Quotes on Firsts

Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.

From first to last, the peak is never passed. Something always fires the light that gets in your eyes.

Turgenev was a very serious fellow but he could make me laugh because a truth first encountered can be very funny. When someone else's truth is the same as your truth, and he seems to be saying it just for you, that's great.

The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone else. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn't it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill--he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it.

The line it is drawn The curse it is cast The slow one now Will later be fast As the present now Will later be past The new order is Rapidly fadin'. And the first one now Will later be last For the times they are a-changin'.

This was the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again.

For an idea that does not first seem insane, there is no hope.

If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.

I leave you free to imagine any dialogue you please. Choose whatever may charm you. Have it, if you like, that they hear the voice of the blood, or that they fall in love at first sight... Conceive the wildest improbabilities. Have it that the depths of their beings are thrilled at accosting each other in slang. Tangle them suddenly in a swift embrace or a brotherly kiss. Do whatever you like.

Aren't there gradations of evil? Is evil a great perilous gulf into which one falls with the first sin, plummeting to the depth?

As you all know first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anyone wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.

...‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎never go to look on man till you have first looked on your God.

As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration [for Lolita] was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.

She often spoke to falling seeds and said, "Ah hope you fall on soft ground," because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach them how to use television.

They want us to give up another chunk of our tribal land. This is not the first time or the last time.

Many have marked the speed with which Muad'Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis of this speed. For the others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.

Do it first and feel about it afterwards.' - Dagny Taggart

They were small, brightly coloured, happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn't be too much education wasted.

Things have their roots and branches. Affairs have their beginnings and their ends. To know what is first and what is last will lead one near the Way.

Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart.