Top 100 Impulse Was Quotes
#1. One of the first times that I went into a book store and saw a bunch of my books, my impulse was to put them all under my coat and run away so that no one else could see them, even though, of course, I wanted everyone to see them.
Stacey D'Erasmo
#3. It was already in place, without him seeing any of it, the web was spun and snug around the house, and while his first impulse, the natural impulse, was to press ahead anyway and see if he might beat out the odds, clear logic held him.
Ann Patchett
#4. I looked at my spices again. Salt for protection, cinnamon to enhance psychic ability, and pepper to drive away evil. I figured I should start with the cinnamon.
My first impulse was to snort it.
Jordan Castillo Price
#5. Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer "Nothing." The thought went through my mind that it didn't make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.
Osamu Dazai
#6. He looked like a normal gorgeous young man, who was at home here amidst all this wealth. Like the heir to a fortune. Highborn.
And still, my first impulse was to stab him with a table knife.
Kresley Cole
#7. The eel's pause gave Kim far too long to weigh how incredibly stupid this impulse was
as if the tattoo covering his wrist weren't reminder enough of how irrevocable some rash ideas could be.
K.A. Mitchell
#8. Her immediate impulse was one of self-preservation. She was tied up in this somehow, she didn't know why or how, but there was something waiting for her on the other side of this crowd.
V.S. Kemanis
#9. There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
Joan Didion
#10. The impulse pumping through my body was to take ahold of her again and ease her head onto my chest. Well no, my actual impulse was to tear off her purple bra with my teeth and prove she was plenty Bond girl for me. But I sensed that might be a slight overkill ...
Ophelia London
#11. If I could get a deal on whatever my impulse was, whenever my impulse struck, and it was nearby, I would use that all the time. It would reshape the way that I shop.
Andrew Mason
#12. His polish-black hair was so silky that my first impulse was to stroke it. That's what beauty does to us. Our first thought is that of the child. Touch it. Make it mine. But the child grows up and learns what happens when you reach for those bright balloons bursting with colour.
Bonnie Hearn Hill
#13. Mae's first impulse was to die of shame, but she realized after a hot, stomach-clenching moment that this was probably impractical.
Sarah Rees Brennan
#14. Some of the drops of water fell onto my skin and by impulse was to smell the water. It stank. My neighbour whispered in my ear, "It's cow's urine and gobar. They use it for purification." We, the untouchables, were purified with bullshit.
Anand Neelakantan
#15. I felt a lot of ambivalence about going back to graduate school for a second MFA. The impulse was really the opposite from what it had been more than a decade before: I wanted to interrupt a career.
Garth Greenwell
#16. But what was possible or practical had been replaced by a far baser impulse. Hope.
Ted Dekker
#17. What is now reason was formerly impulse or instinct.
Ovid
#18. Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security. It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint. Obviously, I lost track of what I was taught.
Tiger Woods
#19. In another place was a vast array of idols - Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian, Phoenician, every country on earth I should think. And here, yielding to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a steatite monster from South America that particularly took my fancy.
H.G.Wells
#20. It was not impulse.
It was not lust.
It was not wrath, or boredom, or desperation.
People remembered the saints because they had their tokens.
Pam Jones
#21. I was stunned by the unexpected electricity that flowed through me, amazed that it was possible to be more aware of him than I already was. A crazy impulse to reach over and touch him, to stroke his perfect face just once in the darkness, nearly overwhelmed me.
-Bella
Stephenie Meyer
#22. Laws are made against the impulse a people most fears in itself. Do not kill was the Shing's vaunted single Law. All else was permitted: which meant, perhaps, there was little else they really wanted to do ...
Ursula K. Le Guin
#23. But there's something about sitting at someone else's desk that makes you feel like looking in the drawers. I resisted the impulse briefly. Then I decided what the hell. I was a private investigator. Poking my nose in where it didn't belong came with the territory.
Stephen R. Donaldson
#24. She did it without thinking--At that moment she was pure Gilly again: red-haired, with fury for blood, perfect aim, and nothing to lose.
Tiffany Baker
#25. The need to call this thing "good" and this thing "bad," this thing "white" and this thing "black," was an impulse that Effia did not understand. In her village, everything was everything. Everything bore the weight of everything else.
Yaa Gyasi
#26. There are several ways to react to being lost. One is to panic: this was usually Valentina's first impulse. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you've misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world.
Audrey Niffenegger
#27. The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne's impulse to go straightway to see her.
Henry James
#28. Only Southerners have taken horsewhips and pistols to editors about the treatment or maltreatment of their manuscript. This
the actual pistols
was in the old days, of course, we no longer succumb to the impulse. But it is still there, within us.
William Faulkner
#29. Sense entered into a short, violent skirmish with instinct and inclination, and was overwhelmed.
Robert Galbraith
#30. Excuse me, your attention please."
He waited until the whole floor had stopped what it was doing and turned to face him. For a split second his impulse control kicked in, but by then his mouth was fully engaged.
"For the record, Claire Marsden and I are not having sex.
Sarah Mayberry
#31. Poor, successful, fallible Republican party! If it could only have kept the purity of the patriot impulse of which it was born!
Candace Wheeler
#32. Motherhood was the great equaliser for me; I started to identify with everybody ... as a mother, you have that impulse to wish that no child should ever be hurt, or abused, or go hungry, or not have opportunities in life.
Annie Lennox
#33. I was Marked by a very cute boy with terrible impulse control. I don't remember because I was basically unconscious but everyone was mad at him when I woke up. The end, love Clary.
Cassandra Clare
#34. Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.
Eric Hoffer
#35. If an energetic and powerful Creator made the world, it could be that what moved Him - or Her, or Them, or It - to create was precisely an impulse to make something beautiful.
Frank Wilczek
#36. My mood, I say, was one of exaltation. I felt as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind. I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap men on the back, fling people's hats astray, and generally revel in my extraordinary advantage.
H.G.Wells
#37. The impulse to tell the truth was not as great as the fear of being left off the page.
Jonathan Messinger
#38. This yearning for new and distant scenes, this craving for freedom, release, forgetfulness
they were he admitted to himself, an impulse towards flight, flight from the spot which was the daily theatre of a rigid, cold, and passionate service.
Thomas Mann
#39. At last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.
Brenda Ueland
#40. If you're thinking of calling on that Mrs. Pentstemmon, you can save yourself the trouble. The old biddy's dead."
"Dead?" said Sophie. She had a silly impulse to add, But she was alive an hour ago! And she stopped herself, because death is like that: people are alive until they die.
Diana Wynne Jones
#41. If, in the quiet of your heart, you feel something should be done, stop and consider whether it is in line with the character and teaching of Jesus. If so, obey that impulse to do it, and in doing so you will find it was God guiding you.
Eric Liddell
#42. There is strong archaeological evidence to show that with the birth of human consciousness there was born, like a twin, the impulse to transcend it.
Alan McGlashan
#43. Much of the Wild had been lost, so that to them the Wild was the unknown, the terrible, the ever menacing and ever warring. But to him, in appearance and action and impulse, still clung the Wild.
Jack London
#44. Whenever it dipped under 80 degrees, it was cause for celebration - time to write home with the news, dig my jacket out of the closet, and try to quell the impulse to sing Christmas carols.
Bryanna Plog
#45. In so many ways, he had wanted this his whole life - or at least ever since he'd survived his transition and had any sexual impulse at all. This moment was the culmination of countless daydreams and innumerable fantasies, his secret desire made manifest.
J.R. Ward
#47. It is almost better to be an impulse shirt-buyer than an impulse shoe-buyer. I have worn shirts that made people think I was a retired Mafia hit-man or a Yugoslavian sports convener from Split, but I have worn shoes that made people think I was insane.
Clive James
#48. I knew I was free; that I had always been free; held back only by my own weakness, lacking impulse and the imagination to break away from an existence that had become habitual for years.
Ruskin Bond
#49. Then again, how could he expect Bela to be interested in marriage, given the example he and Gauri had given? They were a family of solitaries. They had collided and dispersed. This was her legacy. If nothing else, she had inherited that impulse from them.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#50. He was the northern star. I had no choice but to become enveloped in his brightness and let it coax me toward him. Wanting him was an unconscious impulse, like taking my next breath.
R.S. Grey
#51. I have said as much as that the aim of art was to destroy the curse of labour by making work the pleasurable satisfaction of our impulse towards energy, and giving to that energy hope of producing something worth its exercise.
William Morris
#52. As a kid I never had the impulse to climb anything. I think that most kids who live in small towns or rural areas outside of the city, that's what they do - climb walls, or trees, or whatever. To me, it was more dance classes and not being very boyish.
Jamie Bell
#53. How does one know the voice is God's? I believed the voice bidding me to go north belonged to him, though perhaps what I really heard that day was my own impulse to freedom. Perhaps it was my own voice. Does it matter?
Sue Monk Kidd
#54. If there had been another female for him since we arrived in Salvation, I needed to cut off all her hair and beat her half to death. The strength of that impulse scared me, and I took a step back. Deuce the girl was every bit as vicious as the Huntress, it seemed
Ann Aguirre
#55. The price the Virgin demanded was purity, and the way the educators of Catholic children have interpreted this for nearly two thousand years is sexual chastity. Impurity, we were taught, follows from many sins, but all are secondary to the principal impulse of the devil in the soul
lust.
Marina Warner
#56. Daniel was very like a child in all the parts of his character. He was strongly affected by whatever was present, and apt to forget the absent. He acted on impulse, and too often had reason to be sorry for it; but he hated his sorrow too much to let it teach him wisdom for the future.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#57. He'd never thought he would feel that way again. Ready to brave any sorrow just to keep her at his side. Perhaps the impulse wasn't logical or reasoned, but it was real and true. It was choosing hope rather than despair. Seizing the one sparkling possibility in a roomful of someones.
Tessa Dare
#58. The impulse to lie, to continue to wallow in secrets as he had for years, was only the faintest whisper now, a nagging sense of stepping too far on an uncharted path, easily overridden by need to tell her. If he couldn't tell her, at least he could find some comfort in confidence.
Anthony Ryan
#59. The Chinese philosopher Mencius believed that man is innately good. He argued that anyone who saw a child falling into a well would immediately feel shock and alarm, and that this impulse, this universal capacity for commiseration, was proof positive that man is inherently good.
T. Greenwood
#60. What I learned at that moment on the subway 30 years ago, staring at my blank passport, was this: If you have an impulse to do something, and it's not totally irresponsible, why not do it? It might just be the journey you've always needed.
Timothy Hutton
#61. Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.
Barbara Tuchman
#62. This was classic Lockwood. Friendly, considerate, empathetic. My personal impulse would have been to slap the girl soundly around the face and boot her moaning backside out into the night. Which is why he's the leader, and I'm not. Also why I have no female friends.
Jonathan Stroud
#63. I was intentionally curbing the impulse to be funny and hiding the ability. I wrote any number of very serious attempts at poems, short stories, novels - horrible. At a certain point, I recognized that it was fun to write dialogue that had a degree of lightness and humor.
Patrick DeWitt
#64. At least I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it.
Brenda Ueland
#65. It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no man's work but came by wide social labor, whena thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#66. There was a 'magic rock' my mom would lift up, and under the rock was a bunch of bugs. Roly-poly bugs and worms. Somehow I thought that it was a magical world of insects, and I wanted to go there. It was the same impulse as 'Pikmin' - I wanted to go into that world.
Tim Schafer
#67. There was no thought in her now, no control. Every sound, every movement - it was pure impulse. Instinct and desire. Truth.
Kit Rocha
#68. I fly in dreams, I know it is my privilege, I do not recall a single situation in dreams when I was unable to fly. To execute every sort of curve and angle with a light impulse, a flying mathematics - that is so distinct a happiness that it has permanently suffused my basic sense of happiness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#69. The women's movement has not found a way to reconnect comfortably with the religious impulse that was central to its origin.
Helen LaKelly Hunt
#70. Oh no," she said, still smiling; her eyes poured over with light, that of compassion. She understood how he felt, that this was not an impulse only. But the answer was still no, and, he knew, it would always
Philip K. Dick
#71. I always wanted the actors to feel really free to leave the words behind if they weren't working, reword lines, if they felt like there was impulse they wanted to follow, if it was taking the scene out of order or adding something, that you should always feel free to do that.
Lynn Shelton
#72. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because he was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means.
C.S. Lewis
#73. Love wasn't a selfish thing. It was the kindest, most generous impulse a man could have.
Susan Wiggs
#74. Rachel slid inside her silver Kia and slammed the car door, grateful that the museum's security guard was now watching from a distance. If he hadn't been, she might have acted on a homicidal impulse and run Chase over, the manipulative jerk. In fact, it made her feel better just to imagine it.
Kaylin McFarren
#75. In this light my spirit suddenly saw through all, and in and by all creatures, even in herbs and grass it knew God, who he is, and how he is, and what his will is: And suddenly in that light my will was set on by a mighty impulse, to describe the being of God.
Jakob Bohme
#76. What is now an act of reason, was but blind impulse.
Ovid
#77. Because the fact of not being understood by other people had become my only real source of pride, I was never confronted by any impulse to express things and to make others understand something that I knew.
Yukio Mishima
#78. She was torn between the impulse to run and the urge to curl up like a pill bug, close her eyes, tuck her head beneath her arms, and play the game of since-I-can't-see-monsters-monsters-can't-see-me.
Holly Black
#79. Oozing Street was oddly cheerful, with flower boxes hanging from windowsills and houses painted bright colors; even the slaughterhouse that anchored it was an inviting robin's-egg blue, and I resisted an odd impulse to go inside and ask for a tour.
Ransom Riggs
#80. My generation came at a time when photography was advancing by leaps and bounds, creating the impulse to experiment and seek new approaches.
Gjon Mili
#81. There's childhood and early onset bipolar, but it transitions in your early adulthood into something a little bit different, and extremely severe. It was at that time that my impulse control just went out the window. Impulse control when you're manic just disappears.
Marya Hornbacher
#82. I always felt there was a kind of humanistic impulse in my thinking about film as well as a real interest in its formal and aesthetic properties - just this idea that it can bring you into a very intimate encounter with people.
Lenny Abrahamson
#83. There was always a creative impulse in me but I never felt rooted to anything.
Fred Ward
#84. Thus, the entire rationale for overseas expansion was shaped in a domestic crucible. Economic need, Anglo-Saxon mission, and the progressive impulse joined together nicely to justify a more active role for government in promoting foreign expansion. To
Emily Rosenberg
#85. I longed to be able to gather my whole life-force into a single impulse, and transmit it to her and blow into her frozen remains the fire that was consuming me.
Theophile Gautier
#86. Ah, if I could only feel assured that it was right and not a blind impulse of a weak woman's heart!'" ~Rosamond
Louisa May Alcott
#87. Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was 26, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star-struck impulse.
Anne Lamott
#88. She had a silly impulse to add, But she was alive an hour ago! And she stopped herself, because death is like that: people are alive until they die. "Yes.
Diana Wynne Jones
#89. He was trapped in the electrochemical web of cognition, wherein curiosity leads into temptation, temptation leads into fear, and fear is considered an impulse to be mastered.
Laird Barron
#90. Symptoms: an unreasonable belief that everyone around him was crazy, a homicidal impulse to machine-gun strangers, retrospective falsification, an unfounded suspicion that people hated him and were conspiring to kill him.
Joseph Heller
#91. It was the same with the whole Russian machine. Fear was the impulse. For them it was always safer to advance than retreat. Advance against the enemy and the bullet might miss you. Retreat, evade, betray and the bullet would never miss.
Ian Fleming
#92. More than anything, that's been the thread through my life - the desire to write, the impulse to write. I mean, it's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing.
Patti Smith
#93. Poppy was every fine, good, unselfish impulse that he would never have. She was every caring thought, loving gesture, happy moment, that he would never know. She was every minute of peaceful sleep that would forever elude him.
- Harry's thoughts
Lisa Kleypas
#94. The thing that started me painting originally was seeing Bambi when I was about nine. I was incredibly disturbed by the forest fire that killed Bambi's mother, and that distress gave me the impulse to create something, as a way of dealing with it.
Joni Mitchell
#95. The impulse to touch her and all the life in her was something I had to check regularly.
Lily King
#96. When sex was something godlike, Lust was the profane curiosity that killed many a straying cat. Now, having removed mystery, Lust is less a long-standing, overpowering yearning, more a sudden craving of the appetite. Less quest, more impulse buy.
Geoffrey Wood
#97. I didn't think anything I wrote was going to get published. I'm a dyslexic kid who had tutors through college. But I had a very strong impulse to write.
Isabel Gillies
#98. Under the radiant towers, the floodlit ramparts,
must have wondered at my impulse to touch her,
which was like touching myself,
the way your own hand feels when you hold it
because you want to feel contained.
Mark Doty
#99. So Artichoke was a restaurant borne out of impulse and recklessness. Four years on, it's also a testament to how an enterprise started on such a fucked up approach can actually succeed.
Bjorn Shen
#100. When you are the avatar for the writer/director, a lot of times, I just trusted him. If he had a choice, even if it wasn't necessarily what was my first impulse, I was like, "This guy [Billy Ray] has been living with this for two years before I even came on board, so I'm going with him."
Matt Bomer
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