L Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with L. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Looking back, I wish that everyone could have that sort of moment: a moment where you realize that your hands are so impossibly small and this world is so impossibly big. And the two don’t seem to add up. Maybe recognizing the smallness of your own hands is just the very first step to changing anything at all.”
Source: If You Find This Letter: My Journey to Find Purpose Through Hundreds of Letters to Strangers
“Looking back, I wonder if that may have explained my mom's preoccupation with money. It wasn't that she was impressed with it, but she could always tell you who had it and who did not, who was cheap and who was living beyond their means. Then again, my mom could pretty much tell you anything about anyone in Bristol. She wasn't a gossip-at least not a mean-spirited one-she was simply fascinated by other people's business, from their wealth and health to their politics and religion.”
“Looking back in front of me, in the mirror a grin. Through eyes of love I see, I'm only looking at a friend.”
“Looking back in retrospect, there were some great moments working with some great people, ... I don't know quite how to put it into words. I don't look at it quite the same way other people do.”
“Looking back into childhood is like looking into a semi-transparent globe within which people and places lie embedded. A shake - and they stir, rise up, circle in inter-weaving groups, then settle down again.”
Source: The ballad and the source
“Looking back is a form of insanity, given that I could really never understand what everybody else was thinking. I find these days that I'm much more efficient when I just focus on what I need to do in order to move my family forward and get the focus off me.”
“Looking back isn't going to help you! Moving forward is the thing to do”
“Looking back Little Lulu was an early feminist, but at the time I just thought she was a really feisty developed comic strip character.”
“Looking back, my greatest regret is not that I didn't love them enough (to the brink of insanity and back again), but that I couldn't save them from themselves.”
Source: The Details of How We Lived
“Looking back now across fifteen years I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.”
Source: A Separate Peace
“Looking back now at my first World Cup experience, I didn't know what was going on. I was a newbie and I had no idea what to expect.”
“Looking back now I realise that the worst things that happened to me were the best things in disguise - I just didn’t know how to read the signs.”
“Looking back now I see that your own life can be a story that you tell yourself, that you can be both the person reading and the thing being read.”
“Looking back now, I wonder if I was observant enough. Certainly I was alert---I always am, during fieldwork---but I suspect that the unfamiliarity of the landscape, the high, dark mountains swaddled in snow, lulled me into a belief that no living thing could accost me here, certainly nothing fae, creatures I have spent my career associating with greenery and water and life.
Fortunately, my reflexes are sharp. The instant the light flared through the trees, I halted and gripped my coin. It was a grayish light with no warmth in it, like a star. A wind moved through the trees, and there came a whisper of bells. Had I not been touching metal, I might have been bespelled, and as it was my head still spun a little, but I am used to brushing against faerie enchantments and stood my ground.”
Source: Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries
“Looking back now, I would say that this was one of the first valuable lessons I learned, and one that would be useful in my future line of work. Sometimes things go wrong. It is inevitable. But it is a mistake to waste time and energy worrying about events that you cannot influence. Once they have happened, let them go.”
Source: Russian Roulette
“Looking back now on the period when I wrote the books, I feel like it was a good time in my life, because I had work I needed to do, and I did it. I was perennially broke, and lonely, and anxious about money, but I also had this other thing, this part of my life which was secret and protected, and my thoughts returned to it all the time, and my feelings orbited around it, and it belonged to me completely. In a way it was like a love affair, or an infatuation, except that it only involved myself and it was all within my own control. (The opposite of a love affair, then.) For all the frustration and difficulty of writing a novel, I knew from the beginning of the process that I had been given something very important, a special gift, a blessing. It was like God had put his hand on my head and filled me with the most intense desire I had ever felt, not desire for another person, but desire to bring something into being that had never existed before. When I look back at those years, I feel touched and almost pained by the simplicity of the life I was living, because I knew what I had to do, and I did it, that was all.”
Source: Beautiful World, Where Are You
“Looking back now on the whole sexual scene we can see that our species has remained much more loyal to its basic biological urges than we might at first imagine. Its primate sexual system with carnivore modifications has survived all the fantastic technological advances remarkably well.”
Source: The illustrated naked ape: a zoologist's study of the human animal
“Looking back on 200 years of feminist agitation in this country, we've got to get it that the moral high ground doesn't get us anything. Pleading with powerful men never gets us what we need. Talking doesn't do it. Being right doesn't do it. Hardball politics does it ... and a political strategy.”
“Looking back on a 30-year teaching career full of rewards and prizes, somehow I can't completely believe that I spent my time on earth institutionalized; I can't believe that centralized schooling is allowed to exist at all as a gigantic indoctrination and sorting machine, robbing people of their children. Did it really happen? Was this my life? God help me.”
“Looking back on a happy life, one realizes that one was not happy all the time.”
“Looking back on all the things I went through to get here. It was all worth it. It's a blessing that I can write about it all.”
“Looking back on everything, I still can't specifically locate the point of inflection. I don't have the answer to where exactly it all went wrong. Maybe life got in the way. But that answer doesn't entirely make sense to me. Life always gets in the way, even when you are with everyone you could possibly imagine and even when you are not. I guess it's not about life getting in the way but rather about the degree to which we allow it to. Maybe there wasn't a specific point of inflection but a series of points and turns along the way.”
Source: And Comets Pass Away
“Looking back on high school, I just remember specific scenarios and thinking, wow, that was such a big deal at the time, but right now it feels like it never even happened. So I guess if I can give any advice, I would just say that everything will pass, and it'll feel like it was a big deal over nothing.”
“Looking back on his adolescence from the vantage point of his mid-eighties, George H.W. Bush candidly admitted, "I might have been obsessed with bodies – boobs they are now called. But what seventeen-year-old kid was not? Guilty am I.”
“Looking back on it all, I believe when we were on the streets coming up, we were simply looking for somebody to look our way. Even though guys were getting killed, the gang continued to grow. I heard some older folks say one time, ‘As soon as two or three of them get killed, this gang will go to the dogs.’ Each time one of us got killed, it hurt, but, that made us stronger. Anthony ‘Ada’ Allen, one of the former leaders and founders of the Rebellion Raiders”
Source: The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father
“Looking back on it, I realize that it might not have been the completely right thing to do. Unfortunately, the rental market in San Francisco sometimes requires that you overlook trivial things like having a serial killer for a landlord.”
Source: City of Apocrypha
“Looking back on it now, I'd say one's thirties are a cruel age. At this point, I think of them as a time I whiled away unaware of the tide that can suddenly pull you out, beyond the shallows, into the sea of hardship, and even death”
“Looking back on it now, I wonder how I managed to stand it.”
Source: Beyond The Story: 10-Year Record of BTS
“Looking back on it now, I understand why that was not possible [to express ourselves], because the pottery employed a dozen people, not all of whom are making pots. And these people had families, children, and they had to have a wage that would allow them to raise their family and they had to get a paycheck every Friday afternoon. So if we had not made pots that would sell it, would not have been possible for these people to be employed.”
“Looking back on months and years of intimacy, to feel that your friend, while you still remember the moving words you exchanged, is yet growing distant and living in a world apart—all this is sadder far than partings brought by death.”
Source: Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō
“Looking back on my achievements, it is fair to say that I am extremely proud of what I have done and accomplished so far.”
“Looking back on my career, I think I've been extremely fortunate to be in the right place at the right time in order to have the influence that I did.”
“Looking back on my life, I’d say I am grateful to my two sons for having brought me up. It could not have been easy—for them or for their father. For me it was a “Poetry Workshop,” a way of doing poetry by another means (in no sense a continuation of Iowa)—as well as the sort of upbringing I never got from my mother.
As luck would have it, I had a poet, a classical poet, for a mother. She didn’t write free verse; she wrote poetry until the last years of her life in the classical Chinese style. So a lot of work was done for me—when you imbibe Tang and Sung poets with a mother who chanted verses on the balcony in the moonlight.”
“Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I’ve no regrets.”
Source: Rooftop Soliloquy
“Looking back on my own career, I've come to the conclusion that too much money is worse than too little.”
“Looking back on my whole experience, the biggest takeaway was just being proud of what you do, and knowing that it's okay to do your best even if it's not the best. That's sort of the theme. I mean, obviously I'm not the best singer, obviously I'm not the best piano player or the best songwriter, but I'm doing my best on all of 'em. Once you have all those things in place, then I think everything falls the way it should.”
“Looking back on myself as a little kid, I see seeds of entrepreneurship.”
“Looking back on our lives, we invariably find that the person we pretended to be is the person we became.”
“Looking back on that conversation, Rina asked herself if what he had said was true, She had been shiny once as a young girl, when they'd first met, as one if before decisions are made and opportunities are lost. She would never be that way again, but then Sato had never really believe in her shine, had he? He had seen through it from the very beginning, through her to the woman waiting, the fighter beneath.”
Source: What's Left of Me Is Yours
“Looking back on that day, I can't help but wonder: what if I had brought more bread for the ducks? Did I bring this on myself?”
“Looking back on the event, I find myself thinking there are three approaches to journalism represented here. One is the "cool" approach of traditional journalism, including network broadcasting in which NPR is no exception. One is the "hot" approach of talk radio, which has since expanded to TV sports networks and now Fox TV. The third is the engaged approach of weblogging.”
“Looking back on the God my friend believed in, he seems a little erratic, not entirely unlike her father - God as borderline personality.”
Source: Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
“Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one's work, it is interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the emotional and critical sides of his nature, first one, then the other, getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result has the mellowness of full achievement. One can even tell the nature of one's readers, by their preference for the work which reveals more of this side than of that.”
“Looking back on the past four hundred years, this nation's story of racism can seem almost inevitable. But it didn't have to be this way. At critical turning points throughout history, people made deliberate choices to construct and reinforce a racist America. Our generation has the opportunity to make different choices, ones that lead to greater human dignity and justice, but only if we pay heed to our history and respond with the truth and courage that confronting racism requires.”
Source: Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
“Looking back on the past six months, Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.
Margaret hoped that for the future she would be less cautious, not more cautious, than she had been in the past.”
Source: Howards End
“Looking back on the production of 'Nevermind,' I'm embarrassed by it now.' It's closer to a Motley Crue record than it is a punk rock record.”
“Looking back on things, the view always improves.”
“Looking back on those days and little leaguer, the Hall of Fame is not even a blinking star, but through baseball travels and moving up the ladder, that star begins to flicker.”
“Looking back on those games, I probably hustled out of position as much as I hustled into position since I really never had any real training. I was working on instincts alone.”
“Looking back over a decade one sees the ideal of a university become a myth, a vision, a meadow lark among the smoke stacks. Yet perhaps it is there at Princeton, only more elusive than under the skies of the Prussian Rhineland or Oxfordshire; or perhaps some men come upon it suddenly and possess it, while others wander forever outside. Even these seek in vain through middle age for any corner of the republic that preserves so much of what is fair, gracious, charming and honorable in American life.”