I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“it was times like these when a man in a desperate situation must take whatever madness is offered to escape the darker madness in which he finds himself trapped.”
Source: Painting Angels
“It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.”
Source: To Kill a Mockingbird
“It was titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality, to steal a glimpse across its forbidden frontier. Climbing was a magnificient activity, I firmly believed, not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them.”
“It was to a virgin woman that the birth of the Son of God was announced. It was to a fallen woman that his resurrection was announced.”
Source: Life of Christ
“It was to be a short visit for the G-shevs. More than four days in the U.S. and Raisa's VISA card bill would shatter the fragile Soviet economy.”
Source: Holidays in Hell
“It was to be the longest flight I had ever made in my young life and one of the most interesting. Having always been interested in the magic of aviation I knew that the DC-6B, I boarded was an approximately 75 seat, trans-ocean, Pan Am Clipper. It would also be the last long distance propeller driven commercial airliner. The only difference between it and the DC-6A was that it didn’t have a large cargo door in its side, and it was also approximately 5 feet longer than the DC-6A.
1955 was a good year and people felt relatively safe with Dwight D. Eisenhower in the White House. “I like Ike” had been his political motto since before he assumed office on January 20, 1953, even many Democrats held him in high esteem for his military service and winning the war in Europe. Eisenhower obtained a truce in Korea and worked diligently trying to ease the tensions of the Cold War. He did however fail to win over Georgy Malenkov, or Nikolai Bulganin who succeeded him, as Premier of the Soviet Union in February of 1955. As a moderate Conservative he left America, as the strongest and most productive nation in the world, but unfortunately because of his lack of diplomacy and love of golf, failed to prevent Cuba from slipping into the communist camp.
WFLA inaugurated its broadcasting in the Tampa Bay area on February 14, 1955. The most popular music was referred to as good music, and although big bands were at their zenith in 1942, by 1947 and music critics will tell you that their time had passed. However, Benny Goodman was only 46 in 1955, Tommy Dorsey was 49 and Count Basie was 51. So, in many sheltered quarters they were still in vogue and perhaps always will be. I for one had my Hi-Fidelity 33 1/3 rpm multi stacked record player and a stash of vinyl long play recordings shipped to Africa. For me time stood still as I listened and entertained my friends. Some years later I met Harry James at the Crystal Ballroom in Disneyland. Those were the days….
Big on the scene was “Rhythm in Blues,” an offshoot of widespread African-American music, that had its beginnings in the ‘40s. It would soon become the window that Rock and Roll would come crashing through.”
“It was to Blair that Nazarbayev turned for counsel at this delicate moment. The information blackout on Zhanaozen had been insufficient to prevent the basic details leaking out. It was as though someone had spoken aloud a forbidden truth: for the kleptocrat, ruling by licensing theft rather than seeking consent, money can achieve most of what needs to be done. For everything else, there is violence. And so, as he arrived in Cambridge, Mecca of the rational, to deliver his speech, Nazarbayev resolved to follow Blair’s advice. For these Westerners, anxious after years of war and terrorism and, lately, the financial crisis, he would be the bringer of stability to a troubled world.”
Source: Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World
“It was to carry the American democratic journey beyond these failings that Black citizens and civil rights workers risked unemployment, violence and death.”
“It was to emphasise the unity of humanity with nature and our need to accept ourselves as part of a larger continuum of life in this world.”
Source: Meeting Fairies: My Remarkable Encounters with Nature Spirits
“It was to equally little purpose that you obtained against Galileo a decree from Rome condemning his opinion respecting the motion of the earth. It will never be proved by such an argument as this that the earth remains stationary; and if it can be demonstrated by sure observation that it is the earth and not the sun that revolves, the efforts and arguments of all mankind put together will not hinder our planet from revolving, nor hinder themselves from revolving along with her.”
Source: The Provincial Letters
“It was to Hofmeister, working as a young man, an amateur and enthusiast, in the early morning hours of summer months, before business, at Leipzig in the years before 1851, that the vision first appeared of a common type of Life-Cycle, running through Mosses and Ferns to Gymnosperms and Flowering Plants, linking the whole series in one scheme of reproduction and life-history.”
Source: Gossypium in Pre-Linnaean Literature
“It was to the small serious boy that he turned for his enjoyment. He had bought the child some cheap wooden blocks, and with these the little one played endlessly and intently, with a purpose obscure to the adult mind, but completely absorbing.”
Source: Cry, the Beloved Country
“It was told in the Bible. A man fell. He bit into knowledge and fell... How do you fall without falling completely? What do you bring as knowledge to a blank canvas? How do you begin?”
“It was told that during the wedding feast, Eris [Discordia], a daughter of Nyx, threw a golden apple into their midst, intended as a prize for the most beautiful amongst the three Goddesses at the table: Athena, Hera & Aphrodite, the daughter, wife & clandestine lover of Zeus, respectively. And Zeus wisely dodged the responsibility of making such a tough decision,directing that it should be made by Paris of Troy instead.”
“It was told to me, it was in a manner forced on me by the very person herself whose prior engagement ruined all my prospects, and told me, as I thought, with triumph. This person's suspicions, therefore, I have had to oppose by endeavouring to appear indifferent where I have been most deeply interested; and it has not been only once; I have had her hopes and exultations to listen to again and again. I have known myself to be divided from Edward forever, without hearing one circumstance that could make me less desire the connection. Nothing has proved him unworthy; nor has anything declared him indifferent to me. I have had to content against the unkindness of his sister and the insolence of his mother, and have suffered the punishment of an attachment without enjoying its advantages. And all this has been going on at the time when, as you too well know, it has not been my only unhappiness. If you can think me capable of ever feeling, surely you may suppose that I have suffered now.”
Source: Sense and Sensibility
“It was too bad, but sometimes a little knowledge could ruin your whole day, or at least take off some of the shine.”
Source: The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate
“It was too big to be called a sword. Massive, thick, heavy, and far too rough. Indeed, it was a heap of raw iron.”
Source: Berserk, Vol. 1
“It was too bleak to be alone, and so they could do nothing but cling to each other as broken beings, as human beings.”
Source: Child of Vengeance
“It was too difficult. People weren't prepared to put in the hours on the donkey work - you know, dates and facts and so on. I think in retrospect my generation will be seen as a turning point. From now on there'll be a net loss of knowledge in Europe. The difference between a peasant community in fourteenth-century Iran and modern London, though, is that if with their meager resources the villagers occasionally slipped backward, it was not for lack of trying. But with us, here in England, it was a positive choice. We chose to know less.”
“It was too easy to lie, when you’d practised it a few times. It was hard the first time, but once it flow from your tongue like the perfect summer breeze, and everybody seemed to believe in it, it became mundane. You’d just have to program it first, copy and paste the same old sentences all over again.”
Source: One Minute to Midnight
“It was too exactly as imagined to be true. But I felt as gladly and expectantly disorientated, as happily and alertly alone, as Alice in Wonderland.”
Source: The Magus
“It was too important a matter, this talking to people, and listening to them, to do it lightly or often.”
Source: Deerskin
“It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.”
Source: The Beautiful and Damned
“It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)
“It was too late for the truth – and too soon.”
Source: Edge of Truth
“It was too late. Maybe yesterday, while I was still a child, but not now. I knew too much, had seen too much, I was a child no longer now; innocence and childhood were forever lost, forever gone from me.”
Source: The Reivers
“It was too late to go back. There was a hand which could never, in grace and healing, be laid upon him now.”
Source: The Nice and the Good
“It was too late to go to Gaze now, everyone would be in bed. It was a comforting thought. Whatever was happening it was not happening now. There was nothing he could do now. Sleep was overwhelming him again, great clouds and folds of sleep like a warm fog.”
Source: The Unicorn
“It was too late to think about that now. Regrets would only slow him down.”
Source: The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel
“It was too late to think about what could have been or what should have been. What’s done is done. The past was in the past and there was no changing it.”
Source: The Diary of Audrey Malone Frayer
“it was too loud for hope
it was too silent for victory.”
Source: Synecdoche
“It was too much and not enough and everything”
Source: The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches
“It was too much for the Georgians to bear. They had left Macon as heroes and expected to return triumphant, captives in hand. Instead, they had been the ones chased, ridiculed, spat upon, hunted down by law, man, woman, and child. Not only would street boys take aim at them with spoiled eggs and other garbage, but Boston's higher society mocked them for being uneducated, low class, trash, as it it were they, and not the ones they were there to capture, who dwelled at the bottom of the world.”
Source: Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom
“It was too much of a gear change back then in the half an hour desperately trying to put the brakes on my frantic overthinking only made things worse. So did the acute awareness that everyone else seem to be able to do something that I couldn’t.
But in that moment in the scout hall with the sun streaming in, I touched a still, settled, vast, spacious, magnificent knowing at my core. It was only for a few delicate moments, but there was no going back. The scab was removed and the rawness - the “Something Else” I’d been looking for - was finally exposed. I call it the Something Else because there’s no other way of describing this yearning - this indescribable thing or place or energy I’d been looking for - that came before words.
But now I’d touched it.
And goddamn it I wanted to touch it again.”
Source: First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety
“It was too much Tequila, or not quite enough.”
“It was too much to take a chance on, but too much to walk away from. It hurt when he [Neil] nodded, but it hurt more to see that tired look settle in Wymack's eyes. It wasn't the pity he thought he could see in Hernandez from time to time, but something familiar that said Wymack understood that it cost to be Neil. He knew what it was like to have to fight to wake up and keep moving every day.”
Source: The Foxhole Court
“It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.”
“It was too much. The comfortable people made comfortable jokes about weather and things but I sat mostly silent saying a word or so when necessary a word or so trying to hide from them the fact that I was a fool and feeling terrible And I was numb, numb again, numb again again and again, numbness and pain swelling in me.”
“It was too nerve-wracking, a shocking spectacle, like seeing an old, calm friend go insane.”
Source: Travels with Charley in Search of America
“It was too perfect to last,' so I am tempted to say of our marriage. But it can be meant in two ways. It may be grimly pessimistic - as if God no sooner saw two of His creatures happy than He stopped it ('None of that here!'). As if He were like the Hostess at the sherry-party who separates two guests the moment they show signs of having got into a real conversation. But it could also mean 'This had reached its proper perfection. This had become what it had in it to be. Therefore of course it would not be prolonged.' As if God said, 'Good; you have mastered that exercise. I am very pleased with it. And now you are ready to go on to the next.”
Source: A Grief Observed
“It was too quiet for hope, and then too loud for safety.
She thought of the people she had lost, of the affection, the smiles, the belonging she could never again take for granted. It was the end of a life, and as she stood there, shivering in the brief night-time chill, it dawned on her that it was the end of her childhood.”
Source: Where the River Parts
“It was too unfair. You expected unfairness if you breathed, but this went beyond that.”
Source: The Princess Bride
“It was too vast a problem to be just a personal thing. There should be some help, someone should tell them before it was too late. Someone should tell their side of the story, and maybe people would understand then, and wouldn’t be so quick to judge a boy by the amount of hair oil he wore.”
Source: The Outsiders 50th Anniversary Edition
“It was torture to be starving and not being able to eat. All I could think about was my face and my chewing and how much food was on my fork when I brought it to my mouth. Eating in front of people was like stripping and standing there naked for everyone to judge. My mind was in a constant state of panic wondering if I looked like a pig when I was eating, or if I was chewing too loud. Or worse, what if I ate too much and everyone saw what my mom always saw: a fat sob that could do with losing a few meals? The thought always left me in cold chills.”
Source: The Voyeur Next Door
“It was Tottenham at home. I thought: 'Please don't go on about Tottenham, we all know what Tottenham are about. They are nice and tidy but we'll f****** do them.' Alex came in and said: 'Lads, it's only Tottenham.' And that was it! Brilliant!”
“It was touching to see them together - it made you laugh in a hushed, fascinated way.”
Source: The Great Gatsby
“It was tough [to move to the Golden State Warriors] because of my success level in New York. To leave this city and go out west and move my family was tough, but this is part of the business. Something as a player that might happen to you.”
“It was tough at the time but when I was younger, my Dad. I would say my Dad, because without him I wouldn't have been here. I mean it was tough for me because he was really demanding. With him, it was never enough, you know, anything I did was never enough.”
“It was tough being a single mom. It was tough being in a divorce with children. Very, very hard.”
“It was tough coming to the realization that I wasn’t interested in anything, though realizing it didn’t mean I could then immediately find something to engage my interest. I tried to think of something. Maybe I could study a foreign language or study abroad in Rome or somewhere? Or, more realistically, grab some guy I knew and have a destination wedding abroad. But everything I could think of was based on how envious it would make people, not on any genuine interest I might have.”
Source: Parade