Top 100 Were The Quotes
#1. Um," I asked, "isn't the whole point about being a slave that you don't have a choice to be anything else?" Prettying up the word slave with the adjective-noun constructions makes "enslaved African" sound nonchalant. As in "Those were the cabins of the jolly leprechauns.
Sarah Vowell
#2. The only people out at this hour were ones who couldn't sleep, those haunted by one thing or another: love thwarted, love lost, love thrown away. They were the sort of people who didn't want to be noticed, who wanted to slip through shadows, be alone with their despair.
Alice Hoffman
#3. When I was doing 'All in the Family,' half the time, I was looking at where the cameras were, where were the other actors in the scene, what the audience was doing.
Rob Reiner
#4. She did not know that a copy of her incomplete thesis sat behind one of his firewalls, ensuring her words would survive any event short of the apocalypse. These were the only gestures that made sense to him. So much of what he felt did not translate.
G. Willow Wilson
#5. When I was growing up, I saw the Aaliyah shirts, the DMX shirts, or the collab shirts with DMX and Aaliyah when they had a single together. Those were the dope collage shirts with their faces all over it. They were doing cool things like that.
ASAP Ferg
#6. Books were something that happened to readers. Readers were the victims of books.
Holly Black
#7. Protectionism, socialism, all varieties of state favoritism and restrictions on competition, and the growth of bureaucracy and jobbery were the means by which special interests sought to exploit the public, the great mass of consumers and taxpayers.
Ralph Raico
#9. Women were the reason I became a monk - and, ah, the reason I switched back.
Chris Avellone
#10. I was grown up long before the grown ups were the grown ups.
Aporva Kala
#11. I see a wiser person than when I was younger: having babies, and passing 30, were the turning points. What women in their 40s - I am 39 - lack in gorgeousness, they make up for in wisdom. I love ageing, despite the drawbacks - thinner, drier skin.
Thandie Newton
#12. You were the sun, and I wasn't even the moon.
I loved being the supporting character,
because I felt it was my way of supporting you.
I asked for nothing in return
and wanted so much.
David Levithan
#13. If we were the best hope the human race had for its salvation, things were more fucked up than I'd thought.
Manel Loureiro
#14. There were the talking squiggles he'd seen in the crashed Globe too - writing, it was called - and it covered every surface, as if in this mass of people a man could be so lonely as to want to speak to the buildings.
Peadar O'Guilin
#15. Two babbies shagging each other like they were the first two on earth to discover how 'twas done.
Stephen King
#16. Depressing thought: my friends were the girls I ate lunch with, all buddies from kindergarten who knew one another so well we weren't sure if we even liked one another anymore.
Lauren Groff
#17. Emilia hooked her arm through mine, like we were the best of friends. "You solve problems," she said again. "I have a problem. Ergo . . .
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#18. You were the best birthday present I ever got."
"Thank you."
"I wanted to give you something back, but I've got to warn you that it's not half as good as my present. Even so, you have to keep it."
"All right."
He draped the pink bow around his neck and grinned. "Happy birthday, Rosebud.
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
#19. When I met you, you were the bright light that saved me from the darkest depths.
Angie Stanton
#20. I used to get letters saying, 'I didn't know black children and white children were the same.'
Dick Gregory
#21. Growing up she had become used to allowing men the ability to curve themselves into question marks around her and hold her desperately as if she were the answer. She had become afraid to admit that she is not.
R. YS Perez
#22. There's a long history of anthropomorphic animals in Japanese literature. The so-called 'funny animal scrolls' were the first narratives in Japanese history, and the heroes of many folk tales have animals as their companions.
Stan Sakai
#23. those days, back then, these were the years of . . . Or how about, 'Now that the mirror tells a different story, I can say it and get it out of the way. I really was pretty.' Too cruel? No need
Ian McEwan
#24. I will rue for all eternity every moment of suffering I've caused you. The entire time I'm burning in Hell, I'll regret each tear I made you weep. But if Hell were the price for twenty days with you, I'd condemn myself again and again.
Karen Marie Moning
#25. The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.
Sylvia Plath
#26. Books, the books that I loved above all else to spend my time with, were the great tools for understanding one's life and the lives of other people.
Ellen Douglas
#27. Mine were the actions of a desperate man. Present a defining moment to one and he'll bite every time.
Larry Brooks
#28. There are prating coxcombs in the world who would rather talk than listen, although Shakespeare himself were the orator, and human nature the theme!
Charles Caleb Colton
#29. The dreams that were buried the deepest were the hardest to get rid of.
Michelle M. Pillow
#30. Worst of all were the highly unlikely science-fiction novels, or the equally implausible futuristic tales.
Couldn't my mom and Nana Victoria see for themselves that I was both mystified and frightened by life on Earth?
John Irving
#31. We stole their babes and mothers, chiefs and braves Although we held the whip, you knew we were The real slaves To alchemy, human alchemy.
Andy Partridge
#32. TO preach a sermon or edit a newspaper were the two things in life which I always felt I could do with credit to myself and benefit to the world, if I only had the chance.
Rebecca Harding Davis
#33. Fact of the matter was that they were all too close to the situation. They'd been too close to the situation for months. They were so close to the situation that it was difficult to tell whether or not they were the situation.
Maggie Stiefvater
#35. Oh shame on you, who call yourself a Christian! Do you not see that it is the grossest idolatry to speak of the market as though it were the rival of God?
Amitav Ghosh
#36. Someone asked me what home was, and all I could think of were the stars on the tip of your tongue, the flowers sprouting from your mouth, the roots entwined in the gaps between your fingers, the ocean echoing inside of your rib cage.
E. E. Cummings
#37. I almost laughed in spite of my nerves. What were the odds that two werewolves had the hots for
me? Like I was some gigantic monster magnet. Was there a sign on my back that said, bite me,
i'm available !?
Bree Despain
#38. [T]hat his cheating and his bitterness and his cruelty were the revolt of his will ... against a deep-rooted instinct of holiness, against a desire for God that terrified and yet obsessed him.
W. Somerset Maugham
#39. She wondered whether the books she loved consoled her precisely because they were the manifestations of her own isolation.
Rachel Cusk
#40. In ancient times, the seven seas were the Indian Ocean, the Black Sea, the Caspian see, the Adriatic Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Red Sea.
Antal Parody
#41. I remember very vividly what it's like to be a child. The adults you liked were the ones who listened to you when you spoke and gave you time to say what you wanted to say and actually listened, and quite often reacted as a result of what you'd said.
Rolf Harris
#42. A resolute leader who collects ten thousand adventurers about him can do as he pleases. Were the whole world a single Imperium, it would thereby become merely the maximum conceivable field for the exploits of such conquering heroes.
Oswald Spengler
#43. Nobody realizes that Mormons were the first Americans to settle Las Vegas.
David Roberts
#44. Surfers were the ones who named all my songs. They'd yell out the names, and we just kept 'em.
Dick Dale
#45. The Heads were the only band on that scene that had a groove.
David Byrne
#46. I resolve to live with all my might while I do live. I resolve never to lose one moment of time and to improve my use of time in the most profitable way I possibly can. I resolve never to do anything I wouldn't do, if it were the last hour of my life.
Jonathan Edwards
#47. Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good - only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
Ralph Ellison
#48. You do it for me because you were the girl across the street, your hair shining in the sun, laughing, making me fall in love with you, and I didn't even goddamned fucking know you.
Kristen Ashley
#49. I know a lot about when I was a little girl, because my sister used to keep a diary. Today I keep her diary in a drawer next to by bed. I like to see how her memories were the same as mine, but also different.
Cynthia Kadohata
#50. The baby's eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she'd stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she'd washed up on.
Jenny Offill
#51. I was the last, the sole survivor. The most honorable thing a survivor could do was survive. If you stayed on your feet, stayed alive, you were the winner.
Jean-Claude Izzo
#52. The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity. I will avow that I then believed, and now believe, that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.
John Adams
#53. His examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning ... to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#54. My parents were the ones who gave me the independence, who gave me the spark to do anything that you set your mind to, as all parents should do for their kids.
Marlee Matlin
#55. How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said.
I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it.
Nobody would know it.
It wouldn't make any difference. When you die it's the same as if everybody else died too.
Cormac McCarthy
#56. Whites were the winners, blacks were the losers, we wrote the history books, and they didn't feature.
Phillip Noyce
#57. If you want to be negative about the whole thing you can say all guitar bands after the Beatles were just a waste of time because the Beatles were the best. I think it's far better to give new records a try.
Stephen Malkmus
#58. Puma was all about function and not at all about design. The founder of the company always believed functionality and performance were the only ingredients that could make Puma successful and design never mattered.
Jochen Zeitz
#59. In Berlin, I worked from home, were the only other women sat sedately on my bookshelves. They were good company, it has to be said, but a little quiet.
Luisa Weiss
#60. The things I thought were so important
because of the effort I put into them
have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered.
Thomas Merton
#61. Cassius and Brutus were the more distinguished for that very circumstance that their portraits were absent.
[Lat., Praefulgebant Cassius atque Brutus eo ipso, quod effigies eorum non videbantur.]
Tacitus
#62. Genetic studies in Iceland have found that many of the women who were the founding stock of Iceland came from England and what is now France. Some were probably captured and carried off in Viking raids only 40 generations ago.
Keith Henson
#64. It's my theory that many writers were the confidantes of one or the other parent. I was my mother's confidante; she had been her mother's confidante.
Jayne Anne Phillips
#65. The difference between people is that we are all different. If we were the same we would be boring, dull, not that fun. We need to be different if we weren't what type of world would we have?
Lindsey Johnson
#66. Being on United Artists was almost as bad as not being on any label at all. They were the crappiest in the business. All they did was movie soundtracks. Now, they were making an effort to become much hipper - signing people like Bobby Womack and what have you.
Don McLean
#67. Shaquille and I kind of joke we were the Christopher Columbus of social media. We're kind of out on a boat by ourselves going through these uncharted waters. But it's become more understood, embraced and accepted, and now it's pretty much expected by fans for athletes, leagues and teams to be there.
Amy Jo Martin
#68. In that moment, we were the same, each of us destroyed by our limited understanding of reality.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh
#69. But earlier this week on a wooded path,
I thought the swans afloat on the reservoir
were the true geniuses,
the ones who had figured out how to fly,
how to be both beautiful and brutal,
and how to mate for life.
Billy Collins
#70. His books were the closest thing he had to furniture and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.
Laura Hillenbrand
#71. Gone were the memories of her days spent with Quincy. The best thing Chanel could have ever done was shoot that nigga. The
Nako
#72. The instruments, glassware, and chemical reagents necessary for my project were the same as my 19th-century predecessors had.
Rita Levi-Montalcini
#73. I liked Roy Jones, Sugar Ray Leonard, Ali ... those were the guys I was looking at growing up.
Nonito Donaire
#74. Never make a Christ out of your faith, nor think of as if it were the independent source of your salvation. Our life is found in "looking unto Jesus," not in looking to our own faith. By faith all things become possible to us; yet the power is not in the faith, but in the God upon whom faith relies.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#75. Humans were the weakest species. Maybe that was why they could be the meanest animals.
James Patterson
#77. I know that when I was a children's librarian, that was about 1940, boys particularly asked where were the books about kids like us, and there weren't any at that time.
Beverly Cleary
#78. We were the first generation without a draft," he says matter-of-factly. "We didn't need to worry about life and death, so we channeled all that time and energy into obsessing over this TV show or that comic book." This
Glen Weldon
#79. We were the standard, the hope, and the law.
J.J. McAvoy
#80. I didn't doubt for a moment that she had read them all, or that they were the right books to own. Further, they seemed to be an organic combination of her mind and personality, whereas mine struck me as functionally separate, straining to describe a character I hoped to grow into.
Julian Barnes
#81. To attribute these two great developments to the Central Committee, is to take a very narrow view of civilization. The Central Committee announced the developments, it is true, but they were no more the cause of them than were the kings of the imperialistic period the cause of war.
E. M. Forster
#82. Speak as though it were the last sentence allowed you.
Elias Canetti
#83. So requisite is the use of Astrology to the Arts of Divination, as it were the Key that opens the door of all their Mysteries.
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
#84. Why do you think I can remember that," she asked, "when you can't? Why does nature do that to us? How does that serve evolution? Those were the most important years of my life, and you can't even remember them.
Rainbow Rowell
#85. You know for years before the notion of sequels, actors were the franchise. John Wayne would rarely do sequels, but he kind of played the same guy with a different name in every movie. I have no problem with using actors as franchises. And that's what is fun to do.
Joel Silver
#86. I think, you know, it was something that I really wanted. I wanted so much to have a son or daughter. We adopted a son. And it was just the most wonderful thing. I think the only thing that was difficult for both Maury and myself were the sleepless nights.
Connie Chung
#87. My mother was 45 when she had me, so when I was in high school my parents were the same age as my friends' grandparents.
Jack White
#88. Sometimes, lies were the same things as wishes. Sometimes, wishes were things to hate.
Shannon A. Thompson
#89. She was a very beautiful person who was missing something very ugly. Her winnings were the absence of something, and this quality hung around her.
Miranda July
#90. I felt like I was well on my way to becoming the neighborhood cat lady. All I needed were the cats.
J. Lynn
#91. Through Jiu Jitsu I have developed many of the most meaningful relationships in my life, and if that were the only benefit of my practice, Jiu Jitsu would still be the best endeavor I have ever undertaken.
Chris Matakas
#92. The first fantasy books I can remember reading were 'The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek' and the series of 'Mushroom Planet' books.
Melanie Rawn
#93. My parents were of the generation who thought they were the children of a free Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in central Europe.
Madeleine Albright
#94. Then there were the general moral duties: not to commit adultery or fornication, not to stay out late at night after 8 p.m. frequenting inns and brothels, and not to play cards except during the Twelve Days of Christmas.
Jasper Ridley
#95. If low taxes were the way that people like me created wealth, then we'd be starting our companies in the Congo or Somalia or Afghanistan, but we're not. We come to places where there are lots and lots of customers.
Nick Hanauer
#96. From the early 1960s to the mid-1980s - the era of military dictatorship when South Korea was rebuilding itself from a postwar economic basket case to a humming, modern nation - military schools were the track of choice for ambitious young men.
Kim Young-ha
#97. I have worked with some of the greatest minds in astrophysics and it is now clear that they were the dunces of astrobiology.
Steven Magee
#98. It was all a back-handed blessing, and my friends were the ones who kept the faith, read my work, and urged me to submit it to publishers (by sending it out for me - they would not hear no for an answer.
Leslie Banks
#99. I wanted to be a designer since I was a kid, and I was always attracted to the way rock stars dressed and the way their girlfriends dressed. I always thought that they were the most interesting people.
Anna Sui
#100. A reading of the Declaration of Independence on the steps of a building is widely covered. The events that started the American Revolution were the meetings in homes, pubs, on street corners.
Harvey Milk
