Who I Was Quotes

#1. My wife, who does not like journalizing, said it was leaving myself embowelled to posterity
a good strong figure. But I think itis rather leaving myself embalmed. It is certainly preserving myself.

James Boswell

#2. Of all the men I have known, I cannot recall one whose mother did her level best for him when he was little who did not turn out well when he grew up.

Frances Parkinson Keyes

#3. People who shop at Barnes and Noble voted Ulysses the best novel of the last century, and who's to tell them different? There was a point when I would have liked to, but apparently that's just because I'm a bitch.

Dale Peck

#4. I was a little bit of a slob who was sort of surrounded by dirty laundry. I can trace the exact moment that I became a tidy human being, and that moment was the day my son Sam was born.

Tim Daly

#5. Oh! Do not excite yourself. Shall I say that he interested me because he was trying to grow a mustache and as yet the result is poor." Poirot stroked his own magnificent mustache tenderly. "It is an art," he murmured, "the growing of the mustache! I have sympathy for all who attempt it.

Agatha Christie

#6. I rallied all the youth around me, all the people who liked Compa, but felt like it was dying, going away, being replaced with Zouk. So it became a movement. So, through the years, I've played my music with dedication, discipline and originality, and controversy also.

Michel Martelly

#7. There are some great teachers who have had great students, but they themselves can't play a note. I don't understand it, because the most I learned from my teacher was just hearing him play.

Joshua Bell

#8. I'm naturally guarded because of the way I was brought up. But I understand people are interested in who I am.

James McCartney

#9. After a while, the anger I felt just sort of became part of me, like it was the only way I knew how to handle the grief. I didn't like who I'd become, but I was stuck in this horrible cycle of questions and blame.

Nicholas Sparks

#10. Paul Lucas had a particularly amusing accent, so I chuckled. That was terrible; I shouldn't have done that, but he took it too big. He got up and said he couldn't work with people who laughed at him!

Fay Wray

#11. I began photographing in 1946. Before that, I was a painter and drawer, with my mother and father's support. They were a bit pissed when I went into photography. They thought photographers were guys who took pictures at weddings.

Harold Feinstein

#12. I'm one of those people who had Christmas and my birthday always combined, and generally, my birthday was pretty much ignored. But my parents are always good about making some kind of special effort to make me feel like I also have a birthday that exists.

Noel Wells

#13. It seemed that I was the only one who cared about me.

Jay Asher

#14. I worked with someone who told me they'd never like me. But for some reason, I just felt like I needed her approval. So I started changing myself to please her. It made me stop being social and friendly. I was so unhappy.

Ariana Grande

#15. I was 26 when I went to my first acting class. I'm naturally quite shy. I'm a quite private person. There's this really strange acting class in New York called Black Nexxus. For someone who's slightly shy or self-conscious, it's the most frightening thing you can do.

Hannah Ware

#16. I was referred to her by a guardian in northern Wilmington, a guy who handles people that are moving into nursing homes. They leave all their stuff there, and we have to empty the houses out. She provides a great service

Richard Harris

#17. Of course it would be hard. But I remembered what my nurseryman grandfather used to say when I didn't want to go to school: half the work in the world was done by people who didn't feel so good today.

Rollo Romig

#18. I was very compelled by a woman who would choose this profession. She [Maura Isles] came from a very highly-educated, wealthy background and could have chosen to do a lot of other things, and has this uber-feminine, modern woman mentality, but works this job.

Sasha Alexander

#19. It doesn't feel like it was me who was doing that thing. And it's so hard to feel responsible for something you don't remember. So I never feel bad enough. I feel bad, but the thing that I've done - it's removed from me. It's like it doesn't belong to me.

Paula Hawkins

#20. I sit on it's edge, looking down at the man who feels like he just materialized out of nowhere. My head still swims with euphoria from the moment...a moment I was just in with one man whilst sleeping next to another. Suddenly feeling dirty, I pull the sheets wrapped in front of my body closer.

E.J. Mellow

#21. On the other hand, there is a certain advantage in traveling with someone who has a reputation for shooting rather than being shot: as Keram said, in a self-satisfied way, they might kill me, but they would know that, if I was with him, there would be unpleasantness afterwards.

Freya Stark

#22. I think there's nothing better than laughing in life, so that's nice, to be thought of as someone who can make someone laugh. It's 'cause I think life is hard. You know, my dad was a really silly man. A great Irish silly man. And that's fine.

Joan Cusack

#23. If any man is able to convince me and show me that I do not think or act right, I will gladly change; for I seek the truth by which no man was ever injured. But he is injured who abides in his error and ignorance.

Marcus Aurelius

#24. I was always watching the boys and how they interacted. It comes with being a feminist, just somebody who thinks a lot about gender and how it plays out in society.

Lynn Coady

#25. When I was in junior high I read a lot of Danielle Steele. So I always assumed that the day I got engaged I'd be naked, covered in rose petals, and sleeping with the brother of the man who'd kidnapped me.

Jenny Lawson

#26. In every single culture I encountered, there were always women who defied cultural norms to do what they believed was right for them. This phenomenon has never been related to how rich, poor, successful or not successful the woman may be.

Zainab Salbi

#27. The bungalow was a hideous red-brick structure built, if I had to guess, in the early 1980s by some hack architect who'd been aiming at art deco and hit Tracy Emin instead.

Ben Aaronovitch

#28. My mom was always pretty supportive. She saw me do plays and she'd always act out the parts I did. My aunt, who played a big part in my life, was a little bit more reserved, because if they don't see you on TV every week they think you must be starving.

Angela Bassett

#29. This man who was my father's age hit me hard on my head when I was 17. I started bleeding. I took out my sandal and hit his head hard, and he started to bleed, too.

Kangana Ranaut

#30. I hate to think of you stuck here all day every day, doing nothing with that brilliant brain of yours."
"It never was brilliant. Anyway, who keeps these books to see who's used themselves wisely and who's wasted?

Tessa Hadley

#31. But [Patrick's] character is partly based on a boy named Mark who lived across the street from me when I was growing up ... I liked hanging out with him and was sad when he moved away after only a year in the neighborhood. I guess writing about Patrick is a way for me to spend more time with Mark.

Linda Sue Park

#32. Juno MacGuff: Wise move. I know this girl who had a huge crazy freakout because she took too many behavioral meds at once. She took off all her clothes and jumped into the fountain at Ridgedale Mall and she was like, "Blaaaaah! I'm a kraken from the sea!"
Su-Chin: That was you.

Diablo Cody

#33. I started writing when I was 9 years old. I was like this weird kid who would just stay in my room, typing little funny magazines and drawing comic strips.

R.L. Stine

#34. I take my vote as a salute to the little guy, the one who doesn't hit 500 home runs. I was one of the guys that did all they could to win. I'm proud of my stats, but I don't think I ever got on for.

Joe Morgan

#35. The ultimate moment where I most felt like a rebel was in St. Petersburg, Russia [in 2012 during the MDNA Tour] when I was told they were going to arrest anyone who was openly or obviously gay and they came to my shows and I spoke out against the government.

Madonna Ciccone

#36. In effect, I was asking that if Russia mobilized against Austria, the German Government, who had been supporting the Austrian demand on Serbia, should ask Austria to consider some modification of her demands, under the threat of Russian mobilization.

Edward Grey

#37. People are still asking me if I knew Star Wars was going to be that big of a hit. Yes, we all knew. The only one who didn't know was George.

Carrie Fisher

#38. Well, everybody knew their character. I was the only one who didn't have a partner. I basically showed up when people got in trouble. Where I came from, I don't know. Nobody knows. But I would show up to help.

Bubba Smith

#39. There was my mom and I had a wife for a long time and now there is my fianc-e. Eileen is in a long line of women who have given me orders.

Jeffrey Ashby

#40. Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.

John Wayne

#41. I worked with a man named Patty Crane who was Errol Flynn's stand-in back in the '30s in Hollywood.

David James Elliott

#42. My dad was a different bloke to me and not very nice to my mum, although I never judge him. If you did, you'd become one of those people who is all-consumed by a fault in their past. And I haven't got the time for it.

Martin Clunes

#43. They've got this crazy actor who's 82 years old up there in a suit. I was a mayor, and they're probably thinking I know how to give a speech, but even when I was mayor I never gave speeches. I gave talks.

Clint Eastwood

#44. People who were born in '66 are nearly fifty? I know the show's fifty, but it seems like yesterday. Human years are different. I'd have guessed that Tim was twenty-five for thirty.

Nick Hornby

#45. I thought that there is yet hope for someone who was caught in the river's whirlpool, but none exists for those who are trapped in the vortex of a beautiful woman's eyes.

Sumeetha Manikandan

#46. Nothing pleases me more than when somebody who was awe-inspired to be working with me realizes I'm just another schmuck that they're bored of hanging out with on a set. I love that moment. I like it when that persistent illusion is smashed.

Robert Downey Jr.

#47. Who said that love was fire?
I know that love is ash.
It is the thing which remains
When the fire is spent,
The holy essence of experience.

Stephen E. Braude

#48. So I got home, and the phone was ringing. I picked it up, and said 'Who's speaking please?' And a voice said 'You are.'

Tim Vine

#49. So the fact that the first movie about Steve Jobs was made by a guy who was completely entrepreneurial and outside the film industry, I think is very appropriate.

Joshua Michael Stern

#50. I don't dismiss the music that I was involved with, I don't think it was a joke, I don't think it was funny or a phase, I don't think it was just something I was doing back then, to me it was who I am. It connects all the way through. I don't distance myself from any of it.

Ian MacKaye

#51. Geeks are running the world, anyone who's seen The Social Network knows the dynamic has shifted, but what I think is iconic and timeless about Peter Parker is that he's an outsider, on the outside looking in, and that was something I thought was very important to protect.

Marc Webb

#52. I take a backseat to no one in my affection, respect and devotion to veterans. And I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my regard for those who did.

John McCain

#53. I had no idea the amount of people who even knew who I was. Suddenly, they were coming up and saying, "You're my favorite artist." Very surreal. After years of trying to get work, and then coming here and being able to meet some of the fans of Array.

Eric Wight

#54. And still I stayed to plan all my revenge, my vengeance against those who had turned me from good to evil, and made of me what I was going to be from this day forward.

Virginia C. Andrews

#55. I've certainly done some turkeys along the way and made some dumb choices in my career, mostly early on. I'm one of the lucky ones who got to make a lot of mistakes very early when no one was paying attention.

George Clooney

#56. What is most heartbreaking to me is the young women who don't report [being raped] because they were drinking, and they feel like it was their fault that they were drinking. I mean, that is so common.

Claire McCaskill

#57. I was never as focused in math, science, computer science, etcetera, as the people who were best at it. I wanted to create amazing screensavers that did beautiful visualizations of music. It's like, "Oh, I have to learn computer science to do that."

Kevin Systrom

#58. Sigh. These were my people now that I was a writer, people who didn't understand anything. I mean, they understood perfectly the thing I cared most about - books - but basically were moron-level elsewhere.

Claire Dederer

#59. You could own coins but you couldn't have bars of gold. We were on the gold standard. I think it was Nixon who took us off the gold standard.

Carl Andre

#60. I went to the Academy and studied with Stuck who was then a big man. But didn't interest me. I didn't know that before me there was Kandinsky and Klee who had also studied with Stuck. He had a good name at that time.

Josef Albers

#61. He was the man I mentioned who was obsessed by the idea that he had cancer, although X-rays had proved to him that it was all imaginary. Who or what caused this idea? It obviously derived from a fear that was not caused by observation of the facts. It suddenly overcame him and then remained.

C. G. Jung

#62. But in any case, I did poorly on the tests and so, in the first three years of school, I had teachers who thought I was stupid and when people think you're stupid, they have low expectations for you.

Robert Sternberg

#63. I was always drawn toward the Actor's Studio. I studied at the Lee Strasberg Institute when I first came to New York. One of my favorite teachers was one of Al [Pachino]'s teachers, a guy named Charlie Laughton, who was just a wonderful, wonderful man.

Karen Allen

#64. I felt a confusion unspeakable at again seeing him, from the recollection of the ridotto adventure: nor did my situation lessen it; for I was seated between Madame Duval and Sir Clement, who seemed as little as myself to desire Lord Orville's presence. Indeed,

Fanny Burney

#65. The Irish tell the story of a man who arrives at the gates of heaven and asks to be let in St. Peter says, "Of course, just show us your scars." The man says, "I have no scars". St. Peter says, "What a pity was there nothing worth fighting for"?

Martin Sheen

#66. Last week I was just someone who had had a first novel published.

Jon McGregor

#67. I was watching 'Up In The Air' and I thought, 'Jesus, who's the old gray-haired guy?' And it was me. I never wear makeup for movies and now it's starting to show.

George Clooney

#68. I have a father who was the first black student at his junior high and high school and had to do a lot to get to that point.

Solange Knowles

#69. Sometimes I'll read a book and feel it was written just for me. Then I'll flip the book over to look at the cover to see who wrote it, only to discover that it feels like it was written for me because it was written by me.

Jarod Kintz

#70. My last sort of crisis was about overcoming the people who were more interested in what I had done than what I was doing in the present.

Keith Olbermann

#71. I think midwifery was developed by people with common sense, people who were close to nature, and people who observed other species of mammals and saw that there were lessons there to be learned.

Ina May Gaskin

#72. I grew up in the South Bronx, raised by my grandmother, who scrapped and scraped to make sure I had a roof over my head and food in my stomach. I was painfully aware of what it was like to live with limited resources and a certain level of uncertainty.

Joy Bryant

#73. Across a sea of asphalt and cars, was where I caught my first glimpse of the woman who would do the impossible and awaken a long dead part of me.

K.I. Lynn

#74. That's when I realized that part of me would probably always be lost in the past. That just seemed to be my personality: I was the one who couldn't stand change.

Beth Harbison

#75. I was completely broke, so I started saying yes to everything. I said yes to a woman who approached me about shooting the Dracula ballet, even though I felt like I was probably going to sabotage it.

Guy Maddin

#76. Our Father Who Art in Heaven gathered more meaning for me as my own father joined the Maker when I was still in school.

Andy Paula

#77. There was Pauline de Rothschild, who I thought was very fabulous, and Millicent Rogers, the Standard Oil heiress, very chic, very clever, very original. I admired both those women very much. And I had a great example with my mother, who was extremely chic.

Iris Apfel

#78. Why, then, even when I advanced, was I so quick to retreat? Why did I always have ready a gracious smile, a happy laugh, when things went badly? Why, sooner or later, did I always find plausible excuses for those who made me suffer?

Elena Ferrante

#79. I may have been a Wayward, but my way was full of people who loved me. They were the only way I knew

Kami Garcia

#80. I was rescued by librarians. It was librarians who said 'maybe you would like to read The Hardy Boys as well as Nancy Drew.' It is true for me, as for so many countless others, that librarians saved my life, my internal life.

Gloria Steinem

#81. I was born in Berlin on March 15, 1830, the second son of the royal university professor K. W. L. Heyse and his wife Julie, nee Saaling, who came from a Jewish family.

Paul Heyse

#82. I think I'm one of those guys who was sort of always in comedy. I thought of myself - and other people seemed to think of me - as funny from a very young age. I was a very young comedy nerd and I even did sketch comedy in high school and college. I wrote and shot sketches on video and acted in them.

Andy Daly

#83. I do not believe there ever was a man who was his own master, but that every man has a master of some kind or other.

Charles Spurgeon

#84. I was very similar at 19. I wanted something to happen in life, I wanted a bit more. I wanted to find someone who could challenge my ideas. So I definitely tapped into that.

Billie Piper

#85. I grew up in the Midwest, quite far from any ocean or any beach, a million miles. I think for kids who grew up where I did, the idea of California, surfing and beach life was so exotic and glamorous.

John Malkovich

#86. Especially when you play a character for so many years, the character ends up reflecting a lot of who you are and I think I've changed a lot since then, but that represented a lot of who I was as a teenager.

Sara Gilbert

#87. If I am not mistaken, it was a British poet who said that 'no one is properly dressed unless he wears a smile.'

Sukarno

#88. Kennedy was a man who liked writers and even I got invited to the White House.

Irwin Shaw

#89. Fame is like a big eraser. It's strange, now that I'm famous. In my parents' opinion, all the shitty things - all the wreckage of my past - is erased. Now it's like I was never the kid who got arrested. Now I'm a wonderful son.

Bobcat Goldthwait

#90. Then teach me how to not care about someone who was everything to me. All I want is to know she's okay. Is that too much to ask?

Ellen Hopkins

#91. My last girlfriend was a Showgirl - But we eventually broke up because she wouldn't Tell me anything. Now I'm dating a girl who looks exactly like my grandma, only my girl older.
-James Lee Schmidt and Jarod Kintz

James Lee Schmidt

#92. I think it was Harry Walpole who remarked, In this life one should try everything once except incest and country dancing.

Stephen Fry

#93. I can't believe you're going to sacrifice your archery mojo for MacReive." Lucia would forfeit her fantastical skill with a bow if she was unchaste. "Who am I going to hang out with when your a talentless nobody?

Kresley Cole

#94. I got brilliant stories from people who'd never set foot in an MFA program and had published very little, and terrible stories from people who'd published a lot and had all the credentials. It was all over the map and that was part of the fun.

Ben Fountain

#95. I had a stalker who was extremely violent. He broke into the studio with knives and I was locked in a bathroom.

Paget Brewster

#96. The person who did most to give to analysis the generality and symmetry which are now its pride, was also the person who made mechanics analytical; I mean Euler.

William Whewell

#97. Right away, I invited on guests like Steve Wozniak, John Draper, and even porn star Danni Ashe, who took her top off in the studio to show us all how hot she was. (Listen up, Howard Stern, I'm following in your footsteps!)

Kevin D. Mitnick

#98. Do not meet or overtake a patient who is moving about in order to speak to him or to give him any message or letter. You might just as well give him a box on the ear. I have seen a patient fall flat on the ground who was standing when his nurse came into the room.

Florence Nightingale

#99. I had a daughter who was 9 years old and I had the feeling I wasn't going to be a real parent if I didn't quit making movies for a while and spend time with her. I also felt that I'd made enough movies and said what I had to say at the time.

Jane Campion

#100. Yeah, a lot of people ask me to take my shirt off, which is aggressive. I wish that I were just one of those guys who was just like, 'You know, look, when I was seven I had a six-pack, and it just never went away.'

Max Greenfield