O Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with O. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Or maybe there's one thing to say, about the capitalism of the heart, the belief that the essence of life too can be seized and hoarded, that you can corner the market on confidence, stage a hostile takeover of happiness.”
Source: A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“Or maybe they just accept that it's wrong in God's eyes, although not in their own, and they'll worry about sorting it out later.”
Source: Weird: Because Normal Isn't Working
“Or maybe they were just doing it for fun. A lark. Their religion is tolerant of extreme forms of recreation. Boys will be boys, after all, and sociopathic boys will be sociopathic.”
Source: The Odd Thomas Series 7-Book Bundle: Odd Thomas, Forever Odd, Brother Odd, Odd Hours, Odd Apocalypse, Odd Interlude, Deeply Odd
“Or maybe they weren’t changing. Maybe they were just now becoming what they had always wanted to be.”
Source: The False Princess
“Or maybe watching you enjoy a carefree summer while you fell in love was what kept me out of the hospital in the first place.”
“Or maybe we didn’t remember; we just knew. We had defended ourselves since memory against everything and everybody, considered all speech a code to be broken by us, and all gestures subject to careful analysis; we had become headstrong, devious and arrogant. Nobody paid us any attention, so we paid very good attention to ourselves. Our limitations were not known to us—not then. Our only handicap was our size; people gave us orders because they were bigger and stronger. So it was with confidence, strengthened by pity and pride, that we decided to change the course of events and alter a human life.”
Source: The Bluest Eye
“Or maybe we'll make a home somewhere inside ourselves, to carry with us wherever we go- which is the way I carry my mother now.”
“Or maybe what he fears is just the opposite: that nobody is looking; that his death, like his life, is without purpose; that there is neither greater good nor evil--only people living and dying because their bodies function and then do not; that the universe is a rip.”
“Or maybe you are my own life
scheming desperately to climb
back in.”
Source: She Had Some Horses
“Or maybe you’re merely uncomfortable with uncertainty. Like the rest of the human race.”
Source: Love, Stargirl
“Or maybe, he thought now, he just didn't recognize all those other girls. The way a computer drive will spit out a disk if it doesn't recognize the formatting. When he touched Eleanor's hand, he recognized her. He knew.”
Source: The Rainbow Rowell Collection: Eleanor & Park, Fangirl, Landline, and Carry On
“Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic--you were made to feel guilty about everything”
Source: Olive Kitteridge: Fiction
“Or maybe...just maybe this whole process is our training wheels towards something bigger. If we can reflect and know our lives, we might stay awake and shape our futures.”
Source: Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories
“Or maybe...their biggest fear is that they will get close to you again, and you'll go and drop dead.”
“Or might the soul clone itself, create a perfect imitation of something yet to be defined? In this way, can a reflection be altered?”
Source: Identical
“Or more precisely, is there anything I can do for you, ma’am? (Waiter) ‘How about a bag for my head, or a stick to beat Lanie with?’ (Grace)”
“Or no-remember it, and if you think at any time that I am growing conceited —it is not likely, but it might arise."
I concealed a smile.
"Eh bien, my friend, you shall say to me, 'Chocolate box.' Is it agreed?"
"It's a bargain!"
"After all," said Poirot reflectively, "it was an experience! I, who have undoubtedly the finest brain in Europe at present, can afford to be magnanimous!"
"Chocolate box," I murmured gently.
"Pardon, mon ami?"
I looked at Poirot's innocent face, as he bent forward inquiringly, and my heart smote me. I had suffered often at his hands, but I, too, though not possessing the finest brain in Europe, could afford to be magnanimous!
"Nothing," I lied, and lit another pipe, smiling to myself.”
Source: Poirot Investigates
“Or, on the other side, if i regard the face of the Chinese emperor as scared, it remains strange to my eye, which i close at its appearance”
Source: The Ego and Its Own
“Or one meaning of here is “in this world, in this life, on earth. In this place or position, indicating the presence of,” or in other words, I am here. It also means to hand something to somebody—Here you are. Here, he said to her. Here both recognizes and demands recognition. I see you, or here, he said to her. In order for something to be handed over a hand must extend and a hand must receive. We must both be here in this world in this life in this place indicating the presence of.”
Source: Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
“Or one might take the tip of a pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil-tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Viewed at their actual size, the distances between these atoms might become leagues, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.
[...]
“Perhaps you saw what place our universe plays in the scheme of things—as no more than an atom in a blade of grass. Could it be that everything we can perceive, from the microscopic virus to the distant Horsehead Nebula, is contained in one blade of grass that may have existed for only a single season in an alien time-flow? What if that blade should be cut off by a scythe? When it begins to die, would the rot seep into our own universe and our own lives, turning everything yellow and brown and desiccated? Perhaps it’s already begun to happen. We say the world has moved on; maybe we really mean that it has begun to dry up.”
Source: The Gunslinger
“Or Paul Celan said that the poem was no different from a handshake. (...) The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) a self to another. Hence the poem is that - Here. I am here. This conflation of the solidity of presence with the offering of this same presence perhaps has everything to do with being alive.”
Source: Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
“Or people who have one baby and go buy a minivan... how big is your baby?”
“Or perhaps - the secret of life is to choose your risks?”
Source: Shooting Script
“Or perhaps a widow found him and took him in: brought him an easy chair, changed his sweater every morning, shaved his face until the hair stopped growing, took him faithfully to bed with her every night, whispered sweet nothings into what was left of his ear, laughed with him over black coffee, cried with him over yellowing pictures, talked greenly about having kids of her own, began to miss him before she became sick, left him everything in her will, thought of only him as she died, always knew he was fiction but believed in him anyway.”
“Or perhaps all those things you missed upon first glance mean much more than you could ever guess.”
“Or perhaps in Slytherin, you'll make your real friends. Those cunning folk use any means to achieve their ends.”
“Or perhaps is is that time doesn't heal wounds at all, perhaps that is the biggest lie of them all, and instead what happens is that each wound penetrates the body deeper and deeper until one day you find that the sheer geography of your bones - the angle of your hips, the sharpness of your shoulders, as well as the luster of your eyes, the texture of your skin, the openness of your smile - has collapsed under the weight of your griefs.”
“Or perhaps it is because it is so NECESSARY for you to win. It is like a drowning man catching at a straw. You yourself will agree that, unless he were drowning he would not mistake a straw for the trunk of a tree.”
Source: The Gambler
“Or perhaps it is just that desire lies at the heart of human existence. When we turn away from one desire, we must find another to cleave to with all our strength --or else we die.”
Source: Sister of My Heart
“Or perhaps it is some combination of spirit and desire, love and hope, some alchemy that we each possess and can put to use, if we first know where to look without flinching.”
Source: Rebel Angels
“Or perhaps it's "activist," but on environmental and economic problems, without understanding that pressuring women to have too many children is the biggest cause of environmental distress, and economic courses should start with reproduction, not just production.”
Source: My Life on the Road
“Or perhaps that's just me assigning subterranean levels to every goddamn breath he takes.”
Source: The Gentleman’s Guide to Getting Lucky
“Or perhaps the afterlife embraces the aspects of ourselves that love in all their facets, and that part of Michael's mother that did love me is grown into a whole self, and taps her feet impatiently on the step of the wondrous heavenly city.”
Source: Gnomon
“Or perhaps the syndrome we are witnessing is preemptive capitulation: If we reduce our conscience to rubble before the bad men get here, they will have nothing to destroy.”
Source: What We Can't Not Know: A Guide
“Or perhaps this hostility of yours is the pretense. Love does make liars out of your kind.”
Source: Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instrument Series (4 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels
“Or perhaps we should just junk the whole idea of getting
married in the first place. I’m generally against anything where
you’re supposed to change your name. When else do you get
named something else? On joining a nunnery, or becoming a porn
star. As an ostensibly joyful celebration of love, that’s bad company
to be in.”
“Or perhaps you notice a congregation of ladybugs on a rose stalk. Don't invoke the old nursery saying and ask them to fly away home. Their house is not on fire. Your roses are, with aphids, which the ladybugs are feeding on - and you can bless yourself that they have come to your rescue.”
Source: Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden
“Or rather, he was sad because that morning he'd understood that he'd understood nothing, because while he still understood nothing he wasn't sad at all, but now that he'd understood that he'd understood nothing he felt sad, if you follow.”
Source: Hector and the Search for Happiness
“Or, rather, there is a duel between them: death toys with life, life toys with death.
Which of the two succumbs?
Stanislaw Lec reverses the terms here: it is not we who defend ourselves against death, it is death that defends itself against us: 'Death resists us, but it gives in in the end.'
Nothing else so stunning as this has ever been said about death.
Needless to say, this dual relationship has nothing to do with interactivity, which is a parody of it. There is nothing interactive in the antagonistic process of reversibility and becoming.
The feminine and the masculine are not 'interactive': that is ridiculous.
Life and the world are not interactive -life isn't a question-and-answer session or a video game.
There is nothing interactive in words when they are articulated in language.
Interactivity is a gigantic mythology, a mythology of integrated systems or of systems craving integration, a mythology in which otherness is lost in feedback, interlocution and interface - a kind of generalized echography.”
Source: The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
“Or recall a time in your own past when you stood up to a bully. If you know people who know how to handle your Tank, imagine being those people and thinking or feeling whatever it is they feel or think that allows them to be more effective. Identify models of people who have the self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-control to deal calmly and professionally with pushy people. For example, imagine what it would feel like to be Clint Eastwood, saying, “Go ahead. Make my day.” Whichever of these methods you use, make it a mental habit to rehearse dealing with your Tank at least a few times, until you feel comfortable with the prospect of using it.”
Source: Dealing with People You Can't Stand: How to Bring Out the Best in People at Their Worst
“Or renounce life altogether! Accept fate obediently as it is, once and for all, and stifle everything in myself, renouncing any right to act, to live, to love.”
Source: Crime and Punishment
“Or shall I go out as a light does, not first blown out by the wind, but grown tired and weary of itself - a burnt out light? Or finally, shall I blow myself out, so as not to burn out?”
Source: The Gay Science
“Or shipwrecked, kindles on the coast False fires, that others may be lost.”
Source: The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth
“Or should I say that he is like the hand that is able to scratch your itchy parts with the perfect amount of strength!”
Source: ひとりじめマイヒーロー 1
“Or, si l’on compare la diversité prodigieuse d’éducations et de genres de vie qui règne dans les différents ordres de l’état civil, avec la simplicité et l’uniformité de la vie animale et sauvage, où tous se nourrissent des mêmes aliments, vivent de la même manière, et font exactement les mêmes choses, on comprendra combien la différence d’homme à homme doit être moindre dans l’état de nature que dans celui de société, et combien l’inégalité naturelle doit augmenter dans l’espèce humaine par l’inégalité d’institution.”
Source: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
“Or sit they girt by laws unknown
Whereto the senses serve as bars –
With fire of unrecorded stars
That light a heaven not our own?
(“The Testimony of the Suns”)”
Source: The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror
“Or so we don't think about how we're just vulnerable specks trying to survive on a violent, tumultuous planet, at the mercy of hurricanes and volcanoes and asteroids and terrorists and disease and a million other things. We concentrate on having little thoughts so we don't have BIG THOUGHTS. . . . You've got to ignore the one big truth - life is fatal.”
“Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child!”
“Or take a vacation. Everywhere in America is pretty much the same, and I don't recommend going overseas, not with the way the world regards us. It's just not safe now, safe being one of those words like free or clean or sincere that can never be said without the invisible quotation marks anymore, but still. You should get away.”
Source: Timewaste
“Or take fame for instance. For one brief moment, a man finds himself on a throne. And for a while he believes himself specialㅡa little bit better than everyone else. But then he discovers that his throne is just another seat in an ongoing game of musical chairs and eventually he's gong to lose his place. Sometimes he spends the rest of his life trying to get back to the chair.”
Source: A Perfect Day