Quotes by British Authors - Page 516

I have been capable of some mischief in the past. I know what rebellion feels like. Everyone and everything is provided with a destiny, but there is no obligation whatsoever to fulfill it. Some just prefer to ignore the humming of their soul.
E.A.A. Wilson
If you don’t believe your whole life has been a path leading to this one point, you’re not focused enough.” Master Sergeant Gabriel Luther Wells.
Mark Henwick
Suffering is inevitable. It is part of the human condition. It is written in the human script.
Johnny Rich
I may not be free, but I’m not about to surrender the illusion of choice.
Johnny Rich
Sometimes there is nothing you can do.
Neil Gaiman
In my youth, the question chiefly important to me was—What sort of man shall I decide to be? At nineteen one asks oneself this question; at thirty-nine we say, “I wish Fate hadn’t made me this sort of man.
Jerome K. Jerome
Destiny' is the state of perfect mechanical causation in which everything is the consequence of everything else. If choice is an illusion, what's life? Consciousness without volition. We'd all be passengers, no more real than model trains.
Nick Harkaway
Men who’ve made choices always feel they own their destiny. Few ever think to ask who shaped and offered up those choices. Who dangles the carrot they think they’ve chosen to follow.
Mark Lawrence
It isn't where you're born in this world, it's what you do.
Winston Graham
I’ve had enough of this destiny bullshit, OK?
Giselle Simlett
Destiny has got the rope round my neck – and I feel it.
Wilkie Collins
Destiny sees things as they are, not as we would wish them to be. He knows there are no stories, only the illusion of stories: threads and patterns that seem to appear in the pages of existence given meaning and significance by the observer. Destiny observes worlds and molecules like motes of dust hanging in a sunbeam: every movement, every moment inevitable. Destiny walks the paths of his garden, a place of forks and paths which combine and part, seeing only what is. He is surprised by nothing. There is nothing that can surprise him, nothing that was not already written in his book.
Neil Gaiman
Everyone has a destiny. Rosie told me that. A future that already exists – hidden from us but still there, in the future – and each thing that happens to us, each choice we make, each person in our life takes us closer to it.
Debbie Howells
In the quantum multiverse, every choice, every decision you've ever and never made exists in an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes.
Nick Payne
Destiny is desire meeting opportunity. You become who you are driven to be.
Chloe Thurlow
Your destiny is the result of the choices that you make, which paths you take in life.
Steven Redhead
I saw only the reality of his destiny, which he had knownhow to follow with unfaltering footsteps, that life begun in humblesurroundings, rich in generous enthusiasms, in friendship, love, war--inall the exalted elements of romance.
Joseph Conrad
The human situation, in general or in particular, is slightly worse (ignoring an occasional hiccup in the graph) at any given moment than at any preceding moment.
FARRELL J.G.
How few human beings, the major thought with a sigh, can exert by hard work, thrift, intelligence or any other virtue the slightest influence on their own destiny.
FARRELL J.G.
Everything created has a beginning, Destiny of the Endless...as everything created has an end.
Neil Gaiman
Ah, the world was ever so. How sad are heroes when their tasks are done...
Michael Moorcock
Ah me!" said he, "what might have been is not what is!
Charles Dickens
Life was like a jigsaw, but if you tried to fit the pieces together yourself, you generally got them wrong. Pierre had money; she needed money. Pierre was lovable and loved her; she would marry him. She had thought that was the pattern the pieces made. But it had been like trying to force two pieces together that didn't fit, and then, suddenly, the jigsaw had been done, in quite a different way, by other hands.
Monica Dickens
You mean it's my destiny? she said at last.Granny shrugged. Something like that. Probably. Who knows?
Terry Pratchett
You mean it's my destiny?" she said at last.Granny shrugged. “Something like that. Probably. Who knows?
Terry Pratchett
Emotion,' she told him, 'is not a reliable guide for our words and actions.''There you are wrong,' he said. 'Deep, true emotion is our surest guide. We make our greatest mistake when we allow our heads to rules ours hearts.''Emotion is our human weakness.,' she said, 'reason our strength.''And love,' he said, 'is our destiny.
Mary Balogh
You may be sure that it was not for any merit that others do not possess: not for power or wisdom, at any rate. But you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Will you not see?” she cried. “You are not as other men are. Why need you bow to a Fate? Can you not change it?
Jane Gaskell
If you call upon the Gods and they answer, who is there to oppose or to challenge the integrity of your Path?
Andrew D. Chumbley
Then the prophecies of the old songs have turned out to be true, after a fashion!” said Bilbo. “Of course!” said Gandalf. “And why should not they prove true? Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don't really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a whole wide world after all!
J.R.R. Tolkien
The time is come," he spoke quietly. "Now, when lesser folk would wither, thou must be true to the blood of thine ancestors. Much greatness is bred in thee; accept now this terrible mantle and take a step nearer thy destiny.
Robin Jarvis
I come to call down my destiny - and it is tall and dangerous!
Robin Jarvis
I don't want to be the Starwife!" Ysabelle protested. "It isn't fair!"Her mother wavered; even now, it was not too late."You must fulfill your destiny," she said at last. "The Starwifeship is already yours. All that remains is for you to bring the amulet and the Starglass together. Once that is done, the power of the heavens will be yours to command. Use it wisely, for the forces locked within the Silver Acorn may be used for good or ill. On your journey, never be parted from it; always wear it about your neck.
Robin Jarvis
The journey may be fraught with challenges, yet it continues, for even the smallest leaf must embrace destiny...Persistence is the key...
Virginia Alison
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with. There is no problem about changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.
Douglas Adams
It's laughable, looking back, to see the processes I went through, pretending to make a reasoned decision. No choice is ever made on the basis of logic; the logic is fabricated around the impulse, the initial desire which is innate and incontrovertible. All the time, I knew where I was going, the elements of my fulfillment or ruin were always present; I only had to work my way into that seam of desire and find the hidden vein of dross or gold. It's not a question of predestination, it's just that free will and destiny are illusions, false opposites, consolations. In the end, they are one and the same: a single process. You choose what you choose and it could not have been otherwise: the choice is destiny. It was there all along, but any alternative you might have considered is an absurd diversion, because it is in your nature to make one choice rather than another. That is identity. To speak of freedom or destiny is absurd because it suggests there is something outside yourself, directing your life, where really it is of the essence: identity, the craftwork of the soul.
John Burnside
In grief more than in joy, man longs to know that the universe turns around him.
Mary Renault
Every good thing comes to some kind of end, and then the really good things come to a beginning again.
Cory Doctorow
Well, you may think you have all your ducks in a row, that your life is sorted. You might have the perfect house, the perfect job, the perfect life, nothing to worry about and then something can come along and end all of that in a second. It’s absolutely beyond your control. You can’t plan for unexpected things. And then people start saying, as a way of coping with this latest catastrophe, that it was meant to happen, it was fate. It’s not fate, it’s not some greater force out there. It’s just life and you cannot control life.
Garry Crystal
You don’t have to believe in karma, (I didn’t). But you can bet your ass that karma will have been keeping an eye on you.
Garry Crystal
A true thing, poorly expressed, is a lie.
Stephen Fry
Who am I? The shell-selling Lace girl, the attendant of Lady Arilou, Mother Govrie’s other daughter, the thing of dust, the victim, the revenger, the diplomat, the crowd-witch, the killer, the rescuer, the pirate?I am anything I wish to be. The world cannot choose for me. No, it is for me to choose what the world shall be.
Frances Hardinge
We make our own destiny.
Susan Hill
ego promenades, flounces, pushes in unwanted places, trips, stands on others, whereas a sense of destiny grounds - you just do what you do
Jay Woodman
As for her hair, or rather hairs, they are too complicated to describe, but one system went down her back, lying in a thick pad there, while another, created for a lighter destiny, rippled around her forehead.
E.M. Forster
Mark to yourself the gradual way in which you have been prepared for, and are now led by an irresistible necessity to enter upon your great labour.
William Makepeace Thackeray
And now, Elric had told three lies. The first concerned his cousin Yyrkoon. The second concerned the Black Sword. The third concerned Cymoril. And upon those three lies was Elric's destiny to be built, for it is only about things which concern us most profoundly that we lie clearly and with profound conviction.
Michael Moorcock
I have a vision of a Galaxy overrun by mankind from Core to rim. Of four hundred billion stars each enslaved to the rhythm of Earth's day, Earth's year. I have a vision of a trillion planets pulsing to the beat of a human heart.
Stephen Baxter
That's the thing about your destiny how are you supposed to know when it arrives? How are you supposed to recognise it from random life?
David Baddiel
We walk the paths we choose.
Barbara Wood
Demographics is destiny
Arthur Kemp
We are all, he says, the sport of destiny. Ah, but not quite. Destiny is an intelligent force, moving with purpose.
Rafael Sabatini
She put her hand in his, and he clasped it firmly, knowing he had been waiting for her all his life.
Barbara Taylor Bradford
Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.
George Eliot
That's the thing about destiny: It can't be predicted, and it's usually pretty odd.
Jasper Fforde
There have been occasions in my later life (I suppose as in most lives) when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all its interest and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance any more. Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when my way in life lay stretched out straight before me through the newly-entered road of apprenticeship to Joe.
Charles Dickens
The ancients believed in Fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable.
Jeanette Winterson
Destiny's what you make of it. You have to face whatever life throws at you.
Darren Shan
Perhaps there are those who are able to go about their lives unfettered by such concerns. But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.
Kazuo Ishiguro
She was his north star, the fixed point round which his world turned. For as long as his heart beat, or hers, he believed they would always share a destiny.
David Gemmell