Quotes by British Authors - Page 198

Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on [our Heavenly Father's] ground... It is His invention... He made the pleasures... All [Satan and his devils] can do is to encourage... humans to take the pleasures which our [God] has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. Hence [they] always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for and ever diminishing pleasure is the formula... To get a man's soul and give him nothing in return - that is what really gladdens [the heart of Satan and his devils].
C.S. Lewis
...the true test of the perversity of a pleasure is that it occupies a disproportionate amount of the attention.
Aleister Crowley
Government agencies are trying to get doctors to cut back on prescribing opioids. I understand that they need to do something about the epidemic of overdoses. However, labeling everyone as addicts, including those who responsibly take opioids for chronic pain, is not the answer. If the proposed changes take effect, they would force physicians to neglect their patients. Moreover, legitimate pain patients, like myself, would be left in agony on a daily basis.
Alison Moore
The need to find out what will happen if I don't relent or moderate my actions has been a constant source of difficulty and discomfort in my life.
Russell Brand
here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered; happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat-pocket; portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint-bottle; and peace of mind could be sent down by the mail.
Thomas de Quincey
This could be addictive.
Kevin Pietersen
Who shall I shoot? You choose. Now, listen very carefully: where's your coffee? You've got coffee, haven't you? C'mon, everyone's got coffee! Spill the beans!
Terry Pratchett
The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of day with some purchased relief.
Russell Brand
The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.
Niall Ferguson
Even as a junkie I stayed true [to vegetarianism] - 'I shall have heroin, but I shan't have a hamburger.' What a sexy little paradox.
Russell Brand
But, in truth, it had not exactly been gold, or even the promise of gold, but more like the fantasy of gold, the fairy dream that the gold is there, at the end of the rainbow, and will continue to be there forever - provided, naturally, that you don't go and look. This is known as finance.
Terry Pratchett
It's not a case of the glass being half full or half empty; more that we tipped a whole half-pint into an empty pint pot. I had to see how much was there, though, and now I know.
Nick Hornby
They don't try to trade 'reality', they try to tradeother people's perceptions of reality. If a market is dominated by enough technical traders, it could lapse into a 'postmodern' state, with traders trading perceptions of perceptions of reality.
Brett Scott
The problem is that I am in the wrong century to burn things. I am the wrong generation to let it go.
Edmund de Waal
She's finding it hard to cope - her hopes have been dashed, the future she dreamed about has gone and she's scared about that. There's nothing in its place. She wants you back. She doesn't want to let go of everything it meant to her. Because the world seems horribly big and empty. Because the future is a very frightening concept when you'd previously planned on sharing it with someone. Because she's a girl, she's a romantic and she fears if she lets  go of her dream, she'll live a nightmare. Because she has a hope and she fears if she lets her hope go, who will she be?The effort, the pain of clinging on is preferable to the wide-open fear of letting go.
Freya North
Right, you see that girl over there, the one in that group that keeps looking right at you?'...'Right, let's say I'm convinced she's wearing black knickers - she looks like a black knickers kind of gal to me - and I'm so sure that's what she's wearing, so positive of that sartorial fact, I want to bet a million dollars on it. The trouble is, if I'm wrong, I'm wiped out. So I also bet she's wearing knickers that aren't black, but are any one of a whole basket of colours - let's say I put nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars on that possibility: that's the rest of the market; that's the hedge. This is a crude example, okay, in every sense, but hear me out. Now if I'm right, I make fifty K, but even if I'm wrong I'm going to lose fifty K, because I'm hedged. And because ninety-five per cent of my million dollars is not in use - I'm never going to be called on to show it: the only risk is in the spread - I can make similar bets with other people. Or I can bet it on something else entirely. And the beauty of it is I don't have to be right all the time - if I can just get the colour of her underwear right fifty-five per cent of the time I'm going to wind up very rich...
Robert Harris
She remembered something that am old boyfriend had said to her. One that she didn't want to let go of at the time. One person can't be happy enough for the both of us
Chris Manby
...Love is easy, falling in love is even easier, but letting that love go, is the most difficult thing you’ll ever have to do. Some of us never let it go andsometimes it takes a while to realize what you want. But your heart will always have the right answer in the end. You just have to figure out what it’stelling you.
Marie Coulson
Falling in love is easy, letting that love go, is hard. But your heart will always have the right answer. You just have to listen to it and figure out what it’s telling you
Marie Coulson
If I learned anything in this life, I've learned that you can't cling on.
Michael Morpurgo
This he had noticed while doing his military service back in Turkey. When more than three people slept in a narrow place, sooner or later their breaths would become synchronized. Perhaps it was God's way of telling us that if we could just let go of ourselves, we would all eventually be in step and there would be no more disputes.
Elif Shafak
..it is hard to throw off long-established love;Hard, but this you must manage somehow..
Robert Galbraith
...it is hard to throw off long-established love:hard, but this you must managed somehow
J.K. Rowling
If they weren’t good for you in 2015, they won’t be great for you in 2016. Let them go.
Robert Tew
It was hard to understand a little and then walk away.
Rachel Joyce
Letting go is not getting rid of. Letting go is letting be.
Sally Brampton
Sometimes the only reason why you won't let go of someone making you sad is because he was the only one that once made you happy.
Lily Amis
It is not easy to let someone go, even when they have said unforgivable things to you.
Tracy Chevalier
There are times in life when people must know when not to let go. Balloons are designed to teach small children this.
Terry Pratchett
They say when you really love someone, you should be willing to set them free. So that is what I am doing. I will step back and you will move on. I will let you go. ... Your happiness means everything to me. I will listen for your voice in the distance. I will look at the moon. I will keep you in my pocket. I will carry your smile with me everywhere, like a warm and comforting glow.
Tabitha Suzuma
I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart.
Kazuo Ishiguro
You don't have to let that one thing be the thing that defines you.
Jojo Moyes
how can he love me then not? He went,he ran. And I cannot bring him back. Yet I left the door metaphorically wide open, hoping he'd come back and bang on it proclaiming, "I want to be here with you. Always." Soon I'm going to have to shutit. For my safety and my sanity. Let go. I don't want to. Won't letting go be just that - letting go? Giving up? Admitting failure? Admitting that it is really, truly over?
Freya North
Guilt was a fascinating thing: it seemed not to weaken over time. If anything it grew stronger as the circumstances faded from memory, as the fear and the necessity became abstract. And only her own actions stood out with crystal clarity.
Michael Grant
The exoneration of the mass. No one voice is to blame. But his voice was there.
Ian McDonald
If I was president of the Slime Committee, I'd make it easier to come clean about shit. If coming clean is what you're supposed to do, then it should be made more fucken accessible, I say.
D.B.C. Pierre
So there we have it. I get up in the morning determined to do something approximating to the right thing, and with in two hours find something to feel guilty about.
Nick Hornby
His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at their feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet.
Virginia Woolf
She had not come to the shopping centre to buy shoes; she had come to buy food, and there was a big difference between shopping for food and shopping for shoes, and that difference concentrated on one word: guilt.
Alexander McCall Smith
It's a police mantra that all members of the public are guilty of something, but some members of the public are more guilty than others.
Ben Aaronovitch
Your pain and anger will pass, but the guilt would remain with you for always.
Dodie Smith
In the end, I sold my soul." he had said, and Abby had replied "That wasn’t the end.
Jo Walton
Ah! it is well for the unfortunate to be resigned, but for the guilty there is no peace.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
I don't believe in a lot of baggage. It's such a nuisance. Life's too short to fuss with it. And it isn't really necessary
Hugh Lofting
My needs were covered by layer upon layer of denial. I was scrambling for reasons. But the truth was, even if he had had a successful career, I would have used it as an excuse to complain about neglect. He could never actually win. I was running a very common script, that of deciphering why he wasn’t enough for me and why I needed someone else—as if someone else could give me everything. As if there was one person who could be my Mr. Right and who could satisfy every ever-changing facet of my personality. At that point I still believed that this was possible…desirable…and necessary.
Louisa Leontiades
What troubled me most is that although I was an unwilling observer, I felt guilty myself as if something in what I witnessed touched a shameful and repressed desire.
John Mole
Condemn you me for that the duke did love me?So may you blame some fair and crystal river, For that some melancholic distracted manHath drowned himself in’t.
John Webster
It was curious how some people had a highly developed sense of guilt, she thought, while others had none.
Alexander McCall Smith
All my life I have felt events to be the result of my own sins.
Jane Gardam
Anna would like you, he thinks, looking into her face. Anna would like you.
David Mitchell
Lo!" said Percivale, "those I had slain were not put to silence. I heard their breath speak out of the lips of others; I saw their looks mock out of the eyes of others; the life that was gone from their bodies was but draughted to enliven fresh matter. In every ray of light, in every gust that blew, the life of the dead moved to confound me. Ah, Saint, the things they had uttered were black and heavy; I could not bear them.
Clemence Housman
But some mistakes can never be righted and the guilt eats away at the soul. Of all the emotions we have, I have learnt that guilt is the most corrosive. Anger passes quickly, and hatred mellows with age and learning, but guilt endures.
Danny Scheinmann
Somehow the sting of guilt was always more acute when there was a risk that she might get caught.
Frances Hardinge
The back of my hand to guilt.
Patrick O'Brian
We are not punished for our sins, we are punished by them. We can't live with guilt for the whole of our lives..
Susan Hill
But there are some born to do penance by nature. Maybe they lift the load for some of us who take it quite comfortably that we're humankind, and not angels.
Ellis Peters
[T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.
Christopher Hitchens
Guilt is a destructive and ultimately pointless emotion
Lynn Crilly
It is strange the way that someone who wants to find you guilty can start to make you believe in your own guilt, even when you know you are innocent. I was afraid I would condemn myself my mistake.
S.J. Parris
I have never known birds of different species to flock together. The very concept is unimaginable. Why, if that happened, we wouldn't stand a chance! How could we possibly hope to fight them?
Alfred Hitchcock