Quotes by British Authors - Page 509

I want you to have the best of everything I can give you. And I'm not talking money here, Tru. I'm talking memories. Our life together.
Samantha Towle
We live in an age that cannibalises its past because it has lost faith in its future.
Paul McAuley
How merciful a thing is man's ignorance of his immediate future! What a ghastly, paralysing thing it would have been if all those present could have known what was about to happen within a matter of seconds! For nothing short of pre-knowledge could have stopped the occurrence, so suddenly it sprang upon them.
Mervyn Peake
I remember, when I was about ten years old, working out that I would be thirty-six in the year 2000. It seemed so far away, so old, so unreal. And here I am, a fucked, crazy, anorexic-alcoholic-childless beautiful woman. I never dreamed it would be like this.
Tracey Emin
No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us...a difficult moment when you are out of practice - a moment that makes you go cold, cold and wary.
Jean Rhys
You are walking along a road peacefully. You trip. You fall into blackness. That's the past - or perhaps the future. And you know that there is no past, no future, there is only this blackness, changing faintly, slowly, but always the same.
Jean Rhys
Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future.
C.S. Lewis
A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like our Earth.
Christopher Wren
Instead of writing backwards over what had happened, giving structure and meaning to his story, he wrote forwards, slipping into troubling futures.
Alan McCluskey
I thought that a fairer era of life was beginning for me, one that was to have its flowers and pleasures, as well as its thorns and toils. My faculties, roused by the change of scene, the new field offered to hope, seemed all astir. I cannot precisely define what they expected, but it was something pleasant: not perhaps that day or month, but at an indefinite future period.
Charlotte Brontë
Her true hope was that something would happen in the course of her time abroad that would mean she need never take the place. What that 'something' was she had no idea.
Kate Atkinson
Each age selects its own geniuses from the past to suit its own needs. It's always been that way.
Seb Kirby
In fact a favourite problem of [John Tyndall] is—Given the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet or Faust therefrom. He is confident that the Physics of the Future will solve this easily.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future.
Matt Ridley
Who you are in Christ is far more important and meaningful than what has taken place in your past.
Elizabeth George
while she wanted to look neither to her past nor her future, she lived exclusively in both. They had took different paths, but they had journeyed, so she realized, together.
Monica Ali
This is about your future. Nobody else can make the decision for you.
Cathy Bramley
The most obvious and the most distinctive features of the History of Civilisation, during the last fifty years, is the wonderful increase of industrial production by the application of machinery, the improvement of old technical processes and the invention of new ones, accompanied by an even more remarkable development of old and new means of locomotion and intercommunication. By this rapid and vast multiplication of the commodities and conveniences of existence, the general standard of comfort has been raised, the ravages of pestilence and famine have been checked, and the natural obstacles, which time and space offer to mutual intercourse, have been reduced in a manner, and to an extent, unknown to former ages. The diminution or removal of local ignorance and prejudice, the creation of common interests among the most widely separated peoples, and the strengthening of the forces of the organisation of the commonwealth against those of political or social anarchy, thus effected, have exerted an influence on the present and future fortunes of mankind the full significance of which may be divined, but cannot, as yet, be estimated at its full value.
Thomas Henry Huxley
The future is just a memory that has yet to be born
Dean Cavanagh
The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Bertrand Russell
Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.
Talli Roland
If you want a vision of the future, imagine someone watching a boot stamping on a human face - forever...and ‘liking’ it.
Dean Cavanagh
Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely.
Deborah Levy
If we are ever in doubt what to do, it is a good rule to ask ourselves what we shall wish on the morrow that we had done.
John Lubbock
Three million years! The infinitely crowded panorama of written history, with its empires and its kings, its triumphs and its tragedies, covered barely one thousandth of this appalling span of time.
Arthur C. Clarke
It’s one of the things I love about the sea, the way you can see weather afar. It’s like looking at the future.
Carol Birch
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "future perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.
Douglas Adams
Our actions, habits, character, and future are most definitely affected by our thoughts.
Elizabeth George
Sam was the only member of the party who had not been over the river before. He had a strange feeling as the slow gurgling stream slipped by: his old life lay behind in the mists, dark adventure lay in front.
J.R.R. Tolkien
We feel that in the future, groups are going to have to offer much more than just a pop show. They'll have to offer a well-presented theatre show.
Syd Barrett
-the future is a most marvellous creation. For in it lies all the mystery of raw potentiality-a boundless reservoir of all that could be-formed by the illimitable interactions of conscious human beings with their individual environments, circumstances, and conditions, and in concert with their fellow humans.
Stephen R. Lawhead
The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they once served the fitness of our genes. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. The world's last aversive experience will be a precisely dateable event.
David Pearce
The past was dwindling, like something shrinking to a speck in the rear-view mirror, and the future was shining through the windscreen, demanding her full attention.
Michel Faber
Learn from the past, log the lessons from the past, butleave the past!
Elizabeth George
God finds a way to weave even your mistakes into the fabric of a brighter future if you let Him.
Elizabeth George
Remembering to forget the past allows you freedom from a past that holds back your Christian growth.
Elizabeth George
The terrors of the future will not come from the drab repressions of an encroaching bureaucracy, but from the neon lights of a thousand supermarkets, the sounds of a million automobile accidents and from the public cremation of the dead astronauts as they return to earth.
Christopher Riche Evans
All of this comes out of what is now an empty space. There are depths to this. It's a lot to think about. From an empty space the future. If there's no empty space where can one put the future? It all figures if you take the time to think it out.
Russell Hoban
Every adult grew from a kid who beat the odds. But at different times, in different places, the odds have been appallingly steep.
M.R. Carey
The future is trapped in a cage opened only by the key of genius.
Chloe Thurlow
It seems that Russia today—dominated by, and accustomed to, autocracy and empire, and lacking strong civic institutions especially after the shattering of its society by the Bolshevik Terror—is destined to be ruled by self-promoting cliques for some time yet.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Wizards are always troubled about the future.
J.R.R. Tolkien
When young people are cynical, and snarky, they shoot down their own future. When you keep saying "No," all that's left is what other people said "Yes" to before you were born. Really, "No" is no choice at all.
Caitlin Moran
The future though imminent is obscure.
Winston Churchill
The Future,” says Ian, in a film-trailer voice. “Coming soon, to a Present near you.
David Mitchell
I am convinced that the way forward for the human race is to recognize and protect the fundamental right of sovereignty over consciousness, to throw off the chains of our divisive religious heritage, to seek out forms of spirituality (or no spirituality at all if we so prefer) that are truly supportive of liberty and tolerance, to help the human spirit to grow rather than to wither, and to nurture our innate capacity for love and mutual respect. The old ways are broken and bankrupt and new ways are struggling to be born. Each one of us with our own talents, and by our own choices, has a part to play in that process.
Graham Hancock
...a great future behind him, already
Angela Carter
Books’ll be back,” Esther-in-Unalaq predicts. “Wait till the power grids start failing in the 2030s and the datavats get erased. It’s not far away. The future looks a lot like the past.
David Mitchell
All life is preoccupied with death. Death is the only certain future. Yet in the face of reason, everyone holds out hope for the highly improbable.
Johnny Rich
Concentrate on the here and now. The future can take care of itself.
Christopher G. Nuttall
We should always be aware that what now lies in the past once lay in the future.
Frederic W. Maitland
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness," O'Brien had said to him. He knew what it meant, or thought he knew. The place where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one would never see, but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in.
George Orwell
Before, I suspected I might not amount to anything, and now I now I won't, so at least it takes away the wearisome burden of delusive hope
Jasper Fforde
The science done by the young Einstein will continue as long as our civilization, but for civilization to survive, we'll need the wisdom of the old Einstein -- humane, global and farseeing. And whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate into the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth, far beyond the Earth
Martin J. Rees
Dehumanization isn’t a way of talking. It’s a way of thinking—a way of thinking that, sadly, comes all too easily to us. Dehumanization is a scourge, and has been so for millennia. It acts as a psychological lubricant, dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming our destructive passions. As such, it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances, be unthinkable.
David Livingstone Smith
She had generated alternative versions of herself. She had insisted at brutal cost on these conversions. Layering her life, only to strip it bare. Only to be alone in the end. Her life had been paired down to its solitary components.
Jhumpa Lahiri
We have achieved two of the three alchemists' dreams: We have transmuted the elements and learned to fly. Immortality is next.
Max More
MotherHushed and sacred silencefills the dawning skyI ponder in this momentof our journey which is nigh...
Muse
When a builder builds he clears the ground for his new foundations. Then he sees that the basic structure will support the whole. Should we not also clear the mind - at least that part of it that we can reach - of the ruins of past thinking, before building our palace of dharma which will one day reach the sky.
Christmas Humphreys
The shutter of the photographer's camera makes that repeated mechanical sound. That unlocking and locking of the doors of light to send momentary images of the present into the light trap of the past.
Simon Mawer