P Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with P. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Perhaps I can never go back and say what I should have. Perhaps I can never look forward and tell myself I'll be something specific. Perhaps I can just let the hands of time and the hands of God create a path for me from the decisions I've made. Or, is it, that only death is absolute when God is the only thing in control of time?”
Source: Stop
“Perhaps I can say that I am a bit astute, that I can adapt to circumstances, but it is also true that I am a bit naive. Yes, but the best summary, the one that comes more from the inside and I feel most true is this: I am a sinner whom the Lord has looked upon.”
“Perhaps I can stay by the fire and mend your socks and scream if I hear any strange noises.”
Source: Graceling
“Perhaps I cannot make my people good, she told herself, but I should at least try to make them a little less bad.”
Source: George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones 5-Book Boxed Set (Song of Ice and Fire Series): A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and and A Dance with Dragons
“Perhaps I could best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of entering a dark mansion. You go into the first room and it's dark, completely dark. You stumble around, bumping into the furniture. Gradually, you learn where each piece of furniture is. And finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch and turn it on. Suddenly, it's all illuminated and you can see exactly where you were. Then you enter the next dark room.”
“Perhaps I could climb aboard a ship and sail to the farthest corner of the world, where there was only undiscovered wilderness, where I could breathe deep the wet wilds and be so lost in fresh green there was no thought of old red.”
Source: Beauty Reborn
“Perhaps I could have saved him, with only a word, two words out of my mouth. Perhaps I could have saved us all. But I never spoke them.
Strange it is that one could run crying to the house of a man that one loved, to save him from danger, and that he could say to one, have I not told you not to come to this house? And strange it is that one should withdraw silent and shamed.
For he spoke hard and bitter words to me, and shut the door of his soul on me, and I withdrew. But I should have hammered on it,I should have broken it down with my naked hands,I should have cried out there not ceasing, for behind it was a man in danger, the bravest and gentlest of them all. So I who came to save was made a supplicant; and because of the power he had over me, I held, in the strange words of the English, I held my peace.”
Source: Too Late The Phalarope
“Perhaps I'd been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you don't have to comply with a request just because it's reasonable or reasonably put. Age is the great dis-obliger. You can be yourself and say no.”
Source: Enduring Love
“Perhaps I'd felt all along, even when I lived with him, that I was passing the time, that my life hinged on the single moment when I'd learn that my mother was dying. Then I would set everything aside.”
Source: Walking on the Ceiling
“Perhaps I don't give the impression that I'm hurting on the track. But that is because I am animated by an interior force which covers my suffering.”
“Perhaps I failed, but I did my best, These masters of mine may do the rest.”
“Perhaps I fear him because I could love him again, and in loving him, I would come to need him, and in needing him, I would again be his faithful pupil in all things, only to discover that his patience for me is no substitute for the passion which long ago blazed in his eyes.”
Source: The Vampire Armand: The Vampire Chronicles 6
“Perhaps I had better inform my Protestant readers that the famous Dogma of Papal Infallibility is by far the most modest pretension of the kind in existence. Compared with our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils, our infallible astronomers, our infallible judges, and our infallible parliaments, the Pope is on his knees in the dust confessing his ignorance before the throne of God, asking only that as to certain historical matters on which he has clearly more sources of information open to him than anyone else his decision shall be taken as final.”
Source: The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Lectures, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more
“Perhaps I had inadvertently brushed up against the Buddhist axiom, that enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment.”
Source: Bluets
“Perhaps I had just ruined it by reading Barthes at the wrong time. (A Lover’s Discourse, Chandra said, was relationship poison.)”
Source: The Answers
“Perhaps I have a wider range than I'd given myself credit for.”
“Perhaps I have lived my life to excess, but know what — if I had it to do over again, I would overdo it again.”
“Perhaps I have managed some sort of longevity because I haven't won the lead roles.”
“Perhaps I have misjudged you, Christopher,” Erienne commented as he whirled her about in a wide sweep of the ballroom.
“How so, my love?” He searched her face for some hint of her meaning.
“You watch over me as closely as Stuart,” she stated and grew thoughtful. “Perhaps more so.”
“I have not given up hope that you will someday become mine, madam, and I choose to safeguard against those who would take you from me.”
“What of Stuart?” She raised a lovely brow as she awaited his answer. It was a long moment before he gave a reply. “In the ways of love, I do not consider Stuart as much a threat as an inconvenience.”
“An inconvenience?” she queried.
“I shall have to deal with him in time, and that will be the difficult part. I cannot dismiss the man without rousing your hatred again. ’Tis a most perplexing problem.”
“You amaze me, Christopher.” Erienne shook her head, somewhat shocked by his casual disregard of her husband. “You truly amaze me.”
“The feeling is mutual, my love.” His voice came as a soft caress and sent an eddy of sensations spiraling down through the core of her being.
-Erienne & Christopher”
Source: A Rose in Winter
“Perhaps I have no talent, but all vanity aside - I do not believe that anyone makes an artistic attempt, no matter how small, without having a little - or there are many fools.”
“Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered? Perhaps I'm a HIDEOUS child, and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials.”
“Perhaps I just wanted to know what it was that I wanted. Maybe that is all that growing up means.”
Source: King of Thorns
“Perhaps I just wasn't scary enough. Maybe I should invest in some horns or fangs.”
Source: Magic Burns
“Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”
“Perhaps I know to what extent I can go too far.”
Source: The Difficulty of Being
“Perhaps I lost as a politician, perhaps my self-confidence played a trick on me because I did not recognize the double threat – from zealots and radicals, and from reactionaries in my immediate surroundings. Nonetheless, perestroika won. A relapse into the past is out of the question.”
Source: What Is at Stake Now: My Appeal for Peace and Freedom
“Perhaps I love happy endings because I have been created for one. Heaven.”
Source: Storm Sisters: Friends Though All Seasons
“Perhaps I’m merely envious of the Church’s ability to raise money; forgive me for that, Lord. They are trying to celebrate your glory, Lord, just as we in the scientific community are, so I cannot disagree with them too strenuously. Our commonalities are more important than our differences.”
Source: Omphalos
“Perhaps I’m off the mark,” Westcliff said, “but I suspect it may have something to do with Miss Hathaway.”
Cam sent him a damning glare.
St. Vincent looked alertly from Cam’s stony face to Westcliff’s. “You didn’t tell me there was a woman.”
Cam stood so quickly the chair nearly toppled backward. “She has nothing to do with it.”
“Who is she?” St. Vincent always hated being left out of gossip.
“One of Lord Ramsay’s sisters,” came Westcliff’s reply. “They reside at the estate next door.”
“Well, well,” St. Vincent said. “She must be quite something to provoke such a reaction in you, Rohan. Tell me about her. Is she fair? Dark? Well formed?”
To remain silent, or to deny the attraction, would have been to admit the full extent of his weakness. Cam lowered back into his chair and strove for an offhand tone. “Dark-haired. Pretty. And she has … quirks.”
“Quirks.” St. Vincent’s eyes glinted with enjoyment. “How charming. Go on.”
“She’s read obscure medieval philosophy. She’s afraid of bees. Her foot taps when she’s nervous.” And other, more personal things he couldn’t reveal … like the beautiful paleness of her throat and chest, the weight of her hair in his hands, the way strength and vulnerability were pleated inside her like two pieces of fabric folded together. Not to mention a body that had been designed for mortal sin.”
Source: Mine Till Midnight
“Perhaps I may record here my protest against the efforts, so often made, to shield children and young people from all that has to do with death and sorrow, to give them a good time at all hazards on the assumption that the ills of life will come soon enough. Young people themselves often resent this attitude on the part of their elders; they feel set aside and belittled as if they were denied the common human experiences.”
Source: Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes
“Perhaps I myself am a pompous and conceited old fool. And perhaps if these fools I complain of were French or Dutch or German I would not mind so much, because then I could say 'What else can you expect?' and feel superior. It is because they are men of my own race that I would have them all good.”
Source: The Far Pavilions
“Perhaps I need some shattering experience to awaken and inspire me, or at least to give me some emotion to recollect in tranquility. But how to get it? Sit here and wait for it or go out and seek it? . . . I expect it will be sit and wait.”
Source: A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters
“Perhaps I overemphasized the value of keeping busy.... I liked to imagine that I was incapable of doing nothing for afternoons myself, but maybe what disturbed me was that I was capable of it. I feared this was a knack one could get the hang of rather readily, and it was therefore now lurking in my house waiting for me to pick it up like a winter flu.”
“Perhaps I overestimate the intelligence of our species. Perhaps we are little more than psychopathic apes, driven to fashion clubs and smash out the brains of our closest neighbours.”
Source: Fabius Bile: The Omnibus
“perhaps I possess a certain Midwestern sensibility that I inherited from my mother and her parents, a sensibility that Warren Buffet seems to share: that at a certain point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that's hanging in your den, that you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that once your drapes cost more than the average American's yearly salary, then you can afford to pay a bit more in taxes.”
“Perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything.”
“Perhaps I shifted from "me" to "we" when I realized that "I" could get a lot more done with "us."”
“Perhaps I should be flattered that somebody imagines the name is worth so much, especially since my parents gave me the same name 42 years ago for free.”
“Perhaps I should explain that I have recently had to give up golf, for health reasons – my wife was going to kill me.
You see for some time now she’s had the ridiculous idea that I spend so much time playing golf that I’m losing touch with her and our two or three children – little whatsitsname and the other one. Actually it all came to a head at about eleven thirty last night. She suddenly shouted at me, “Golf – golf – golf – all you think about is bloody golf!”
And I’ll be honest it frightened the life out of me, I mean you don’t expect to meet somebody on the fourteenth green at that time of night.”
Source: Ronnie In The Chair
“Perhaps I should give up books and conversation and walks, and head for a place where the pleasures of money and frivolity and other absorbing distractions could be enjoyed. Perhaps I should acquire the means to do so and myself become a thing of beauty.”
Source: Bonjour Tristesse / A Certain Smile
“Perhaps I should go back a few years earlier. My parents, who travelled from Odessa, the Russian city on the Black Sea, shortly before the 1914 war, were part of a vast migration of Jews fleeing Tsarist oppression to the dream of America that obsessed poor men all over Europe. The tailors thought of it as a place where people had, maybe, three, four different suits to wear. Glaziers grew dizzy with excitement reckoning up the number of windows in even one little skyscraper. Cobblers counted twelve million feet, a shoe on each. There was gold in the streets for all trades; a meat dinner every single day. And Freedom. That was not something to be sneezed at, either.
But my parents never got to America.”
Source: Journey through a Small Planet
“Perhaps I should have pointed out more often that without her (mother's) guidance and example I might have gone straight from short pants to Long Bay Gaol, which in those days was still in use and heavily populated by larcenous young men who had chosen their parents less wisely.”
Source: The Complete Unreliable Memoirs
“Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.”
Source: The Old Man and the Sea
“Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity.”
Source: Dagon et autres nouvelles de terreur
“Perhaps I should say that in general there are three solutions to such a situation. I mean not only in Holland, but everywhere where there are minority groups: in America, in Vietnam with the Chinese. Everywhere there is the same problem. But there are fundamentally three, actually only two possible solutions. A possible solution is that the despised minority is able to establish its own state somewhere else. The other solution is a higher or lesser degree of assimilation. And the third possibility, which is not a solution at all, is the permanence of the tension and conflict over time.”
“Perhaps I shouldn't call it shit. That's a bit crude. I don't really despise Christianity or even the Roman Church, and certainly not the incontrovertible glory of the Middle Ages. What I do despise is the contemporary inclination to flop to the knees and crawl back into the past, to shy from what seem like impossible problems in order to bury the head, asshole aloft and twitching, in the Sands of Time. Cowardice, I calls it. Illusion-seeking. Womb-crawling. And treason. Desertion in the face of the enemy.
Strong words indeed. But I've always been rather a blunt, tough, plain-spoken type . . .”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“Perhaps I shouldn't have been influenced by the idea that my name could be spread across the entire world.”
“Perhaps, I thought, rape was effectively decriminalised here – if not in the letter of the law, then in the practice of it.”
Source: Not the Perfect Victim
“Perhaps I was also afraid the little voice in the back of my head telling me I had no idea what I was doing was right. I didn’t have any idea what I was doing; if I had, things would be different now. Although, thoughts like this led the other little voice inside my head to point out if I wasn’t here, or if I didn’t know what I was doing, Martin would be a chalk outline of some goo on the pavement. I sighed audibly and put my head on my desk. If only all the voices in my head could just get along. I laughed at the absurdity. I must be clinically insane.”
Source: Likely Suspects
“Perhaps I was being picky, but I really didn’t think being able to spell orgasm without being spotted a vowel was asking too much.”
Source: Summer's Journey: Volume One - Losing Control