There Once Was Quotes

#1. Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.

Nicole Krauss

#2. Once there was a tree, and she loved a little boy.

Shel Silverstein

#3. Especially once those poetry events began, because, yeah, the stuff was still on the page, but the page was starting to spill into real space, spill into air, once you could hear it, once there was a typewriter, once there was a body of a typist, it was getting rid of the confines of the page.

Vito Acconci

#4. Once there was a moose, a very poor, thin, lonely moose who lived on a rocky hill where only bitter leaves grew and bushes with spiky branches. One day a red motor car drove past. In the backseat was
a grey gypsy dog wearing a gold earring.

Annie Proulx

#5. There was once a caustic comment from someone suggesting I was breeding a new race. Fans from different countries have married, amazing things like that. I've been to some of the weddings. I went to one here the other day, a pagan ceremony.

Terry Pratchett

#6. Once undressed I felt less exposed. (...) Naked was my uniform. (...) There was no pressure to conform.

Aiden Shaw

#7. Once upon a time, there was a generation of parents who were certain that Elvis Presley's unashamed hip-swivellingvwas most certainly the end of society.

Charlie Caruso

#8. I didn't show up at the ceremony to collect any of my first three Oscars. Once I went fishing, another time there was a war on, and on another occasion, I remember, I was suddenly taken drunk.

John Ford

#9. Every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down.

Ryu Murakami

#10. I had no idea that, when you audition for television or movies, you go to a big building - like, an office building - and you walk in the room, and everybody, I assumed, was smarter than me and better than me, and there's actors you recognize. I once fainted at an audition.

Kurt Fuller

#11. It's lucky I was there. Then again, who am I kidding? I'm in most places at least once, and in 1943, I was just about everywhere.

Markus Zusak

#12. Once upon a time, there lived a boy, and he had to risk everything to keep what he loved. But really the story was: Once upon a time, there lived a boy, and his fear ate him alive.

Maggie Stiefvater

#13. Mamie told me living rooms were once known as death rooms, back when funerals were a home matter. After mortuaries came into fashion, there was no need for keeping bodies on ice at home, and the death room was rechristened the living room.

Sarah Jude

#14. It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can.

Bill Bryson

#15. Once upon a time, there lived a troll that was so naughty and so evil that he decided to make a mirror that would twist the image of anything and anyone reflected in it.

Ken T Seth

#16. Once upon a bye, before your grandfather's grandfather was born, on the edge of an unexplored wilderness called the Endless Forest, there lived a boy named Tim

Stephen King

#17. I'm a very bad impersonator so I can't even remember if I've ever done a sports person. I mean, I think I was Bruce Jenner once but I don't think I said anything in the sketch I was just sitting there in a like a bronze track suit. No dialogue. They don't trust me with dialogue.

Will Forte

#18. What was it like out there? Away from the city?"

"Quiet," Gib chuckled. "My neighbor once had a chicken lay an egg that hatched two chicks. That was big news for a year.

Shiriluna Nott

#19. There once was a demographic survey done to determine if money was connected to happiness and Ireland was the only place where this did not turn out to be true.

Fiona Shaw

#20. There is no more pressure on my rudder, he once remarked. Plain sailing, no drag on other people either. A bit of dancing now and then, that's fine. I still see those girls, but I pretend they're paintings. Or advertisements. But that was only later.

Cees Nooteboom

#21. My father once asked me if I knew where yonder was. I said I thought yonder was another word for there. He smiled and said, No, yonder is between here and there.

Siri Hustvedt

#22. Frank Sobotka in 'The Wire' on HBO was one of the greatest characters I've ever played. They cut his throat at the end of that season. There's something about creative coupling that seems to go with great characters, and the fact that you can never play them again once you're done.

Chris Bauer

#23. There was no justice in the world, but he had known that ever since the death of his father. The spirits took no part in the lives of men once they had been born. A man either endured what the world sent his way, or was crushed.

Conn Iggulden

#24. Once I decided football was the way for me, there was no looking back. Nothing was going to distract me.

Michael Vick

#25. The Japanese island of Okunoshima, also called "Rabbit Island" after the many furry inhabitants who live there, was once home to Japan's poison gas factories. The rabbits are descendants of ones used for chemical testing during World War II.

Cary McNeal

#26. Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#27. Sinatra invited me once to his birthday party in L.A. I was young, and I felt great about it. But when I got there, the Rat Pack were all in the kitchen laughing their heads off.

Tony Bennett

#28. Before there was a death there had been a life, and before that life a death and that there would be a life after this death too. The circles would continue on without end and everyone who was once connected would be connected again.

M.J. Rose

#29. I am less blindly confident than I once was, for I have been learning a truer estimate of myself, my failings and limitations, in these dark days. I have learnt to hope that if there be a Judgment Day of some kind, God will not see us with our own eyes, nor judge us as we judge ourselves.

Vera Brittain

#30. Once you're a Motown artist, that's your stigmatism, and I was there from the very first day.

Smokey Robinson

#31. In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#32. A kind of memory that tells us that what we're now striving for was once nearer and truer and attached to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath. After the first home the second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#33. Reality the iconoclast once more. Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.

C.S. Lewis

#34. The greatest drawback to true love was that once true love unexpectedly ends there is no other romance that can replace it. Romance instead becomes a race, with one's new beau consistently failing to meet up to the grand expectations set by the meaning of one's existence. The only one.

Denis Fitzpatrick

#35. I was once asked why I don't participate in anti-war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I'll be there.

Mother Teresa

#36. Vilnius was once known as 'The Jerusalem of Lithuania' because of the number of prayer houses and scholars there; in the first half of the 20th century, it became a center of Yiddish-language scholarship.

Elizabeth McCracken

#37. There's not much to any of us once you take out all the water. How much is left in a person, do you think?" She waited for an answer. "Probably less than a two-liter," Lincoln said, still feeling like it would be rude to act as if this was anything other than normal conversation.

Rainbow Rowell

#38. There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart's Desire.

Neil Gaiman

#39. I think Donald Trump's history has shown that this was a very problematic thing. There were so many ways Iraq could have gone awry once we started, and I don't think most of us spend enough time considering the dangers.

Jeff Sessions

#40. There are a variety of techniques for breaking software down into pieces and making software development more efficient. Many of these techniques have been sort of ... and everybody got excited about but very little benefit was actually derived once the thing was put into practice.

Bill Gates

#41. A woman could do that to you - reach that place in your soul where the best and worst of you was kept. And once she was there, she owned that place and never left.

Lisa Kleypas

#42. There was also no character arc. Change only comes when we face the difficulty of reality head-on. Fantasy changes nothing, which is why, once we're done fantasizing, it feels like a bankrupt story.

Donald Miller

#43. Now I'm reading an old article on San Giovanni a Carbonara, where it explains what the Carbonara or Carboneto was. I thought that there was coal there once, and coal miners. But no, it was the place for the

Elena Ferrante

#44. Maybe there was once a human who looked like you, and somewhere along the line you killed him and took his place. And your superiors don't know.

Philip K. Dick

#45. Once, in a kingdom called Delain, there was a King with two sons. Delain was a very old kingdom and it had had hundreds of Kings, perhaps even thousands; when time goes on long enough, not even historians can remember everything.

Stephen King

#46. Once you do have a child, you want to talk about every detail of it. And it is really boring to all your friends, and it should be. I was really worried about even going there at all.

Matt Berninger

#47. Something rose in Oscar's chest, like a flower blossoming all at once. It grew until it filled him and threatened to spill over everywhere. The words [he] spoke touched a longing so deep Oscar hadn't even known it was there.

Anne Ursu

#48. Once upon a time there was a huge family of children; and they were terribly, terribly naughty.

Christianna Brand

#49. He was going to die soon, you knew when you saw those eyes. There was no sign of life in his flesh, just the barest traces of what had once been a life. His body was like a dilapidated old house from which all furniture and fixtures have been removed and which awaited now only its final demolition.

Haruki Murakami

#50. She'd made her choice when he asked for her hand and she'd offered it without question. Once he touched her, she knew she was his. Afterward, he had always been there in the shadows, like a ghost who would not leave. And now the ghost had decided that he wanted her.

Sylvain Reynard

#51. Once there was a seamstress who could weave fabric from feeling. She sewed gowns of delight: sheer, sparkling, sleek. She cut cloth out of ambition and ardor, idyll and industry.

Marie Rutkoski

#52. Once there was a boy so meek and modest, he was awarded a Most Humble badge. The next day, it was taken away because he wore it. Here endeth the lesson.

Nancy Gibbs

#53. She seemed a series of slight flaws best expressed in a beauty spot above her right lip. And he understood that the sum of all these blemishes was somehow beauty, and there was about this beauty a power, and that power was at once conscious and unconscious.

Richard Flanagan

#54. Nobody heard of Vietnam until there was a war," Ali once proclaimed. "Nobody heard of Korea until there was a war. Nobody heard of Zaire until I fought there, and paying me is a whole lot cheaper than fighting a war."9

Thomas Hauser

#55. Once there was a girl named Riley, the story began. Her heart was a secret garden, its stone walls cracked and weathered. And it was hungry. p160

Scott Westerfeld

#56. The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.

Marcel Proust

#57. I might have been made of metal once, but not anymore. Like Pinocchio, I'd turned into a real girl. So far it sucked. But there was nothing I could do about it.

Natalie Standiford

#58. He knew I'd seen everything in that alley, that I'd stood there and done nothing. He knew that I'd betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me once again, maybe for the last time.

Khaled Hosseini

#59. There is an empty place within me where my heart once was.

George R R Martin

#60. It's become like an urban myth. I don't know her. I don't know anybody she knows. I was standing there at the party by myself for an hour and then I left. Once I got those auditions, I worked really hard. Nobody did me any favors.

Shannyn Sossamon

#61. They valued themselves. Once, they knew God valued them. Then they began to think there was no God, only blind forces. So they valued themselves, they loved themselves and attended to their natures -

A.S. Byatt

#62. Only the keeper sees
that,where the ring-dove broods
and the badgers roll at ease,
there was once a road through the woods

Rudyard Kipling

#63. It was the kind of knowledge that, once it enters you, seems like it's lived there forever.

Marie Rutkoski

#64. The quality of death, like that of life, must be of an infinite variety, and if one has already died once, then what was there to look for in dying for good and all, as he was now?

Ray Bradbury

#65. I am not doctor who and I can't turn back time. I once said the audience was all punks and little girls, now they are old punks and old little girls. I don't mind the fans being maturer, if there are younger fans that's good too.

Marco Pirroni

#66. Bodybuilders party a lot, and once, in Gold's
the gym in Venice, California, where all the top guys train there was a black girl who came out naked. Everybody jumped on her and took her upstairs, where we all got together.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

#67. I had once read, in one of those pre-plague books in the library, that love was bearing witness. That it was the act of watching someone's life, of simply being there to say: you're life is worth seeing.

Anna Carey

#68. When we think about fairy tales, we think about happily ever afters, forgetting the darkness that stories beginning with "once upon a time" so often contain.
I tried to protect Shay from that darkness. But there was no way to shield her from the truth: Life is not a fairy tale.

Laura J. Burns

#69. At which Charion Pratt blushed girlishly, to her own furious embarrassment, yet the eye she cast upon the little coxcomb was not unlike that which a certain toad had once cast upon her: for there is never anything but apparent paradox in the choices made by lovers.

Michael Moorcock

#70. Conducting, I tried it once off the cuff, and quickly realized there were subtle aspects that I was missing. There is a lot more to it that I was able to grasp simply by watching conductors.

Carter Burwell

#71. Nike used to be known as Blue Ribbon Sports. What's now Sara Lee used to be Consolidated Foods. And Exxon was once Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. These were name changes that worked. But for all the ones that do, there are 10 or 20 that don't.

James Surowiecki

#72. Once a man criticized my desire for knowledge by saying that it was not fitting for a woman to possess learning because there was so little of it. I replied that it was even less fitting for a man to possess ignorance because there was so much of it.

Christine De Pizan

#73. I owed it to my father that I was elected to Parliament in the first place, but I owed it to my mother that I stuck it out once I got there.

Agnes Macphail

#74. Once you free your mind about the concept of harmony and of music being correct, you can do whatever you want. So nobody told me what to do, and there was no preconception of what to do.

Giorgio Moroder

#75. A friend of mine once said that there were only two truly national events in the history of the United States. One was the Civil War and the other one was the Depression.

Arthur Miller

#76. Once the interlude was over and I was released, I fled the room and, taking the stairs two at a time, found refuge in a dank corner of the basement filled with potatoes and mice. I stayed there until dinner, doing my best to stop crying by staring at the glowing face of my father's wristwatch.

Allen Kurzweil

#77. Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.

Ray Bradbury

#78. Once you've ruled out the impossible then whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. The problem lay in working out what was impossible, of course. That was the trick, all right. There was also the curious incident of the orangutan in the night-time.

Terry Pratchett

#79. I mean, without the antagonist, there would be no story! It'd be like: 'Once upon a time there was a girl who wanted to be loved, so she met a prince and got married and lived Happily Ever After, The End'? That's not a story; that's a bumper sticker.

Shannon Hale

#80. The FBI had once estimated there were approximately two-hundred and fifty serial killers active in the US at any one time. Alex's job was whittling that number down, one murderous asshole at a time.

Toni Anderson

#81. It wasn't long before he spotted another pay phone, a slanted structure near the river, and Annie and Emma waited patiently while he once again dialed and then hung up, but there was a strange comfort in the numbers, and words had never come easily to him anyways.

Jennifer E. Smith

#82. Am dining at Goldini's Restaurant, Gloucester Road, Kensington. Please come at once and join me there. Bring with you a jemmy, a dark lantern, a chisel, and a revolver. S. H. It was a nice equipment for a respectable citizen to carry through the dim, fog-draped streets.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#83. Emma showered carefully - the downside of having your hair long when you were a Shadowhunter was never knowing after a fight if there was ichor in it. Once the back of her neck had been green for a week.

Cassandra Clare

#84. MR. MOUSTAFA
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once know as humanity... He was one of them. What more is there to say?

Wes Anderson

#85. Once there was an elephant Who tried to use the telephant. No! no! I mean an elephone Who tried to use the telephone. Dear me, I am not certain quite That even now I've got it right.

Laura E. Richards

#86. There was the focus of seeking pleasure, and the numbing effect, once they were finished, removing all specific thoughts from her brain. It ushered in the solid, dreamless sleep that otherwise eluded her.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#87. I realized that there was something internal that I could gain from pursuing this career as an actor. However, once I got into the business I just really abhorred what this career can drum up inside of a person.

Sonja Sohn

#88. I had a lot of successes, but what really made me fearless was my complete failure at Zidd-Davis. Once you've lived through that, you know you can survive, and you're not as scared ... There's nothing to build confidence like real achievement, but also like real failure.

Esther Dyson

#89. My dad was a longshoreman in the Port of Miami. Tough job. I worked down there in the summer once. One day. Never again. My dad was a no-nonsense guy. As a kid, I hated his rules, but as a man, I understand what he was teaching. He taught me you have to work hard for everything you get.

Nick Ferguson

#90. As Christian mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said: "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience." He was right. If we recognize the soul lesson, we can grow beyond suffering, and there is no stress in this state of understanding.

Brian L. Weiss

#91. In a city by the sea which was once called St. Petersburg, then Petrograd, then Leningrad, then, much later, St. Petersburg again, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street. By a long, thin window, a child in a pale blue dress and pale green slippers waited for a bird to marry her.

Catherynne M Valente

#92. In all cases love was a strong emotion, not easily contained once it was unleashed. I realized now that love was like a blossoming flower that continually added more and more petals. But there was no end point. There was no full bloom. It went on forever. Growing, strengthening.

Rachel Hawthorne

#93. He reached for her and kissed her. It was all at once passionate, as if there was too much in him to contain. He was immediately swept up in it. It took no effort, the difference between swimming on your own and being washed away in a flood.

Sarah Addison Allen

#94. I didn't learn to read until I was almost 14 years old. Reading out loud for me was a nightmare because I would mispronounce words or reconstruct things that weren't even there. That's when one of my teachers discovered I had a learning disability called dyslexia. Once I got help, I read very well!

Patricia Polacco

#95. She had told herself more than once not to call it loneliness, since it wasn't any different from one year to the next, it was just how her body felt, like hungry or tired, except it was always there, always the same.

Marilynne Robinson

#96. Once upon a different time, there was a girl who lived in a kingdom of death. Wolves howled up her arm. A whole pack of them--made of tattoo ink and pain, memory and loss. It was the only thing about her that ever stayed the same.

Ryan Graudin

#97. There were faces at the windows and words written in blood; deep in the crypt a lonely ghoul crunched on something that might once have been alive; forked lightnings slashed the ebony night; the faceless were walking; all was right with the world

Neil Gaiman

#98. There you go, belittling us again. You must know by now that I've never done any of this for anyone else. I was a slut once with my body, but I've never been a slut with my heart.

R.K. Lilley

#99. There was once a king, and he had a queen; and he was the manliest of his gender, and she was the loveliest of hers. They had nineteen children, and were always having more.

Charles Dickens

#100. There is nothing better than this, he said, and I worried he was right. I worried that once something had entered you, it would never leave - he would plant himself inside me and grow and grow until I was nothing but him.

Alison Espach