Quotes by British Authors - Page 128

Contentment is a pearl of great price, and whoever procures it at the expense of ten thousand desires makes a wise and a happy purchase.
John Balguy
In the Envoy Corps, you take what is offered, Virginia Vidaura said, somewhere in the corridors of my memory. And that must sometimes be enough.
Richard K. Morgan
The two women sat by the fire, tilting their glasses and drinking in small peaceful sips. The lamplight shone upon the tidy room and the polished table, lighting topaz in the dandelion wine, spilling pools of crimson through the flanks of the bottle of plum gin. It shone on the contented drinkers, and threw their large, close-at-hand shadows upon the wall. When Mrs Leak smoothed her apron the shadow solemnified the gesture as though she were moulding an universe. Laura's nose and chin were defined as sharply as the peaks peaks on a holly leaf.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Thus it looks in the last analysis as if the soul which serves God in spirit and in truth enjoys a very unusual kind of peace: not the satisfying inward rest which we would have expected, nor the outward rest of having everything in order and nothing left out, but a rest which consists in contentment at having sacrificed both to the will of God.
Dom Hubert Van Zeller
just find your way, like a river settling into its bed, and the sigh of the wind over a lake, light but restful... content with the joy in the arc of an arm throwing a ball for a dog to fetch
Jay Woodman
.... just find your way, like a river settling into its bed, and the sigh of the wind over a lake, light but restful... content with the joy in the arc of an arm throwing a ball for a dog to fetch, the ease of the grassy slope stretching away, birds in the trees singing sweet high notes, flowers growing close in the ditch.
Jay Woodman
She had nothing to wish otherwise, but that the days did not pass so swiftly. It was a delightful visit;—perfect, in being much too short.
Jane Austen
Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
Alain de Botton
The storm is over, there is sunlight in my heart. I have a glass of wine and sit thinking of what has passed.
P.G. Wodehouse
You say, 'If I had a little more, I should be very satisfied.' You make a mistake. If you are not content with what you have, you would not be satisfied if it were doubled.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.
John Stuart Mill
It might be just some trend that came and went,' I said. 'But for us, it's our life.
Kazuo Ishiguro
I'm a survivor - a living example of what people can go through and survive.
Elizabeth Taylor
There are normal hours, and then there are invalid hours, when time stalls and slips, when life -real life- seems to exist at one remove.
Jojo Moyes
There are normal hours, and then there are invalid hour, when time stalls and slips, when life -real life- seems to exist at one remove
Jojo Moyes
The fool says 'I never intended to kill. I meant only to wound.' But I tell you that if you prick a finger with a poisoned thorn you may not claim innocence when the heart dies. Do not plant a weed and pretend surprise when it grows to strangle your garden. For, I tell you that hate is to kill, for from hatred grows death as surely as life grows from love. Therefore do not nurture hatred, but love, even for those who hate you in return. Hatred wins many battles, and yet love will triumph.
Michael Grant
I'm the idea of the human imagination, which, when you think about it, is the only thing we can really be certain ISN'T imaginary.
Alan Moore
If life gets you down.Just try digging a deeper hole.
Anthony T.Hincks
A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.
Diane Setterfield
What happens to sanity when you chain it to a wall?
Ian Rankin
Sometimes that’s all it takes. Just one person to turn everything on its head. Remind you of the person you were.
Samantha Towle
Um, you don’t have to join me, but if you’re looking for a table, there are a couple good seats over there.” He nodded toward the far end.
J.M. Richards
We die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.
Mark Lawrence
Life was such a precious thing, easily broken.
Shaun Jeffrey
Shall a mangrave his sorrows upon a stone when he hath but need to write them onthe water? Nay, oh /She/, I will live my day, and grow old with mygeneration, and die my appointed death, and be forgotten.
H. Rider Haggard
The real question is: to whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong ? To those who can app|y it to their own lives, or to a cultural hierarchy of relic specialtsts?
John Berger
The key question is does the wrong interpretation of reality change reality.
Steven Redhead
Who is right and who is wrong is a personal question.
Steven Redhead
Your health is probably good if you have just been reinstantiated, and is likely to remain good for some time. Most diseases are curable, and in event of an incurable ailment or injury, a new body may be provided--for a fee. (In the event of your murder, you will be furnished with a new body at the expense of your killer.)
Charles Stross
I was at a dinner party many years ago,sitting along from Tom Stoppard, who in those days smoked not just between courses,but between mouthfuls. An American woman watched in disbelief."And you so intelligent!""Excuse me?" said tom"Knowing those things are going to kill you" she said "and still you do it.""How differently I might behave" Tom said, "if immortality were an option
Stephen Fry
Men could not have too much. Ecstasy and vulnerability belonged in the same dish. The fear the cup would be snatched away was what gave the wine its savor and as Zhirem’s cup was sure, so was his joylessness… to die is a fear, but to live is a fear, also.
Tanith Lee
The ‘Elves’ are ‘immortal’, at least as far as this world goes: and hence are concerned rather with the griefs and burdens of deathlessness in time and change, than with death.
J.R.R. Tolkien
O Time the fatal wrack of mortal things,That draws oblivion's curtains over kings;Their sumptuous monuments, men know them not,Their names without a record are forgot,Their parts, their ports, their pomps all laid in th' dustNor wit nor gold, nor buildings scape time's rust;But he whose name is graved in the white stoneShall last and shine when all of these are gone.
Anne Bradstreet
A great irony is that the quest for secular immortality is being funded by foundations and individuals who seem to hate life
Dean Cavanagh
O I will accompany the windUntil the chainOf my white bonesDrifts like fine sandAnd I become compassing.I become the
John Fairfax
Our heads will happen cold when this is found.
Tony Harrison
Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities.
John Fowles
Many things can prolong your life, but only wisdom can save it.
Neel Burton
You do not need God and Death as precursors to immortality. You need Life as a great fire, setting you and everything around you into a blaze.
Clare Morgan
I keep saying that I had everything, but all I had was endless tomorrows.
Colin Thompson
The past can't now be altered, the future has yet to be lived, and consciously to experience every moment of the present is the only way to gain at least the illusion of immortality.
P.D. James
Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
William Wordsworth
A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal...
Bertrand Russell
Think then what it is to live on here eternally and yet be human; toage in soul and see our beloved die and pass to lands whither we maynot hope to follow; to wait while drop by drop the curse of the longcenturies falls upon our imperishable being, like water slow drippingon a diamond that it cannot wear, till they be born anew forgetful ofus, and again sink from our helpless arms into the void unknowable.
H. Rider Haggard
After all, you’re only an immortal until someone manages to kill you. After that, you were just long-lived.
Simon R. Green
What is any of this to us? Time is endless and ours. Love and Death are only the games we play in it.
Tanith Lee
Just for a moment, amid all the bad stuff, this was a happy place again.
Caroline Green
Every moment we are new and full of infinite possibility as we are part of ALL.
Jay Woodman
The moments of déjà vu were coming more frequently, now. Moments would stutter and hiccup and falter and repeat. Sometimes whole mornings would repeat. Once I lost a day. Time seemed to be breaking down entirely.
Neil Gaiman
Cherish the moment and the time in which you live.
Fennel Hudson
Sublime moments refracted,Even if only for seconds,Caught forever in your soul.
Scott Hastie
And always, in our highly regularised way of life, he is obsessed by thoughts of themorrow. Of all the precepts in the Gospels the one that Christians have most neglected is the commandment to take no thought for the morrow. If a man is prudent, thought for the morrow will lead him to save; if he is imprudent, it will make him apprehensive of being unable to pay his debts. In either case the moment loses its savour. Everything is organised, nothing is spontaneous.
Bertrand Russell
But as men grow more industrialised and regimented, the kind of delight that is common in children becomes impossible to adults because they are always thinking of the next thing and cannot let themselves be absorbed in the moment. This habit of thinking of the ‘next thing’ is more fatal to any kind of aesthetic excellence than any other habit of mind that can be imagined, and if art, in any important sense, is to survive it will not be by the foundation of solemn academies, but by recapturing the capacity for wholehearted joys and sorrows which prudence and foresight have all but destroyed.
Bertrand Russell
Hell-on-skis, can you hear me? This is flying cupcake.
Joss Stirling
For a split second they stared at each other. A fleeting, lasting moment. One person noticing another person out of a whole crowd of strangers.
Alexandra Potter
I think that those few words were my greatest mistake.
Anita Brookner
Honour, in her modern self-confidence, had grown up never having to face actual raw, passionate, drop-down-dead-hostility. She didn't really understand what was going to happen,
Ruth Ahmed
The most important thing in life is to stop saying 'I wish' and start saying 'I will
Charles Dickens
This outburst caused Vexis to tremble and reach up to her neck. Fox groaned and glared at them exasperated. ‘Shut up! Stop blaming yourselves! You think you’re these big heros going around doing good, saving the world? Does it make you feel good? Well, you’re not. You can’t change much, you can do a bit of good here and there, but you can’t blame yourselves for every wrong you failed to right!'~Fox FletcherDeathsworn Arc 5: The Temple of the Mad God- Martyn Stanley
Martyn Stanley
That happens in life sometimes, doesn't it? Something terrible happens and you think it's the worst thing ever and then it turns out to be the best.
Sarah Morgan