I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church and nobility; as if they had any more occasion to love and honor king and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honor the lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him! Why, dear me, ANY kind of royalty, howsoever modified, ANY kind of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably never find it out for yourself, and don't believe it when somebody else tells you. It is enough to make a body ashamed of his race to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people that have always figured as its aristocracies -- a company of monarchs and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions...
The truth was, the nation as a body was in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel before king and Church and noble; to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they might be fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs that they might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them, be familiar all their lives with the degrading language and postures of adulation that they might walk in pride and think themselves the gods of this world. And for all this, the thanks they got were cuffs and contempt; and so poor-spirited were they that they took even this sort of attention as an honor.”
“It was pivotal in making you but you don't remember it. Or do you? Do we understand the events that make us who we are? Do we understand the factors that make us do the things we do?”
Source: Shampoo Planet
“It was plain that Nazaam and Gieyat were lovers. I'd like that, Arram thought as he followed Nazaam. To be comfortable with my lover, and laugh together, even when things are terrible. Like I do with Ozorne and Varice.”
Source: Tempests and Slaughter
“It was plain to see the Hollywood undertakers take care of everything. If you die you don't have to lift a finger.”
Source: I KID YOU NOT
“It was Plato, according to Sosigenes, who set this as a problem for those concerned with these things, through what suppositions of uniform and ordered movements the appearances concerning the movements of the wandering heavenly bodies could be preserved.”
“It was play rather than work which enabled man to evolve his higher faculties - everything we mean by the word 'culture'.”
“It was pleasant - and the sense of otherness was nice, that there were two people involved in this process, that we were each giving something to the other.”
Source: Any human heart
“It was pleasant to me to get a letter from you the other day. Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I don't think that I mastered anything beyond the date (which I knew) and the signature (which I guessed at). There's a singular and a perpetual charm in a letter of yours; it never grows old, it never loses its novelty. Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but yours are kept forever - unread. One of them will last a reasonable man a lifetime.”
“It was pleasant to observe that Mrs. Wemmick no longer unwound Wemmick’s arm when it adapted itself to her figure, but sat in a high-backed chair against the wall, like a violoncello in its case, and submitted to be embraced as that melodious instrument might have done.”
Source: Great Expectations
“It was pleasant to talk shop again; to use that elliptical, allusive speech that one uses only with another of one's trade.”
Source: The Daughter of Time
“It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons. It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and, close below, Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of E. M. Forster (Illustrated)
“It was pointless. The crowd was itself. There was no swaying it, squeezing through, or reasoning with it. You breathed with it and you sang its songs. You waited for its fire.”
Source: The Book Thief
“It was poisonous, unnatural to let the dead go with a mere whimpering, a slight murmur, a rose bouquet of good taste. Good taste was out of place in the company of death, death itself was the essence of bad taste. And there must be much rage and saliva in its presence. The body must move and throw itself about, the eyes must roll, the hands should have no peace, and the throat should release all the yearning, despair and outrage that accompany the stupidity of loss.”
Source: Sula
“It was pop culture, entertainment, Hollywood, award shows - these are the things that really captivated me as a kid. I would watch the Oscars and every award show with my parents. I would make lists of who was going to win.”
“It was possible at last to hear the silence to appreciate that there was a silence, deep and potent, out there beyond the pretension of the light.”
Source: The Chronoliths
“It was possible, I found, to both mourn a loss and yet be grateful it happened.”
Source: Modern Girls
“It was possible, I had realised, to resist evil but in doing so you acted alone. You stood or fell as an individual. You risked everything in the attempt: it might even be the case, I said, that evil could only be overturned by the absolute sacrifice of self. The problem was that nothing could give greater pleasure to your enemies.”
Source: Transit
“It was possible, I knew, to live on two planes at once - to have one's feet planted in reality but pointed in the direction of progress. It was what I had done as a kid on Euclid Avenue, what my family - and marginalized people more generally - had always done. You get somewhere by building that better reality, if at first only in your own mind. Or as Barack had put it that night, you may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.”
Source: Becoming
“It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”
Source: 1984
“It was possible she might not have the right feeling after all, that she wasn't in love, wasn't in limerence, but was in some unnamed place alone.”
Source: The Answers
“It was possible that a miracle was not something that happened to you, but rather something that didn’t.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #3: Vanishing Acts, The Tenth Circle, and Nineteen Minutes
“It was possible that he could care passionately about only one thing at a time. Or that he needed only one passion to feel order and purpose in the universe. But I had difficulty believing that birds and music were just transposable distractions, simple ways of "passing the time," as the musician was now explaining to me. Were they really just different but equal forms of "anti-death medicine"? Was that really what he believed? That our primary impulse in life was to fill the holes left by being human, to divert ourselves from life's central sadness? Did he not need music and birds for reasons beyond solace?”
Source: Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation
“It was possible that I'd thrown one too many Molotov cocktails over God's fence.”
Source: Shiver Trilogy (Shiver, Linger, Forever)
“it was possible that when Lamb tempted her, it was because he wanted her to fall. The important thing to remember was that she'd not done so yet.”
Source: Real Tigers
“It was possible to explore the 'great tradition' of the English novel and believe that in doing so you were addressing questions of fundamental value -- questions which were of vital relevance to the lives of men and women wasted in fruitless labour in the factories of industrial capitalism. But it was also conceivable that you were destructively cutting yourself off from such men and women, who might be a little slow to recognize how a poetic enjambement enacted a movement of physical balancing.”
Source: Literary Theory: An Introduction
“It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.”
Source: The Marriage Plot: A Novel
“it was possible to grow up in an instant, that you could look down and see the line in the sand dividing your life now from what it used to be.”
Source: The Tenth Circle: A Novel
“It was possible to love life, without loving your life.”
“It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own.”
“It was possible, maybe, to have facts in your mind that weren't facts at all. You could build a whole life's story on false assumptions. You could make truths out of untruths and untruths out of truths. Until you spoke them, really said them out loud or checked for sure, you may not have known which were which.”
“It was possibly the most circumspect advance in the history of military maneuvers, right down at the bottom end of the scale that things like the Charge of the Light Brigade are at the top of.”
“It was post war. It was very gray, very dreary. Everything was still rationed when I first saw the United States in 1951. I went over to visit my sister who was a war bride.”
“It was practically with people with strings. There was no CG involved, it was just painfully taking Collin [Farrell] and Jessica Biel and putting them upside-down, we built the set upside-down and just try to twist perspective to make it all seem like zero gravity. And it was one of the most difficult things I've ever shot.”
“It was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, as I will now demonstrate, that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright.”
Source: Jumpers
“It was preeminently the smell of the human body after it had been used to its limit, such a smell as has meaning and poignance for any athlete, just as it has for any lover.”
Source: A Separate Peace
“It was President [Bill] Clinton and the United States congress in 1998 which said that the regime has to be changed because the regime would not give up its weapons of mass destruction. We came into office in 2001 and kept that policy because Saddam Hussein had not changed.”
“It was pretend.
It was supposed to be this act professionals do for laughs. For profit. For whatever it was until it no longer was any of those things for the two people that mattered: me and him.”
Source: You'd Be Mine
“It was prettily devised of Aesop, The fly sat on the axle tree of the chariot wheel and said, what dust do I raise!”
Source: The Essays Or Counsels, Civil and Moral
“It was pretty absurd travelling up through Peru to arrive in Iquitos, hoping to find an expedition! Life does not work like that. To say it was naive would be kinder than I deserve!”
“It was pretty clear that he was mad, for madness means just this dislocation of the modes of thought which mortals have agreed upon as necessary to keep the world together.”
Source: The Three Hostages
“It was pretty common to form bands that only lasted a few years. Slint was my favorite band that I was in at the time, and I didn't realize that I was bummed out about it until quite a while later.”
“It was pretty daunting. Normally, I never go to a gym, but before we started shooting, I thought I'd better. I reckoned I was in really good shape, and then I looked around and I was half the size of everyone else. A lot of these American actors have this - in my view - misplaced view that they have to look like Action Man. The trouble is, they all run the risk of being interchangeable.”
“It was pretty depressing. There's a lot of people here who want the war to go on forever, and they don't give a shit who's getting killed or who's doing the killing.”
Source: Shantaram
“It was pretty extensive - we worked out 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 3 months, which I think is more than anybody in the Olympics. I thought well I don't need this, the girls need it, but it was a gift.”
“It was pretty frightening because as we all know, when large, famous groups breakup, a lot of the members don't survive in solo careers.”
“It was pretty fun [auditioning on the Millennium Falcon], because I enjoyed the material a lot. Last year I read for the directors, then came to England and did a test on the Falcon, then came back and did a couple more screen tests in Los Angeles.”
“It was pretty good. Even the music was nice.”
“It was pretty hard to actually have to say the words with my teammates, my wife and my boys there. I realized it was going to happen before that day [I announce retirement], but to have to announce it and talk about in front of a lot of people was tougher than I expected. I'm glad that feeling has kind of gone away. That sadness hasn't lingered.”
“It was pretty miserable wretches that minded at all whether they were wet or dry. He could not understand why such people had been born. "It's nothing but damned eccentricity to want to be dry" he would say. "I've been wet more than half my life and never been a whit the worse for it.”
Source: Independent People
“It was pretty much the male code not to let your friends have too much fun if there was any chance you could throw a wrench in their good times.”
Source: Burning Up