Top 46 Almost There But Not Quite Quotes
#1. It was not that the woman boasted. Quite the opposite. She was modest to a fault, the fault being she insinuated her modesty, deftly, into almost any conversation, proclaiming her insignificance and ignorance, thereby assuring a correction.
Cathleen Schine
#2. I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real.
China Mieville
#3. If it wasn't for the fact that Bruno was nowhere near as skinny as the boys on his side of the fence, and not quite so pale either, it would have been difficult to tell them apart. It was almost (Shmuel thought) as if they were all exactly the same really.
John Boyne
#4. Bridget was so excited to see the giant Colin Firth statue, she almost had a stroke. But she couldn't quite reach.
Bridget Golightly
#5. Hate is all that keeps us alive when love is gone. You're almost there. Not quite ready to let it go yet.
Kim Harrison
#6. The knock-kneed brown moose, a tired group of ten, yards ahead of her for the last three days, comfort her too. It's like following a pack of grandfathers, their large, weary eyes, red lids sagging, their gray muzzles, puckered as if the world is almost done with them but not quite yet.
Amy Bloom
#7. If people stopped looking on their emotions as ethereal, almost inhuman processes, and realistically viewed them as being largely composed of perceptions, thoughts, evaluations, and internalized sentences, they would find it quite possible to work calmly and concertedly at changing them.
Albert Ellis
#8. They walked off on the earthy path, laughing not quite naturally, for they could hardly help being pleased by the momentary attention of descending passengers and by their own almost meritorious youth.
Shirley Hazzard
#9. I am astonished each time I come to the U.S. by the ignorance of a high percentage of the population, which knows almost nothing about Latin America or about the world. It's quite blind and deaf to anything that may happen outside the frontiers of the U.S.
Eduardo Galeano
#10. It's always a strange moment when you get up on stage because in a way that's really the fulfilment of what you do, but at the same time when you write from a place that's very personal and quite isolated, at least for me, there's something that almost doesn't feel natural about it.
Alexi Murdoch
#11. This was the cream of marriage, this nightly turning out of the day's pocketful of memories, this deft habitual sharing of two pairs of eyes, two pairs of ears. It gave you, in a sense, almost a double life: though never, on the other hand, quite a single one.
Jan Struther
#12. I head off to the back of the store where there are racks and racks of records. As I flick through them and breath in the smell, I smile. It's almost as good a the smell of books. Almost but no quite.
Zoe Sugg
#13. Mutual surrender, maybe that's an act of love. Surrendering to this thing that's bigger than we are: this love, this pain. The courage to surrender comes from knowing that the love and pain will almost kill us, but not quite.
Glennon Doyle Melton
#14. Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it.
Tom Stoppard
#15. There's quite a difference between "almost never" and "never never".
Julie Berry
#16. We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.
Madeleine L'Engle
#17. It wasn't love, not quite, but it was almost there and it was desperate and I didn't know how to put it into words. It was the back and forth of him, the hot and cold, it made me crazy, made me feel crazy, and sanity never felt more pointless than when I was with him.
Kristine Wyllys
#18. And then the line was quite but not dead. I almost felt like he was there in my room with me, but in a way it was better, like I was not in my room and he was not in his, but instead we were together in some invisible and tenuous third space that could only be visited on the phone.
John Green
#19. It was going to be a long, dark night but not quite as dark as it was in the abyss of his heart where there was nothing but hollowness, yet it felt heavy, almost as if someone still resided there.
Faraaz Kazi
#20. Parenting girls makes you quite gender-conscious - it's almost impossible to fight the power of pink. It's not such a terrible thing to want to be a princess when you're five, but it would be nice if there were some other options.
Robert Webb
#21. I can't always reach the image in my mind ... almost never, in fact ... so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it.
Chuck Close
#22. I went home and tried to sleep, but couldn't, so I stared up at the moon, watching how it's trailing edge faded into darkness, so close to being full, but not quite there. A pregnant moon, Grandma called it. Full almost to bursting, and ready to give birth to something unthinkable.
Neal Shusterman
#23. The moon is whole all the time, but we can't always see it. What we see is an almost moon or not-quite moon. The rest is hiding just out of view, but there's only one moon, so we follow it in the sky. We plan our lives based on its rhythms and tides.
Alice Sebold
#24. Then it was that the exports of slaves from Virginia and the Carolinas was so great that the population of those States remained almost, if not quite stationary.
Henry Charles Carey
#25. Hal Incandenza has an almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot quite believe is even real, and tries to get to the side of, to see whether deLint has a true z coordinate or is just a cutout or projection.
David Foster Wallace
#26. You ever f**k Susan here?" she said, her face almost touching mine.
"I'm impressed," I said. "The question is intrusive, annoying, coarse, and voyeuristic. That's quite a lot to get into a simple question.
Robert B. Parker
#27. I've realized now that hope almost never goes together with reason. It's something quite irrational and instinctive.
Vasily Grossman
#28. Take my advice, dear reader, don't talk epigrams even if you have the gift. I know, to those have, the temptation is almost irresistible. But resist it. Epigram and truth are rarely commensurate. Truth has to be somewhat chiselled, as it were, before it will quite fit into an epigram.
Joseph P. Farrell
#30. She smiled at Coraline, as if it had been a very long time since she had smiled and she had almost, but not quite, forgotten how.
Neil Gaiman
#31. Everything that happens to us can be looked at as a gift. Although it's quite difficult when you're in the middle of a hard struggle with something, it's hard to see it as a gift, but in retrospect, we can almost always look back and say, "Oh, I see why I had to go through that."
Shakti Gawain
#32. Our society is very, very good at developing certain types of skills and certain types of genius. We are fantastically good at identifying and developing athletic skills - better than we are, really, at almost anything else. We are quite good at developing and rewarding inventiveness.
Bill James
#33. Heartache, Daphne eventually learned, never really went away; it just dulled. The sharp, stabbing pain that one felt with each breath eventually gave way to a blunter, lower ache - the kind that one could almost - but never quite - ignore.
Julia Quinn
#34. Quite often they are lines of thought starting out from more than one centre, but not without their points of contact; almost invariably one train of thought is accompanied by its contradictory opposite, associatively linked to it by contrast.
Sigmund Freud
#35. One might ask why tobacco is legal and marijuana not. A possible answer is suggested by the nature of the crop. Marijuana can be grown almost anywhere, with little difficulty. It might not be easily marketable by major corporations. Tobacco is quite another story.
Noam Chomsky
#36. Whatever is almost true is quite false, and among the most dangerous of errors, because being so near truth, it is more likely to lead astray.
Henry Ward Beecher
#37. He was awfully good at being aristocratic. Alexia, on the other hand, was only good at being autocratic. Not quite the same thing.
Gail Carriger
#38. It's one thing if a person learns you're a witch. It's quite another if he learns you're a murderer. I almost forget I'm a witch now that I know I'm a murderer - murderess, actually. Murderess sounds so much worse.
Franny Billingsley
#39. Here's a phrase that apparently the airlines simply made up: near miss. They say that if 2 planes almost collide, it's a near miss. Bullshit, my friend. It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss.
[WHAM! CRUNCH!]
"Look, they nearly missed!"
"Yes, but not quite.
George Carlin
#40. The moment you say, "We are proud. I'm proud to be this, and I'm proud to be that," what you're saying is we're almost as good as the others. "Almost" always means not quite.
Harry Hay
#41. With amazement and disappointment, we discovered in late October and early November that the beaten Russians seemed quite unaware that as a military force they had almost ceased to exist.
Gunther Blumentritt
#42. Mazarin, in his character of cardinal and prime minister, was almost an atheist, and quite a materialist.
Alexandre Dumas
#43. I enjoy comedic invention, both high and low, there is almost nothing quite so satisfying as making an audience laugh while removing its insides.
Gore Vidal
#44. The way that actors talk about acting is generally quite punishing, and I think actors want to put forward the idea that they do all of this work because, you know, it's a post-De Niro world, when, largely, in fact, it's almost never true.
Ben Mendelsohn
#45. The surprise, for me, is that the accruing weight of these departures doesn't bury us, and that even the pain of an almost unbearable loss gives way quite quickly to something more distant but still stubbornly gleaming.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
#46. There is a majesty to lucid dreaming that is almost beyond words. To find yourself present and aware in another world, a universe within your own mind, is simply so far removed from our daily "normal" experiences that it can quite literally take your breath away.
Daniel Love
