Quotes by British Authors - Page 808

If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.
Alan W. Watts
But instead of spending our lives running towards our dreams, we are often running away from a fear of failure or a fear of criticism.
Eric Wright
He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.
William Golding
We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.
Brian Cox
My formula for life is very simple: in the morning, wake up; at night, go to sleep. In between I try and occupy myself as best I can.
Cary Grant
When people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the big bang, so there is no time for god to make the universe in. It’s like asking directions to the edge of the earth; The Earth is a sphere; it doesn’t have an edge; so looking for it is a futile exercise. We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is; there is no god. No one created our universe,and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization; There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.
Stephen Hawking
Tried living in the real world instead of a shell, but I was bored before I even began.
Morrissey
If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.
Bill Bryson
It’s always about timing. If it’s too soon, no one understands. If it’s too late, everyone’s forgotten.
Anna Wintour
I've been embarrassing myself since about birth.
Phil Lester
Whatever happens to your body, your soul will survive, untouched...
J.K. Rowling
I think, that if the world were a bit more like ComicCon, it would be a better place.
Matt Smith
We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we'd go crazy.
Patrick Ness
I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
Virginia Woolf
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of treesand changing leaves.
Virginia Woolf
Perhaps it would be simpler if you just did what you're told and didn't try to understand things.
Terry Pratchett
You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
Alan Bennett
How easy it was to capitalize on a person’s own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree that it had been the inevitable result of a chaotic, catastrophic life.
Robert Galbraith
She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.
Kate Atkinson
And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.
Martin Amis
There's a race of men that don't fit in, A race that can't sit still;So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will.They range the field and rove the flood, And they climb the mountain's crest; Their's is the curse of the gypsy blood, And they don't know how to rest.
Robert W. Service
Real life is only ever just real life. Messy. What it means depends on how you look at it. The only thing you’ve got to do is find a way to live there.
Patrick Ness
I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.
Jeanette Winterson
Never stop. Never stop fighting. Never stop dreaming. And don’t be afraid of wearing your heart on your sleeve - in declaring the films that you love, the films that you want to make, the life that you’ve had, and the lives you can help reflect in cinema. For myself, for a long time… maybe I felt inauthentic or something, I felt like my voice wasn’t worth hearing, and I think everyone’s voice is worth hearing. So if you’ve got something to say, say it from the rooftops.
Tom Hiddleston
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
John Berger
There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
Alain de Botton
Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce.
Neil Gaiman
In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the lips and face and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smile and kept moving. If I could have physically passed away, just let it all go, like that, without doing anything, stepped out of life as easily as walking through a door I would have done. But I was going to sleep at night and waking in the morning, disappointed to be there and resigned to existence.
Neil Gaiman
That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
Charles Dickens
Life doesn't make any sense, and we all pretend it does. Comedy's job is to point out that it doesn't make sense, and that it doesn't make much difference anyway.
Eric Idle
Exactly!" said Deep Thought. "So once you do know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means.
Douglas Adams
YOU FEAR TO DIE?"It's not that I don't want... I mean, I've always...it's just that life is a habit that's hard to break...
Terry Pratchett
I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.
G.K. Chesterton
My only regrets are the moments when i doubted myself and took the safe route. Life is too short to waste time being unhappy.
Dan Howell
... millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Susan Ertz
Have you ever hoped for something? And held out for it against all the odds? Until everything you did was ridiculous?
Ali Shaw
My life isn’t theories and formulae. It’s part instinct, part common sense. Logic is as good a word as any, and I’ve absorbed what logic I have from everything and everyone… from my mother, from training as a ballet dancer, from Vogue magazine, from the laws of life and health and nature.
Audrey Hepburn
No matter how hard life is, don't lose hope
Zayn Malik
I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.
Jean Rhys
Your time may come. Do not be too sad, Sam. You cannot be always torn in two. You will have to be one and whole, for many years. You have so much to enjoy and to be, and to do.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Disappointment came to me,and booted me,and bruised and hurt me,but that's how people grow up.
Morrissey
Life... is like a grapefruit. Well, it's sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.
Douglas Adams
Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.
Lewis Carroll
It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.
Neil Gaiman
Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.
George Eliot
This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.
George Orwell
Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.
Joseph Conrad
And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.
Ian McEwan
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.
George Orwell
... And these childrenthat you spit onas they try to change their worldsare immune to your consultations.They're quite awareof what they're going through...
David Bowie
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
George Eliot
My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus.", December 12, 2004)]
Stephen Hawking
I think computer viruses should count as life ... I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Stephen Hawking
I have noticed that even those who assert that everything is predestined and that we can change nothing about it still look both ways before they cross the street
Stephen Hawking
Without music, life would be a blank to me.
Jane Austen
...when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.
Jane Austen
We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.
E.M. Forster
It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.
Virginia Woolf
The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
Alan W. Watts
I suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial. We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.
Daphne du Maurier