Quotes by British Authors - Page 806

There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
Alain de Botton
In my end is my beginning.
T.S Eliot
It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.
Alexander McCall Smith
Its important to be comfortable with uncertainty.
Xiaolu Guo
We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.
C.S. Lewis
The human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye)...
C.S. Lewis
We shouldn't live as if [other worlds] mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.
Philip Pullman
Life without thankfulness is devoid of love and passion. Hope without thankfulness is lacking in fine perception. Faith without thankfulness lacks strength and fortitude. Every virtue divorced from thankfulness is maimed and limps along the spiritual road.
John Henry Jowett
I don't do regrets. Regrets are pointless. It's too late for regrets. You've already done it, haven't you? You've lived your life. No point wishing you could change it.
Lemmy Kilmister
I was wasting my time, praying for love.For a love that never comes, from someone who does not exist.
Morrissey
Life stand still here.
Virginia Woolf
Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.
Joseph Conrad
Things Happen and once they start happening you pretty much just to hold on for dear life and see where they drop you when they stop.
Meg Rosoff
Thinking there is something better out there in the world, something worth more than you already have- of all my mistakes,that was my biggest.
Louise Candlish
The rule of the universe is that others can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and one can paddle every canoe except one's own.
C.S. Lewis
Life is more fun if you play games.
Roald Dahl
Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I left my coat behind after a party, that is where I met my love; I cried there once, I was heartsore; but felt better round the corner once I saw the hills of Fife across the Forth, things of that sort, our personal memories, that make the private tapestry of our lives.
Alexander McCall Smith
Live for each second without hesitation
Elton John
He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.
Ian McEwan
The preparation of good food is merely another expression of art, one of the joys of civilized living…
Dione Lucas
Some things take so longBut how do I explainWhen not too many peopleCan see we're all the sameAnd because of all their tearsYour eyes can't hope to seeThe beauty that surrounds themNow, isn't it a pity
George Harrison
It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.
Lewis Carroll
There's so much destruction all over the world - and all you can do is complain about ME!
Morrissey
Now this might disturb you, but I find I'm OK by myself;and I don't need you or your benevolence to make sense.
Morrissey
So we forgive each other?" The crooked smile climbs up one more time. "Again?"And I look right into his eyes, right into him as far as I can see, because I want him to hear me, I want him to hear me with everything I mean and feel and say."Always," I say to him. "Every time.
Patrick Ness
Nothing ever becomes real till experienced – even a proverb is no proverb until your life has illustrated it
John Keats
If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.
Ian McEwan
You can't hang around waiting for somebody else to pull your strings. Destiny's what you make of it. You have to face whatever life throws at you. And if it throws more than you'd like, more than you think you can handle? Well then you just have to find the heroism within yourself and play out the hand you've been dealt. The universe never sets a challenge that can't be met. You just need to believe in yourself in order to find the strength to face it.
Darren Shan
A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?
Alan Moore
Things don't matter, people do
Rosie Thomas
Go boldly and honestly through the world. Learn to love the fact that there is nobody else quite like you.
Daniel Radcliffe
Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it.
Jhumpa Lahiri
In my life so far, I have discovered that there are really only two kinds of people: those who are for you, and those who are against you. Learn to recognize them, for they are often and easily mistaken for each other.
Lemmy Kilmister
First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
Virginia Woolf
Learn to drive?""Never," said Quentin. "My mission in life is to be a passenger.
Diana Wynne Jones
How unhappy does one have to be before living seems worse than dying?
Deborah Curtis
Life is but a memory Happened long ago. Theatre full of sadness For a long forgotten show.
Nick Drake
I think people would live a bit longer if they didn't know how old they were. Age puts restrictions on things.
Karl Pilkington
You said we all want there to be more than this! Well, there's always more than this. There's always something you don't know.
Patrick Ness
I’ll never second guess the things that I have done. I’ve got too much left to say and too much to become.
Alex Gaskarth
Because no one needs to live for ever. I think that sometimes you can outstay your welcome.
Gemma Malley
I feel very adventurous. There are so many doors to be opened, and I'm not afraid to look behind them.
Elizabeth Taylor
You don't win races by wishing, you win them by running faster than everyone else does.
Philip Pullman
Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.
Graham Greene
All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.
John Ruskin
Whenever I see an ambulance, I like to think there is a baby being born, rather than a death.
Phil Lester
The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.
Jeanette Winterson
Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?
Tom Stoppard
Middle age has been defined as what happens when a person's broad mind and narrow waist change places.
A.C. Grayling
Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born...Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole. - Vida Winter
Diane Setterfield
The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life--or at least, shoved up so hard against someone else's life that you might as well have your face pressed against their window--is that it forces you to rethink your idea of who you are. Or how you might seem to other people.
Jojo Moyes
I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.
Tom Stoppard
This is not the end, this is not even the beginning of the end, this is just perhaps the end of the beginning.
Winston S. Churchill
my friends don't seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven't lost.
Nick Hornby
When your sad--like really sad--you only want to be with other people who are sad.
Nick Hornby
Sure it could get rough sometimes, but life wasn't a Hollywood movie. Shit happened. You fought, you screamed, and somehow you worked like hell to get out the other side still intact.
Samantha Young
Women only cut their hair in times of crisis... It's somethin' a woman always has the power to do, even when she loses control over everything else. Cuttin' hair is a cry for help.
Bella Pollen
But fate, as Merlin always taught us, is inexorable. Life is a jest of the Gods, Merlin liked to claim, and there is no justice. You must learn to laugh, he once told me, or else you'll just weep yourself to death.
Bernard Cornwell
Unless you have great parents or some inspirational teacher from a movie that pushes you to follow your dreams, you can't expect a kid to be smart enough to realize they can do what they want with their life before they've been pushed through the school system into having an average life.
Dan Howell
Yet if I was asked to do this again - in fact, if I was ever asked to repeat any of my experiences - I'd have to say, fuck it, bring them on. I've no regrets.This is what it means to be alive.
John Barrowman