Quotes by British Authors - Page 809

If you can't do anything about it, laugh like hell.
David Cook
I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.
W Somerset Maugham
If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome."]
Anne Bradstreet
Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!.Yes. Anybody in the world. ..But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come...dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes... and let's go home.
Alan Moore
Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.
Arthur Conan Doyle
I only want to write. And there's no college for that except life.
Dodie Smith
Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life’.
Helen Exley
Stay hungry, stay young, stay foolish, stay curious, and above all, stay humble because just when you think you got all the answers, is the moment when some bitter twist of fate in the universe will remind you that you very much don't.
Tom Hiddleston
A joke is a very serious thing.
Winston S. Churchill
About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.
Christopher Hitchens
Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.
John Lubbock
Do your own thing on your own terms and get what you came here for
Oliver James
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
C.S. Lewis
What do you most value in your friends?Their continued existence.
Christopher Hitchens
This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.
Ian McEwan
The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help.
Jeanette Winterson
Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lustLike diamonds we are cut with our own dust
John Webster
Do not lose hope — what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story. (from 'Instructions')
Neil Gaiman
Hearing voices no one else can hear isn't a good sign, even in the wizarding world.
J.K. Rowling
We all have two lives. The second one starts when we realize that we only have one.
Tom Hiddleston
Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.
Thomas Hardy
How quick come the reasons for approving what we like.
Jane Austen
What I'm not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time.
Kazuo Ishiguro
There will be time, there will be timeTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
T.S Eliot
One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
Jane Austen
The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
Ian McEwan
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
Graham Greene
I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.
George Gordon Byron
Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.
Julian Barnes
Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
Neil Gaiman
It is a very funny thing that the sleepier you are, the longer you take about getting to bed.
C.S. Lewis
It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.
D.H. Lawrence
He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.
P.G. Wodehouse
Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.
Nick Hornby
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives,Who thinks most, feels noblest, acts the best.
Philip James Bailey
To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.
Winston S. Churchill
Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.
David Mitchell
Hollowness: that I understand. I'm starting to believe that there isn't anything you can do to fix it. That's what I've taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mold yourself through the gaps
Paula Hawkins
We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!
Douglas Adams
The great object of life is sensation- to feel that we exist, even though in pain.
George Gordon Byron
I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.
Jeanette Winterson
All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.
Douglas Adams
Earth's crammed with heaven...But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.
Julian Barnes
To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away...
Virginia Woolf
This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.
Terry Pratchett
When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.
Anthony Burgess
If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life.
Terry Pratchett
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.I wish you all very good lives.
J.K. Rowling
There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. tThe world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who's been pinching my beer?tAnd at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass) or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman's eye.
Terry Pratchett
We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
Douglas Adams
This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
Alan W. Watts
For I have known them all already, known them all—Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
T.S Eliot
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
C.S. Lewis
Knowledge, like air, is vital to life. Like air, no one should be denied it.
Alan Moore
The best of us must sometimes eat our words.
J.K. Rowling
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
Virginia Woolf
Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.
Mark Haddon