I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“It was his [Gen. Douglas MacArthur's] relationship with the administration In Washington which became poisoned by his egomania. Link upon link the bond between events on the battlefield and his own ruin was forged, and, as is essential in genuine tragedy, the gods used the victim himself to forge the links.”
Source: American Caesar
“It was his cunning, this confidence and farsightedness in dealing with his own Clan, that made Crookedstar one of the strongest leaders the Clans have ever seen.”
“It was his desperation I despised.”
Source: Topics of Conversation
“It was his experience that life worked under the same guidelines as a capitalistic society. In order to get what you wanted, it was usually necessary to give up something in return. Sometimes gaining what you defined as everything meant losing what you most needed.”
Source: Patches of Grey
“It was his eyes. When you looked into them, you saw chained violence baring teeth and claws back at you.”
Source: Magic Slays
“It was his first experience with this kind of love and it nearly killed him”
“It was his Fourth Concerto, the last work he had written. The crash of its opening chords swept the sights of the streets away from her mind. The Concerto was a great cry of rebellion. It was a 'NO' flung at some vast process of torture, a denial of suffering, a denial that held the agony of the struggle to break free. The sounds were like a voice saying There is no necessity for pain why, then, is the worst pain reserved for those who will not accept its necessity we who hold the love and the secret of joy, to what punishment have we been sentenced for it, and by whom ... The sounds of torture became defiance, the statement of agony became a hymn to a distant vision for whose sake anything was worth enduring, even this. It was the song of rebellion and of a desperate quest.”
Source: Atlas Shrugged
“It was his home now. But it could not be his home till he had gone from it and returned to it. Now he was the Prodigal Son.”
“It was his job to expect the worst of humanity, including myself.”
Source: Cibola Burn
“It was His love for us that cost Him everything. And that is the essence of Christmas that should be the substance of our lives.”
“It was his misfortune to be respected as a writer by almost everyone except those with whom he most consorted.”
Source: Put out more flags
“It was his nature to believe anything, before he would believe he could be wrong.”
Source: The Bull from the Sea
“It was his optimism that Freud bequeathed to America and it was the optimism of our youthfulness, our freedom from the sterner, sadder tradition of Europe which enabled us to seize his gift.”
“It was his own fault. He had been on the straight and narrow for four years, but slip once and everybody is glad to help you slip hard. Crooked stays crooked and bent hates straight. The rest is survival.”
Source: Crook Manifesto
“It was his own grief turned magically to song.”
“It was his peculiar happiness that he scarcely ever found a stranger whom he did not leave a friend; but it must likewise be added, that he had not often a friend long without obliging him to become a stranger.”
Source: The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper: Including the Series Edited with Prefaces, Biographical and Critical
“It was his power, his gift, suddenly to shed all superfluities, to shrink and diminish so that he looked barer and felt sparer, even physically, yet lost none of his intensity of mind, and so to stand on his little ledge facing the dark of human ignorance, how we know nothing and the sea eats away the ground we stand on - that was his fate, his gift. But having thrown away, when he dismounted, all gestures and fripperies, all trophies of nuts and roses, and shrunk so that not only fame but even his own name was forgotten by him, he kept even in that desolation a vigilance which spared no phantom and luxuriated in no vision, and it was in this guise that he inspired in William Bankes (intermittently) and in Charles Tansley (obsequiously) and in his wife now, when she looked up and saw him standing at the edge of the lawn, profoundly, reverence, and pity, and gratitude too, as a stake driven into the bed of a channel upon which the gulls perch and the waves beat inspires in merry boat-loads a feeling of gratitude for the duty it is taking upon itself of marking the channel out there in the floods alone.”
Source: To the Lighthouse
“It was his self-esteem she had sought to destroy, knowing that a man who surrenders his value is at the mercy of anyone’s will; it was his moral purity she had struggled to breach, it was his confident rectitude she had wanted to shatter by means of the poison of guilt—as if, were he to collapse, his depravity would give her a right to hers.”
Source: Atlas Shrugged
“It was his soul's freedom that was in question. And that question was whether freedom was worth the price when it meant shirking the responsibilities of honor.”
Source: Tempus with His Right-Side Companion Niko
“It was his subconscious which told him this - that infuriating part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.”
“It was hollow, my triumph, I could feel that, but I held on to it just the same.”
Source: Lucy: A Novel
“It was hope, dying unsurprised.”
“It was hope that brought me love.”
Source: Marker of Hope
“It was hope that was the problem. Hoping feelings wouldn't be hurt, hoping love would blossom, that was painful. But committing yourself to misery, that was just a dead feeling. It was pulling the Band-Aid and embracing the pain.”
Source: Winter Town
“It was hopeless to regret; instead, he made a pact with Regret: “You will lead me back to Hope, and nowhere else.”
Source: Harp and the Lyre: Exchange
“It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong.”
“It was hopeless. She was flawless. She was a sunbeam. Mosca gave up and got on with hating her.”
Source: Twilight Robbery
“It was horrible to watch a man being tortured. She felt like something inside her own soul was cracking, something that would never heal.”
Source: Palace Intrigue
“It was horrifying how nice she sounded. Pamela wanted to hate her and be set against her but she couldn't find it in her heart.”
Source: Let's Meet on Platform 8 / A Whiff of Scandal
“It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.”
Source: Burning Chrome
“It was how it had been with the madman among the tombs, that their number was legion, far in excess at any rate if the number listed on the back of the door as the room's maximum occupancy.”
Source: Chance
“It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed -- not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered.”
“It was, however, time to accept fear for what it was, an emotion that was preventing them from being who they needed to be.”
Source: The Visions of David Palmer: Rising Phoenix
“It was huge mistake to avoid working with the rest of the world because (a) we're the largest source of the problem: 4% of us who are in the U.S. produce 25% of the world's carbon dioxide.”
“It was human nature. You didn't give everything away; if you did, you would have nothing left.
There were those who took the view that there was a liberation in the act of confession, but mostly they tended to be the ones who were listening, and not the ones confessing. The only full confessions occur on deathbeds; all others are partial, modified.”
Source: The Burning Soul
“It was humanity's ability to heal so quickly, by means of babies, which encouraged so many people to think of explosions as show business, as highly theatrical forms of self-expression, and little more.”
Source: Galápagos
“It was humanly impossible for the disciples to free themselves from their selfish pursuit of self-exaltation, just as it's impossible for us to free ourselves from the very same sins.”
Source: Humility: True Greatness
“It was Hypatia’s fault, said the Christians, that the governor was being so stubborn. It was she, they murmured, who was standing between Orestes and Cyril, preventing them from reconciling. Fanned by the parabalani, the rumours started to catch, and flame. Hypatia was not merely a difficult woman, they said. Hadn’t everyone seen her use symbols in her work, and astrolabes? The illiterate parabalani (‘bestial men – truly abominable’ as one philosopher would later call them) knew what these instruments were. They were not the tools of mathematics and philosophy, no: they were the work of the Devil. Hypatia was not a philosopher: she was a creature of Hell. It was she who was turning the entire city against God with her trickery and her spells. She was ‘atheizing’ Alexandria. Naturally, she seemed appealing enough – but that was how the Evil One worked. Hypatia, they said, had ‘beguiled many people through satanic wiles’. Worst of all, she had even beguiled Orestes. Hadn’t he stopped going to church? It was clear: she had ‘beguiled him through her magic’. This could not be allowed to continue.
One day in March AD 415, Hypatia set out from her home to go for her daily ride through the city. Suddenly, she found her way blocked by a ‘multitude of believers in God’. They ordered her to get down from her chariot. Knowing what had recently happened to her friend Orestes, she must have realized as she climbed down that her situation was a serious one. She cannot possibly have realized quite how serious. As soon as she stood on the street, the parabalani, under the guidance of a Church magistrate called Peter – ‘a perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ’ – surged round and seized ‘the pagan woman’. They then dragged Alexandria’s greatest living mathematician through the streets to a church. Once inside, they ripped the clothes from her body then, using broken pieces of pottery as blades, flayed her skin from her flesh. Some say that, while she still gasped for breath, they gouged out her eyes. Once she was dead, they tore her body into pieces and threw what was left of the ‘luminous child of reason’ onto a pyre and burned her.”
Source: The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
“It was hypnotic, and then it was unsettling, and finally I became aware of another entity in my universe, sitting on the shore two hundred yards away, smoking a pipe.”
Source: O Jerusalem
“It was hysterical going to work. I would just walk in and think, 'What in hell? Am I here? What's going on? I'm going to wake up in a minute. I'm in a dream.'”
“It was I who drank the chocolate that had been made for my little cousin, broke the jug, finished off the jar [...] I wanted to create a barrier between myself and others, define my territory, say here, in this place, the only place in the world where it is known with absolute certainty who drank the chocolate. Here, is me.”
Source: Orlanda
“It was I who made Fellini famous, not the other way around.”
“It was I who wronged you. I won’t blame you, in life or in death.”
Source: 二哈和他的白貓師尊
“It was if the city knew about Percy's dream of Gaea. It knew that the earth goddess intended on razing all human civilization, and this city, which had stood for thousands if years, was saying back at her: You wanna dissolve this city, Dirt Face? Give it a shot. In other words, it was the Coach Hedge of mortal cities- only taller.”
“It was if the devil himself had devised the perfect earthly torture for Lady Alicia Lawrence. “Now how will I occupy myself when I get to hell?”
Source: Seducing the Spy
“It was if The Wave had taken on a life of its own and now he and his students were literally riding it.”
“It was if we all sensed we'd be gone someday soon in a sudden instant--often it happened in the middle of the night--and didn't want to get involved. Or else it was that none of us wanted to know anybody later on who was the way we were now.”
Source: The Sportswriter
“It was illegal for black people and white people to play checkers together in Birmingham. And there were even black and white Bibles to swear to tell the truth on in many parts of the South.”
“It was immediately clear to me that security was a cross-cutting issue, so rather than dividing the space up in parallel with each of the other areas, I wanted security cut across the areas in addition to having its own content.”
“It was implicitly supposed that every living thing was distinctively plant or animal; that there were real and profound differences between the two, if only they could be seized.”
Source: Natural science and religion, 2 lectures