Quotes by British Authors - Page 121

Given the chance, i'll die like a baby, on some faraway beach, when the season's over.
Brian Eno
We don't want to give people straight answers. We'd rather they question things for themselves.
Deborah Curtis
But it's easier to say 'I love you',than 'Yours, sincerely' I suppose.
Elvis Costello
There's a girl in this dress,there's always a girl in distress.
Elvis Costello
Seven deadly sins,seven ways to win,seven holy paths to hell,and your trip beginsSeven downward slopesseven bloodied hopesseven are your burning fires,seven your desires...
Iron Maiden
Come on you target for faraway laughter. Come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!
Pink Floyd
You made me feel less aloneYou made me feel not quite soDeformed, uninformed and hunchbackedAre you aware wherever you areThat you have just died?
Morrissey
I walked when I should have runI ran when I should have walkedAnd don't I know it, don't I know it
Jamie Woon
you knowI knowyou knowI'll remember youand I knowYou knowI knowyou'll remember me
One Direction
But at times words can be a dangerous addition to music — they can pin it down. Words imply that the music is about what the words say, literally, and nothing more. If done poorly, they can destroy the pleasant ambiguity that constitutes much of the reason we love music. That ambiguity allows listeners to psychologically tailor a song to suit their needs, sensibilities, and situations, but words can limit that, too. There are plenty of beautiful tracks that I can’t listen to because they’ve been “ruined” by bad words — my own and others. In Beyonce's song "Irreplaceable," she rhymes "minute" with "minute," and I cringe every time I hear it (partly because by that point I'm singing along). On my own song "Astronaut," I wrap up with the line "feel like I'm an astronaut," which seems like the dumbest metaphor for alienation ever. Ugh.
David Byrne
You're rarer than a can of Dandelion & BurdockAnd those other girls are just post-mix lemonade
Arctic Monkeys
You choke my throatWith words of wonderYou make it hard to breatheYour love's so coldJust like an arrowPierced through my skin I bleed
Charli XCX
She once said her songs were "mostly about myths, spirits, that kind of thing. Not fairies, stronger than that." Not fairies. Stronger than that: there's a fine phrase to bear in mind. Her lyrics are about the things that drive, or repulse, or empower the human spirit. Not escapism, in fact, but its exact opposite.
Graeme Thomson
And as I touch your shoulder tonight this room has become the centre of the entire universe.
Jarvis Cocker
That was how we spoke, my mother and I: in puns and games and rhymes. In, you might say, lyrics. This was our tragedy. We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny. We were tinpan alleycats, but the gift of music had been withheld. We could not sing along, though we always knew the words. Still, defiantly, we roared our tuneless roars, we fell off the high notes and were trampled by the low ones. And if bitter ices were the consequence, well, there were worse fates in the world than that.
Salman Rushdie
They keep you doped with religion, and sex, and T.V.And you think you're so clever and classless and freeBut you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see
John Lennon
Are we just dreamingIn the city that never sleeps?Cause I can't be seeingWhat my eyes tell me.
Bring Me The Horizon
You must know life to see decay.
Mumford and Sons
It's under my skin but out of my hands (Tears for Fears - Womain in Chains, 1992)
Roland Orzabal
Am I the only onewishing life away?Never caught up in the momentbusy begging the past to stayMemories painted with much brighter ink;they tell me I loved, teach me how to think.
Dodie Clark
We're all trying to keep up in this stupid raceBut that won't be much funWhen we're floating in space.
John Symeou
For mankind you've made your wintry bed.A shipwreck of your own mortality
Marie Symeou
And where colours likeA rainbow dance alive, asWisdom’s arrows rain downAnd ages come to pass.
Marie Symeou
You wrote my thoughtsFor all the world to seePainted the skyWith immortal words
Marie Symeou
They can take tomorrow and the plans we made They can take the music that we'll never play All the broken dreams, take everything Just take it away but they can never have yesterday They can take the future that we'll never know They can take the places that we said we would go All the broken dreams, take everything Just take it away but they can never have yesterday
Leona Lewis
Oh, there ain't no love, no Montagues or CapuletsJust banging tunes and DJ setsAnd dirty dancefloors and dreams of naughtinessI Bet that You Look Good on the Dancefloor
Arctic Monkeys
You used to get it in your fishnetsNow you only get it in your nightdressDiscarded all the naughty nights for niceness......Remeber when the boys were all electric?
Arctic Monkeys
You may still be here tomorrow...but your dreams may not.
Yusuf Islam
They can rip you bring you down, down to their size, but they will never get to the heart you hold inside.
Little Mix
Pretty's just a pretty word.
Little Mix
We have eyes and we have nervesesWe have tails we have teethYou'll all get what you deservesesWhen we rise from underneath.
Neil Gaiman
We have teeth and we have tailsWe have tails we have eyesWe were here before you fellWe will be here when you rise.
Neil Gaiman
Life's just a cocktail party - on the street.
Mick Jagger
Thou shalt not use poetry, art or music to get into girls’ pants - use it to get into their heads.
Scroobius Pip
If I could be anywhere, where would I be?
Tom Felton
I find it kind of funny. I find it kind of sad. The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had.
Tears For Fears
We are small but we are manyWe are many we are smallWe were here before you roseWe will be here when you fall
Neil Gaiman
Aye, though he loved her from his soul with such a self denying love as woman seldom wins; he spoke from first to last of Martin.
Charles Dickens
The worst things in life come free to us
Ed Sheeran
It's so easy to laughIt's so easy to hateIt takes guts to be gentle and kind
Morrissey
I didn't simply want children - I probably could have found someone who would have been willing to do the baby thing - I wanted them with her. I longed to see the sparkle of her eyes in the eyes of a child; to have that infectious laugh of hers coming out of a baby's mouth as I tickled them; I wanted to hold a child in my arms and look at it and see her and me, our genes combined to make another human being. When it came to me that that would never happen, I put my fist through the back door. All these little things kept coming to me, all the "I'll nevers", but that was the worst one. I grieved for the children we'd never have almost as much as I'd grieved for her.
Dorothy Koomson
He felt himself now, as he had often fancied other people, adrift on the stream, and far removed from control of it, a man with no grasp upon circumstances any longer. Old battered man loafing at the doors of public-houses now seemed to be his fellows, and he felt, as he supposed them to feel, a mingling of envy and hatred towards those who passed quickly and certainly to a goal of their own. They, too, saw things very thin and shadowy, and were wafted about by the lightest breath of wind. For the substantial world, with its prospect of avenues leading on and on to the invisible distance, had slipped from him.
Virginia Woolf
I look into my glass,And view my wasting skin,And say, 'Would God it came to passMy heart had shrunk as thin!
Thomas Hardy
Therefore, have done with this nonsense: you have no ground for hope: dismiss, at once, these hurtful thoughts and foolish wishes from your mind, and turn to your own duty, and the dull blank life that lies before you. You might have known such happiness was not for you.
Anne Brontë
It's our version of "me" that causes us the most stress and heartache. Which is why it comes as a relief to discover that this version is as transient as a cloud in the sky. Focus on the cloud and the result is uncertain. Focus on the sky and we discover clarity.
David Michie
I hoped with every ounce of my being that he would have the pleasure of knowing love and heartache in the way that I did. It might sound strange me wanting my five-year-old son to experience heartache, but without it I wouldn't have met his mother - a wonderful woman who taught me just how uncomplicated falling in love can be when it is with the right person, as well as highlighting the notion that timing is everything. If I had met her earlier in life I've no doubt that I'd have made a complete mess of the whole thing. I wouldn't have been ready to receive her love or to give the love I'd spent year accumulating.
Giovanna Fletcher
And because you not always can keep your eyes shut there comes the real trouble--the heart pain--the world pain. I tell you, my friend, it is not good for you to find you cannot make your dream come true, for the reason that you not strong enough are, or not clever enough. . . . Ja! . . . And all the time you are such a fine fellow too! Wie? Was? Gott im Himmel! How can that be? Ha! ha! ha!"’The shadow prowling amongst the graves of butterflies laughed boisterously.
Joseph Conrad
We have found each other for a reason to fill each other’s empty heart in every season!
Lily Amis
After a night of drinking, she would be a pale, starling-sized creature, but now, in this place, she is moonlight in heels.
Claire North
Charity liked brandy. She liked the way it burned her throat while soothing the ache in her heart.
Elizabeth Jane Howard
My swimming cap was really sprouting leaks these days. The thing is, you could patch over the holes, but it would never be the same. Like my love life.
Helen Salter
But the years came and went without bringing the careless boy; and when they met again Wendy was a married woman, and Peter was no more to her than a little dust in the box in which she had kept her toys.
J.M. Barrie
Whatever happens tomorrow, we had today; and I'll always remember it
David Nicholls
I know who you are. I love you. I love everything about you that hurts.
Patrick Marber
Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.
Christopher Morcom
Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it.
Sally Brampton
the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the “nursery,” as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Please tell a story about a girl who gets away.”I would, even if I had to adapt one, even if I had to make one up just for her. “Gets away from what, though?”“From her fairy godmother. From the happy ending that isn’t really happy at all. Please have her get out and run off the page altogether, to somewhere secret where words like ‘happy’ and ‘good’ will never find her.”“You don’t want her to be happy and good?”“I’m not sure what’s really meant by happy and good. I would like her to be free. Now. Please begin.
Helen Oyeyemi
The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth.
Marina Warner
Now fairy stories are at risk too, like the forests. Padraic Column has suggested that artificial lighting dealt them a mortal wound: when people could read and be productive after dark, something fundamental changed, and there was no longer need or space for the ancient oral tradition. The stories were often confined to books, which makes the text static, and they were handed over to children.
Sara Maitland