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I Quotes

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All I Quotes

“It was in the nature of those who had long dreamt of Pacific empire to stress the optimism with which George Berkeley opened his quatrain. Few pondered the line with which he closed it: Westward the course of empire takes its way; The first four acts already past. A fifth shall close the drama with the day: Time's noblest offspring is its last.”

“It was in the neck of the Boat pool in October 1922 that Georgina Ballantine, the daughter of a ghillie, landed the largest ever salmon at 64lb. The capture and landing is described as 'Homeric' on the beat's website today. Following its capture and killing, a cast was taken by a taxidermist from Malloch's in Perth. The fish's body was then donated to and eaten by patients and staff at Perth Royal Infirmary. The stuffed fish was then added to the sculpted monuments to the dead going up all along Tayside between the two world wars.”

“It was in the spring that Josephine and I had first loved each other, or, at least, had first come into the full knowledge that we loved. I think that we must have loved each other all our lives, and that each succeeding spring was a word in the revelation of that love, not to be understood until, in the fullness of time, the whole sentence was written out in that most beautiful of all beautiful springs.”

“It was in this line of thought, where true courage was mustered. A strength measured not by the size of his muscles or the amount one could lift, but the more impressive type, the type quantified in the amount of shit one can wade. Identified in the amount of crap hands dealt without bowing out altogether.”

“It was in this year, 1828, that the standard of "the Christian Party in Politics" was openly unfurled... This was an evident attempt, through the influence of the clergy over the female mind - until this hour lamentably neglected in the United States - to effect a union of Church and State.”

“It was in times like these I wondered if dying could be a peaceful thing. I'd been cooped up the last few days, struggling with the flu—or at least, that was what I thought it was. My nose felt like a delicate piece of china, one sneeze away from shattering me completely. My throat? Violated. And not in a way that could be mistaken for pleasurable.”

“It was indeed as though ice was flooding his body. He put the bottle down and walked forward; he braced himself, saw the black flames licking his body but couldn't feel them - for a moment he could see nothing but dark fire - then he was on the other side, in the last chamber. There was already someone there - but it wasn't Snape. It wasn't even Voldemort.”

“It was indeed the transcendent force of modernization that accounts for the unparalleled strength of Know-Nothingism in Massachusetts. The political fallout from the pressures of modernization, however, included more than the backlash of the native-born majority against immigrants, Catholics, and the South that most historians perceive as the essence of Know-Nothingism. Explosive urban and industrial growth had thrust the Commonwealth into the forefront of the industrial states in the antebellum period, creating, in the process, wrenching social and economic dislocations. The failure of the established parties to mount a significant response to the myriad issues and problems spawned in the matrix of modernization weakened partisan attachments and set the rank and file of the established parties on a quest for a political vehicle that would make a difference in their lives. In 1854, such a vehicle materialized in the form of an antiparty, antipolitician populist movement that promised to cleanse the statehouse of corrupt old parties and self-serving political careerists and turn the government over to the people so that they might right the wrongs that had for so long afflicted them. Among the afflictions, it is true, were the many social problems associated with mass immigration; but there were other troubling and pervasive concerns endemic to an unharnessed, rapidly expanding urban, industrial order, including the tyrannical factory system, the decline in the status of labor, the widening gulf between rich and poor, and the deteriorating quality of urban life.”

“It was inevitable, as soon as legends of miracles became attached to the names of the great mystics, that the credulous masses should applaud imposture more than true devotion; the cult of the saints, against which orthodox Islam ineffectually protested, promoted ignorance and superstition, and confounded charlatanry with lofty speculation. To live scandalously, to act impudently, to speak unintelligibly—this was the easy highroad to fame, wealth, and power.”

“It was inevitable that in the proliferation of media and media channels and the natural debasing of authority that comes when you make an expert of someone who knows a few things and can be on television and you put the word "expert" underneath them, that is to say me, then eventually the very concept of expertise itself would become meaningless.”

“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he has hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.”

“It was inevitable: Yankel fell in love with his never-wife. He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depressed the bed next to him, remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too-real chest, making his widower's rememberences that much more convincing and his pain that much more real.”

“It was intended that Catholics and Protestants draw closer together, but it is evident that Catholics have become Protestants, rather than the reverse. The New Mass itself was a Protestant conception and leads to Protestantism, and it is for that reason that we cannot conceive the possibility of using it in our seminaries. The definition of the Mass as given in the Introduction of the Novus Ordo Missae is clearly a Protestant one, and this, in itself, is inadmissible and inconceivable! Henceforth, the emphasis will be on the Supper, the Meal, and no longer on the Sacrifice. This shift of emphasis must of necessity lead - and is already leading - to the destruction of Catholic Doctrine which rests upon the Sacrifice of the Cross continued on the altar. It will lead to loss of faith in the Real Presence, and to the ruin of the Catholic priesthood. This alone would suffice to justify our emphatic rejection of the Reform. This means that no compromise whatever can be consented to in this regard. It means also that those who have taken the Mass along that road bear a heavy burden of responsibility.”

“It was interesting in that we were excluded entirely but after a while we got restless and went inside, where there were some more of us sitting on the steps that went up to the bathroom and bedrooms and this lot was talking among themselves like birds before they fly off in one jaggy but coordinated movement. There were ten of us cousins give or take and the tallest and also the oldest one was Travis. He was twelve. He looked at us with his long, swinging jaw, trying to weigh us up. Time had passed since the last time we’d all been together, his face said, but blood was blood.”