I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“It was not for the piano-tuner to know that in this still, grey, winter-gripped dining-room, this apparent mortuary of desire and passion (in which the lift rumbled and knives and forks scraped upon plates), waves were flowing forward and backward, and through and through, of hellish revulsion and unquenchable hatred!”
Source: The Slaves of Solitude
“It was not for the sake of oil that the risky decision to cease this corrupt coexistence was made. But at least now the Iraqi people have a chance of controlling their own main resource, and it will be our task to ensure that the funding and revenue are transparent instead of opaque.”
“It was not four-and-twenty hours ago since they had met there to the same repast, but in circumstances how different! With what cheerful ease, what happy, though false security, had she then looked around her, enjoying every thing present, and fearing little in future, beyond Henry‘s going to Woodston for a day! Happy, happy breakfast! for Henry had been there, Henry had sat by her and helped her.”
Source: Northanger abbey
“It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.”
“It was not going to be the end of the world. Just the end of the Cullens. The end of Edward, the end of me. I preferred it that way – the last part anyway. I would not live without Edward again; if he was leaving this world, then I would be right behind him.”
Source: Breaking Dawn: Twilight
“It was not Hansu that she missed, or even Isak. What she was seeing again in her dreams was her youth, her beginning, and her wishes--so this is how she became a woman.”
Source: Pachinko
“It was not hard to persuade people that the market was sound; as always in such times they asked only that the dispiriting voices of doubt be muted and that there should be tolerably frequent expressions of confidence.”
“It was not her fault he had liked her. It was not her fault she was a cyborg.”
Source: Cinder
“It was not her heart so much as her temper that was wrong.”
Source: Shirley
“It was not her way to make a conspicuous entry into anyone’s life, but towards the end of that week Sebastian said rather sourly: “You and mummy seem very thick,” and I realized that in fact I was being drawn into intimacy by swift, imperceptible stages, for she was impatient of any human relationship that fell short of it.”
Source: Brideshead Revisited
“It was not his habit to dwell on what could have been, but what could never be.”
“It was not his job at square leg to inform the batsman what I was doing. I did nothing for which I need to apologise.”
“It was not his policy to talk to strangers.”
Source: The Strange Land
“It was not honor that made Meleager fight, or his friends, or victory, or revenge, or even his own life. It was Cleopatra, on her knees before him, her face streaked with tears. Here is Phoinix’s craft: Cleopatra, Patroclus. Her name built from the same pieces as mine, only reversed.”
Source: The Song of Achilles
“It was not how one lived, but how one chose to die.”
Source: Citadel
“It was not, however, to these Fascist groups, numerically unimportant as they were, that the Third Republic owed its collapse. On the contrary, the plain, if paradoxical, truth is that their influence was never so slight as at the moment when the collapse actually took place. What made France fall was the fact that she had no more true Dreyfusards, no one who believed that democracy and freedom, equality and justice could any longer be defended or realized under the republic.”
Source: The Origins of Totalitarianism
“It was not I who was teaching my cat to gather rosebuds, but she who was teaching me.”
“It was not important how many enemies there are, but where the enemy is”
“It was not imprisonment, supposedly, but simply that all Manchus needed special protection because they were related to the royal house and so were part of officialdom. Actually it was a luxurious imprisonment, for this was the Chinese way of conquering enemies. When the Manchu invasion of 1644 was successful in a military sense-and almost any people could invade China successfully, it seemed, in a military sense-China did not resist. The people were apparently passive, mildly curious, and even courteous to their conquerors. The real struggle came afterwards, but so subtly that the conquerors never knew they were being conquered. The technique of victory was that as soon as the invaders laid down their arms the philosophical but intensely practical Chinese persuaded them to move into palaces and begin to enjoy themselves. The more the new rulers ate and drink, the better pleased the Chinese were, and if they also learned to enjoy gambling and opium and many wives, so much the better. One would have thought that the Chinese were delighted to be invaded and conquered. On the pretext of increased comfort, the Manchus were persuaded to live in especially pleasant part of any city, and to be protected by special guards against rebellious citizens. This meant they were segregated and since they were encouraged to do no work, the actual and tedious details of the government were assumed performed by the chinese, ostensibly for them. The result of this life of idleness and luxury was that the Manchus generally became a fit while the Chinese administered the government. The Manchus were like pet cats and the Chinese kept them so, knowing that when the degeneration was complete, a Chinese revolutionary would overthrow the rotten structure. Revolution was in the Chinese tradition and every dynasty was overthrown, if not by foreign invasion, then by native revolution”
Source: My Several Worlds
“It was not imprisonment, supposedly, but simply that all Manchus needed special protection because they were related to the royal house and so were part of officialdom. Actually it was a luxurious imprisonment, for this was the Chinese way of conquering enemies. When the Manchu invasion of 1644 was successful in a military sense-and almost any people could invade China successfully, it seemed, in a military sense-China did not resist. The people were apparently passive, mildly curious, and even courteous to their conquerors. The real struggle came afterwards, but so subtly that the conquerors never knew they were being conquered. The technique of victory was that as soon as the invaders laid down their arms the philosophical but intensely practical Chinese persuaded them to move into palaces and begin to enjoy themselves. The more the new rulers ate and drink, the better pleased the Chinese were, and if they also learned to enjoy gambling and opium and many wives, so much the better. One would have thought that the Chinese were delighted to be invaded and conquered. On the pretext of increased comfort, the men shoes were persuaded to live in especially pleasant part of any city, and to be protected by special guards against rebellious citizens. This meant they were segregated and since they were encouraged to do no work, the actual and tedious details of the government were assumed performed by the chinese, ostensibly for them. The result of this life of idleness and luxury was that the Manchus generally became a fit while the Chinese administered the government. The Manchus were like pet cats and the Chinese kept them so, knowing that when the degeneration was complete, a Chinese revolutionary would overthrow the rotten structure. Revolution was in the Chinese tradition and every dynasty was overthrown, if not by foreign invasion, then by native revolution.”
Source: My Several Worlds
“It was not impulse.
It was not lust.
It was not wrath, or boredom, or desperation.
People remembered the saints because they had their tokens.”
“It was not in her nature to stop short at half-measures, not to pause when once she had fixed her purpose. If she ever trembled on looking forward to the utter ruin she was about to encounter, her second emotion was to despise herself for such pusillanimity, and to be roused to renewed energy.”
Source: Lodore
“It was not in her nature, however, to increase her vexations by dwelling on them. She was confident of having performed her duty, and to fret over unavoidable evils, or augment them by anxiety, was not part of her disposition.”
Source: Pride and Prejudice
“It was not in me It came and went I wanted to hold it It was held by wine (I no longer know what it was)”
Source: Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
“It was not in my nature to be an assertive person. I was used to looking to others for guidance, for influence, sometimes for the most basic cues of life. And yet writing stories is one of the most assertive things a person can do. Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconceive, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, "Listen to me."”
“It was not in my nature to gossip, which put me at odds with most of my sisters at San Zaccaria, who twittered hearsay like so many flocks of birds.”
Source: The Virgins of Venice
“It was not in the winter
Our loving lot was cast!
It was the time of roses,
We plucked them as we passed!”
Source: The poetical works of Thomas Hood, ed. by W.M. Rossetti
“It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Illustrated)
“It was not just inappropriate behavior”
“It was not just the Church that resisted the heliocentrism of Copernicus.”
“It was not just the need for blood that drove the virus. It also needed death.”
Source: My Unbeating Heart
“It was not like everyone had said.
Not like being needed,
or needing; not desperate;
it did not whisper
that I'd come to harm. I didn't lose
my head. No, I was not
going to leap from a great
height and flap
my wings.
It was in fact
the opposite of flying:
it contained the wish
to be toppled, to be on the floor,
the ground, anywhere I might
lie down. . . .
On my back, and you on me.”
Source: A Working Girl Can't Win
“It was not long after sunrise, and Stephen Waterman, fresh from his dip in the river, had scrambled up the hillside from the hut in the alder-bushes where he had made his morning toilet.”
Source: HOMESPUN TALES TRILOGY: Rose o' the River, The Old Peabody Pew & Susanna and Sue (Illustrated): Three Small Town Novels in One Volume
“It was not long after that Ganesh saw a big new notice in the shop, painted on cardboard.
‘Is Leela self who write that,’ Ramlogan said. ‘I didn’t ask she to write it, mind you. She just sit down quiet quiet one morning after tea and write it off.’
It read:
NOTICE
NOTICE, IS. HEREBY; PROVIDED: THAT, SEATS!
ARE, PROVIDED. FOR; FEMALE: SHOP, ASSISTANTS!
Ganesh said, ‘Leela know a lot of punctuation marks.’
That is it, sahib. All day the girl just sitting down and talking about these puncturation marks. She is like that, sahib.”
Source: The Mystic Masseur and Miguel Street
“It was not long before English Law took the one step needed to produce the modern scheme of legal remedies. And when it did, it used the Writ of Trespass as the starting point.”
Source: A Short History of English Law: From the Earliest Times to the End of the Year 1919
“It was not lost on Osama bin Laden that it only took 18 dead in Somalia for the Great Satan to pull out. It should not be lost on Americans that this is what the Democrats are again demanding we do in Iraq.”
Source: If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans
“It was not malaise we suffered from; it was Jimmy Carter - and Walter Mondale.”
Source: National and international dimensions
“It was not meant that the soul should cultivate the earth, but that the earth should educate and maintain the soul.”
Source: Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli
“It was not merely that his brother was dead. His brain, too young to realize the full paradox, wondered with an obscure self- pity why it was that the pulse of his brother's fear went on and on, when Francis was now where he had always been told there was no more terror and no more--darkness.”
Source: The End of the Party
“It was not miserable - often I did not miss her at all. But there was sometimes a quick, sinking ache when I walked in the door and saw she was not there. Twice, however, I'd felt the same sinking feeling when she was.”
Source: A Gate at the Stairs
“It was not Muslims that had made Islam great; it was Islam that had made the Muslims great.”
Source: The Road To Mecca
“It was not my aim to paint about the Negro in America in terms of propaganda. It is to depict the life of my people as I know it, passionately and dispassionately as Brueghel.”
Source: Romare Bearden: The Human Condition : [exhibition] October 3-October 26, 1991
“It was not my class of people. There was not a producer, a press agent, a director, an actor.”
“It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam.”
“It was not my dream to be an artist. How could it have been? I thought, artist, much like a leader, was something you either were or weren't. Never something you set out to be.”
“It was not my intention to collapse; no, I would die standing.”
Source: Hunger
“It was not my intention to doubt that, the Doctrines of the Illuminati, and principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more truly satisfied of this fact than I am.”
“It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.”
Source: Heart of Darkness
“It was not nails that held Jesus to that wretched cross; it was his unqualified resolution, out of love for his Father, to do his Father's will-and it was his love for sinners like me.”
“It was not necessarily the best of times in America when Catholics and Protestants were suspicious of and hated one another; but at least they were taking their beliefs seriously, and the more or less satisfactory accommodations they worked out were not simply the result of apathy about the state of their souls.”
Source: Closing of the American Mind