Quotes by British Authors - Page 515

Don't be a creation of circumstances, create your dreams, take full control of your destiny.
Steven Redhead
Life is indeed a gamble, the ultimate game of chance, based purely upon having the ability to make the right choices at the right time. You never win or lose in life if you realise it is all just for the experience. Learn to create your own destiny, don't wait to see what fate throws your way.
Steven Redhead
Every sacred mission, every hunt for hidden relics, every pilgrimage from one end of the earth to the other … I was looking for you.
Dianna Hardy
Affraig’s eyes moved to the oak tree that towered above her, its branches like antlers against the white sky. Her gaze travelled up to the weathered web that hung from one of the higher boughs, the slender noose swinging inside. In her mind she saw herself weaving it while she chanted words against Malachy’s wrathful curse. She remembered the lord’s hand settling on her shoulder, the hiss of the fire,his breath on her neck and, outside, stars falling like fiery rain. Her gaze moved west towards Turnberry.Her memory clouded with thoughts of the earl, but as she thought of his son her mind cleared. The stars had been falling too on the night he was born. She remembered seeing Mars, full and red, a bloody eye winking in the black.
Robyn Young
Atlas said, 'Must my future be so heavy?' Hera said, 'That is your present, Atlas. Your future hardens every day, but it is not fixed.' 'How can I escape my fate?' 'You must choose your destiny.
Jeanette Winterson
Walk any path in Destiny's garden, and you will be forced to choose, not once but many times.
Neil Gaiman
At the negotiations in Irvine, it became clear to me that there was no side I could stand on. The English despise me and my countrymen don’t trust me. Wallace and the others are rebelling in the name of Balliol. I cannot fight with them. It would be as much a betrayal of my oath as when I was fighting for England. I know what I must do. What I should have done months ago.’Robert felt embarrassed, about to say the words. Inside, his father’s voice berated him, but he silenced it. ‘I want you to weave my destiny,’ he finished. ‘As you did for my grandfather.’When she spoke, her voice was low. ‘And what is your destiny?’He met her eyes now, all hesitation and embarrassment gone. ‘To be King of Scotland.’A smile appeared at the corners of her mouth. It wasn’t a soft smile. It was hard and dangerous. ‘I will need something of yours,’ she said, rising.
Robyn Young
The smallest issues can become the most important things in life and reality slips away.
David Millar
What destiny is there, but to sense, observe, merge, re-emerge,Empty, yet filled, spreading everywhere, inside, outside, in, Pulsing, fluctuating, breathing as part of one being, Whispering, feeling, reflecting, flowing between hot and cold, Mineral and plant, dark and light, love and fear, new and old.
Jay Woodman
Tattoos, after all, are a passionate, usually doomed assertion of mastery of your own destiny, or at least a defiant embrace of one that you cannot control.
Mark Simpson
It only takes one thought in one moment to alter the course of your life.
Mark Donnelly
It's as if my footprints were already on the road before I even got there.I walk into them, my waiting footprints.
Jackie Kay
The destination of the journey could not be altered, only the manner in which one approached it - whether one chose to walk erect or to be dragged complaining through the dust.
Robert Harris
On some deep, unconscious level, he had always known it to be true. He was an invention, a fictional character. Jacob Lightfoot didn't exist.
Sharon Sant
It seems to me that no matter whether you marry, settle down or live with a bird or not, certain ones simply have your number on them, like bombs in the war; and even if you don’t happen to like them all that much there’s nothing you can do about it — unless you’re prepared to spend a lifetime arguing fate out of existence, which you could probably do if you tried but I’m not the type.—Crust on Its Uppers, p. 87
Derek Raymond
Few can foresee whither their road will lead them, till they come to its end.
J.R.R. Tolkien
We are the unknown, he says, and you will join us.
Andrew Crumey
Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations; only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.
H.A.L. Fisher
The beagle and the kobold approached, walking out of the dusty distance.
Terry Pratchett
My mother can't have been magic, or she wouldn't have died", said Riddle
J.K. Rowling
Some people were born to the shape they would occupy all their lives.("Wait")
Conrad Williams
In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economy is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects.
Salman Rushdie
Each of us is born to follow a star, be it bright and shining or dark and fated. Sometimes the path of these stars will cross, bringing love or hatred. However, if you look up at the skies on a clear night, out of all the countless lights that twinkle and shine, there will come one. That star will be seen in a blaze, burning a path of light across the roof of the earth, a great comet.
Brian Jacques
The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.
Freeman Dyson
It’s been so hard!” she whispered. “I don’t know what our destiny is!”Cloudstar bent his head toward her. “Your destiny is what you make it, Leafstar.
Erin Hunter
Sandgorse chose his own destiny. Why should he get to choose yours, too?
Erin Hunter
Dreams are like stars. you may never touch them, but if you follow them, they will lead you to your destiny.
Liam Payne
Can't you see there's a determinism about the fate of nations? They all seem to get what they deserve in the long run.
Malcolm Lowry
He is holding a book.Inside the book is the Universe.
Neil Gaiman
Find what you love to do, what you're good at and passionate about and then dedicate your entire life to working hard at it. I wil say it again. Work hard. I mean that. Even if you're not sure where that work will lead, even if it is underappreciated or undervalued. Do it because the satisfaction, pride, and sense of self that comes from a job well done; from being the very best at what you do; from knowing that you did this, will be your ulltimate weapon and our greatest shield in a life that will often test you. One day destiny may conspire to take everything away from you, but it can never take away the abilities you have cultivated. As I am sure your grandfather will tell you, your winning lottery ticket is your mind.
Amy Mowafi
. . . the mysteries, on belief in which theology would hang the destinies of mankind, are cunningly devised fables whose origin and growth are traceable to the age of Ignorance, the mother of credulity.
Edward Clodd
I believe in transhumanism: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.
Julian Huxley
There was no thunderbolt, no quickening of the heart, but there was a sense of recognition.A familiarity about his face..
Judith Kinghorn
When Fortune knocks, open the door,' they say. But why should one make fortune knock, by keeping the door shut?
Idries Shah
Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Your problem is that you’re more like an empty book and you’re waiting on someone else to write your pages for you. For someone who doesn’t believe in fate, destiny and all that shit, you seem to spend an awful lot of time waiting for something to happen to you.
Garry Crystal
I know genes are a big deal, son, but they're not the be-all and end-all." Rob slowed to a halt at the lights, wishing the dickhead behind would back off. "If they were, you'd be in a seafood salad and I'd be in prison.
Karen Traviss
Some people are agents from birth, Monsignors -- he told them -- appointed to the work by the period of history, the place, and their own natural dispositions. In their cases, it was simply a question of who got to them first, Your Eminences: 'Whether it's us, whether it's the opposition, or whether it's the bloody missionaries.
John le Carré
Destiny is like a book. It needs manufacturing, the pulp process, the glue fixed tightly--and it requires a binding, to hold it together, lest it fall apart.
Lavie Tidhar
A moral dilemma is equally absorbing whether the stakes are the destiny of nations or the happiness of one or two people - at the most.
Alexander McCall Smith
Those who don't know history are destined to be tyrannized by it
Dean Cavanagh
There was no beginning, middle and end to destiny, it wasn't neat and manageable. It was random and scary and if it wanted to it would.
Lisa Jewell
And indeed if you think you're a genius at something what you achieve is very much according to your expectations; if you think you're no good, you're not going to get anywhere.
Diana Wynne Jones
We make our own destiny, not because we can see the road ahead, but because we cannot see the road ahead. It is the road, the motion, the forward movement, that takes us to ourselves.
Chloe Thurlow
From the very beginning, there was not the slightest doubt that Olga da Polga was the sort of guinea pig who would go places.
Michael Bond
The future is certain. It is just not known.
Johnny Rich
We appealed to the conscience of the world. The world has no conscience. We have no one but ourselves."The fight. The struggle. The historic destiny. The return of the people. The cause: life therefore having a meaning and shape that eludes the rest of us in the endless wash of 'What the hell are we doing here?' In a single day, says an Israeli friend, he experiences events and emotions that would keep a Swede going for a year.
David Hare
She shook her head in perplexity. "I'll never know where you got the idea that you were destined for greatness." She dropped the rest of the rabbit in the pot and begun to clean the underside of its skin. She would use the fur. "You certainly didn't inherit it from your forebears.
Ken Follett
Let me here remind you that the essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama. This remorseless inevitableness is what pervades scientific thought. The laws of physics are the decrees of fate.
Alfred North Whitehead
This was her destiny, and it was a fit and proper one. She was not unwilling, but she knew this was a fateful moment, and she had a sense of doors closing behind her and the path of her life being fixed irrevocably.
Ken Follett
Destiny was funny stuff, he knew. You couldn’t trust it. Often you couldn’t even see it. Just when you knew you had it cornered, it turned out to be something else—coincidence, maybe, or providence. You barred the door against it, and it was standing behind you. Then just when you thought you had it nailed down it walked away with the hammer.
Terry Pratchett
Insanity, thy name is woman
Virginia Alison
Love is waiting, just around the corner, over the hill...
Virginia Alison
Only fate would decree how it reached its destiny, which always waited just around the corner, over the hill...
Virginia Alison
But it is precisely at those moments when the glass seems to be ‘set fair’ that Fate invariably decides to take a hand.
John Bude
,m./But it is precisely at those moments when the glass seems to be ‘set fair’ that Fate invariably decides to take a hand.
John Bude
Even the dry and dusty arid desert air could not get her sweet perfume out of his nostrils. That one night was all it took. She stole his heart; he could do nothing about it, but accept his fate.
Virginia Alison
If life's journey was intended to be easy, we would have been given directions. However, since we have no road map, we must climb the highest mountain and forge the deepest streams with love in our souls, in the hope that our own journey will give us peace within...
Virginia Alison
Nothing in life is a foregone conclusion unless and until it is foregone and concluded
Rasheed Ogunlaru
I think there are some who live on a knife-edge in the soul, and at times are driven to hurl themselves into the air, at the mercy of heaven or he'll which way to fall.
Ellis Peters