T Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with T. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“This was supposed to be yesterday. I was sitting on the Cardiff/London train, supposedly about to write this very column, and realising something quite terrible. My head was entirely empty. A vast echoing void. Bigger on the inside, but with nothing in it. You could drop a pebble in my brain and wait for an hour to hear it land. No actually, you couldn't - that would be aggressive and unhelpful, so keep your damn pebbles to yourself.”
“This was the Athenians' war against the King of Macedon, a war of words. Words are the only weapons the Athenians have left.”
“This was the beginning - and I was ready to be bold".”
Source: The Hawthorne Legacy
“This was the beginning of something big, that much I knew. It used to be hard for me to cherish new beginnings because I found myself anxious to learn what would come next. I always got too far ahead of myself....Desire hung heavy in the air, a third part to our every action. But the present was perfect too. Sweet and full of hope.”
“This was the beginning. The end is easily foreseen; for, given a young man of Dick's temperament, longing
for companionship, and another young man of Charlie's make−up, with a legitimate business to bring the two
together, and only a friendship of the David and Jonathan order could result.”
Source: That Printer of Udell's
“This was the best and worst thing about my wife: she felt sorry for me. When I put my work boots on the mantel or fell asleep on her side of the bed, she'd groan and clench her teeth. She'd kiss me, long and deep, a sigh of disappointment.”
Source: Catapult
“This was the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a body from which all desire had been eliminated.”
Source: The Vegetarian
“This was the bonus to liberal Christianity: I could use my reason and believe at the same time.”
Source: Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
“This was the boy who now kissed her without reservation, as if he were dying and she was air itself.”
Source: Gathering Darkness
“This was The City, India's biggest, a huge city, but people heard and responded to what was happening in your life. Sometimes, this much was enough.”
Source: Em and the Big Hoom
“This was the closest anybody in Iraq came to finding WMDs.
Even though it was obvious to me and my staff that there was
no way the vans could have produced biological weapons, a month
after we got the photos, the CIA published a twenty-eight-page
pamphlet insisting that was what they were for.
…I was bewildered - Colin Powell”
Source: It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership
“This was the consequence of seeing too much and understanding the horrible truth: No one is safe. The world is not manageable.”
“This was the cost of ambition. Loneliness, heartbreak, stoicism.”
Source: The Inconvenience of Time
“This was the cruelest of ironies; you only loved the parts of me that needed finding, and I had to choose between losing everything and staying lost.”
Source: As Muses Burn
“This was the danger of sharing your dreams with your parents. If you told them you wanted to learn to play the guitar, all they heard you say was, “I want to learn to play the guitar,” and then they found some practical, convenient, cheap way, often involving a church basement, for you to do it. But Hector had not come up with any plan of his own. And owning a guitar seemed like an important stepping stone on the way to being a guitar player. So he pawned his soul and said he would take the lessons from the Presbyterian youth minister. What the hell, he thought. Or heck, he thought. What the heck.”
Source: Criss Cross
“This was the Darker Life, where every truth was written backward.”
Source: Full Dark, No Stars
“This was the definition of eternity; it was the space of time devised by the Great God Om to ensure that everyone got the punishment that was due to them.”
“This was the desert, everything all at once, whether it was needed or not. What survived had learned to save, live carefully, and keep a low profile, even appear to be dead for long periods. Perseverance and patience.”
Source: The Never-Open Desert Diner
“This was the difference between cured and healed, she thought. One you leave behind, another you live with.”
Source: The Institute for Creative Dying
“This was the domain established in less than twenty years by the young man of promise. Then he had had almost nothing over which his fingers might close with a sense of possession, but because the lack had stirred no anxious irritation in him, all these things had now come securely into his grasp.”
Source: Runaway Horses
“This was the door to both sustenance and sanity. And we were each other's key.”
“This was the doorway to the heart of the Great Keep. The one place
any son of Lila Jane Evers Wate would instinctively find his way,
whether or not he was a Wayward.
The library.”
“This was the double blade of how I felt about anything that hurt: I wanted someone else to feel it with me, and also I wanted it entirely for myself.”
Source: The Empathy Exams
“This was the eighteenth day in a row that the special was Mushroom Surprise. It was called Mushroom Surprise because it would have been a surprise if anybody had ever ordered it. No one ever did—except Louis, of course. That’s why they’d had it for eighteen days. There was always plenty left over.”
Source: Wayside School is Falling Down
“This was the ethos of the intelligence analysis directorate during most of the 27 years I spent there.”
“This was the face of slavery. To have nothing, and still have something more to lose.”
“This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "conciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him... but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him.”
“This was the feel at the top of the world. He waited. For something... But the mountain dismissed him like an unwanted suitor. There was nothing here that cared for him. He was king of small purchase, of rocky places, a wide expansive nothingness...”
Source: Dixon, Descending
“This was the feeling that Ms. Hempel couldn't shake: a conviction that she spent her days among people at the age when they are most purely themselves. How could she not be depleted when she came home, having been exposed for hours, without protection, to all those thrumming radiant selves? Here they were, just old enough to have discovered their souls, but not yet dulled by the ordinary act of survival, not yet practiced in dissembling.”
“This was the first experience of billions of First World babies of their mothers for decades; at worst, the mothers – or their babies – experienced respiratory distress, were stupefied, unconscious, or in a delirium.”
Source: Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine
“This was the first Memorial Day [Monday, May 1st, 1865]. African Americans invented Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina. What you have there is Black Americans recently freed from slavery announcing to the world with their flowers, their feet, and their songs what the war had been about. What they basically were creating was the Independence Day of a Second American Revolution.”
“This was the first place I everfelt strong. Every time I breathe this air I feel it again.”
Source: Free Four - Tobias tells the Divergent Knife-Throwing Scene
“This was the first thing I ever said, "All right, I'm gonna try to do the very best I can." Instead of doing this, "All right, I'll work at like three-quarters speed, and then I can always figure that if I just hadn't been a fuckup, the book coulda been really good." You know that defense system? You write the paper the night before, so if it doesn't get a great grade, you know that it could've been better.
And this worked--I worked as hard as I could on this. And in a weird way, you might think that would make me more nervous about whether people would like it. But there was this weird--you know like when you work out really well, there's this kind of tiredness that's real pleasant, and it's sort of placid.”
Source: Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
“This was the first time he had seriously confronted what he was doing, and the force of that awareness came very abruptly - with a surging of his pulse and a frantic pounding in his head. He was about to gamble his life on that table, and the insanity of that risk filled him with a kind of awe.”
“This was the first time I had not just rushed in and followed my instincts, and it wasn't working out. I was beginning to actively regret it.”
Source: Triple threat
“This was the first time I thought of S— that day. Her music was beautiful, her voice was beautiful, her body was beautiful. Even the dirty little pads of her feet were beautiful. I cursed myself then. For once, heaven had sent me Beauty in its most perfected form and I abandoned it. She might not have been a girl after all but an angel: a force to guide me on this hazardous path of life I hurry down. How can life be hazardous if it can only end in death?”
“This was the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again.”
Source: Paper Towns
“This was the first time that he has ever looked into the labyrinth of the human soul. He was very far from understanding what he saw. But what was of more value, he felt and suffered with her. In years that were yet to come, he relived this memory in song, in the most beautiful song this world has known. For the understanding of the soul's defencelessness, of the conflict between the two poles, is not the source of the greatest song. The source of the greatest song is sympathy.”
“This was the first time we had two ex-Soviet Cosmonauts in Houston. A lot of us, including me, viewed it with some skepticism, because I grew up during the Cold War, so I had been hit with all this propaganda all along that their stuff wasn't that good, it wasn't that safe and we were so much better. What I found out later was that their space stuff was very good and good enough that I was certainly comfortable flying on their equipment. So, it was kind of a revelation of sorts as the years went by and I think it underscores the importance right now of international cooperation.”
“This was the foreman—a boiler-maker by trade—a good worker. He was a lank, bony, yellow-faced man, with big intense eyes. His aspect was worried, and his head was as bald as the palm of my hand; but his hair in falling seemed to have stuck to his chin, and had prospered in the new locality, for his beard hung down to his waist.”
Source: Heart of Darkness
“This was the furthest she’d ever get. It was the only place she could go that made her feel as if she was actually going somewhere. It was there that she sat on the state line. It was there that she crossed over into Utah and could be in a different place that wasn’t a pharmacy tech program, that wasn’t a life that she didn’t want.”
Source: All the Little Things
“This was the gastronomic heartland of Italy, where every inch of the fertile soil was cultivated. In Parma he visited shops festooned with hams, each one postmarked with the stamps of a dozen different inspectors---the regions of Italy are fiercely protective of their produce, and only a handful of towns between the Enza and Stirone Rivers are allowed to designate themselves as true producers of prosciutto di Parma. Because the huge lofts in which the hams are aged are always left open to the wind, the villages of the Enza valley seemed scented with the aromatic sweetness of the meat as he drove through them. In the valley to the north of Parma, he sampled culatello di zibello, perhaps the greatest of all Parma's pork products and for that reason almost never exported, even to other parts of Italy: a pig's rump, marinated in salt and spices, then sewn inside a pig's bladder and aged for eighteen months in the humid air of the flat river basin, a process so delicate that almost half the hams are spoiled before they are ready, but which leaves the rest incomparably delicious.”
Source: The Food of Love
“This was the ghetto: where children grow down instead of up.”
“This was the gift of recovery, he thought. The ability to be here in this moment with the female he loved and be fully aware, fully awake, fully present. Undiluted.”
Source: Lover Enshrined: A Novel of The Black Dagger Brotherhood
“This was the girl who made him swoon. Even after everything they had been through, she was the one he killed for. More importantly, she was the one he lived for.”
Source: Reanimate at Dawn
“This was the Goblin King. That was my sister in his arms. This was my sister tilting her head back to greet his lips. That was the Goblin King bending down to receive her kisses like sacred offerings made at the altar of his worship. This was the Goblin King running long, slender fingers down the line of my sister's neck, her shoulder, her back. That was my sister laughing, her bright, musical bell of a laugh, and this was the Goblin King smiling in return, but looking at me, always looking. I was entranced; my sister was enchanted.
Enchanted. The word was a dash of cold water, and my senses returned with a jolt. This was the Goblin King. The abductor of maidens, the punisher of misdeeds, the Lord of Mischief and the Underground. But was he also not the friend of my childhood, the confidante of my youth?”
Source: Wintersong
“This was the great clarity of being beyond emotion, after the reward of having felt everything one could feel.”
Source: Atlas Shrugged
“This was the great difference between disappointing him and disappointing somebody like my mother, or even my aunts. Masculine self-centeredness made him restful to be with.”
Source: Lives of Girls and Women
“This was the greatest gift that he had, the talent that fitted him for war; that ability not to ignore but to despise whatever bad ending there could be. This quality was destroyed by too much responsibility for others or the necessity of undertaking something ill planned or badly conceived. For in such things the bad ending, failure, could not be ignored. It was not simply a possibility of harm to one's self, which could be ignored. He knew he himself was nothing, and he knew death was nothing. He knew that truly, as truly as he knew anything. In the last few days he had learned that he himself, with another person, could be everything. But inside himself he knew that this was the exception. That we have had, he thought. In that I have been most fortunate. That was given to me, perhaps, because I never asked for it. That cannot be taken away nor lost. But that is over and done with now on this morning and what there is to do now is our work.”
Source: For Whom the Bell Tolls
“This was the kid who used to toddle over to my bed at 6 o’ clock in the morning every weekend morning to pull on my blankets so I’d get up and watch cartoons with him. This was the kid who once made me play Hungry Hungry Hippos for an hour straight, until I thought my hands were going to fall off from slamming down those dumb little levers to make the hippos’ heads move. This was the kid who had spent an entire days at a time begging me to play Chutes and Ladders with him. And now he was feeling too sick to play with me.”