Top 100 Never Quite Quotes
#1. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
John Berger
#2. Somehow a bachelor never quite gets over the idea that he is a thing of beauty and a boy forever.
Helen Rowland
#3. A joyous occasion is never quite as wonderful as when it becomes a memory.
Jimmy Carter
#4. Terror finally becomes almost
bearable
but never quite
terror creeps like a cat
crawls like a cat
across my mind
Charles Bukowski
#5. Once someone has had the good fortune to share a true love affair with a Golden Retriever, one's life and one's outlook is never quite the same.
Betty White
#6. It seemed to me that you make magic real by making it a little prosaic, a little difficult and disappointing - never quite as glamorous as the other characters imagine.
Susanna Clarke
#7. Methinks I am never quite committed, never wholly the creature of my moods, but always to some extent their critic. My only integral experience is in my vision. I see, perchance, with more integrity than I feel.
Henry David Thoreau
#8. I liked Latin, I like languages, I liked all the myths, and the Roman tales that we were required to translate in Latin, and all these interesting people who were never quite what they thought they would be or seemed to be.
Suzanne Farrell
#9. The P'lice Department hounded him, they called him Mr. Smith. They got him on conspiracy, they were never quite sure who with.
Bob Dylan
#10. My body has always been
a question mark,
never quite knowing what it
means
to be alive.
Darshana Suresh
#11. I'm not great around the house, I'm pretty useless. I do little bits, but I never quite finish tidying up - I'll start, but I'll leave things unwashed in the sink. It has been known to irritate people somewhat.
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
#12. When we rehearse, we're always trying to aim for something else. But we never quite succeed in getting there.
Colin Greenwood
#13. I never quite know when I'm not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, "Dammit, Thurber, stop writing." She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph.
James Thurber
#14. His voice had sounded as though he lived entirely on mayonnaise and butter but never quite cleared his throat of them;
Dean Koontz
#15. But when I direct I become possessed, a possession I've never quite understood.
Ted Kotcheff
#16. I'm trying to find answers. It can be quite frustrating, but at the same time, I'm never quite satisfied with what I'm doing, so I'm always looking for the next thing.
Robert Longo
#17. But the sky was never quite the same shade of blue again.
Anne Rice
#18. The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
H.L. Mencken
#19. God, he could be a prick. A moody, stubborn prick who I would avoid if I knew what was good for me.
It seemed I never quite learnt my lessons very well in life.
Nina Levine
#20. When you're making a psychological thriller, what you need to do is have an audience on shifting sand so they're never quite sure where they are.
Mark Strong
#21. You never quite realize how much you love and need him until the very moment you realize he's slipping away ...
Alice
#22. She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.
Sinclair Lewis
#23. I haven't always voted for the same party, mostly because I find that strange. One thing I've never quite understood is when people say 'I'm a Conservative' or 'I'm Labour,' before even hearing what the person running stands for or wants to change.
James Corden
#24. Emotionally, I feel mostly out-of-depth, like I will never quite learn how to be what I should be. And that makes me feel pretty vulnerable a lot of the time.
Gotye
#25. I can only guess that it made the world he went back to ... strangely without meaning. Though he lived in it, though he even enjoyed it, it remained utterly remote. I think it had lost sense for him. In his heart was the reflection of a lovely dream that he could never quite recall.
W. Somerset Maugham
#26. Sisters never quite forgive each other for what happened when they were five.
Pam Brown
#27. Outwardly mocking, but never quite to the point if not wanting to participate.
Robyn Schneider
#28. All these words to say the same sad thing. That's what these people are like, they're never quite sure what they mean.
Jose Saramago
#29. The anxiety that has followed me through my life like a bad friend had reappeared with a vengeance and taken a brand-new form ... I didn't know why this was happening. The cruel reality of anxiety is that you never quite do.
Lena Dunham
#30. I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it.
William S. Burroughs
#31. We must have ideals and try to live up to them, even if we never quite succeed. Life would be a sorry business without them. With them it's grand and great.
Lucy Maud Montgomery
#32. I marched and I protested against the war in Vietnam, along with many, many thousands of others. But I never quite understood the bombs that were placed in science labs or office buildings.
Don DeLillo
#33. It's not that I don't believe in miracles, but I never quite trust that they're real.
Mariel Hemingway
#34. It's never quite right, all the things we are
taught, all the loves we chase, all the deaths we
die, all the lives we live.
Charles Bukowski
#35. I didn't know why this was happening. The cruel reality of anxiety is that you never quite do. At the moments it should logically strike, I am fit as a fiddle. On a lazy afternoon, I am seized by a cold dread.
Lena Dunham
#36. L.A. is brilliant, but however long my trip is I'm always ready to leave. But New York I'm never quite happy to see the back of.
Kelly Macdonald
#37. It's so far up your street it's got its tongue through your letter-box.
Mum could never quite get the hang of conspiracies.
Adam Mars-Jones
#38. All night his mind seemed to skip over the surface of sleep like a stone upon water, never quite breaking the skin. As
Justin Cronin
#39. There has always been a sliver of panic in him, deeply buried, when it comes to his daughter: a fear that he is no good as a father, that he is doing everything wrong. That he never quite understood the rules.
Anthony Doerr
#40. To have your life blow up four times before you're thirty would take something out of anyone, and I think it drained from my mom just enough hope that she never quite built her confidence back to what it once had been.
Dean Koontz
#41. What most moved me in his letter was the sense of frustration that permeated the lieutenent's words: the frustration of never quite being able to depict or explain anything to his full satisfaction.
Haruki Murakami
#42. He was never quite at home in what we may call our post-positivist era
Jocelyn Gibb
#43. Once you have swung a pickax that will reveal the curve of a street four thousand years covered over which was once an active, much-traveled highway, you are never quite the same again.
Thornton Wilder
#44. It's the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.
Barbara Kingsolver
#45. Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.
Neil Gaiman
#46. I could never quite figure out if I needed to rescue Dara or be rescued from her.
Paula Garner
#47. Somehow our devils are never quite what we expect when we meet them face to face.
Nelson DeMille
#48. Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
Charles Simic
#49. The wisest man I ever knew taught me something I never forgot. And although I never forgot it, I never quite memorized it either. So what I'm left with is the memory of having learned something very wise that I can't quite remember.
George Carlin
#50. You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.
John Irving
#51. I actually don't believe in big government, and half the time I'm never quite sure I believe in government, generally.
Sebastian Coe
#52. Working with Mel Gibson is a little like waltzing with a hurricane. It's always exciting, and you're never quite sure where it's going to take you.
Jim Caviezel
#53. You never quite know what's going to strike your imagination, or something that won't going to leave you alone, not going to leave alone, and this was one for me.
Peter Shaffer
#54. One never quite stops believing,' said the Marquis. 'Some doubt remains forever.' Abrenuncio understood. He had always thought that ceasing to believe caused a permanent scar in the place where one's faith had been, making it impossible to forget.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#55. Time is an optical illusion- never quite as soild or strong as we think it is
Jodi Picoult
#56. So often, I have seen really, really talented performers never quite relating to material. I mean, there's a lot of gay actors, for example, that are obviously gay. They're not going to be able to do some of the material. Some of them they can, some of them they can't.
Julie Halston
#57. She reminds me of a turtle; you can never quite know wha ta turtle is thinking.
Jaycee Dugard
#58. On the surface we are drawn to each other, but the reality is we have never quite been on the same page - we repel each other like the north ends of two magnets.
Suzie Groers
#59. You are going around on the wheel again and again. You go around and around from lifetime to lifetime. You never quite wake up. Enlightenment is waking up.
Frederick Lenz
#60. Venice never quite seems real, but rather an ornate film set suspended on the water.
Frida Giannini
#61. Mediocre founders spend a lot of time talking about grand plans, but they never quite make a decision.
Sam Altman
#62. One is so apt to cheapen a thing when one tries hastily to put it into words, and ever afterward it is never quite the same.
Ruth Sawyer
#63. I could never quite accustom myself to absinthe, but it suits my style so well
Oscar Wilde
#64. You're never quite sure, when you first get something if you really have a sense of what an opportunity it is.
Timothy Olyphant
#65. I though about what death is, what a loss is. A sharp pain that lessens with time, but can never quite heal over. A scar. The idea occurred to me there on the site. Take a knife and cut open the earth, and with time the grass would heal it. As if you cut open the rock and polished it.
Maya Lin
#67. Do you miss wearing your kilt?" she asked.
"In London, it caused more bother than it was worth. Ladies either found it indecent or intriguing. A fair few found it to be both. I was never quite sure whether it was indecently intriguing or intriguingly indecent!
Marguerite Kaye
#68. Welcome to Hollywood, a land just off the coast of planet Earth. I am never quite certain if I am visiting the zoo, or if I'm one of the animals in a cage.
Elinor Glyn
#69. I've never quite understood that feeling: that you arrive in a strange place, yet you want to have nothing but familiar experiences.
Bill Bryson
#70. She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start - she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten.
Ian McEwan
#71. The bully and the victim never quite forget their first relations.
E. M. Forster
#72. I languish around in my life, never quite doing what I set out to do. I am tired of being a silver medalist, and tired of fighting uphill battles that I only sort of win.
Kim Gruenenfelder
#73. For me, one of the biggest thrills is going to a theater and going, "Oh, I got a laugh!" Because you never quite get to hear it [otherwise].
Jeremy Irvine
#74. The great thing about 'Weeds' is that everything we do is never quite serious enough to be taken seriously. It always has humor behind it, and it think it makes it definitely more fun for the audience.
Alexander Gould
#75. Old habits never die. And when you've once been in the business of granting wishes, the impulse never quite leaves you
Joanne Harris
#76. He will hear this voice in uneasy dreams for the rest of his life, never quite remembering what he has dreamed, only knowing that the dreams leave him feeling ill somehow - walking restlessly, straightening pictures in loveless rooms, listening to the call to muzzein in alien town squares.
Stephen King
#77. Part of what Brahms and others could never quite get over was that Bruckner the composer of epic symphonies behaved, much of the time, like a nincompoop.
Jan Swafford
#78. Once you move away from home, it's never quite the same again. You expect everything to be just as you left it, and it never is. It's almost the first step into adulthood, realizing you've got to make your own way.
Saoirse Ronan
#79. If you've ever had that feeling of loneliness, of being an outsider, it never quite leaves you. You can be happy or successful or whatever, but that thing still stays within you.
Tim Burton
#80. I'm struck by the sense of desolation in places like this when they're out of season. It's quite shabby and feels like something once happened here that has never quite been re-created.
Steve Hanley
#81. Ialways think it's funny when Indians celebrate Thanksgiving. I mean, sure, the Indians and Pilgrims were best friends during the first Thanksgiving, but a few years later, the Pilgrims were shooting Indians.
So I'm never quite sure why we eat Turkey like everybody else. (101)
Sherman Alexie
#82. I try to find myself in things but never quite make it and end up losing myself in them. That is the fate of the ego.
Eckhart Tolle
#83. I start walking toward my bike with renewed purpose.
"I don't think I need any help to knock on a door."
Carlos yells, "Be careful, my friend. The problem with knocking on doors is you're never quite sure who's going to be on the other side.
Greg Logsted
#84. You're never quite prepared for the inundation of stardom, or whatever you want to call it.
Al Jourgensen
#85. Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader
it is never quite oneself. 2) I usually hate the sight of my handwriting
it lives too much and I dislike its life
I mean by "lives," of course, betrays too much!
Lionel Trilling
#86. He [Thelonious Monk] played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to.
Geoff Dyer
#87. Feel," said Driscoll, his hands and arms out loosely. "Remember how you used to run when you were a kid, and how the wind felt. Like feathers on your arms. You ran and thought any minute you'd fly, but you never quite did.
Ray Bradbury
#88. You know what Lowell says, 'Not failure but low aim is crime.' We must have ideals and try to live up to them, even if we never quite succeed. Life would be a sorry business without them. With
L.M. Montgomery
#89. But Elise eclipses the woman from Jamey's future, the lady in tennis whites flashing her diamond as she drinks orange juice fresh-squeezed by a maid. A woman Jamey never quite believed in anyway.
Jardine Libaire
#90. I've felt afraid as a reporter many times. Sometimes it's sharp, as in a bad moment, or a bad situation; other times it's general, as in a country known for kidnapping, where you can never quite relax.
William Finnegan
#91. The only thing worse than growing up is never quite learning how
Joel Plaskett
#92. We do not disappear without a trace. We leave a wake that never quite disappears, a gash in time that we so laboriously leave behind us.
Lars Saabye Christensen
#93. Some people were like that; they could not escape criticism, because they never quite managed to convince themselves of the role everyone believed they should fill.
Meredith Duran
#94. I'm never quite as excited as people think because with my voice, when I shout, I squeak.
Sid Waddell
#95. Something like your parents divorcing never quite leaves you. What you thought was real isn't real anymore, and that changes your perspective. It makes you more wary but also means you are better equipped to deal with challenges.
Hannah Ware
#96. my cross to bear in life, to always want to help, but to never quite measure up, never be there quite on time to do any good, always to miss the mark.
J. A. Jance
#97. Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England.
Archibald MacLeish
#98. She'd always known she was a bit unnatural. Now it was proven. Her emotional responses were somehow never quite right. When she met Callum she thought he'd saved her, but obviously it was only temporary.
Liane Moriarty
#99. The sum of such chaos was that I seemed to be reading a book that never really started and never quite finished.
Richard Flanagan
#100. The spell of power never quite releases its hold.
Isaac Asimov
