P Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with P. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Perhaps these ancient observatories like Stonehenge perennially impress modern people because modern people have no idea how the Sun, Moon, or stars move. We are too busy watching evening television to care what's going on in the sky.”
“Perhaps these earthbound types were more susceptible to the freaks and fumes of delusion, having no resistance when once they stumbled in.”
Source: The Master Bedroom
“perhaps these men in the House Caucus Room [Committee on Un-American Activities] are determined to spread silence: to frighten those voices which will shout no, and ask questions, defend the few, attack cruelty and proclaim the rights and dignity of man. ... America is going to look very strange to Americans and they will not be at home here, for the air will slowly become unbreathable to all forms of life except sheep.”
“Perhaps these nights in Edinburgh will become more frequent, and I'll be spending evenings alone more often than not. It's an unsettling thought. The Manse is different with Carrie in it. It keeps time better, it hides its other faces, the bathroom door stays closed and the boiler flame doesn't snuff out. It behaves like the mere pile of bricks it ought to be.
God, I will have to cook.
I head to the fridge and eye up the contents despairingly. It's by no means bare, but everything in it requires effort: chopping or prepping or frying or grilling or possibly all of those; Carrie would know. But the fridge door has been open too long; it begins a low accusatory beeping. I close it and consider my options.
Fuck it. I can buy a microwave meal at the village shop.”
Source: The Missing Years
“Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.”
“Perhaps these Ten Commandments cases will be the turning point in the legal war against religion.”
“Perhaps they'd been conditioned by all the quarantines and blackouts, all the invisible boundaries CSIRA erected on a moment's notice. The rules changed from one second to the next, the rug could get pulled out just because the wind blew some exotic weed outside its acceptable home range. You couldn't fight something like that, you couldn't fight the wind. All you could do was adapt. People were evolving into herd animals.
Or maybe just accepting that that's what they'd always been.”
Source: Maelstrom
“Perhaps they needn't even believe - it was enough that they needed angels, and the angels would return gladly.”
“Perhaps they never die at all. I quite believe that myself, and it is a comfort, don't you think? That there is a place where no one ever grows old?”
Source: The Secret Horses of Briar Hill
“Perhaps they never left the island when construction was complete," Otto replied.
Wing raised an eyebrow. "A true job for life."
"Or a life for a job," Otto countered. He wouldn't be at all surprised, given the emphasis on total secrecy, if H.I.V.E. offered an "aggressive" retirement package for lower-level employees. Here, being fired was probably a term that was taken a little too literally.”
Source: H.I.V.E. Higher Institute of Villainous Education
“Perhaps they put party loyalty ahead of the welfare of their constituents, are afraid of crossing the president or are as stupid as Mr. Gruber thinks the American people are.”
“Perhaps they're opening up a world I'm only just starting to see the edges of. An adult world. It's scary and I don't like it.”
Source: Life on the Refrigerator Door
“Perhaps they should feel this safe sand blow away so that their heads are uncovered for a time, so that they will have to taste not only the solid honesty of my red borscht, but the new flavor of the changing world.”
Source: The Art of Eating
“Perhaps they suspected that I thought less of them because I knew it. (I'm too aware of human frailty to have let that happen. If anything, I thought more of them for wanting to face up to what they had done and for trying to change.)”
Source: Overcoming Life's Disappointments
“Perhaps they thought they could bring to this valley only those things they loved, leaving behind all ugliness.
We are not, however, a species that can choose the baggage with which it must travel. In spite of our best intentions, we always find that we have brought along a suitcase or two of darkness, and misery.”
Source: Odd Thomas
“Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.”
Source: The Blind Assassin
“Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is the absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some indiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.”
Source: Moby Dick
“Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.”
Source: Light in August
“Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real; when you look upon a scene as an outsider, and come to possess it in its entirety and forever; when you live in the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory; when, for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes art.”
Source: Ellis Island and Other Stories
“Perhaps this all sounds too simple and happy-go-lucky. Well, snap out of it! No thing has dominion or power over you unless you give it that power. Stand your ground. Take three deep breaths. Be willing to see into what something truly is. Be willing to take the time and ask questions. Be willing to Play.
This is what we are inviting you to do here.
Imagine your new life of being free from all fear. Imagine a life where fear is being used as an empowerment through you. Yes. Own your power.
Every moment.
This is You!
Make your choice.”
Source: Our New Story: Guides in the Garden Volume 1
“Perhaps this 'dead' feeling was also brought on by an intensification of her old secret sorrow. Perhaps one day this sorrow might end. But she did not think it would end or see how it could end.”
Source: The Green Knight
“Perhaps this general degradation was the result of too much crowding, too little privacy, too much noise. You couldn't be decent if you weren't intelligent; you couldn't be intelligent if you couldn't think—and who could think in all this racket? Add the stench to the confusion of cramped quarters, and who could be self-respecting?”
Source: The Robe
“Perhaps this is an age when men think bravely of the human spirit; for surely they have a strange lust to lay it bare.”
Source: Christopher Morley's omnibus: an excursion among the books of Christopher Morley
“Perhaps this is an area where every generation starts from scratch. Although the crisis of the First World War inaugurated an especially strong period of disillusion with regard to the optimism of the previous age, the pattern has repeated itself in many ways in more recent times, e.g., the loss of faith in politics as a means of advancing human well-being. And perhaps this also has to do with basic elements in growing up.”
“Perhaps this is how girls fall -- not in some crime of enchantment at the hands of a wicked ne'er-do-well, a grand before and after in which they are innocent victims who have no say in the matter. Perhaps they simply are kissed and want to kiss back. Perhaps they even kiss first. And why should they not?”
Source: The Sweet Far Thing
“Perhaps this is how it is--life flowing smoothly over memory and history, the past returning or not, depending on the tide. History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities, surface towards us, then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pattern changes, so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time, which returns everything, changes everything.”
Source: The Powerbook
“Perhaps this is how life translates, and we all bumble through taking opportunistic advantage, passing off the accidental as the creative plan, the deliberate expression of a sometimes ordered intelligence.”
“Perhaps this is how you know you're doing the thing you're intended to: No matter how slow or how slight your progress, you never feel that it's a waste of time.”
“Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit.”
“Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.”
Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns
“Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America -- that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.”
Source: You Can't Go Home Again
“Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.”
Source: Wisdom from Gift from the Sea
“Perhaps this is the only real evil left.”
“Perhaps this is the purpose of all art, all writing, on the murders, fiction and non-fiction: Simply to participate.”
“Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional -- to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death.”
Source: The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective
“Perhaps this is the ultimate freedom, eh, Dreamlord? The freedom to leave.”
“Perhaps this is what it means to go mad: to be emptied and to be aware of the emptiness.”
“Perhaps this is what it was all about. Leaning on God when life made no sense, as well as when the answers seem clear.”
“Perhaps this is what life is -
just being
with each other.
And perhaps this is also what death is,
because the fossils of the amphibian and the mammal were found,
curled up together:
perhaps because of broken ribs and shared heat,
or perhaps because of the universal need we have for each other.
A flood buried the two together, alive,
and although they sang unheard pleas,
they were singing together.”
Source: Push and Pull
“Perhaps this is what really happens in life to most good men. They are not crucified. They simply pass through life and then die, and their passing influences just a few people to make them just a little happy.”
Source: More Classics Revisited
“Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt hollow and empty and aching.”
Source: Daughter of the Forest
“Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching.”
“Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people's stories, insofar as these stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.”
“Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not villains of our own stories.”
Source: Open City
“Perhaps this is where he belonged, with the lonely old banderbear in the endless Deepwoods, wandering from meal to meal, sleeping in the soft, safe, secret places that only banderbears know. Always on the move, never staying in one place for long, and never following a path.
Sometimes, when the moon rose above the ironwood pines, the banderbear would stop and sniff the air, its small ears fluttering and its eyes half closed. Then it would take a deep breath and let out a forlorn yodelling call into the night air.
From far, far away, there would come a reply: another solitary banderbear calling back across the vastness of the Deepwoods. Perhaps one day they would stumble across each other. Perhaps not. That was the sorrow in their song. It was a sorrow Twig understood.”
Source: Beyond the Deepwoods
“Perhaps this is why lunatics have a harder time dating, not because they are off the wall but because it is hard to find soemone who is willing to date so many people in one person.”
“Perhaps this is why not one of 800 sexologists attending a conference raised a hand when asked if they would trust a thin rubber sheath to protect them during intercourse with a known HIV-infected person. I don't blame them. They're not crazy, after all. Yet they're perfectly willing to tell your generation that "safe sex" is within reach and you can sleep around with impunity. It is a terrible lie.”
Source: Life on the Edge: A Young Adult's Guide to a Meaningful Future
“Perhaps this is why so many depressed people become artists: to reclaim the power of answering the question ‘what is the point?”
Source: Untamed
“Perhaps this new kind of reading will appeal to us after we give it a try.”
Source: The Spirit of Pessimism
“Perhaps this sounds very simple, but simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life it requires the greatest discipline to be simple, and the acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook upon life.”
Source: Modern Man in Search of a Soul