Quotes by British Authors - Page 632

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.
Virginia Woolf
But he who dares not grasp the thorn Should never crave the rose.
Anne Brontë
Life is a dance more than it is an assertion and there is more health in dynamism or fluidity than there is rigidity and stasis.
Oli Anderson
There are times when it is conservative to be a revolutionary, when the world must be turned on its head in order to be stood on its feet.
Christopher Hitchens
Just because a door appears closed it does not mean that it is locked - nor that it will not open with the right heart, call or touch
Rasheed Ogunlaru
There were only seven years between the first and last Beatles albums. That's nothing, seven years, when you think of how their hairstyles changed and their music changed. Some bands now go seven years without hardly bothering to do anything.
Nick Hornby
the knowledge that change can be frightening, that responsibility can, but that the answer to that is not refusing to change or to accept responsibility.
Jo Walton
It was due to his tact, to his judgment, to his sympathetic manipulation of human beings that the atmosphere had always been such a happy one... If there was a change, therefore, the change must be due to the man at the top.
Agatha Christie
I studied history at university. My mutinous discontent recalls something I read there on the subject of revolutions. They do not happen, it was argued, when the oppressed class is being maximally ground down by misery, but, rather, when conditions improve. It is the slight relief of pressure which gives the downtrodden the chance to lift their heads out of the slime, to look about them. and become cognisant of the true circumstances of their lives.
Anna Lyndsey
I long for the Church to be more truly itself, and for me this involves changing its stance on war, sex, investment and many other difficult matters. I believe in all conscience that my questions and my disagreements are all of God. Yet I must also learn to live in and attend to the reality of the Church as it is, to do the prosaic things that can be and must be done now and to work at my relations now with the people who will not listen to me or those like me—because what God asks of me is not to live in the ideal future but to live with honesty and attentiveness in the present, i.e., to be at home."What if the project in question is myself, and not some larger social question such as war? At the end of the day, it is the central concern for most of us. We long to change and to grow, and we are rightly suspicious of those who are pleased with the way they are and cannot seem to conceive of changing any further. Yet the torture of trying to push away and overcome what we currently are or have been, the bitter self-contempt of knowing what we lack, the postponement of joy and peace because we cannot love ourselves now—these are not the building blocks for effective change. We constantly try to start from somewhere other than where we are. Truthful living involves being at home with ourselves, not complacently but patiently, recognizing that what we are today, at this moment, is sufficiently loved and valued by God to be the material with which he will work, and that the longed-for transformation will not come by refusing the love and the value that is simply there in the present moment."So we come back, by a longish detour, to the point to which Mark's narrative brought us: the contemplative enterprise of being where we are and refusing the lure of a fantasized future more compliant to our will, more satisfying in the image of ourselves that it permits. Living in the truth, in the sense in which John's Gospel gives it, involves the same sober attention to what is there—to the body, the chair, the floor, the voice we hear, the face we see—with all the unsatisfactoriness that this brings. Yet this is what it means to live in that kingdom where Jesus rules, the kingdom that has no frontiers to be defended. Our immersion in the present moment which is God's delivers the world to us—and that world is not the perfect and fully achieved thing we might imagine, but the divided and difficult world we actually inhabit. Only, by the grace of this living in the truth, we are able to say to it at least an echo of the 'yes' that God says, to accept as God accepts.
Rowan Williams
I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad about her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss.
Jeanette Winterson
Change what is into the wonder it can be.
Steven Redhead
Everything is determined by your interpretation of what happens. You can change the meaning of what happens through your perception of events or memories.
Steven Redhead
Life gives you what you expect, what you are prepared to put up with or can change.
Steven Redhead
Don't make changes to suit others, stay true to yourself.
Steven Redhead
Start to change your reality today, moulding your reality to suit what you want from life.
Steven Redhead
The trouble is that things never get better, they just stay the same, only more so.
Terry Pratchett
Change your life by following the desires of your heart, aiming to achieve your true bliss; creating your own part of heaven here on earth.
Steven Redhead
Because there was no pre-existing patrician elite, those successful in the new book industry could write very swiftly to the top of the social hierarchy.
Andrew Pettegree
As long as your work remains unwritten in your head, it has no effect on anyone. Except you. And not in a good way. Once you let your idea out of the hermetically sealed vault of your brain and out into the fresh air, it will immediately start to evolve. The minute you get it down on a piece of paper, it will change.And once you let it out of the house — once someone else gets to experience it — everything is changed.You are changed. The project is changed. The audience is changed.That’s the alchemy of art.
Sam Bennett
The stranglehold of the departed was much resented by the new generation of aspiring authors. Which is why it is who did make the breakthrough were so admired.
Andrew Pettegree
It is often the parishioners, the men and women in the pews, who set the tone.
Andrew Pettegree
People don't really change, they just adapt to circumstances.
Ruth Ahmed
Whenever we find ourselves stuck, whenever we find ourselves lost or confused by the chaos of the world, we can be sure that the only way to free ourselves is to take action of some kind. Action is the only thing that ever changes anything and in a world that ever changes, it is the best way to keep ourselves in the flow of the world unfolding.
Oli Anderson
The alternatives in my life went through my mind. Unemployed, alone, despairing, watching daytime TV. That couldn't end well.Or helping people, like genuinely making a difference. Imagine waking up and doing that every day?
Ruth Ahmed
As the days dwindled towards the end of the week I knew only one thing: I couldn't return to our old life. Haroon had taken Honour and Al with him,
Ruth Ahmed
Can a mere song change a people's minds? I doubt that it is so. But a song can infiltrate your heart and the heart may change your mind.
Elvis Costello
One day, this Establishment will fall. It will not do so on its own terms or of its own accord, but because it has been removed by a movement with a credible alternative that inspires. For those of us who want a different sort of society, it is surely time to get our act together.
Owen Jones
Reality can be mischievous at times, fragile, fleeting; with the potential to change vastly without warning.
Steven Redhead
Harnessing change is the most valuable tool available for creating the reality that you clearly desire.
Steven Redhead
Oh, Lord! don't I know it's difficult! ... Don't I know that perhaps it's impossible! But it's the only way to do it. Therefore, I say, let's try to get it done. And everybody says, 'difficult, difficult,' and nobody lifts a finger to try. And the only real difficulty is that everybody for one reason or another says that it's difficult. It's against human nature. Granted! Every decent thing is. It's socialism. Who cares?
H.G.Wells
I think adults must get sort of worn away over time, like rocks out at sea, but remain who they are, just slower and grayer with those funny vertical wrinkles in front of their ears. But the young are a different shape from one week to the next. To know us is to run alongside us, like someone trying to shout through the window of a moving train.
Eve Chase
I've discovered that life doesn't always turn on the obvious things - people dying, marriages, all the stuff that gets carved on the tombstones - but little unrecorded things too.
Eve Chase
He had been reborn into the knowledge of death; and the inescapability of change, of things-never-the-same, of no-way-back, made him afraid. When you lose the past you're naked in front of contemptuous Azraeel, the death-angel. Hold on if you can, he told himself. Cling to yesterdays. Leave your nail-marks in the grey slope as you slide.
Salman Rushdie
For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman's glance.
George Eliot
The misconception of something being a certainty sometimes gets to me until I remember we can change most things consciously.
Jay Woodman
How things change,’ I say, ‘how strange that, even when all is lost, we can still find beauty in simple things.
Judith Arnopp
But... it's one of those laws of the universe, isn't it? Nothing stays the same. Things change.
Sam Gayton
To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.
Winston S. Churchill
I needed to tell him, silently, that things might change, grow, or fail, but that life did go on. That we were all part of some great cycle, some pattern that it was only God's purpose to understand.
Jojo Moyes
Mankind willfully changing the global electromagnetic radiation environment has created what I expect will become known as the man-made evolution era.
Steven Magee
Modify the environmental radiation and you will change the course of evolution.
Steven Magee
Fill the world with acid rain clouds and you will be in a new era of evolution, due to the changed electromagnetic frequencies emissions and light emissions from the lightning clouds. A new era of global environmental radiation!
Steven Magee
I think about it all the time, about what makes everyone who they are, and if we went back in time and changed anything, whether or not it would make a difference. Would it make us better or worse, or would we just stay exactly the same because we were always destined to end up this way no matter what happened throughout our lives? ~ Evie Snow
Carrie Hope Fletcher
You plan every step of your life, but sometimes you have to let life happen. Change is always unsettling, sometimes scary, but you have to let go. Take a risk. Risk can be fun.
Sarah Morgan
SCORPIUS: The world changes and we change with it. I am better off in this world. But the world is not better. And I don't want that.
Jack Thorne
People are always changing themselves and their world, dear. Very few of the changes are new. We rather confuse change and newness, I think. What is truly new never changes.""You speak in riddles, aged progenitor.""The world worships a certain kind of newness. People are always talking about a new car, or a new drink or p-p-play or house, but these things are not truly new, are they? They begin to get old the minute you acquire them. New is not in things. New is within us. The truly new is something that is new forever: you. Every morning of your life and every evening, every moment is new. You have never lived this moment before and you never will again. In this sense the new is also the eternal.
Tony Hendra
I just wonder… Isn’t it better to start as a monster and become a hero? Isn’t that what creates belief? The idea that someone can change?
F.D. Lee
The only clue to what is in people's minds is in their behavior. If a man behaves strangely, oddly, is not himself--Then you suspect him?No. That is just what I mean. A man whose mind is evil and whose intentions are evil is conscious of that fact and he knows that he must conceal it all costs. He dare not, therefore, afford any unusual behavior.
Agatha Christie
The world is all change, my friend. We all would like to go back, but the past is done. We must look forwards. We must change ourselves, however painful it may be, or be left behind.
Joe Abercrombie
Time was this place didn’t make sense and I could live with it. Either it’s changed, or I have.
Warren Ellis
The change was made in me; the thing was done. Well or ill done, excusably or inexcusably, it was done.
Charles Dickens
...love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down
Jeanette Winterson
Maybe all you needed in life was the belief you could change things. Somehow. Some way.
Holly Bourne
The world changes and we change with it.
Jack Thorne
Reality is never clear, said Boris. It's never final. You can always change it or see it a different way.
Rana Dasgupta
Curious how even a little time can alter so much.
Robin Jarvis
... Weber insists that one should not give up or lose faith in the face of this struggle. Indeed, he calls for us to engage in, rather than withdraw from, the problems of this world. He reminds us, for example, that while 'successful political action is always the "art of the possible" ... the possible is often reached only by striving to attain the impossible that lies beyond it'.
Nicholas Gane
[Concerning postmodernism:] The aim of this experimental history is to disturb the ontological security of modern identity and hence to provoke the possibility of otherness through exposition of the cultural difference concealed by, and within, the order of modern rationalism.
Nicholas Gane
I am pointing to you that under these conditions--mental strain, physical malaise--it is highly probable that dislikes that were before merely mild and disagreements that were trivial might suddenly assume a more serious note. The result of pretending to be a more amiable, a more forgiving, a more high-minded person than one really is, has sooner or later the effect of causing one to behave as a more disagreeable, a more ruthless and an altogether more unpleasant person than is actually the case! If you dam the stream of natural behavior, mon ami, sooner or later the dam bursts and cataclysm occurs.
Agatha Christie