O Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with O. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?”
Source: The Will to Believe and Human Immortality
“Or if there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it,
Making it momentany as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And, ere a man hath power to say ‘Behold!’
The jaws of darkness do devour it up.
So quick bright things come to confusion”
Source: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
“Or if Virtue feeble were, Heav'n itself would stoop to her.”
“Or in other words, it's the substance you've got when you start that determines the outcome.”
Source: Handle with Care: A Novel
“Or in other words, why does disorder increase in the same direction of time as that in which the universe expands?”
Source: A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes
“Or in other works I have also projected the sound in a cube of loudspeakers. The sound can move vertically and diagonally at all speeds around the public.”
“Or is anyone's identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?”
“Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows - a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?”
Source: Moby-Dick or, The Whale
“Or is it that I think too much?”
“Or is it that slow paced evil creeps in when it espies and envies happiness, and then takes a deliberate foul delight in spoiling it?”
Source: The Golden Tup
“Or is it the case that no one gets over anything? Is there really that much pain and suffering continuing right now at this minute, in millions of hearts, in bodies carrying on the burden of existence, trying to smile through tears for fleeting, passing moments here and there-when they can forget what happened to them, maybe even for whole hours at a time? Maybe that's what it is to live.”
Source: The Never List
“Or is it the mind state that's ill, creating crime rates to fill the new prisons the build”
“Or is it your reputation that's bothering you? But look at how soon we're all forgotten. The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of those applauding hands. The people who praise us; how capricious they are, how arbitrary. And the tiny region it takes place. The whole earth a point in space - and most of it uninhabited.”
Source: Meditations: A New Translation
“Or is there no such thing as 'too late'? Is there only 'late' and is 'late' always better than 'never'? I don't know.”
Source: The Reader
“Or is this how humans survive, shrugging off history, immersing themselves in the moment?”
“Or just claim it come from Leviticus since nobody ever read Leviticus. This is how you know. Nobody who get to the end of Leviticus can still take that book seriously. Even in a book full of it, that book is mad as shit. Don't lie with man as with woman, sure I can run with that reasoning. But don't eat crab? Not even with the nice, soft, sweet roast yam? And why kill a man for that? And trust me, the last thing any man who rape my daughter going get to do is marry her. How, when I slice him up piece by piece, keeping him alive for all of it and have him watch me feed him foot to stray dog?”
Source: A Brief History of Seven Killings
“Or just claim it come from Leviticus since nobody ever read Leviticus. This is how you know. Nobody who get to the end of Leviticus can still take that book seriously. Even in a book full of it, that book is mad as shit. Don't lie with man as with woman, sure I can run with that reasoning. But don't eat crab? Not even with the nice, soft, sweet roast yam? And why kill a man for that? And trust me, the last thing any man who rape my daughter going to get to do is marry her. How, when I slice him up piece by piece, keeping him alive for all of it and have him watch me feed him foot to stray dog?”
“Or just fucking maybe we make our own way in life - no destiny or fate, just stumbling along the way, and eventually we find some people to ride it out with.”
Source: The Cities
“Or l’espace est une réalité qui dure : nos impressions se chassent l’une l’autre, rien ne demeure dans notre esprit, et l’on ne comprendrait pas que nous puissions ressaisir le passé s’il ne se conservait pas en effet dans le milieu matériel qui nous entoure. // Now space is a reality that endures: since our impressions rush by, one after another, and leave nothing behind in the mind, we can understand how we recapture the past only by understanding how it is, in effect, preserved by our physical surroundings.”
Source: On Collective Memory
“Or let us posit that it is incumbent upon us to found a materialism of grace through the strong, simple idea that every existence can one day be seized by what happens to it and subsequently devote itself to that which is valid for all, or as Paul magnificently puts it, 'become all things to all men'.”
Source: Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism
“Or like in the early 70's when we had the reaction against acid rock and all the fuzz tone, and feedback, and the noise. And you had James Taylor and everyone went acoustic and that.”
“Or like the snow falls in the river, A moment white-then melts for ever . . .”
“Or, like the thief of fire from heaven,
Wilt thou withstand the shock?
And share with him, the unforgiven,
His vulture and his rock!”
Source: The World's Best Poetry, Volume 6 (Part 2): Fancy and Sentiment
“Or maybe a person is just made up of a lot of peopleMaybe we’re accumulating these new selves all the time. Hauling them in as we make choices, good and bad, as we screw up, step up, lose our minds, find our minds, fall apart, fall in love, as we grieve, grow, retreat from the world, dive into the world, as we make things, as we break things.”
“Or maybe crying is like everything else we do- it's best if you don't get caught.”
Source: Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy (B&N Custom Pub)
“Or maybe desire kicked in when it pleased without noticing the rules we lived and died by.”
Source: The Secret Life of Bees
“Or maybe he means in a richer world the begging population is melting away. But no to that too. So maybe, perhaps, he means there aren't many 'human beings' left to look, see, and understand well enough for one to ask and one to give. Everyone busy, running, jumping, there's no time to study one another. But I guess that's bilge and hogwash, slop and sentiment.”
“Or maybe I could have anesthetized myself with homework and extra credit and binge-reading.”
Source: You Don't Have to Say You Love Me
“Or maybe I discovered something more fundamental: worry is a constriction. A mind narrows when it has too much to bear. Art is not born of unwanted constriction. Art wants formless and spacious quiet, anti-social daydreaming, time away from the consumptive volume of everyday life.”
Source: Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation
“Or maybe I had known him or maybe there's something that happens between some people at a level that goes beyond time measurements and what society thinks is proper. Maybe what had happened between Stark and me in those few minutes in the field house had been enough to have our souls recognize each other. Soul mates? Was that even possible?”
Source: Untamed: A House of Night Novel
“Or maybe I hated that I wanted her-that I wanted her so much I learned to hate her. That’s the kind of parasite she is.”
Source: SummerTime Madness
“Or maybe I, like, cuddle raped him or something.”
Source: Two-way Street
“Or maybe I’m just right,’ I said quietly. ‘And sometimes people are brighter and braver than they know.”
Source: Beach Read
“Or… maybe I’m not going crazy. “Maybe I’m some sort of android-cyborg-clone-thing, and I’m just breaking down.
I’m not sure which way is worse.
Dad laughs. “You’re not in your right mind, dear,” he says. “No, no, no, you’re not.”
And then—
—Silence.
Dad fades away. The reverie chair disappears.
There’s just blackness. I remember then that I am in the reverie of something dead. Whatever that thing was, it was dead.
And, just as I’m starting to wonder if, perhaps, I have died, too, I see a light, far away in the corner of the dreamscape. The light isn’t soft; it’s not glowing. It crackles like silent lightning, burning with electricity, sparks flying out and fizzling in the dark.
I don’t know why—it makes no sense, the way dreams often don’t—but I want to touch the light.
So I do.”
Source: The Body Electric
“Or maybe I should say a few things that I “like like”
In that same way that in the 7th grade I knew
That there was a difference between how to like a sandwich
And how I like liked Katie Elbin’s pale blonde pigtails.
So..I like like Vietnamese Coffee and the long wait for it to drip
Drops down into my clear glass coffee mug with penguins on it.
I like like that the penguins playfully dance as the black of my coffee
Meets the creaminess of condensed milk.
I like like the way that Gatsby read when I was twelve
And thought that Romanticism and the early twenties
Would be as romantic in my early twenties.
As if a field of daisies would be the same as the field of Daisy’s.
However, I like like the melancholic tone of my chemicals as well
When they become overly emotive.
Haven’t you heard the news that we’re dead?
Wouldn’t it be grand to go exactly as we planned?
I like like wondering if wandering is a wanderlust
Or just a wanderlust?
I think this was address by a Tribe Called Quest
But I’ve lost just who it is whom I was promised I could trust.
I like like driving with a GPS
Not playing it too close to the chest
Or relying on all the Redbull and Slim Jim’s
Which my passenger-self digests.
And I like like a gentle sadness like a reminder I can feel
The realizations that this is all just so ever gosh golly really real
That my dream board has visions of what I can do
And that what absolutely matters is only relatively true.”
“Or maybe I'd do what I always do - hang out and see what develops. Fatalist to the core.”
“Or maybe it is only that we are so habitually inattentive that when some rare but simple geometry grabs us by the shoulders and shakes us into consciousness, we call our response sacred.”
Source: Thirteen Moons: A Novel
“Or maybe it was just that my life was a big, cruel joke, and there was no escape from the punch line.”
Source: Breaking Dawn
“Or maybe it was survival mode they both lived in, and they didn't dare allow anyone else in because if they were ripped apart a second time there would be no fixing either of them”
Source: Earth Bound
“Or maybe it's just that beautiful things are so easily broken by the world.”
Source: Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (5 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls
“Or maybe it's not a miracle. Maybe this is just life. When you open yourself up to it. When you put yourself in the path of it. When you say yes.”
“Or maybe it's time to broaden out some of the African civil wars?”
“Or maybe I’d lost my soul already. I doubted God let someone like me keep any gift from him. It was highly likely I’d been born without one.”
Source: While It Lasts
“Or maybe memories are like karaoke - where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen's bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn't even know the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning - and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it's better not to know the lyrics to your life.”
Source: The Gum Thief
“Or maybe our paths will diverge someday, taking us in separate directions, making our relationship a brief but beautiful spot in a series of unforgettable encounters. Either way, it will be a journey worth taking. Either way, it will be a love story.”
Source: The Best Kind of Magic
“Or maybe Ravi Singh’s itchy head was the equivalent of Pip’s useless facts: armour and shield when the knight inside was squirming.”
Source: A Good Girl's Guide to Murder
“Or maybe Robert merely stumbled into something that worked for him, unsure what he wanted until he had it. Some people are lucky like that. Me, I've always gone after what I wanted with everything in me. Others fall into happiness. Sometimes I wish I was like them. I'm sure sometimes they wish they were like me.”
Source: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
“Or maybe that's not it,
I'm just not it.”
Source: I Am
“Or maybe that’s what it’s all about: this religion’s substance is its lack of substance.
In McLuhanesque terms, the medium is the message. Some people might find that cool.”
“McLuhanesque?”
“Hey, look, even I read a book now and then,” Ayumi protested. “McLuhan was ahead of his time. He was so popular for a while that people tend not to take him seriously, but what he had to say was right.”
“In other words, the package itself is the contents. Is that it?”
“Exactly. The characteristics of the package determine the nature of the contents, not the other way around.”
Source: 1Q84
“Or maybe the dreamer was still alive only inside me, buried deep where I thought I had killed it long ago. But sometimes, its whispers still slipped through the cracks of my emotional dam – that dam I built so high to protect myself.
I told myself I no longer needed anything in this world… but deep down, more than anything, I still wanted to love and to be loved.
But… it wasn’t meant to be.”
Source: Where the Dark Knelt