W Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It's a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.”
“What war is ever really won?”
“What Warcollier demonstrated is compatible with what modern cognitive neuroscience has learned about how visual images are constructed by the brain. It implies that telepathic perceptions bubble up into awareness from the unconscious and are probably processed in the brain in the same way that we generate images in dreams. And thus telepathic “images” are far less certain than sensory-driven images and subject to distortion.”
Source: Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality
“What Waringa tried hard to avoid was looking at the pictures of the walls and windows of the church. Many of the pictures showed Jesus in the arms of the virgin Mary or on the cross. But others depicted the devil, with two cow-like horns and a tail like a monkey's, raising one leg in a dance of evil, while his angels, armed with burning pitchforks, turned over human beings on a bonfire. The Virgin Mary, Jesus and God's angels were white, like European, but the devil and his angels were black.”
Source: Devil on the Cross
“What warnings has life given you in your darkest of times? Does it give anybody? The best works disturb, challenge, inspire. They expand your mind, help you grow. They make you stronger! Help you get through life’s worst moments when they actually come. A book is not a binky!”
Source: In Limbo
“What was a face on television but a code, and what was the difference between these faces but a realignment of line and color to shift among signals? If he grasped deeply this language of symbols, grasped it beneath the surface, he could course through the currents of authority as they coursed through him like heat or the tremble of cold.”
Source: How the Dead Dream
“What was a foreigner, anyway? Is the place you're born the only place you really belong? At what point do you stop being from "away" and start being from "here"?”
“What was a home but somewhere you wouldn’t have to feel quite so alone?”
Source: The Teller of Small Fortunes
“What was a kiss without a kiss?"
It was a tablecloth tugged from beneath a party service, everything jumbled against everything else in just a few chaotic moments. Fingers in hair. Hands cupping necks. Mouths dragged on cheeks and chins in dangerous proximity.”
Source: Blue Lily, Lily Blue
“What was a kiss without hands but a letter left unsigned—intentions only halfway delivered?”
Source: Modern Divination
“What was a lie in the father becomes a conviction in the son.”
Source: The Antichrist
“What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.”
Source: TransAtlantic
“What was a little dark, anyway? Just no sun, [Petra] reminded herself as her sneakers pounded toward the opening. Just dark, all three fine, she whispered to herself again and again, spinning the words outward into a mobile in her mind. They floated into dark-three, all-just-fine and then into all-fine, dark-just-three.”
Source: The Calder Game
“What was a person but someone who turned monstrous, anyway? What was a person, in Moss's experience, but a kind of demon.”
Source: Dead Astronauts
“What was a problem was the excessive amount of media attention to the appointment of the first woman and everything she did. Everywhere that Sandra went, the press was sure to go. And that got tiresome; it was stressful.”
“What was a really private and nice relationship was judged and made to be something ugly.”
“What was a rose but the living proof of desire, the single best evidence of human longing and earthly devotion. but desire could be twisted,after all, and Jealousy was the name of the rose that did well in arid souls.”
“What was a shadow, after all, but a shape in the moving world reduced to a projection of possibilities?”
Source: Conservation of Shadows
“What was a slap for ten pages of escapism, ten pages far from everything that made him unhappy, ten pages of real life instead of the monotony that other people called the real world?”
“What was a tender innocent soul like Francis doing in the midst of the hellish cauldron of mortal combat”
Source: Inferno
“What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?”
Source: James Joyce: The Complete Novels (Book House)
“What was alien was being ordinary, being humdrum, being trapped into appeasing...having to crush and stifle my opinions, not being allowed to be brilliant, tricking myself into mediocrity.”
“What was an apocalypse to a man whose world was already gone?”
Source: Mr. Mendlebee's Pandimensional Literary Repository [and Yarn]
“What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, to strong to stop, too sweet to lose.”
“What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.”
Source: The Best of Willa Cather
“What was arguably the most important voyage of scientific exploration ever to be undertaken arose in a distinctly haphazard fashion.”
Source: Voyage of the Beagle
“What was Aristotle’s life?’ Well, the answer lay in a single sentence: ‘He was born, he thought, he died.’ And all the rest is pure anecdote.”
“What was art if it did not come from hard work and devotion? If it was not tended to and grown in the careful pockets of one's heart?”
“What was atrocious was the fact that, like every other building in the new towns, they were dumped almost at random; the leakage of escaping gas scented the so-called gas-house districts, and not surprisingly these districts frequently became among the most degraded sections of the city. Towering above the town, polluting its air, the gas tanks symbolized the dominance of 'practical' interests over life-needs.”
Source: The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
“What was beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, despise. To nail their dreams onto like a picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me.”
Source: White Oleander
“What was below could remain below no longer.
The Nightbreed were rising.”
Source: Cabal
“What was bizarre, when I was younger, I never watched TV. I would rather watch a movie 100 times than to watch a TV show, just to find another nuance. I can't tell you how many times I've watched 'On the Waterfront', just to find a flaw so that I can learn and try to improve my thing.”
“What was bright and exciting becomes weary, flat, and unprofitable.”
Source: The Principles of Psychology
“What was broken will never be the same again.”
“What was called extreme 20 years ago definitely isn't extreme anymore. When I started, I remember people saying, 'Oh my God, I can't walk in that!' It was like, three inches - they look like kitten heels now.”
“What was closure if not a clock? Not an end as everyone imagined, but a beginning.”
Source: In Absence of Fear
“What was consciousness other than the cone of light from a torch in the middle of dark forest?”
Source: Min kamp 5
“What was considered a peak mystical experience a few years ago is today the basic platform of sanity from which our exploration begins.”
Source: The Translucent Revolution: How People Just Like You Are Waking Up and Changing the World
“What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.”
“What was critical to my father was that we not "go into government". His father and mother had both worked in the Treasury Department; and to him, "going into government" meant getting "hooked" on the salary and job security, and spending the rest of one's life in predictable, routinized labor that stunted the mind and sapped the spirit. My father would tell us of accountant friends who had passed their C.P.A. exam, then gone to work for the generous starting salaries offered by the I.R.S. While he was struggling in his mid-twenties, they were bragging about the cash they were taking home. Now, he said, he rarely saw them. Now, they had a defeated look; now, they were taking orders from some bureaucrat, and would be taking orders for the rest of their lives.
He admired the disposition to roll the dice and risk everything that his Jewish friends and clients, Benny Ouresman, the Chevrolet dealer, and Harry Viner and his son Melvin, who had made a fortune with Sunshine Laundry, had exhibited. "They didn't have a damn dime when they started," Pop would tell us, emphatically. "They went to friends, borrowed money, started a business, went broke, went back to their friends, borrowed again, went broke again. Finally, they made it. They built something of their own. Now they work for themselves, and everybody else works for them. Be your own man!" That was the attitude we should adopt.”
Source: Right from the Beginning
“What was difficult was the travel, which, on arrival, is forgotten.”
“What was Dionysus going to go? Send him back to his hellish isolation? He’d been there, done that, and had the Ozzy T-shirt to prove it.’ (Styxx)”
Source: Night Pleasures/Night Embrace
“What was distinctively Western was not slavery but the moral crusade to end slavery.”
Source: The End of Racism: Finding Values In An Age Of Technoaffluence
“What was done with the seed saved from the India Hemp last summer? It ought, all of it, to have been sewn again; that not only a stock of seed sufficient for my own purposes might have been raised, but to have disseminated the seed to others; as it is more valuable than the common Hemp.”
“What was Dr. Mera's motive for murder? I don't need to tell that to a writer of detective novels such as yourself. You know well enough yourself that even without a motive, a murderer lives to kill.”
“What was even more germane was my study of the history of religion. It was one of the few things in school I was fascinated by.”
“What was everybody's business in the end proved to be nobody's business. Each one looked to the other to take the lead, and the aggressorsgot away with it.”
“What was evident was that Mozart was simply transcribing music completely finished in his head. And finished as most music is never finished. Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and structure would fall. I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at Absolute Beauty.”
“What was exciting in the Victorian Age, would leave a man of franker epoch quite unmoved. The more prudes restrict the permissible degree of sexual appeal, the less is required to make such an appeal effective.”
Source: Marriage and Morals
“What was family, Sarah thought, if not a place to belong? Family was everything. It was a warm blanket… an embrace… a safe place to hide when the world threatened. A refuge where the door was always open, and a friendly face welcomed.”
Source: Reunion