I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“It was one of those hot, silent nights, when people sit at windows listening for the thunder which they know will shortly break; when they recall dismal tales of hurricanes and earthquakes; and of lonely travellers on open plains, and lonely ships at sea, struck by lightning.”
Source: Martin Chuzzlewit
“It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.”
Source: Middlesex
“It was one of those idiotic things that could've been resolved in a split second. Tara had no right to touch Raphael, and once she did he had every right to punch her. She should've left it at that, and now she was dead because she didn't.”
Source: Magic Slays
“It was one of those imponderables of existence that months, even years, can go by without anything significant happening, and then suddenly a cluster of hours comes along or even minutes, that can blow a hole in time a mile wide”
Source: The Dark Fields
“It was one of those late summer days trying its best to convince everyone that winter would never seep through and ravage the earth.”
Source: Girl on a Train
“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.”
Source: Great Expectations: Classic English Literature
“It was one of those moments of perfect tiredness, of having conquered not only the work at hand, but the night who had blocked the way.”
Source: The Book Thief: 10th Anniversary Edition
“It was one of those moments that would have had dramatic music if my life were a movie, but instead I got a radio jingle for some kind of submarine sandwich place blaring over the store's ambient stereo. The movie of my life must be really low-budget.”
Source: Dead Beat: A Novel of The Dresden Files
“It was one of those moments when we suddenly recall a dream that we've unaccountably forgotten, and back in a flood comes all the emotion we felt in our sleep”
Source: The Amber Spyglass
“It was one of those moments when you feel the future so much that it humbles the present.”
Source: Dash & Lily's Book of Dares
“It was one of those moments—which sometimes occur only at the interval of years—when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind's eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed himself as he did now.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter
“It was one of those mornings when a man could face the day only after warming himself with a mug of thick coffee beaded with steam, a good thick crust of bread, and a bowl of bean soup.”
“It was one of those nights, I quickly decided, when you slip into an alternate continuum, a city that looks exactly like the one where you live, except for the peculiar difference that it contains not one person you love or know or have even spoken to before.”
Source: Burning Chrome
“It was one of those occasions. Those big not-thought-through/spur-of-the-moment/more-intuition-than-rational-analysis occasions. The occasions that make us who we are.”
Source: The Creeping Shadow
“It was one of those parties where you cough twice before you speak and then decide not to say it after all.”
Source: My Man Jeeves
“It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.”
Source: A Taste for Death
“It was one of those perfect fall days when the air is cool enough to wake you up but the sun is also kissing your face.”
“It was one of those perfect New York October afternoons, when the explosion of oranges and yellows against the bright blue sky makes you feel like your life is passing through your fingers, that you've felt this autumn-feeling before and you'll probably get to feel it again, but one day you won't anymore, because you'll be dead.”
Source: Secrets To Happiness
“It was one of those pictures that children are supposed to like but don't. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know?”
Source: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
“It was one of those places where mist lingers well into the day and the dawn chorus starts early.”
Source: Wild Carp: Fennel's Journal No. 4
“It was one of those plays in which all of the actors unfortunately enunciated very clearly.”
“It was one of those problematic occasions with long silences, sporadic coughs, and people saying isolated things like, "Well, isn't this nice.”
“It was one of those puzzling facts of life that women either celebrated a happy event or solved their problems with a shopping spree.”
Source: Vocation of a Gadfly
“It was one of those rare moments where one has a vision of the scope of the wild ocean. Not just small cylinders firing to keep a tiny engine running, but rather the giant, massive gears of nature, each one with its own reasoning, its own meta-logic, spinning in its particular circle in competition or in confluence with the gear below it. We zeroed in on the school, but our progress was painfully slow, It would have been foolish to speed into the tumult-we would have ruined our baits in the process and doomed our chances of hooking a tuna.
But luckily, the commotion did not subside. If anything it only grew more frantic and exhuberant on our approach. Beneath the birds, beneath the dolphins, beneath the menhaden, there should have been an equally vast school of giant bluefin tuna, collaborating with vertebrates of the so-called higher orders of life to form the floor of the prey trap, sealing the baitfish in from below, while the dolphins and birds made up the trap's walls and ceiling. A strike from a giant tuna seemed inevitable.....as the boat moved forward, I saw seabirds gathering up ahead into a cloud, the size and violence of which I had never seen before. Gannets - big, albatross-like pelagic birds - flew hundreds of feet above the churning surface of the water. In a flock of many thousands, they whirled in unison and then, as if on command from some brigadier general of bird life, dropped in an arc, bird after bird, into the water beneath. The gyre of gannets turned in a clockwise direction, and down below, spinning counterclockwise, was the largest school of dolphins I'd ever seen. There in the angry blue-green sea, the dolphins had corralled a vast school of menhaden-small herringlike creatures that, when bitten, release globules of oil that float on the surface. Oil slicks flattened the water everywhere as the dolphins swirled around, using their exceptional intelligence and wolf-pack cooperation to befuddle and surround the fish, which in turn whirled in a clockwise direction.”
Source: Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food
“It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.”
Source: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
“It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.”
Source: The Great Gatsby
“It was one of those rare times of shared happiness, of perfect contentment. We had a feeling of expectation, that what was already wonderful would only get better and better as time went on. These moments are one of the rarest, most fragile things in the world. You have to seize the day; you have to recall all the rotten, dirty things you endured to earn this peace. You have to remember to enjoy each minute, each hour, because although you may feel like it's going to last forever, the world plans otherwise. You want to be grateful for every precious second, but you simply can't do it. It's not in human nature to live life to the fullest. Haven't your ever noticed that equal amounts of pain and joy are not, in fact, equal in duration? Pain drags on until you wonder if life will ever be bearable again; pleasure, though, once it's reached its peak, fades faster than a trodden gardenia, and your memory searches in vain for the sweet scent.”
Source: When Gravity Fails
“It was one of those rare times when remembering the dead was more inmportant than tending to the needs of the living.”
Source: Lightning
“It was one of those red-gold early October days, the air crisp and tart as heady as applejack, and even at dawn the sky was the clear, purplish blue that only the finest of autumn days brings. There are maybe three such days in a year. I sang as I lifted my traps, and my voice bounced off the misty banks of the Loire like a challenge. It was the mushroom season, so after I had brought my catch back to the farm and cleaned it out, I took some bread and cheese for breakfast and set out into the woods to hunt for mushrooms. I was always good at that. Still am, to tell the truth, but in those days I had a nose like a truffle pig's. I could smell those mushrooms out, the gray chanterelle and the orange, with its apricot scent, the bolet and the petit rose and the edible puffball and the brown-cap and the blue-cap. Mother always told us to take our mushrooms to the pharmacy to ensure we had not gathered anything poisonous, but I never made a mistake. I knew the meaty scent of the bolet and the dry, earthy smell of the brown-cap mushroom. I knew their haunts and breeding grounds. I was a patient collector.”
Source: Five Quarters of the Orange
“It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating, but before they are divorced - when they still imagine that children and property can be shared with more magnanimity than recrimination.”
“It was one of those somber evenings when the sighing of the wind resembles the moans of a dying man; a storm was brewing, and between the splashes of rain on the windows there was the silence of death. All nature suffers in such moments; the trees writhe in pain and twist their heads; the birds of the fields cower under the bushes; the streets of cities are deserted.”
Source: The Confession of a Child of the Century
“It was one of those sort of apocalyptic moments. I remember within ten minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff, just knowing that every computer would work this way someday. It was so obvious once you saw it. It didn't require tremendous intellect. It was so clear.”
“It was one of those strange moments that came to him rarely, but never left. A moment that stamped itself on heart and brain, instantly recallable in every detail, for all of his life. There was no telling what made these moments different from any other, though he knew them when they came. He had seen sights more gruesome and more beautiful by far, and been left with no more than a fleeting muddle of their memory. But these-- the still moments, as he called them to himself-- they came with no warning, to print a random image of the most common things inside his brain, indelible.”
“It was one of those striking moments in life where you find familiarity in the inexplicable.”
“It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astounding sight when every tree in a landscape becomes individual, when each winding back highway and plump hillside is suddenly and infinitely splashed with every sharp shade that nature can bestow - flaming scarlet, lustrous gold, throbbing vermilion, fiery orange.”
“It was one of those sweltering summer days in which the air itself seems to decline as a haze suffocates the outside world. It is painfully bright whether you are looking up at that ball of burning hydrogen or down at its vivid reflection on sheer pavement.”
“It was one of those things that had to be experienced to be understood”
Source: When he was wicked
“It was one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with its peeled, dead eyes staring out at you and never seeing you. It went with the noiselessness of late night, and only the crickets chirping, the frogs sobbing off in the moist swampland. One of those things in a big jar that makes your stomach jump as it does when you see a preserved arm in a laboratory vat.”
Source: THE OCTOBER COUNTRY
“It was one of those things where you admire and respect a person, and you watch them for almost your entire life - and Meryl Streep was definitely one of those people that inspired me throughout my career. Having a chance to have a scene with her was pretty unreal.”
“It was one of those times when you can feel the air in a room. Everything stood still. I can remember the T-shirt I was wearing and the bag I was carrying. I don't think I breathed for 15 minutes. It was a devastating moment. They said they wanted me to experience more things. OK. I began contemplating things. Maybe I should take LSD or become a hooker. I left Juilliard and was just meandering and drifting for a while. Thank God I had support from my family and close friends. Bad times.”
“It was one of those times you feel a sense of loss, even though you didn't have something in the first place. I guess that's what disappointment is- a sense of loss for something you never had.”
Source: Nature of Jade
“It was one of those winter days that suddenly dream of spring, when the sky is blue and soft and clear, and the wind has dropped its voice and whispers instead of screaming, and the sun is out and the trees look surprised, and over everything there is the faintest, palest tint of green.”
Source: Come Along with Me: Classic Short Stories and an Unfinished Novel
“It was one thing not to want a husband, I realized; it was quite another not to need one for the roof over your head, for your meat and bread, for the shoes on your feet and the coat on your back.”
Source: The Brides of Rollrock Island
“It was one thing to accept I couldn't have Dimitri. It was something entirely different to realize someone else could.”
Source: Frostbite: A Vampire Academy Novel
“It was one thing to be driven mad with pleasure. It was an entirely different and even more powerful thing to do the same to someone else.”
Source: The Basilisk of Star Manor: A Tempting Monsters Story
“It was one thing to be fooled, and another thing to be taken for a fool all the time.”
Source: Triple Agent, Double Cross
“It was one thing to believe in yourself, but quite another to bet.”
Source: The Fairy's Tale
“It was one thing to contain the Soviet Union in Europe because Britain, France, and Germany were all willing to join in. But will Japan and other Asian countries be willing to join in the containment of China?”
“It was one thing to divide the major assets, but how was it possible to divide the heart?”
“It was one thing to find happiness and lose it, quite another to have someone else's happiness thrust at you like an unwanted second slice of cake. Then again, she'd never refused a second slice of cake.”
Source: King of Scars