Seemed Quotes by Alice Munro, John Piper, Nick Tosches, Don Kardong, Albert J. Nock, Ian Hislop and many others.
When I was in middle school, and teachers lectured about World War II, the conflict seemed impossibly distant and irrelevant. And it had only happened 15 years earlier.
I never really thought I had much to add to the conversation that was occurring at ‘MADtv.’ I didn’t know what I would do on the show. But I showed up, and I was surprised – it was fun to work on. Everybody there was really nice, and they seemed to be interested in my contributions.
My very first products were hand-made, one-of-a-kind pins. When I finally realized I could repeat a phrase to make multiples, ‘intellectuals gone bad,’ a fairly succinct description of my own life, seemed appropriate.
I went to grad school in San Francisco, and then left for New York City with my eye on Broadway. I had saved $5000, which seemed like a lot of money in my mind… until I realized it was going to take $2500 to get to New York and then the first and last month‘s rent.
Seemed like everything I tried to do in broadcasting and as a player before that turned out successfully. I was succeeding. I got to the top of the heap in every facet of broadcasting.
I thought his performance was absolutely wonderful and had said so, but he seemed, as actors quite often are when they first see something, to be disappointed. I think he expected more from the film and himself.
I lived through the Fifties in the Midwest when everything that was happening – the repression of homosexuality, for instance, the demonization of the Left, the giggly, soporific ordinariness of adolescence, the stone-deafness to the social injustice all around us – seemed not only unobjectionable but also nonexistent.
It took me so many years to move out. I’m definitely a bit of a Peter Pan, reluctant to grow up. It all seemed really nice at home-why change it? Part of me would prefer not to have any responsibility whatsoever.
I wanted to be a neurologist. That seemed to be the most difficult, most intriguing, and the most important aspect of medicine, which had links with psychology, aggression, behavior, and human affairs.
From the time I was a kid, I was crazy about anything having to do with the West. I’d look at all of these photos of Montana, and they all seemed so magical and majestic. I just wanted to go west, and I finally did it when I was barely 21. I went off to volunteer at a Navajo reservation in New Mexico.
Why has it seemed that the only way to protect the environment is with heavy-handed government regulation?
I didn’t want to get married – I thought it was like a cult! It seemed so conservative and unnatural.
The encouragement I got from Campbell was a quick check and praise. Once the Space Beagle was launched on its mission, it seemed natural for it to breed additional thoughts.
When I was growing up, if there was a Young Adult section of my town‘s library, I missed it. I wandered right from ‘The Babysitter‘s Club’ over to Stephen King. His books were big and fat and they seemed important. I eventually worked my way through most of the shelf, but ‘It’ is the one that stuck with me.
America was founded on Christians not trusting each other, and they sometimes seemed more willing to reach out to the godless than to someone from another sect.
I had no inclination to perform as a kid. I was a shy child – I always had my nose in a library book. I didn’t start acting until I went to college. Once I started, it seemed to fit like a glove. I felt completely at home on stage. It was the perfect way for me to express myself, even better than writing.
I think women think a lot about cycles, biological and personal. This year another cycle came around: my contract was up. It seemed an opportunity to take a life audit.
People’s identities as Indians, as Asians, or as members of the human race, seemed to give way – quite suddenly – to sectarian identification with Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh communities.
When I was first introduced to Buddhism in a high school World Studies class, I dismissed it out of hand. This was during the hedonistic days of the late ’60s, and this spiritual path seemed so grim with its concern about attachment and, apparently, anti-pleasure.
The more I worked on ‘Half Brother,’ the more it seemed to me the story was really about love in all its possible forms – how and why we decide to bestow it, or withdraw it; how we decide what is more worthy of being loved, and what is less. We are masters of conditional love.
I thought there had to be something I could do because it seemed crazy that, in addition to the psychological tragedy each woman has to face, came also all the rest.
When I was younger, I was so crazy about poetry that I didn’t notice who was noticing. It seemed to me so tremendous and large.
All the books on my shelves, when I would go to them to look for help with my anguish, they all just seemed so crass. They didn’t get it. Those books don’t understand. Nobody understands.
It has always seemed to me that those who are without power, who have to create their own in a makeshifit way, know more about life than those who govern.
I was always interested in writing from an early age, but it seemed so far away and inconceivable, like wanting to be an astronaut or a pop star.
It always seemed much better to be a writer – a Real Writer – than a successful hack.
Girls didn’t really take much interest in me until I was about 14. But I knew how to talk to them very quickly. What I figured out – that my friends didn’t – was you have to talk to women like you‘re not constantly trying to have sex with them. That seemed to work.
It was only through getting interested in more out-there and avant-garde forms that the musical suddenly seemed like such a wonderful genre to me.
It always seemed to be a constant that my parents were political.
These are strange times. Reason, which once combatted faith and seemed to have conquered it, now has to look to faith to save it from dissolution.
When William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey of his English realm at Gloucester in 1085, the result was a work so thorough, fair, dispassionate, and wide-ranging that it seemed to the succeeding generations to have come from another world.
I grew up loving actresses or actors who were very classy but who seemed a little bit mysterious because you couldn’t grasp what they’re really thinking.
Communism seemed to be an ideal experiment in trying to achieve a state where all persons have greater democracy. I might add, like other persons here and elsewhere, I found myself concerned with the problem of increasing need for greater economic and political democracy for greater numbers of people.
I went with agnosticism for a long, long time because I just hated to say I was an atheist – being an atheist seemed so rigid. But the more I became comfortable with the word, and the more I read, it started to stick.
I only used a cell phone for the first time after I was released. I had difficulty coping with it because it seemed so small and insubstantial.
I was never very good at exams, having a poor memory and finding the examination process rather artificial, and there never seemed to be enough time to follow up things that really interested me.
I was only in college, unfortunately, for, um, a year. I think my major was public relations, and I had no idea what it meant except it seemed maybe attainable.
The issues of the day have never seemed more complicated, and yet the conversations over how to solve them increasingly resemble cars passing down a divided highway. Whizzing by without a glance.
Growing up in Ireland, there never seemed to be the notion that children should be seen and not heard. We all looked forward to mealtimes when we’d sit around the table and talk about our days. Storytelling and long, rambling conversations were considered good things.
It always seemed to me ironic that the McCain campaign kept referring sneeringly to Obama’s meager resume – ‘a mere community organizer!’ – before he entered electoral politics. It was Obama’s experience as a community organizer that proved such a killer app when he applied that skill to the Internet.
The Indians seemed to be living in a place and in a way that was of immense importance to me. So I associate learning to read – English, oddly enough – with wanting to know about Indians. I’m still growing into it. I’ve never outgrown that.
But each time I seemed to be climbing into a roller coaster and finding myself coming through the downhill run with that sort of dazed feeling that we all know.
School and I never seemed to walk hand in hand.
My mum gave me pretty good genes in that department. She had gorgeous skin. That good English complexion. She never seemed to have a blemish that I knew of.
Every time you look at a house in Los Angeles, the real-estate agent will tell you that someone famous once lived there. It always seemed irrelevant to me: Does a property gain value just because Alfred Hitchcock used to eat breakfast there?
The fact of being an underdog changes people in ways that we often fail to appreciate. It opens doors and creates opportunities and enlightens and permits things that might otherwise have seemed unthinkable.
I was in college, and very disappointed. I majored in commercial art and interior design for three or four years. At that time, it seemed the thing I really wanted to do, production design, just wasn’t available in the U.K., so I turned to music.
At the age of nine, I simultaneously fell in love with two Dutch sisters because they seemed so beautifully strange, and their clothes were mysterious and alluring – added to which, they could not speak a word of English. More than anything, I wanted to connect with them and embark on a vast journey of exploration.
I venture to allude to the impression which seemed generally to prevail among their brethren across the seas, that the Old Country must wake up if she intends to maintain her old position of pre-eminence in her colonial trade against foreign competitors.
When the first settlers landed on American shores, the difficulties in finding or making shelter must have seemed ironical as well as almost unbearable.
The moment seemed right to me for a full and, if possible, authoritative portrait of the life and character of the Prince of Wales.
On March 4th, 1830, I arrived in London, where a new world seemed opened to me.
I always seemed to disappoint them. They expected me to be different than Henry or exactly like Henry. I was neither.
Compared to dancing, films seemed to me to be the work of lay bums. There was no physical pain; it was enough to say and imagine what was in the script. It was very easy for me.
I got into journalism because I came of age in the ’60s. It just seemed one way for me to get things done.
We celebrated Christmas. Not religiously, but we did the tree and the lights. Hannukah always seemed not quite as thrilling – Sorry to my Jewish brothers and sisters! But when you’re a kid, Santa and all that, you know, that really trumps the menorah. So we did Christmas.
I remember the day Richard Nixon won in 1968. That was a time that seemed certain to bring about long awaited seismic change in America. But events of tragic proportion took us on a turn. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were suddenly dead.
Sharks don’t particularly have a great interest in divers. It seemed that in a normal dive, I would jump in the water, and one or two gray reef sharks would swim in and kind of check me out – and then they would keep their distance. So they weren’t particularly threatening or anything to be afraid of.
In a way I guess I’d be a bad judge of what it was like because it just seemed perfectly normal to me.
I’m a judge. It seemed to me that it was critical to try to take action to stem the criticism and help people understand that in the constitutional framework, it’s terribly important not to have a system of retaliation against decisions people don’t like.
I went to about one frat party a year. A year seemed to be enough time for me to forget how much I didn’t like frat parties, and my friends would eventually convince me to go to one. Cheap beer, guys looking for a quick hook-up, and girls playing ‘dumb‘ to get in on the hook-up. I just never got into it.
I started drumming around the same time I came across this part of American history. But there seemed to be a way forward playing drums. There didn’t seem to be a way forward being fascinated by a piece of history.
My sisters used to learn dance, and I used to stand behind them and dance. So my guruji suggested that I also learn, as I seemed interested. I started learning at the age of three and was always on stage for something or the other. My mother is proud of me, and clearly my artistic bent comes from her.
Once I’d chosen the songs, it seemed like it would just be a question then of recording them. But it’s a case of trying to re-invent the songs; taking them in different directions.
I went into photography because it seemed like the perfect vehicle for commenting on the madness of today’s existence.
The thing is, it really did take us too long to get these recordings done. We’ve had our rough times in the studio in the past, but after four weeks most of the material would have been recorded. This time it seemed like it just goes on and on.
‘Anthems’ was a harsh indictment of American foreign policy; the video for the first single featured an American flag engulfed in a pool of oil, imagery which might have been risque in 2002, but seemed unimaginably passe in the last year of Bush’s presidency.
My desire for my own sitcom began as a little girl – I spent hours lying on my belly on the shag carpeting getting lost in the world of the ’70s sitcom. All I wanted to do was run away to the Brady house, The Partridge Family bus; even the project on ‘Good Times‘ seemed better than Clark, NJ.
My mother took me to the British Museum aged five. I had thought people from the past weren’t as good as we were, and then I saw the Elgin marbles. Suddenly, the world seemed more complicated.
I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.
Many filmmakers pretend that they never see anything, which has always seemed odd to me.
I was always different from all the other kids, and I was doing things that nobody else did or seemed to have any interest in.
In Paris and later in Marseille, I was surrounded by some of the best food in the world, and I had an enthusiastic audience in my husband, so it seemed only logical that I should learn how to cook ‘la cuisine bourgeoise’ – good, traditional French home cooking.
Before college, I hadn’t voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn’t think I’d understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher‘s interpretations of what we read.
What until then seemed impossible to achieve has become a fact of life. We have won the right to association in trade unions independent from the authorities, founded and shaped by the working people themselves.
People in the world can never imagine the length of days to those in asylums. They seemed never ending, and we welcomed any event that might give us something to think about as well as talk of.
I looked at longevity in show business when I was about 13, and the people who seemed to have longevity were the ones who’d spent quite a bit of time learning about what they were doing before they made it.
It’s not that I wanted to be an actor; it’s that I didn’t want to be a dancer! I was trained in traditional Chinese dance, and after working so hard it seemed unfair to just disappear into a group.
If you asked somebody, ‘what do you wish for in life?’ they wouldn’t say ‘happiness.’ I would have answered ‘excitement, knowledge,’ God knows – I mean, many, many different things, but certainly not ‘happiness’. It seemed like a foreign concept to wish for something that specific and that singular.
Yogi seemed to be doing everything wrong, yet everything came out right.
A voyage to Europe in the summer of 1921 gave me the first opportunity of observing the wonderful blue opalescence of the Mediterranean Sea. It seemed not unlikely that the phenomenon owed its origin to the scattering of sunlight by the molecules of the water.
Michael is a funny character, for whom I have a great deal of affection. He sat across his desk and seemed to be a bit of a blunt fellow. We began talking about the characters and he opened up about his vision.
They are few in the midst of an overwhelming mass of brute force, and their submission is wisdom; but for a nation like England to submit to be robbed by any invader who chooses to visit her shores seemed to me to be nonsense.
When I was 3 or 4, I seemed to be bursting with music. They played Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra in the house, so I learned my vocabulary from song lyrics – I was literally singing before I was talking.
Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me.
Seven years ago, when I started free soloing long, hard routes in Yosemite – climbing without a rope, gear or a partner – I did it because it seemed like the purest, most elegant way to scale big walls. Climbing, especially soloing, felt like a grand adventure, but I never dreamed it could be a profession.
It seemed to me that I could write commercial fiction. I wasn’t sure whether I could, or whether I wanted to write serious fiction at that point. So I said, ‘Let me try something else,’ and I wrote a mystery – but I didn’t know much about it.
War had always seemed to me to be a purely human behavior. Accounts of warlike behavior date back to the very first written records of human history; it seemed to be an almost universal characteristic of human groups.
I still have in my memory, almost agonizing impressions of a serious illness which I had when I was about eight years old. Those about me called it scarlet fever, and its very name seemed to have a diabolical quality.
I remember being really poor until I got my first $250,000 check from Faberge. That was pretty nice; I put it in the bank, and from that moment on, there seemed to be a lot of champagne and limousines in my life.
When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.
To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.
I never thought about being on a series before. It seemed like such a big commitment. But I love going to work every day. This is not about ego, it’s about work, and that’s refreshing in this town.
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt faced adversities that, in their times, seemed impregnable. Great presidents overcome great odds.
Every time I got close, somebody seemed to play a little better.
I’m one of the most optimistic persons in the world. I always believed that – there’s another shot, another chance. In boxing, I never gave up. I kept trying, kept trying. Even when things seemed so dim, I continued to push forward to make something happen in my favor.
I wanted to be a writer, but the idea of writing novels or movies seemed really intimidating. I never got more than a few pages into one.
The interesting thing about my character Sylar is that my strengths as an actor seemed to go completely against the shape of a character in the shadow.
I grew up in a very small country town, so I was exposed to horses at quite a young age, but I used to cry and run; they seemed so powerful and so unpredictable.
I think if you play a character that is fearless, then it’s boring. I think that’s what was so incredible about Harrison Ford, is that he always seemed like he was never going to survive it, he’s always scared, and yet he always does survive it somehow.
Robert Kennedy was such an inspiring figure. His interest in politics seemed to come not from a desire for power, but from a need to help our society live up to its ideals.
So, that notion of hypertext seemed to me immediately obvious because footnotes were already the ideas wriggling, struggling to get free, like a cat trying to get out of your arms.
I was named after my mother. And I guess when I started making records, Madonna Ciccone seemed too long and complicated, and I just got stuck with Madonna.
When I was in seventh grade, I was bored out of my mind. We seemed to be learning the same things over and over in science and math, and two of the boys in my class were allowed to move ahead into these advanced classes, but I wasn’t allowed because I was a girl.
In the beginning, New York and I had kind of a love-hate relationship. It seemed so abrasive compared to Europe. But the transformation here in recent years is really something. I don’t think I would have seen as much change if I’d lived in any other city in the world.
So why sign your name in blood for more? It seemed like a sensible arrangement for me. I didn’t sell large numbers of records and the record company paid advances they rarely recouped.
Sleep is one of the great pleasures of life. Designing my bed linen line seemed like a natural progression for me. Everyone loves getting into a bed made up with beautiful linen. I love sewing, I love fabrics, and I love sleeping.
Everything about my life seemed so perfect to people. But I struggle like everyone else.
In every age ‘the good old days‘ were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.
The historical Woodrow Wilson suffered from numerous complaints which we might today label as psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson did have a stroke as a relatively young man of 39 and seemed always to be ill. He was ‘high-strung’ – intensely neurotic – yet a charismatic personality nonetheless.
But it seemed to me that the American way of doing things was to obliterate a complete area, without really knowing exactly what was there and where they were.
What distinguished my life from my brother‘s is that my mother didn’t like me. When I became a woman, I seemed to repel her.
The role seemed to demand that I keep myself worked up to fever pitch, so I took on the actual attributes of the horrible vampire, Dracula.
The prize seemed to change my professional life very little.
Acting is a great way to make a living, especially when I consider what my alternatives were and probably still are. I mean, you are only making movies. It is a lot less pressure than being a surgeon; although it seemed like the only other thing that I was qualified for was manual labour.
I would not go so far as to say that the French trade unions attached greater importance to the struggle for peace than the others did; but they certainly seemed to take it more to heart.
I wouldn’t tell Jill how I felt. I behaved in such a way that was opposite to how I felt. I must have seemed strong to her. I didn’t want to bring her down.
I was a supporting character in other people’s lives, which seemed right and familiar to me. I was also an outsider: English in the U.S., American in England, dogged yet comforted by that familiar feeling of alien-ness, which occupied that space where my sense of self should have been.
I went to a Catholic high school and it seemed like every time I drew something for a class project, it either got thrown away by the teacher or something.
Self-Realization Fellowship seemed like training. It was the training ground for finding a sense of peace in myself. Because that’s my job. It’s no one else’s.
For months it seemed that a revolution was certain. But instead, slavery seems more likely now. The working class no longer has the physical resistance for a revolution, and the Entente is too strong, and Russia is too weak.
For me, Mexploitation seemed like something that should have existed, but didn’t.
It never seemed that honorable to me, and I guess I was always afraid that I might fail.
What they were giving me seemed incredibly real to me, so I’d react to it in a very real way. That was frightening for me, especially because of the subject.
I wanted to answer big questions about humanity, about how it is that we understand about the world, how we can know as much as we do, why human nature is the way that it is. And it always seemed to me that you find answers to those questions by looking at children.
Of course there will be disappointments and the way will not always be as I expected it. But if it seemed easy, then that would be the time to worry that I am on the wrong path.
From a very young age, I wanted to get up on stage whenever I went to the theatre – the actors just seemed to be having so much fun. One of my worries about theatre, in fact, is that the actors are quite often having more fun than the audience.
I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.
Harvard‘s Kennedy School of Government asked me to serve as a fellow at its Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. After my varied and celebrated career in television, movies, publishing, and the lucrative world of corporate speaking, being a fellow at Harvard seemed, frankly, like a step down.
My sister and my brother, of whom I have not spoken before, were considerably older than I; it seemed almost as if we belonged to different generations.
Anti-inflammatories always seemed to work well for my joints, but the problem was you couldn’t take them all the time.
I felt like when I got with Kanye, and we discussed me being on G.O.O.D. Music, he just really took me to a place in regards to music that I love and music that I had made previously. We had a clear understanding of what I wanted to make, and he just seemed like he was an advocate for hardcore, uncompromising hip-hop.
I’m not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.
The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
The first thing I ever wanted to be was a lawyer, because I love arguing. But I’m very lazy. I’m intelligent, but I’m very lazy, so it seemed like a bit too much.
I was very laced with drugs myself, but Fred seemed to be even more so than me. That might have had something to do with it. That might have had something to do with nobody wanting to play my records, too, I don’t know.
In 2002 the Yamaha was at more or less the same level as the Honda, better in some ways, worse in others. But in the winter of last year between 2002 and 2003, Honda made a big step forward and it seemed as if Yamaha couldn’t quite match that improvement.
In 2007, early in the improbable presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, the young first-term senator began a series of foreign-policy speeches that seemed too general to provide a guide to what he might do if elected.
I did the Kilimanjaro climb a few years ago, then the six-day trek to Machu Picchu in Peru so this bike ride to raise money for Great Ormond Street seemed like the next big challenge.
It seemed to me… that the only valid people to deal with crime were cops, and I would like to make the lead character, rather than a single person, a squad of cops.
I’ve always found the rhetoric of mainstream civil rights leaders and organizations to be far too timid, accommodationist, and gradualist. It always seemed to me that they behaved like meek and gentle supplicants begging the oppressor for a few crumbs of justice, for a few molecules of citizenship rights.
When ‘Drag Race’ first began, it seemed like a fun window into an underground culture, but over the nine years it has aired, the show has evolved to reflect America’s changing relationship to queer rights and acceptance.
I played for England at cricket and football. Playing at Wembley in front of 60,000 people seemed better than playing at Cirencester in front of my family and friends.
Many years ago, large packs of wolves roamed the countryside in Ukraine, making travel in that part of the world very dangerous. These wolf packs were fearless. They were not intimidated by people nor by any of the weapons available at that time. The only thing that seemed to frighten them was fire.
The acting bug just seemed to stick with me. I loved going to theatre school in college and continued to train in film classes and had been auditioning for T.V. and movie roles since I was in my late teens. My career has been slow and steady, and I kind of like it that way.
It seemed to me that this might be a great pageant, which would give a chance for a very interesting picture.
Coming out of university, one of my obsessions was that in the novels I was reading, they seemed to be portraying a world that had a social fabric. People knew each other in ‘War and Peace.’ They went to all the same balls. These were societies with tightly wound, woven, social textures.
Well, I was passionately curious about what my body was doing, and when I got the lessons on how to meditate, it seemed really solid to me. It seemed real.
We don’t have enough Latinos on TV just getting cast in supporting roles; the idea of having your own show named after you seemed like such a long shot.
Yes, we believe in globalization and trade, but we also believe in you being able to benefit from that more. For too long, we progressives have seemed like part of the system. We need to start thinking about whether or not it’s delivering for us now.
Money was always on my mind when I was growing up. So I was always wondering how we were going to afford this and that. Acting seemed to be a shortcut out of the mess.
I could have been more famous if I did all the glitzy things, but celebrity always seemed so unnecessary.
The question of who is right and who is wrong has seemed to me always too small to be worth a moment’s thought, while the question of what is right and what is wrong has seemed all-important.
I became a Communist by studying capitalist political economy, and when I had some understanding of that problem, it actually seemed to me so absurd, so irrational, so inhuman, that I simply began to elaborate on my own formulas for production and distribution.
It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.
In 1989, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, it seemed that the liberal story had won. The liberal story says that humankind is inevitably marching towards a global society of free markets and democratic politics.
What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word’s setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word’s full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise.
A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success.
I think in the ’70s that there was a general feeling of chaos, a feeling that the idea of the ’60s as ‘ideal’ was a misnomer. Nothing seemed ideal anymore. Everything seemed in-between.
The press seemed to take some delight that I previously had a ‘straight audience,’ and set about trying to destroy that. And I think some men were frustrated that their girlfriends wouldn’t let go of the idea that George Michael just hadn’t found the ‘right girl.’
My father cared a lot about me, but he never gave me the satisfaction of really knowing it. Hitting .390 wasn’t enough for him. Nothing seemed to be. He was not trying to be mean. He was just seeing to it that I never got self-satisfied, that I worked hard to get the most out of what I had.
Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.
I’m a big fan of honesty and being real, so to me, it seemed like Wynonna was a very human character in a very supernatural circumstance. I was like, ‘I can do that!’
I started training with school friends and, one by one, they all dropped out. When we became teenagers, it seemed more exciting to go shopping at weekends. My mum told me not to worry about what my friends were doing and to stick at it.
The scientists at the end of the 19th century had people coming to them with this weird behaviour, and they didn’t know what was going on but there seemed to be a similarity. They needed an answer, so they made up one.
I grew up in the East Village with a lot of old people in my building, and I’m not sure if they lost their sense of smell over the years, but they always seemed to smell like they poured a bottle of perfume on themselves. I never want to become that person.
The most important advances, the qualitative leaps, are the least predictable. Not even the best scientists predicted the impact of nuclear physics, and everyday consumer items such as the iPhone would have seemed magic back in the 1950s.
The longer we were in it, the smaller it seemed to get.
To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.
I got too old to live in the bush. You really need to be youngish and healthy, so it seemed stupid to keep going.
Working for the Man seemed really good to me.
I learned American Sign Language in college and seemed to pick it up rather quickly. I really love to sign and wish that I had more friends to sign with.
I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a boy, though it seemed an unlikely outcome since I showed no real talent. But I persevered and eventually found my own row to hoe. Ignorance of other writers’ work keeps me from discouragement and I am less well-read than the average bus driver.
My singing really seemed to connect with people, and it ended up as my main career, which I love.
I had dreams, but I didn’t have the sense that they would necessarily work out. They seemed very far-fetched.
I bought into Saks as a personal investment because, when I was a young man and went to America for the first time, it seemed to me that Saks was like a cathedral of retail. I never dreamt that I could one day be a part of it. And now I am.
It’s the idea that when you say ‘actress’, people think of an airy, floaty, no-brain person, which of course you can’t be if you are an actor. It is an unfortunate word, which is why, for a time, I hung on to ‘actor’, because it just seemed more workmanlike, you know, like you say ‘woman doctor‘ not ‘doctoress’.
Carla Lane’s ‘Butterflies‘ seemed to be on in our house at all times when I was a kid, as did ‘The Good Life.’ But it was ‘Fawlty Towers that made me really sit up for the first time. Basil‘s incandescent rage made me howl.
There was a lot of fiction I did not enjoy, whose landscapes seemed bland and unevocative, the characters faint-hearted within them, the very words lacking vibrancy.
The sky was clear – remarkably clear – and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.
I could do exploration in this particular career field, and it was a goal that, even if I didn’t reach it, it was so high it seemed almost impossible, but even if I didn’t reach it, I would still have a good time and a very satisfying career.
I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell.
It has always seemed to me that a love of natural objects, and the depth, as well as exuberance and refinement of mind, produced by an intelligent delight in scenery, are elements of the first importance in the education of the young.
The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it – language, art, science – seemed to have evolved only once. The eye, by contrast, independently evolved 40 times. So, if you were to ‘replay‘ evolution, the eye would almost certainly appear again, whereas the big brain probably wouldn’t.
I was terrible in English. I couldn’t stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention – it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature.
With the violin, for example, one understands culturally that the sound comes from the instrument that can be seen. With electronic music, it is not the same at all. That’s why it seemed so important to me, from the beginning of my career, to invent a grammar, a visual vocabulary adapted to electronic music.
My father was a civil servant in northern India where I was born. As a boy I saw the dire effects of poverty and illiteracy, especially on women and children. It often seemed that the only thing separating me from them was luck.
Puppies, like all babies, grow up fast. Before long, Gracie was no longer barking at her reflection, instead offering a blase look that seemed to say, ‘I know what that is now. I know it’s not another dog.’
I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, ‘Hey, I’m a professional writer now.’
Trying to break into the horror market seemed natural.
When I got to college, acting suddenly seemed like a very risky proposition and all my friends were going to law school or med school or Wall Street.
When I started off with Trainspotting, it was the way the characters came to me. That’s how they sounded to me. It seemed pretentious to sound any other way. I wasn’t making any kind of political statement.
My career was always about working with people, and understanding issues and problems and helping them to solve those issues and problems. How you deal with people – that’s what diplomacy is all about. So while I’m not a career diplomat, many of the skills I had seemed to directly translate into the diplomatic arena.
It seemed sensible to move to a market town where I could walk everywhere.
My comfort zone is like a little bubble around me, and I’ve pushed it in different directions and made it bigger and bigger until these objectives that seemed totally crazy eventually fall within the realm of the possible.
It just seemed too weird to me. I don’t know, maybe they were smoking a joint in the car downstairs from their parents’ apartment. I had to go that far to put together a scenario of how they could have possibly recognized me.
And George Carlin was a guy that the more he aged the younger he seemed.
It would be naive to think that the problems plaguing mankind today can be solved with means and methods which were applied or seemed to work in the past.
I don’t think anything I’ve written has been done in under six or eight drafts. Usually it takes me a few years to write a book. ‘World’s Fair’ was an exception. It seemed to be a particularly fluent book as it came. I did it in seven months. I think what happened in that case is that God gave me a bonus book.
I had a mother I could only seem to please with verbal accomplishments of some sort or another. She read constantly, so I read constantly. If I used words that might have seemed surprising at a young age, she would recognize that and it would please her.
Setting my mind on a musical instrument was like falling in love. All the world seemed bright and changed.
Communications devices were always used to effect change, to effect revolution. Telephone, telegraph – these all seemed like very big enhancements at the time.
Westminster Abbey, the Tower, a steeple, one church, and then another, presented themselves to our view; and we could now plainly distinguish the high round chimneys on the tops of the houses, which yet seemed to us to form an innumerable number of smaller spires, or steeples.
As a painter, it seemed easier to sort of disappear.
I’ve always made a total effort, even when the odds seemed entirely against me. I never quit trying; I never felt that I didn’t have a chance to win.
Barack Obama was elected during my second year of college, and save for his skin color, he had much in common with Bill Clinton: Despite an unstable life with a single mother, aided by two loving grandparents, he had made in his adulthood a family life that seemed to embody my sense of the American ideal.
I’ve always loved movies, since I was a little kid, but I never wanted to be part of that industry. It always seemed horrifying, the way films were made.
It is inconceivable that even the gang who runs Russia would be willing to take on war, but one always has to remember that there seemed to be no reason in 1939 for Hitler to start war, and yet he did, and he started it with a world practically unprepared.
It seemed like my professional life would take a more scientific route. I guess that plan started to become undone when, at the age of 17, I happened upon a screening of Alain Resnais’ ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour,’ and it took my breath away.
My Southern heritage is a big part of who I am. I grew up around people who seemed like characters but are actual, real people. My grandmother made sure I had manners and all that stuff.
I was living in New York City and flat broke. My next door neighbor was an actor and he always seemed to be having more fun than I was. He convinced me to give acting a shot, but because of my shyness I was sure it would be a lost cause.
I can’t do fiction unless I visualize what’s going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.
Very early in life, it seemed to me that there was a relationship between the problems of the Negro people in America and the Jewish people in Russia, and that the Jewish people’s problems were worse than ours.
I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilised music in the world.
I wanted to go to drama school, but when I got the part in ‘Falling,’ I got an agent, so it seemed a good idea to work. I always did a lot of singing and dancing, so I am glad it worked out that way. I would like to study stage acting at some point, though.
Jazz is about freedom within discipline. Usually a dictatorship like in Russia and Germany will prevent jazz from being played because it just seemed to represent freedom, democracy and the United States.
I would like to take the stigma away. ‘Mastectomy‘ the word seemed so scary to me at first. After doing research and seeing the advancements, the surgery has come a long way from 20 years ago. The results can be incredible.
I did not want to reject religion as nonsense because life seemed to have no ultimate purpose without it, and most of the good people I knew were Christians.
Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with.
I came into a strong organization, and I hope I strengthened it more and expanded its capacity to deal with some of the challenges that might not have seemed as great 10 years ago, such as H.I.V., AIDS and children affected by war.
My fellow students there were very smart, but the really novel thing was that they actually seemed to put a lot of effort into their school work. By the end of my first semester there, I began to get into that habit as well.
Having bought furniture for my own house, and bought furniture for our house in Washington, a furniture store seemed like a good idea, and it also played into my personal history.
I still have a vivid memory of my excitement when I first saw a chart of the periodic table of elements. The order in the universe seemed miraculous.
I remember, May 1944: I was 15-and-a-half, and I was thrown into a haunted universe where the story of the human adventure seemed to swing irrevocably between horror and malediction.
When I was in school, I liked math because all the problems had answers. Everything else seemed very subjective.
I am waiting for the right story to tell. Just like ‘Man of Tai Chi‘ just seemed to be the right story to tell. So I’m looking for that. Because I really love directing. I love developing the story. I love actors. I love the cinema of it, the way that you tell a story visually.
Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker seemed so sophisticated and bad. I wanted to be like that.
There wasn’t much for me to do after school except the drama club, so when I kind of started doing drama club, it seemed to be something I could do.
I really didn’t want to have my name on the center, because it just seemed like it was too much of a personal thing.
Both French and Latin are involved with nationalistic and religious implications which could not be entirely shaken off, and so, while they seemed for a long time to have solved the international language problem up to a certain point, they did not really do so in spirit.
I’m a lot luckier than most people, although I used to look at it the other way around-that so many people seemed luckier than me.
I went for an outrageous form of expressing myself. It seemed to be a way that I could make my name and show that I was somebody.
The law seemed to be always what I came back to. I have never, one day in my life as a lawyer, regretted my decision to become a lawyer.
When I was a kid I was always afraid of small dogs, because they always seemed like the ones that would attack.
When I was working my way up, it seemed to me that only Westerns and ‘Star Treks’ or sci-fi movies could afford to get away with presenting the problems – like prejudice and desegregation, for instance – that we face in our everyday lives.
With the opening of the second decade of the twentieth century it seemed that the stage was set for the last act in an unquestioned evolutionary drama.
I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.
There’s a trend toward anti-heroes now, and I think it goes back to guys like Bogart and Cagney. They seemed to have no compassion, and they were always alone.
I started wrestling at ten. I played a lot of other sports: soccer, football. I really enjoyed skiing. But wrestling just took off for me. It seemed to be the sport I had an affinity for; I liked the individual, combative nature. There’s something special about that. It took me all the places I wanted to go.
As music became more profitable in the 1990s, it seemed like it attracted a lot of people who were just interested in the financial aspect of it, which is depressing.
As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied.
When I started learning the cello, I fell in love with the instrument because it seemed like a voice – my voice.
When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.
The point here is that physics followed the data where it seemed to lead, even though some thought the model gave aid and comfort to religion.
One day, I was playing ‘The Game of Life,’ the board game, with a mess of kids, and I wasn’t quite sure how, but it seemed different than the game I remembered playing as a kid. So I bought an old game, from 1960, and it was different.
I was fed up with the situation I found myself in in the 1960s. I didn’t like being a barrister’s wife and going out to dinner with other professional people and dealing with middle class life. It seemed claustrophobic.
A lot of the futuristic space stuff seemed to me to be a very cool form of science-fiction, so that was my first real baptism in the genre.
In the post-Watergate atmosphere of 1975 and 1976, the just-plain-folks personalities of both Ford and Carter seemed the perfect antidote to Nixon’s arrogant, isolated presidency. But as alert history-minded readers know, Ford and Carter were both rebuffed by voters in their efforts to hold on to the presidency.
During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence.
