O Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with O. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“On the Thursday before her [tenth] birthday, Abby brought the classroom twenty-five E.T. cupcakes as a reminder. Everyone ate them, which she thought was a good sign. On Saturday, she forced her parents to drive to Redwing Rollerway an hour early so they could set up. By 3:15 the private party room looked like E.T. had exploded all over the walls. There were E.T. balloons, E.T. tablecloths, E.T. party hats, snack-sized Reese's Pieces next to every E.T. paper plate, a peanut butter and chocolate ice cream cake with E.T.'s face on to, and on the wall behind her seat was Abby's most treasured possession that could not under any circumstances get soiled, stained, ripped, or torn: an actual E.T. movie poster her dad had brought home from the theater and given to her as a birthday present.
Finally, 3:30 rolled around.
No one came.”
Source: My Best Friend's Exorcism
“On the Thursday before her [tenth] birthday, Abby brought the classroom twenty-five E.T. cupcakes as a reminder. Everyone ate them, which she thought was a good sign. On Saturday, she forced her parents to drive to Redwing Rollerway an hour early so they could set up. By 3:15 the private party room looked like E.T. had exploded all over the walls. There were E.T. balloons, E.T. tablecloths, E.T. party hats, snack-sized Reese's Pieces next to every E.T. paper plate, a peanut butter and chocolate ice cream cake with E.T.'s face on top, and on the wall behind her seat was Abby's most treasured possession that could not under any circumstances get soiled, stained, ripped, or torn: an actual E.T. movie poster her dad had brought home from the theater and given to her as a birthday present.
Finally, 3:30 rolled around.
No one came.”
Source: My Best Friend's Exorcism
“On the Tier One Teams I studied, the typical pecking order put the coach at the top, the talent on the bottom, and a water-carrying captain in the middle who served as an independent mediator between them. In this new order, where power and popularity went hand in hand, the middle manager’s role had been squeezed out. Unless the captain was the superstar, the captain was a bystander.”
Source: The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams
“On the times when I used to make movies that were with a lower budget, nobody was expecting it to be a hit, and nobody was paying attention to what I was doing, and it was a free type of creative process. So, one way to reset myself is to go back to that kind of moviemaking.”
“On the top of Cadair Idris,
I felt how happy a man might be
with a little money and a sane intellect,
and reflected with astonishment and pity
on the madness of the multitude.”
“On the top of each peak you are on the edge of the abyss”
“On the top of the batting list we have pinned our hopes on the Dilshan-Thirima nne combination as they have been putting the runs on the board whenever they have been entrusted with the opening slot.”
“On the top of the head is a Chakra - Sahasradala or the thousand-petalled lotus. There is a Chakra in the middle of the forehead between the eyebrows and one in the heart-centre. The region between the navel and head constitutes the mental field. From navel downward extending till the terminus of the spinal chord, mūlādhāra, is the seat of the vital.”
“On the top of these mile thick slabs of ice the water is percolating quickly to the base and greasing the skids, as it were, for the slide of that ice into the ocean.”
“On the top rack is a cooled and decorated seven-layered 'opera' cake. Her client- the Peruvian ambassador- had requested a "tropical" theme for a dinner party dessert. Avis had based the decoration on the view through the kitchen window, re-creating in lime, lemongrass, and mint frostings the curling backyard flora, curving foliage shaped like tongues and hearts, fat spines bisecting the leaves.”
Source: Birds of Paradise
“On the tour we get a case of beer on the bus every day from Ozzfest.”
“On the track keep a track of the track so as not to be off the track.”
Source: Rep By Rep
“On the track, you`re Tommie Smith, the fastest man in the world, but once you`re in the dressing rooms, you are nothing more than a dirty Negro.”
“On the trail of another man, the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn; any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.”
Source: The Art of Biography
“On the train I had a lot of time to think. I thought how in the thirty years of my life I had seldom gotten on a train in America without being conscious of my color. In the South, there are Jim Crow cars and Negroes must ride separate from the whites, usually in a filthy antiquated coach next to the engine, getting all the smoke and bumps and dirt. In the South, we cannot buy sleeping car tickets. Such comforts are only for white folks. And in the North where segregated travel is not the law, colored people have, nevertheless, many difficulties. In auto buses they must take the seats in the rear, over the wheels. On the boats they must occupy the worst cabins. The ticket agents always say that all other accommodations are sold. On trains, if one sits down by a white person, the white person will sometimes get up, flinging back an insult at the Negro who has dared to take a seat beside him. Thus it is that in America, if you are yellow, brown, or black, you can never travel anywhere without being reminded of your color, and oft-times suffering great inconveniences.
I sat in the comfortable sleeping car on my first day out of Moscow and remembered many things about trips I had taken in America. I remembered how, once as a youngster going alone to see my father who was working in Mexico, I went into the dining car of the train to eat. I sat down at a table with a white man. The man looked at me and said, "You're a nigger, ain't you?" and left the table. It was beneath his dignity to eat with a Negro child. At St. Louis I went onto the station platform to buy a glass of milk. The clerk behind the counter said, “We don't serve niggers," and refused to sell me anything. As I grew older I learned to expect this often when traveling. So when I went South to lecture on my poetry at Negro universities, I carried my own food because I knew I could not go into the dining cars. Once from Washington to New Orleans, I lived all the way on the train on cold food. I remembered this miserable trip as I sat eating a hot dinner on the diner of the Moscow-Tashkent express.
Traveling South from New York, at Washington, the capital of our country, the official Jim Crow begins. There the conductor comes through the train and, if you are a Negro, touches you on the shoulder and says, "The last coach forward is the car for colored people." Then you must move your baggage and yourself up near the engine, because when the train crosses the Potomac River into Virginia, and the dome of the Capitol disappears, it is illegal any longer for white people and colored people to ride together. (Or to eat together, or sleep together, or in some places even to work together.) Now I am riding South from Moscow and am not Jim-Crowed, and none of the darker people on the train with me are Jim-Crowed, so I make a happy mental note in the back of my mind to write home to the Negro papers: "There is no Jim Crow on the trains of the Soviet Union.”
Source: Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings
“On the train I saw that world passing my window. It was when I came to see it was I who was passing that my self-centered childhood was over. But it was not until I began to write, that I found the world out there revealing, because memory had become attached to seeing, love had added itself to discovery, and because I recognized in my own continuing longing to keep going, the need I carried inside myself to know - the apprehension, first, and then the passion, to connect myself to it. Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it. This is, of course, simply saying that the outside world is the vital component of my inner life. My imagination takes its strength and guides its direction from what I see and hear and learn and feel and remember of my living world. But I was to learn slowly that both these worlds, outer and inner, were different from what they seemed to me in the beginning.”
Source: On Writing
“On the train: staring hypnotized at the blackness outside the window, feeling the incomparable rhythmic language of the wheels, clacking out nursery rhymes, summing up moments of the mind like the chant of a broken record: god is dead, god is dead. going, going, going. and the pure bliss of this, the erotic rocking of the coach. France splits open like a ripe fig in the mind; we are raping the land, we are not stopping.”
Source: The Journals of Sylvia Plath
“On the transit ride home, I read about how switching jobs can help maximize your income. I also read about how to build your resume to get past AI screening tools, which may toss your application for the most arbitrary of reasons.”
Source: Time Loops & Meet Cutes
“On the tray were two plates of a yellowish curry.
"Today's menu is shirobanba. Monday is shirobanba day."
"Curry always perks me up."
Minami nodded.
"What do you mean by shirobanba?" Otoha asked.
"You don't know?" Kinoshita asked. "You haven't read it? It's from Yasushi Inoue's novel Shirobanba. It's a re-creation of the curry an old woman in the story cooks. Shirobanba, by the way, are the so-called snow bugs, teeny tiny insects that have a white puff on their wings that looks like cotton. They look like little flakes of snow.”
Source: Dinner at the Night Library
“On the tree, Future, we build our nest; and in our solitude eagles shall bring us nourishment in their beaks!”
Source: The Portable Nietzsche
“On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy's hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.”
Source: Winesburg, Ohio
“On the trees surrounding me, the leaves are just beginning their slow turn toward the colour of fire..”
Source: Dear John
“On “The truth coming out of the well” (1896), by Jean-Léon Gérôme: the naked truth and the lie dressed in truth: is the problem of truth a question of moral modesty?”
“On “The truth coming out of the well” (1896), by Jean-Léon Gérôme: the naked truth and the lie dressed in truth: is the problem of truth a question of moral pudency?”
“On the TV he found cartoons and movies, music videos and game shows, repeat broadcasts and reruns, but there was nothing current, and no news. Many channels were just blank, or displayed brightly coloured test cards.”
Source: Infected Connection
“On the TV, the newscaster kept referring to the imperialists, as translated in the closed captions. During her time here, she had learned that the term was virtually synonymous with Americans.”
Source: Bliss Montage
“On the unhampered market there prevails an irresistible tendency to employ every factor of production for the best possible satisfaction of the most urgent needs of the consumers. If the government interfered with this process, it can only impair satisfaction; it can never improve it.”
“On the unofficial level it was a glorious moment in our national life because young people decided that this had to stop, that they could no longer stand the shedding of blood in this tragic adventure in Southeast Asia.”
“On the Upper East Side, women are prisoners to the ideology of intensive motherhood, which is that you should be enriching your child's well-being on every measure you possibly can at every moment. So when your kid is sitting down playing with Legos, intensive motherhood dictates that you should be engaging with him or her somehow, praising, questioning, making it into a learning opportunity. It's not enough to just tell your child, "Do your homework." It's not enough to help with the homework. You go to the school and learn how they do math, so that you can tutor your child in math.”
“On the value of blind shots to golf course design.”
“On the Vanna White diet, you only eat what you can spell.”
“On the vaporization and the centralization of the Self. All is there.”
“On the verge of tears or about to break down, dance will rescue you from frowns.”
“On the very first Day of School, we had to paint the Letters from the Alphabet with Color. I found 'A' quite funny – at 'B', I didn't want to be in School anymore.”
“On the very instant that we know that our assailant intends us serious physical harm, we must work just as fast as we can.”
Source: Principles of Personal Defense: Revised Edition
“On the very last day of shooting [of The Last King of Scotlang], I remember wanting to get the [Idi Amin] character out of me right away, as much as I could. You literally take a bath to wash him off you. Luckily, I went into another part not so long afterwards, so I was kind of able to push it away a little bit. But speech patterns, and little sounds, particularly colloquial things, like the way you ask questions or might respond, were sticking with me, probably because I'd worked so hard to make it a part of my everyday way of expressing myself.”
“On the very same day that I ordered an iPad 2, I went shopping to buy myself a letter opener. I like to cover all my bases.”
“On the Vietnam War: I've lived under situations where every decent man declared war first and I've lived under situations where you don't declare war. We've been flexible enough to kill people without declaring war.”
“On the wagon sped, and I, as well as my comrades, gave a despairing farewell glance at freedom as we came in sight of the long stone buildings.”
Source: Ten Days in a Mad-House
“On the wall behind was a row of chrome letters that said “We Make The Future,” but the words were obscured by a tangle of vines.”
Source: The Lost World
“On the wall of his rehabilitation room was a picture of the space shuttle blasting off, autographed by every astronaut now at NASA. On top of the picture it says, "We found nothing is impossible." That should be our motto.”
“On the wall of our life together hung a gun waiting to be fired in the final act.”
Source: Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936-1938
“On the wall of time to come
a window appears.
I open it, let angels in.”
Source: Life in Suspension: La Vie Suspendue
“On the ward there was hurt and pain so big and so deep that speech could not express it. I had been interested in philosophy, and suddenly philosophy came alive for me, for here the basic questions of human existence were not abstractions: they were embodied in human suffering”
Source: Unusual Associates: A Festschrift for Frank Barron
“On the warm stone walls, climbing roses were just coming into bloom and great twisted branches of honeysuckle and clematis wrestled each other as they tumbled up and over the top of the wall. Against another wall were white apple blossoms on branches cut into sharp crucifixes and forced to lie flat against the stone. Below, the huge frilled lips of giant tulips in shades of white and cream nodded in their beds. They were almost finished now, spread open too far, splayed, exposing obscene black centers. I've never had my own garden but I suddenly recognized something in the tangle of this one that wasn't beauty. Passion, maybe. And something else. Rage.”
Source: How I Live Now
“On the way back, Columba made a little detour. From a mound above the monastery he blessed it and all the people who would in the future come to the island [Iona] for his sake. Then he returned to his cell, not to rest but to go on with his daily stint of copying the scriptures. He was working on the thirty-fourth psalm. He wrote steadily for a while, but when he got to the verse that says, They that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing, he put down his pen. It seemed a perfect place to stop.
"I think I can write no more," he said.”
Source: Tales of st Columba
“On the way back something very strange happened. I didn't realize I was going to say it, but I said out loud, "I wish I was dead"... the love and the beauty and the ecstasy of the whole experience I'd just gone through were really so alien. I didn't even know the man... it had been a one-night jag... he was married and had children... and I just felt lost. It hardly seemed worth living any more because once again I was alone.”
Source: Edie: American Girl
“On the way back to shore, I sit on the deck and let the low golden light slant onto my face. This is northern sunbathing—soaking the only part of your body you dare expose to the elements in the most diffuse warmth imaginable and feeling renewed.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“On the way down the hill we walked three abreast in the cobblestone street, drunk and laughing and talking like men who knew they would separate at dawn and travel to the far corners of the earth.”
Source: The Rum Diary
“On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis.”