Quotes by British Authors - Page 494

If we seem to get no good by attempting to draw near to Him, we may be sure we will get none by keeping away from Him.
John Newton
Our struggle is--isn't it?--to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already
C.S. Lewis
For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.
C.S. Lewis
Oh, will you pray? Stop now and pray, lest desire turn to feeling and feeling evaporate.
Amy Carmichael
Prayer's a very tricky business.
Dodie Smith
A man may study because his brain is hungry for knowledge, even Bible knowledge. But he prays because his soul is hungry for God.
Leonard Ravenhill
For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait.
C.S. Lewis
We knew our Father. There was no need for persuasion. Would not His Fatherliness be longing to give us our hearts' desire (if I may put it so)? How could we press Him as though He were not our own most loving Father?
Amy Carmichael
Praying and sinning will never live together in the same heart. Prayer will consume sin, or sin will choke prayer.
J.C. Ryle
Groanings which cannot be uttered are often prayers which cannot be refused.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
God bless us, every one!
Charles Dickens
And shall I pray Thee change Thy will, my Father,Until it be according unto mine?But, no, Lord, no, that never shall be, ratherI pray Thee blend my human will with Thine.I pray Thee hush the hurrying, eager longing,I pray Thee soothe the pangs of keen desire—See in my quiet places, wishes thronging—Forbid them, Lord, purge, though it be with fire.
Amy Carmichael
Do not have your concert first, and then tune your instrument afterwards. Begin the day with the Word of God and prayer, and get first of all into harmony with Him.
James Hudson Taylor
No man is greater than his prayer life. The pastor who is not praying is playing; the people who are not praying are straying. We have many organizers, but few agonizers; many players and payers, few pray-ers; many singers, few clingers; lots of pastors, few wrestlers; many fears, few tears; much fashion, little passion; many interferers, few intercessors; many writers, but few fighters. Failing here, we fail everywhere.
Leonard Ravenhill
Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to.
Terry Pratchett
The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.
Christopher Hitchens
...for if we try to go on protecting them we prevent them from growing up to be ordinary, confident adults, capable of looking after themselves.
Dorothy Rowe
The problem with growing up fearing and expecting rejection is that you cannot enter into adult relationship in the expectation of happiness.
Dorothy Rowe
Depression isn't just being a bit sad. It's feeling nothing. It's not wanting to be alive anymore.
J.K. Rowling
What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.
Nick Hornby
Does he know about me? George wonders; do any of them? Oh yes, probably. It wouldn't interest them. They don't want to know about my feelings or my glands or anything below my neck. I could just as well be a severed head carried into the classroom to lecture to them from a dish.
Christopher Isherwood
By the time it has gotten dressed, it has become he; has become already more or less George — though still not the whole George they demand and are prepared to recognize. Those who call him on the phone at this hour of the morning would be bewildered, maybe even scared, if they could realize what this three-quarters-human thing is what they are talking to. But, of course, they never could—its voice's mimicry of their George is nearly perfect.
Christopher Isherwood
Bodily haste and exertion usually leave our thoughts very much at the mercy of our feelings and imagination.
George Eliot
There's a boy whose affection I am determined to hunt down and kill. It used to be material objects I felt I needed to be happy. It would make me feel stable if I had him. If I had someone like him, it would prove that I'm stable, and then I wouldn't have to do the work to get there. I am constantly looking for ways to cede control of my worries to someone, anyone.
Emma Forrest
I want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable--indescribable--my misery amazing.
Charles Dickens
In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.
George Eliot
Like if Leonardo from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started being all bummed out about everything. How were we going to kick arse if our Leonardo was wearing a black eye-band instead of a blue one?
Dougie Poynter
It is madness. And if you don't know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity. It's the same with self-loathing. You're probably just normal and normal-looking but that's not a real identity, not the way ugliness is. Normality, just accepting that you're probably normal-looking, lacks the force field of self-disgust. If you don't know who you are, madness gives you something to believe in.
Emma Forrest
I'm in love with someone good and kind and gentle, and he's seen the darkness too, but somehow we've become each other's light.
Emma Forrest
But I saw the pain and sadness in everything, and swirled it round my mouth like a fine wine.
Emma Forrest
The sadness ― the general sadness that squats and pees inside my brain ― isn't over. It never will be. I know how best to chase it away, though. It usually works. Sometimes it doesn't. But I pray and say, fuck it, then. I choose this. It chooses me. I choose it back.
Emma Forrest
I think I've lost my faith and I can't stop writingbecause I don't know howmuch longer I can hold on.
Emma Forrest
The goal was to get sane, to get whole, to be complete enough to support someone else.
Emma Forrest
He meant everything he said, when he said it. But this is his default. And it won out. Right now you're depressed about one thing. Before you were depressed about everything. These are good times for you.""I'm afraid of loving again. I'm afraid I've lost my faith.""You haven't.""The trapdoor I have in my mind? That can go to those bad places? It's almost gave way again.""You know the ways to keep it nailed shut.
Emma Forrest
You do it how you can do it, so long as it's getting done, you're okay.
Emma Forrest
While pensive poets painful vigils keep,Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep.
Alexander Pope
I never lie ― I am a blatantly truthful person about almost everything. My addiction (or disease as some call it) always lies. I have had very good relationships, but the addict in me always fucked them up. I fall in love quickly, it's a high that rivals drugs for a while. I am monogamous, but I always cheated with depression before the relationship fell apart. Addicts need best friends, healthy people need healthy relationships.
Emma Forrest
It's as if he can no longer acknowledge the love he felt or the pain I am in. I have been dismissed. I don't think I was smarter or as beautiful as the other girls he did this to. It's just that I was me. It was all I had.
Emma Forrest
I'm not crazy or dangerous,just a bit eccentric and lonely.
Emma Forrest
When he kisses me, I cry. I explain it's not because I wish he were someone else, it's because it's such a shock to the system to be desired after feeling so completely abandoned.
Emma Forrest
What people don't understand when you've already been a suicide and pulled through is that after the sadness comes fear: Where is my mind going with this? I don't want to die. I do not want to die. When you don't have so much control over your own thoughts, over the myriad voices in your head, you don't know where they could go.
Emma Forrest
When you live with voices in your head, you are drawn inextricably to voices outside your head. Very often the voices work to confirm your worst suspicions. Or think of things you could never have imagined! There are only so many hours of the day to hate yourself.
Emma Forrest
If killing yourself is not an option anymore, you have to sink into the darkness instead, and make something out of it.
Emma Forrest
I needed somewhere that wasn't bad. I wanted to be light and happy like you, and I wanted never for you to see the dark. I was scared I would infect you with terrible feelings and pictures in my head of walking out in front of the traffic and - No. That's not for you, see? Not for you to hear. I needed you to be my sunlight, Bessi,' and here George paused and her words became very small, 'I lost mine, I lost it.
Diana Evans
It was days like this when I felt it more than ever: I wasn’t a real human.
Melanie Cusick-Jones
It is two years since I emerged from depression and I no longer want myself dead. I want myself alive. I am no longer my own enemy. Depression is the enemy. The monster lives at my gate. My hope is that, with sufficient effort and luck, I can keep it there.
Sally Brampton
Everyone else has a work party,'Kate said. 'So why shouldn't we? We're working hard at not being mad.
Sally Brampton
I often find myself grateful for the comfort of strangers; a man who gave up his seat for me on the bus, a woman who helped me out with a heavy shopping bag. Remembering small acts of kindness puts the world in a finer, sweeter order.
Sally Brampton
The terrible truth about depression, and the part of its nature that terrifies me the most, is that it appears to operate beyond reason; feelings happen to you for no apparent cause. Or rather, there is usually an initial cause, a 'trigger'as they say in therapeutic circles, but in severe depression the feelings of sadness, grief, loneliness and despair continue long after the situation has resolved itself. It is as if depression has a life of its own, which is perhaps why so many sufferers refer to it as a living thing, as some sort of demon or beast.
Sally Brampton
I find it easy to spot a depressive. The illness is scrawled across them like graffiti.
Sally Brampton
I would not wish depression on anybody. And yet, it taught me a lot. I have not become suddenly mawkishly grateful for my life but I am more interested in it, more engaged you might say. When you have spent long years in the dark, there is joy in seeing the light and pleasure, above all, in the ordinary.
Sally Brampton
I had carried on when all I wanted was to be dead. I had stayed alive for other people. I never stayed alive for myself. I cannot begin to describe the intensity of that effort.
Sally Brampton
Wanting to die (or 'suicidal ideation'as the experts would have it) goes hand in hand with the illness. It is a symptom of severe depression, not a character failing or moral flaw. Nor is it, truly, a desire to die so much as a fervent wish not to go on living. All depressives understand that distinction.
Sally Brampton
A part of my depression lies, I think, in my unanswered question: Where is home? I feel a sense, always, of trying to find my way back to a place that doesn't exist.
Sally Brampton
Ian was living in fairyland and in our own way we all helped him to stay there.
Deborah Curtis
However, robust evidence shows that people systematically overestimate the probability of positive future contingencies, and underestimate the probability of negative ones — only those who are depressed or dysphoric come to accurate assessments.
Daniel Nettle
But for each high, there's a low. Periods of such despair and listlessness that you don't ever see a way of getting out of it. Everything's bad. Nothing's ever going to be all right again. There's no reason to get out of bed in the morning. You don't want to talk to anybody, and when you do you end up pissing them off. You can't remember what it's like to be happy.
McFly
Her soul died that night under a radiant silver moon in the spring of 1918 on the side of a blood-spattered trench. Around her lay the mangled dead and the dying. Her body was untouched, her heart beat calmly, the blood coursed as ever through her veins. But looking deep into those emotionless eyes one wondered if they had suffered much before the soul had left them. Her face held an expression of resignation, as though she had ceased to hope that the end might come.
Helen Zenna Smith
There are people in this world, whose lives are nothing but a burden to them. A black veil stands between them and the world. They are utterly alone. They are like shadows in the night, shut off from joy and all gentle human emotions, unable to even give comfort to each other. Their days are full of nothing but darkness, misery and solitude.
Susanna Clarke
A radio was playing quietly. Nobody was listening. It was there to drown out the silence.
Rachel Abbott