I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“It was easy, terribly easy, to become with time a middle-aged spinster with a sharp tongue. She would have to guard against this.”
Source: The Sunday Philosophy Club
“It was easy to be a friend when times were good. It was in hard times that true friends revealed themselves. Their friendship had been forged in the hottest of fires and fused them into family.”
Source: The Chocolate Maker's Wife
“It was easy to be good and kind in times of plenty. The trying times were the moments that defined a man.
And love? Love was something that did much to change a person. It brought joy as it brought suffering, and in turn brought about those moments that defined one’s character. Love gave life to the lifeless. It was the greatest of all living powers.
But, as with all things, love had a dark side to it.”
Source: The Rose & the Dagger
“It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt.”
Source: The Right Attitude to Rain
“It was easy to believe, between lessons on Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, that all of the great stories had already been written by dead Europeans. But every time I saw 'The Outsiders', I knew better. It was the first time I'd realized that real people write books.”
“It was easy to blame other people for treating me in ways I didn't like, but now I was seeing that I was the one at fault. The only way you can be mistreated is by allowing yourself to be mistreated, and that was something I did over and over again. Somehow, I needed to find that glimmer of self-respect, buried deep inside, that would allow me to say: I am never going to let that happen to me again. I needed to learn how to stand up for myself in a different way, but I didn't know how.”
“It was easy to conjure him up this morning, when everything was quiet and still. A little, ginger-bearded man; she had been taller than him by half a head. She had never felt the slightest physical attraction towards him. 'What was love, after all?' thought Parminder, as a gentle breeze ruffled the tall hedge of leyland cypresses that enclosed the Jawandas’ big
back lawn. Was it love when somebody filled a space in your life that yawned inside you, once they had gone?
'I did love laughing', thought Parminder. 'I really miss laughing.'
And it was the memory of laughter that, at last, made the tears flow from her eyes. They trickled down her nose and into her coffee, where they made little bullet
holes, swiftly erased. She was crying because she never seemed to laugh any
more (...).”
Source: The Casual Vacancy
“It was easy to cover up ignorance by the mystical word "intuition.”
Source: Foundation's Edge
“It was easy to forget that the real ghost stories had little to do with that cinematic nonsense and everything to do with the human experience: life, love, loss, faith, redemption.”
Source: After Death
“It was easy to gain strength from chaos because it had about it the abyss--always so tantalizing--as the heroin addicts knew. But the journey to the abyss was short-lived. The harder road was to draw strength and not power. To gain footing not in the wild uncertainty of immortality but the abiding knowledge of mortality.”
Source: The Museum of Modern Love
“It was easy to get a job at the Cedar Bar because people came and went, but I didn't like the atmosphere. Instead, I got a job at Cooper Union Library. I stayed at Cooper Union for seven years; it was my salvation. While I worked there, I also read books of every kind.”
“It was easy to idealize someone you barely knew.”
“It was easy to imagine he’d just rolled out of bed and then it was easy to imagine him in bed and I wasn’t going there.”
“It was easy to kiss someone when it didn’t matter; it was more difficult when it might be meaningful.”
Source: Mexican Gothic
“It was easy to know the doctrine. It's much harder to help a billion people live it.”
“It was easy to laugh at Fascism when we imagined that it was based on hysterical nationalism, because it seemed obvious that the Fascist states, each regarding itself as the chosen people and patriotic contra mundum, would clash with one another. But nothing of the kind is happening. Fascism is now an international movement, which means not only that the Fascist nations can combine for purposes of loot, but that they are groping, perhaps only half consciously as yet, towards a world-system. For the vision of the totalitarian state there is being substituted the vision of the totalitarian world.”
Source: The Road to Wigan Pier
“It was easy to leave the art world after I found out that it was just another corporation. When they told me I had to create the same thing, I rebelled.”
“It was easy to love God in all that was beautiful. The lessons of deeper knowledge, though, instructed me to embrace God in all things.”
“It was easy to make fun of Bush, but it was sort of like shooting fish in a barrel and it didn't really feel all that good because it was so easy to do. I would much rather live under a thoughtful president. Even if it makes it harder to be funny about politics, it makes it more interesting to be funny about politics.”
“It was easy to make fun of the marines when they weren't listening. In Holden's navy days, making fun of jarheads was as natural as cussing. But four marines had died getting him off the Donnager, and three of them had made a conscious decision to do so. Holden promised himself that he'd never make fun of them again.”
Source: Leviathan Wakes
“It was easy to make someone into a hero when they were gone, to ascribe to them infinite potential.”
Source: Sorrowland
“It was easy to make the obvious leap that the money was supposed to be my fee for whatever Lillian Holler wanted to expose. Sometimes my clients come with prepayment. I still questioned why she had picked me and how she had found me. But she was a wealthy woman and wealthy women have ways of finding out whatever it is they want to know.”
Source: Treacherous Estate
“It was easy to persecute me without people feeling ashamed. It was easy to vilify me and project me as a woman who was not following the tradition of a 'good African woman' and as a highly educated elitist who was trying to show innocent African women ways of doing things that were not acceptable to African men.”
“It was easy to present figures demonstrating the contrast between lead work in the United States under conditions of neglect and ignorance, and comparable work in England and Germany, under intelligent control.”
Source: Exploring the Dangerous Trades - The Autobiography of Alice Hamilton, M.D.
“It was easy to rack up Evil Overlord points in prison.”
“It was easy to repossess imagination with false promises; much harder to do so with nuanced truths. It demanded an act of exquisite measuring and remeasuring, filling and unfilling a psychological respirator with oxygen. Too much "repossession" and imagination might bloat into delusion. Too little and it might asphyxiate hope altogether.”
Source: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
“It was easy to run around barefoot in oblivion in Costa Rica. But once I gave birth to my child, I didnt want to be oblivious to the obvious.”
“It was easy to screw your head on straight; it was quite another matter to expect your heart to behave in turn.”
Source: Murder in the City of Liberty
“It was easy to see how upsetting it would be if women began to love freely where love came to them. An abyss would open in the principal shopping street of every town.”
Source: For Love Alone
“It was easy to see what Bundy and anti-public-land politicians really wanted: for public lands to be given to certain people. People who want land for their own gains--to mine it, graze it, drill it, or sell it--people who want to exploit it.”
Source: That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands
“It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.”
“It was easy to tell Jamie to move on, be happy with someone else. But she saw now that it would absolutely kill her to see him with another woman.”
Source: Someone Like You
“It was easy to understand how the local legends had grown that sometimes, on an autumn night, once could hear the muffled beat of horses' hoofs as smugglers brought their kegs and bales from Sizewell Gap to hide them in the marshes or carry them inland across the desolate Westleton heathlands. Easy, too, on such a night to hear from the sea the faint bells of long-drowned churches, St. Leonard's, St. John's, St. Peter's and All Saints clanging their dirges for the souls of dead men. And now there might be new legends to keep the countryman indoors on the autumn nights. The October legends. One of a naked woman, pale under the moon, walking through the waves to her death: one of a dead and handless man drifting out on the tide.”
Source: Unnatural Causes
“It was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their uncanny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come long before it came, dream it overnight and read your mind”
Source: Small Things Like These
“It was easy, when you were a child, to go unseen.
The challenge, Céline understood now, was to be seen—and once seen, to endure judgment”
Source: Ghosts of the Shadow Market
“It was Edward Lear who created the original limerick, and is credited with A Book of Nonsense (1846). Apparently, he did this to amuse his clients’ children while they were waiting for their parents’ having portraits painted. Edward Lear was an artist first and a poet last. How strange then that we remember him mostly for limericks?
Since writing many of these little jocular verses, I have noticed a strange effect that keeps you reading: each time you read one limerick, you just cannot help reading the next, especially when they are nicely set out on a page. I am particularly proud of my lim-sagas, of which only two are contained in this book, but I consider them the best of my collection.”
Source: An A - Z of Looney Limericks
“It was eerie how casually people donned the level of polish the Papers offered. Where others fawned over the results of Paper-made glamours, that level of calculated, pristine perfection made Sofi uncomfortable. Humans were messy and complex. It pained her that magic disguised that potential for failure with a fleeting sense of flawlessness.”
“It was eerie. I saw myself in that machine. I never thought my work would come to this.”
“It was eerie. I saw myself in that machine. I never thought my work would come to this. Upon seeing a distorted image of his face, reflected on the inside cylindrical surface of the bore while inside an MRI (magnetic-resonance-imaging) machine-a device made possible by his early physical researches on nuclear magnetic resonance (1938).”
“It was Einstein who made the real trouble. He announced in 1905 that there was no such thing as absolute rest. After that there never was.”
Source: On the Front Line of Life: Stephen Leacock : Memories and Reflections, 1935-1944
“It was either bluster or look weak and Thorn reckoned that no choice at all, so she puffed herself up and snapped out, "How did you get the scar?"
"How did you get the scar?"
Thorn frowned. "What scar?"
"That's the face the gods gave you?" And with the faintest of smiles the Vansterman went back to coiling rope.”
Source: Half the World
“It was either that or punch him, and I've got sensitive hands.”
Source: The Whispering Skull
“It was either the chaos of a crowd of thoughts or the silence of solitude... nothing in between..”
“It was either therapy or die.”
“It was either Voltaire or Charlie Sheen who said, 'We are born alone. We live alone. We die alone. And anything in between that can give us the illusion that we're not, we cling to.'”
“It was electric and we couldn't deny it anymore, even when our words spoke different the energy we drew from each-other spoke too loud, it was almost impossible to ignore.”
“It was electric. When Death Valley is rocking, it seems as if it might actually take flight. On Saturday, I went back to Baton Rouge to see Alabama barely beat LSU, and was, once again, reminded that Tiger Stadium is the best place in the world to watch a sporting event. ... I'm not sure what it was like to walk into the Coliseum, but I bet it was something like this.”
“It was eleven more than neccessary.”
“It was Elvis that got me interested in music. I've been an Elvis fan since I was a kid.”
“It was Elvis who really got me hooked on beat music. When I heard 'Heartbreak Hotel' I thought, this is it.”