W Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Why had I ever thought my dad would be the superhero? Mom had been standing in front of me all along, holding our world up on her shoulders.”
Source: Clues to the Universe
“Why had I taken all those useless classes like bio and German when I should have been taking lipreading?”
“Why had I wasted all my time pretending to be someone I wasn't? I was tired, so very, very tired of standing on my own brakes. I felt...right. I felt free.”
Source: Gunmetal Magic: A Novel in the World of Kate Daniels
“Why had it taken finally seeing her again for him to realize just how much it had hurt watching her leave?”
Source: A Vision in Smoke
“Why had it taken me so long to understand there were other homes I could enjoy and jobs I’d find fulfilling, but only one of him—my adventurous lover and best friend?”
Source: Deep Waters: A Memoir of Loss, Alaska Adventure, and Love Rekindled
“Why had my life suddenly become a Nancy Drew mystery from hell?”
Source: Demonglass
“Why had no one told me that my body would become a battlefield, a sacrifice, a test? Why did I not know that birth is the pinnacle where women discover the courage to become mothers? But of course there is no way to tell this or to hear it. Until you are the woman on the bricks, you have no idea how death stands in the corner, ready to play his part. Until you are the woman on the bricks, you do not know the power that rises from other women-even strangers speaking an unknown tongue, invoking the names of unfamiliar goddesses.”
Source: The Red Tent
“Why had peace given place so soon to turmoil? To two separate solitudes? Because peace had been without thought? Without...integrity?
How could she have felt like that without love?
Was love essential?
Did it even exist - the love she had dreamed of her life?
If it did, it was too late now for her to find it.
Must she make do with this instead, then?
Only this?
Pleasure without love?”
Source: Then Comes Seduction
“Why had she ever wanted to come here? To see art. To see someone else’s inspiration, but in its worst, its least natural form. The point being not that it was beautiful, but that it was chosen.”
Source: End of the World House
“Why had such a promising world been crucified on the tree of obligation, thorned by duties, hanged by hypocrisy, smothered by customs?”
“Why had the counterfeit timbre of his voice rung true to me? What had prompted me to believe a man who spent most of his life dissembling? Why had I, usually so suspicious, become so credulous and simpleminded in his presence? Was it just that I had wanted to hear someone tell me he loved me? Was it just that the words he spoke, the vows he swore, were so freighted with sweetness that they would have seemed true no matter who spoke them?”
Source: The Dream-Maker's Magic
“Why had they arrested me?
'Because of a word, perhaps, or a silent grimace,' Razziel Paritus suggested, stroking his beard. 'Or for something your parents were supposed to have done or said. In this country denouncing people is a social duty, a moral imperative, a kind of state religion. It's also possible they arrested you for no reason at all. That your only crime is your innocence.”
Source: The Judges
“Why had this penguin come to mean so much? That, at least, is easy to explain. Anybody who suddenly moves far from family and friends and the pets they love, feels a .. vulnerable emptiness. It is inevitable; even despite the sensational compensation. Nature upholds a vacuum and it was into this space that Juan Salvador rushed. At first, he occupied it, and then he filled and dominated it. It was not big enough for him, and so he stretched it; expanded it beyond the measure. I didn't think about it, it just happened; and then, he was gone. Of course, time moves on and new family and friends and pets jostle for position in our heart, but the vacancy left by previous occupants never fills. We keep our loved ones alive throughout our memory, our conversations and our stories, but we don't necessarily choose to reveal how much they really meant. We don't have to. Anybody who lost a pet knows.”
Source: The Penguin Lessons
“Why had we, as a species, convinced ourselves that brutality was strength?”
Source: a three body solution: A Daringly Subversive & Juicy Tale of Love, Evolution, & Humanity's Last Hope
“Why had we come to the moon? The thing presented itself to me as a perplexing problem. What is this spirit in man that urges him for ever to depart from happiness and security, to toil, to place himself in danger, to risk an even a reasonable certainty of death? It dawned upon me that there in the moon as a thing I ought always to have known, that man is not made to go about safe and comfortable and well fed and amused. ... against his interest, against his happiness, he is constantly being driven to do unreasonable things. Some force not himself impels him, and he must go.”
Source: H. G. WELLS Ultimate Collection: 120+ Science Fiction Classics, Novels & Stories; Including Scientific, Political and Historical Works: The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, Modern Utopia, A Short History of the World, What Is Coming, The Story of the Last Trump…
“Why had we let it go? Why had we both been condemned...to an exile among dreary strangers who had made us give up all desire for rest, for friendship, for the sound of human voices? Could I now reclaim a single hour spent talking to my brother, Philip, and give it to Ken Daggart? Who made it our duty to accept, as the only reward for our work, the gray torture of pretending love for those who roused nothing but contempt?”
“Why hang about in long drawn out fights, you want them to be over as quick as possible and I was blessed with a pitiless punch that sorted the men out from the boys. The only drawback to having such a vicious punch is that my hands have been broken so many times over the years.”
Source: Born to Fight: The True Story of Richy Crazy Horse Horsley
“Why hang out with celebrities when I can hang out with the people who made me one?”
“Why, Hang Town Fry...I remember once..."
Then, for a few minutes or seconds before the part he has been playing so long submerges his real thinking self, and smudges all the outlines into those of a campus character, you see what this big deaf lost man must have been, one night down near the Ferry Building when he ate Hang...Town...Fry...”
“Why harass with eternal purposes a mind to weak to grasp them?”
“Why harrow oneself by looking on the worst side?... Because it is sometimes necessary.”
Source: Sad cypress
“Why harvest before the fruits gets ripe?”
“Why has a religious turn of mind always a tendency to narrow and harden the heart?”
“Why has America's fringe left been making common cause with the Taliban, whose views on such matters as women's rights and separation of church and state are appallingly retrograde by anyone's standards? One reason may be that the Taliban seem to have mastered the language of victimhood, sounding like denizens of some college ethnic-studies department.”
“Why has elegance found so little following? That is the reality of it. Elegance has the disadvantage, if that's what it is, that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it.”
“Why has everything got to be about feelings these days? In the old days, no one knew what anyone was feeling and, what's more, they weren't expected to.”
“Why has God given me such magnificent talent? It is a curse as well as a great blessing.”
“Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.”
“Why has he taken this job?... For the sake of the dogs? But the dogs are dead; and what do dogs know of honour and dishonour anyway? For himself then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.”
Source: Disgrace
“Why has it been accepted as gospel for so long that homework is necessary? The answer, I think, lies not in the perceive virtues of homework but rather in the clear deficiencies of what happens in the classroom. Homework becomes necessary because not enough learning happens during the school day... The broadcast, one-pace-fits-all lecture... turns out to be a highly inefficient way to teach and learn.”
Source: The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined
“Why has it seemed that the only way to protect the environment is with heavy-handed government regulation?”
“Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him.”
Source: Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays
“Why has no one come to pry me out of here?
- Cersei”
Source: A Feast for Crows
“Why has no one, not the Hawks with their serious commercial crimes unit or the police's crime intelligence unit, ever investigated the shenanigans of this family? The State Security Agency (SSA) has a unit that specialises in organised crime. What have they been doing all these years? Why have the Guptas and their associates been allowed to amass their ill-gotten fortunes with such impunity for so long? Why, now that evidence of this is out in the open, are our law enforcement agencies still sitting on their backsides?”
Source: The President's Keepers: Those Keeping Zuma in Power and Out of Prison
“Why has no one written a November rhapsody with plenty of lilt and swing? The poets who are moved at all by this month seem only stirred to lamentation, giving us year end and 'melancholy days' remarks, thereby showing that theory is stronger than observation among the rhyming brotherhood, or else that they have chronic indigestion and no gardens to stimulate them.”
Source: The garden of a commuter's wife
“Why has no religion this command before all others: Thou shalt work?”
“Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe.”
“Why has not England a great mythology? Our folklore has never advanced beyond daintiness, and the greater melodies about our country-side have all issued through the pipes of Greece. Deep and true as the native imagination can be, it seems to have failed here. It has stopped with the witches and the fairies. It cannot vivify one fraction of a summer field, or give names to half a dozen stars. England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature—for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.”
Source: Howards End
“Why has not Man a microscopic eye? For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly. Say what the use, were finer optics giv'n, T' inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav'n.”
Source: The Works: Including Several Hundred Unpublished Letters, and Other New Materials
“Why has our poetry eschewed The rapture and response of food? What hymns are sung, what praises said For home-made miracles of bread?”
“Why has pachinko swept Japan? It can hardly be the excitement of gambling, since the risks and rewards are so small. During the hours spent in front of a pachinko machine, there is an almost total lack of stimulation other than the occasional rush of ball bearings. There is no thought, no movement; you have no control over the flow of balls, apart from holding a little lever which shoots them up to the top of the machine; you sit there enveloped in a cloud of heavy cigarette smoke, semi-dazed by the racket of millions of ball bearings falling through machines around you. Pachinko verges on sensory deprivation. It is the ultimate mental numbing, the final victory of the educational system." - Lost Japan, Eng. vers., 1996”
“Why has Scandinavia been producing such good thrillers? Maybe because their filmmakers can't afford millions for CGI and must rely on cheaper elements like, you know, stories and characters.”
“Why has slamming a ball with a racquet become so obsessive a pleasure for so many of us? It seems clear to me that a primary attraction of the sport is the opportunity it gives to release aggression physically without being arrested for felonious assault.”
“Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers.”
“Why has the idea of Māori privilege been so durable? In the first hundred years of colonisation, the idea of Māori privilege aided and abetted the taking of Māori lands and resources. This loss was framed as a ‘privilege’, a necessary step towards amalgamation and the innumerable benefits it would bring to Māori. In the latter half of the twentieth century and the early decades of the twenty-first century, Māori privilege has again been put to use. Notions of privilege, first used to dispossess Māori, are now being redeployed to consolidate the ill-gotten gains of the previous centuries.”
Source: Privilege in Perpetuity: Exploding a Pākehā Myth
“Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars?”
Source: Slowness
“Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.”
“Why has the word become such an uncomfortable one?”
“Why has there been so much secrecy about AIDS? When you ask where did the virus come from, it raises a lot of flags. That makes me suspicious.”
“Why has there never been a holiday where peace is celebrated all throughout the world?”