. It was a strategy of invulnerability. For example, they might apologetically acknowledge they were “talking too much” or sprinkle phrases like “Ah! I’m so self-absorbed” so as to exclude themselves from any claim of narcissism. Or when they achieved things, they perfectly said they were grateful and honored. Though at home, they hungrily harbored self-interest and greed. People praised their humility and, lacking the patience to notice that tiny bullseye of falseness, called those people humble. All it took for the humble people to be humble was to break the fourth wall of ego. To announce there was a snake in the room allowed them to never be suspected of being a serpent. No one saw the serpent. But one detected when it was there. It bothered a listener quietly. Some blockade prevented Andrei’s soul from resting.”
Source: A Happy Ghost
“It was difficult to say which were the more dismal, these deserted streets that wandered away to right and left, or the great main thoroughfare with its narcotic and shadowy life. For the latter appeared vast, interminable, grey, and those who travelled by it were scarcely real, the bodies of the living, but rather the uncertain and misty shapes that come sand go across the desert in an Eastern tale, when men look up from the sand and see a caravan pass them, all in silence, without a cry or a greeting. So they passed and repassed each other on those pavements, appearing and vanishing, each intent on his own secret, and wrapped in obscurity.”
Source: The Hill of Dreams
“It was difficult to think about assignments and romantic entanglements when I still had the fate of the world looming over me, but the world ending didn't mean that our other problems disappeared. We could push them aside for awhile, but we dragged them behind us everywhere we went.”
Source: The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza
“It was difficult, and yet I was very eager to do it. It was a really odd thing. I really wanted to do that story. I really wanted to write the death of Captain Kirk. I really wanted to do it in the movie.”
“It was difficult, but it was also rewarding. When you have a chance to see kids get better, everything makes it all worth it. All I wanted was to try to make a difference in my life and have a legacy in some way, but for something I had done in someone else's life.”
“It was dirty and hot, and you're on a horse, all day. It was physical work, but there wasn't one of us - cast or crew - who didn't have a smile on our face. Even when it got real hard and tempers would rise because things would get difficult and the day would get late, we all loved the job and loved doing it. When you finished that day of work, everyone was looking around and going, "Yeah, that was a good day, man."”
“It was disabling sickness and the quest to cure it that turned on the discovery machine of the human mind.”
“It was disabling sickness in my forties that turned me into a leading scientist as I went on a voyage of discoveries to treat it.”
“It was disconcerting for the novel to seem so different when I re-read it. Of course we are a different person each time we open a book to read it again; we can never really experience it in the same way, just as we can never step into the same stream twice.”
“It was disconcerting that being in love felt lonelier than lonelines.”
“It was disconcerting to live in a time in which accepting reality required a suspension of disbelief.”
Source: Sleepwalk
“It was disgraceful but also romantic enough to make Lina's heart turn.”
Source: Rumors
“It was Disney World fused with Cancerland.”
Source: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
“It was disturbing to me that an idea or a song could become something so different from what you originally intended. It's like if a friend took a stupid picture of you at a party on their phone, and the next thing you knew, it was on every billboard.”
“It was dizzying trying to keep up with his moods, which rapidly swung from one extreme of a pendulum to the other on any given day. I'd wake up each morning unsure of which version of him I was going to get.”
Source: Alive Day: A Memoir
“It was dog food. Beef livers with onions in a can. You open it up and it looks like vomit.”
“It was doing very well; it was doing particularly well outside of England. It was a very big seller for Carlton Television. But it was getting more and more expensive to do.”
“It was Don Paolo's birthday and all the people of the village were gathered in the piazza to celebrate him. The band played, the wine flowed, the children danced, and, as he stood for a moment alone under the pergola, a little girl approached the the beloved priest. "But Don Paolo, are you not happy?" she asked him. "Of course I am happy," he assured the little girl. "Why, then, aren't you crying?”
Source: The Lady in the Palazzo: At Home in Umbria
“It was done, it was gone. There was no going back now. This was her, and it was OK.”
Source: Good Girl, Bad Blood
“It was downright depressing, the lengths it took to feel special when you wrote yourself out on paper. All As? Who cared? That was the standard here. Some shows, some activities? Big deal. How were you changing the world?
Sometimes, when I wasn't too busy, I wondered why we had to change the world so early.”
Source: Noteworthy
“It was Dr. King's tireless activism that fostered our modern way of relating to one another.”
“It was dramatic to watch my grandmother decapitate a turkey with an ax the day before Thanksgiving. Nowadays the expense of hiring grandmothers for the ax work would probably qualify all turkeys so honored with gourmet status.”
“It was Draven. He’d come up behind me. I jumped for a second time that morning, unable to help myself, then glared up at him. “How did you even do that?”
“I have the ears of an exmoor and the tread of a fenrir,” he said with a smirk.
“I’d say comparing yourself to wild animals was fitting, except the exmoor seems highly intelligent,” I muttered.”
Source: Queen of Roses
“It was dreadful the way all the three were looking at him, just as if they did not admire him.”
Source: Peter Pan: Top 100 Classic Novels
“It was dreadful, I had pain. It was like someone was trying to put pressure up there.”
“It was dripping and, you know, and there was a whole line of cameras and microphones. I felt like - you remember the honor guards, only it was a dishonor guard.”
“It was duck apocalypse!”
Source: True Letters from a Fictional Life
“It was during a cosmetic procedure that I first had painkillers.”
“It was during George W. Bush's presidency that Iran mastered the nuclear fuel cycle, that they built covert facilities, that they stocked them with centrifuges, that they were spinning merrily away toward getting a nuclear-weapons program.”
“It was during my enchanted days of travel that the idea came to me, which, through the years, has come into my thoughts again and again and always happily—the idea that geology is the music of the earth.”
Source: Conversation with the Earth
“It was during my explanation to my young daughter that I finally realized why I had been drawn to this particular practice of law. Yes, some of my clients were just gaming the system. They were charlatans no better than the banks they were taking on. But some of mu clients were downtrodden and disadvantaged. They were true underdogs in society and I wanted to stand for them and keep them in their homes for as long as I possibly could.”
Source: The Fifth Witness
“It was during my first trip to America in 1953 - thats when I learned to visit museums. I was then 26 years old. When I travel, the first thing I do is to visit museums. When I go to New York City, I usually go to Broadway to see the shows.”
“It was during my study in Israel that I came to the realization that most of what I had learned in my courses in religion in the United States was outdated or in error. In order to understand what the biblical position is on any subject and, particularly on the subject of sex, one has to do it from a Hebrew perspective.”
Source: The Bible Sex and You
“It was during my time at secondary school that I abandoned religion.”
“It was during the early summer of 1952 that I found myself in the small community park next to Stevens Institute of Technology. Although I had a job, I had only worked as a “soda jerk” for a little over a week before I started looking for something else.
The Hoboken waterfront was still familiar to me from earlier years when I walked this way to catch the trolley or the electrified Public Service bus home from the Lackawanna Ferry Terminal. Remembering the gray-hulled Liberty Ships being fitted out for the war at these dilapidated piers, was still very much embedded in my memory. Things had not changed all that much, except that the ships that were once here were now at the bottom of the ocean, sold, or nested at one of the “National Defense Reserve Fleets.”
The iconic movie On the Waterfront had not yet been filmed, and it would take another two years before Marlon Brando would stand on the same pier I was now looking down upon, from the higher level of Stevens Park. Labor problems were common during this era, but it was all new to me. I was only 17 years old, but would later remember how Marlon Brando got the stuffing kicked out of him for being a union malcontent. When they filmed the famous fight scene in On the Waterfront, it took place on a barge, tied up in the very same location that I was looking upon.”
“It was during the eighteenth century - a period of boastful satisfaction with the nice balances within the English constitution - that Englishmen came to accept the Whig view of the utility of an armed citizenry. The armed citizen was not only affirmed to be protecting himself but, together with his fellows, provided the ultimate check on tyranny.”
“It was during the Reagan years that defiance of international law and the U.N. Charter became entirely open.”
“It was during the summer of 1952 when I first came through the center of Rockland on the bus, “I was impressed by the obvious ties the community had with the sea. The fishing and lobster industry was evident by the number of commercial fishing and lobster boats. Rockland was, and still is, the commercial hub of the mid-coastal region of the state.” The local radio station WRKD was an important source of local news and weather reports. This was also the radio station that opened each day’s broadcasting with Hal Lone Pine’s song, recorded on Toronto's Arc Records label: “There’s a winding lane on the Coast of Maine that is wound around my heart....”
The United States Coast Guard still maintains a base in Rockland, which is reassuring to the families of those who go fishing out on the open waters of Penobscot Bay and the Gulf of Maine. Rockland remains the home of the Farnsworth Art Museum, which has an art gallery displaying paintings by Andrew Wyeth, as well as other New England artists.”
“It was during this [as a kid] time that I came out of my shell vocally and performance wise, I learned how to really and truly sing in a different way.... my way. It was an amazing experience because I also realized my lifelong dream - to sing my own songs...I have something to say and it was a great release for me to share that part of myself with others.”
“It was during this final Parisian period of Rodenbach's life that his literary absorption in Bruges really rose and flowered. Bruges-La-Morte was the Paris literary sensation of 1892, and he followed it with La Vocation in 1895, and Le Carilloneur (translated as The Bells of Bruges) in 1897. This kind of immersion at a distance is hardly unknown - think of Joyce, minutely anatomizing Dublin in Ulysses while living in Trieste - but it is also quintessentially Symbolist in its concern with the richness and plenitude of absence: 'The essence of art that is in any way noble is the DREAM,' wrote Rodenbach, 'and this dream dwells only upon what is distant, absent, vanished, unattainable.' (Introduction)”
Source: Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories
“It was during this terrible night that the three wounded died, and the jeeps froze solid.”
Source: Hold Back the Night
“It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed.”
Source: Long Walk To Freedom
“It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.”
“It was dusk, on a Friday. The battered skeletons of trees tapered against the fresh starlight in No Man's Land. The sky offered curious glimpses of beauty, from time to time. The men wrote about it in their letters, describing sunsets in painstaking detail to their families, as if there was nothing to see at the front but crimson clouds and dusted rays of golden light.”
Source: In Memoriam
“It was dusk when Rick led Amelia and Sam toward the Old Town plaza. "Come with me. You're going to love this."
Amelia could hear music in the distance. She recognized the delicate strumming of a few guitars and the faint sound of singing. As they approached the plaza, Amelia could see four men playing and singing folk songs. It was beautiful. The music was coming straight from their soul and it held her spellbound. She stood in awe and watched, loving every note that drifted toward her.
"Come here," said Rick as he motioned toward some benches. "Let's sit down."
After the three of them got comfortable, Rick put his arm around Amelia's shoulders. "If you think this is beautiful, wait until Christmas. They have Luminarias and sing Christmas songs in both English and Spanish.”
Source: The Mysterious Doll
“It was early black. The Sun didn’t seem to be the sun, but an eyeball, evil and merciless.”
Source: Lost in the Shell
“It was early detection that saved my voice - and I imagine, my life.”