B Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with B. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“But dreams move on, if you wait too long.”
“But druggies don't keep their looks any longer than they keep their promises.”
“But drunkenly, or secretly, we swore,
Disciples of that astigmatic saint,
That we would never leave the island
Until we had put down, in paint, in words,
As palmists learn the network of a hand,
All of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines,
Every neglected, self-pitying inlet
Muttering in brackish dialect, the ropes of mangroves
From which old soldier crabs slipped
Surrendering to slush,
Each ochre track seeking some hilltop and
Losing itself in an unfinished phrase,
Under sand shipyards where the burnt-out palms
Inverted the design of unrigged schooners,
Entering forests, boiling with life,
Goyave, corrosol, bois-canot, sapotille.
Days!
The sun drumming, drumming,
Past the defeated pennons of the palms,
Roads limp from sunstroke,
Past green flutes of the grass
The ocean cannonading, come!
Wonder that opened like the fan
Of the dividing fronds
On some noon-struck sahara,
Where my heart from its rib cage yelped like a pup
After clouds of sanderlings rustily wheeling
The world on its ancient,
Invisible axis,
The breakers slow-dolphining over more breakers,
To swivel our easels down, as firm
As conquerors who had discovered home.”
Source: Another Life: Fully Annotated
“But Dryden had a poem: "Annus Mirabilis". The year of wonders. It was a poem about England in 1666. England in 1666 was decidedly not having a year of wonders. England in 1666 had war, plague, and a three-day fire that destroyed most of London, plus Issac Newton invented calculus, thereby making the lives of mathematically ungifted students immeasurably worse. But Dryden's poem was about what a great year it was because it could have been worse. They lived to see 1667 after all. At least, everyone who read the poem did.”
Source: This Is How It Always Is
“But duets are a lot of fun, I'd love to do another one”
“But Dumbledore says he doesn't care what they do as long as they don't take him off the Chocolate Frog cards.”
“But Dunraven refused to ask God – he may as well be asking Santa to comb the area with Rudolph and his toy sled.”
Source: Finding Jesus
“But during all these years I had a vague but persistent desire to return to New Orleans. I never forgot New Orleans. And when we were in tropical places and places of those flowers and trees that grow in Louisiana, I would think of it acutely and I would feel for my home the only glimmer of desire I felt for anything outside my endless pursuit of art.”
“But during the Prayer of the Faithful, she gave thanks for all the babies present and for their voices, because, she said, they show us what we are; we are capricious when we wish to tell God what to do.”
Source: Chiara Corbella Petrillo
“But during those two months of fog . . . the saddest and the heaviest thing was to stand beside the sea. To be upon the beach yourself, and see the long waves coming in; to know that they are long waves, but only see a piece of them. And to hear them lifting roundly, swelling over smooth green rocks, plashing down in the hollow corners, but bearing on all the same as ever, soft and sleek and sorrowful, till their little noise is over.”
Source: Lorna Doone
“But duty is cold... It serves its purpose. It has never filled the hollowness inside me. I was born hollow.”
Source: Saturnine
“But dying is a pleasure / When living is a pain.”
Source: The works of John Dryden: now first collected in eighteen volumes. Illustrated with notes, historical, critical, and explanatory, and a life of the author
“But dying is for the sweetest ones. And he remembers sweetness, when life was sweet, and sweetly he was given that other lifetime.”
Source: Short Cuts: Selected Stories
“But dying people don't need to be reminded that they're dying; I feel they need to be reminded that they're still very much alive.”
Source: Better Than New: Lessons I've Learned from Saving Old Homes
“But dying's part of the wheel, right there next to being born. You can't pick out the pieces you like and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that's the blessing.”
Source: Tuck Everlasting
“But each soul is unique, each grows at its own pace, and that's how it must be...a bit at a time.”
Source: Circle of Light
“But each time I seemed to be climbing into a roller coaster and finding myself coming through the downhill run with that sort of dazed feeling that we all know.”
“But each time you use spirit, you're more likely to go crazy.” “Already crazy about you, Sage.”
Source: The Indigo Spell: A Bloodlines Novel
“But earthlier happy is the rose distill'd
Than that which withering on the virgin thorn
Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.”
“But 'easy' will not give us the things and experiences that we will treasure and cherish for the rest of our lives. Greatness doesn't always come out from easy circumstances and events. One thing we can expect through difficulty and perseverance is that we will grow. And when we do, the struggles, the failures, and the challenges will suddenly, become "easy".”
Source: The Art of Letting God
“But easy's like, who cares? Easy's like, how much is easy going to get you?”
Source: Crooked Little Heart: A Novel
“But eating carbohydrates is like eating hungry pills.”
“But economic recovery must be earned. And it will be earned by entrepreneurs and it will be earned by small businesses.”
“But ecstatic rituals are also good, and expressive of our artistic temperament and spiritual yearnings as well as our solidarity. So how can civilization be regarded as a form of progress if it precludes something as distinctively human, and deeply satisfying, as the collective joy of festivities and ecstatic rituals? In a remarkable essay titled "The Decline of the Choral Dance," Paul Halmos wrote in 1952 that the ancient and universal tradition of the choral dance - meaning the group dance, as opposed to the relative recent, European - derived practice of dancing in couples - was an expression of our "group-ward drives" and "biological sociality." Hence its disappearance within complex societies, and especially within industrial civilization, can only represent a "decline of our biosocial life" - a painfully disturbing conclusion.”
Source: Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
“But Ed [the family counselor] wasn't fazed; in fact, he suggested the dynamic had served each of us well. Something in the way he said this gave me the feeling that the dynamic was moving on, perhaps down the block, where it would serve some other confused family. And we would be left dynamic-less, four people alone with all the wrong feelings for one another.”
Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You
“But editors are still the world's readers. And thus the eyes of the world.”
Source: The Forest for the Trees (Revised and Updated): An Editor's Advice to Writers
“But egoism is more than this. It is the realization by the individual that he is above all institutions and all formulas; that they exist only so far as he chooses to make them his own by accepting them.”
“But elimination will only happen if all countries - nuclear and non-nuclear states - genuinely work towards this result. Nuclear states must abolish their arsenals, as was indicated by the unanimous opinion of the international Court of Justice, the highest international tribunal. The five nuclear states seem to expect others to refrain from obtaining bombs while at the same time maintaining their own caches of deadly weapons.”
“But Elisabeth..."
I held my breath.
"She was never a hothouse flower. She is a sturdy oak tree. If her leaves have fallen, then she will bloom again come spring. She was not ready to die when she gave her life to me. But she did anyway, because she loved, and loved deeply.”
Source: Wintersong
“But Ellie's fingertips brushed over my cheekbone, soft as rose petals. Traced my temple, my jawline.
She touched me like I was precious.
No one in my entire life had been gentle with me.
And her lips said, "I'm here" and "Be mine." But wait. She was faking it. We both were. A fake kiss could taste like vanilla milkshakes and prosecco and feel like floating on a cloud.”
Source: The Slowest Burn
“But emotion cannot be buried by words, though it can be aroused by them.”
Source: Hunter's Green
“But emotions were, indeed, wild horses and they demanded to be heard. Brida let them run free for a while until they grew tired”
Source: Brida
“But emotions when based on valued things can be a faithful and consistant sum of truths.”
“But empathy requires imagination, and he didn’t have enough of either.”
Source: Ship Wrecked
“but empirical science, empiricism, takes no account of the soul, no account of what constitutes and determines personal being. Perhaps there is a philosophical as well as a clinical lesson here: that in Korsakov's, or dementia, or other such catastrophes, however great the organic damage and Humean dissolution, there remains the undiminished possibility of reintegration by art, by communion, by touching the human spirit: and this can be preserved in what seems at first a hopeless state of neurological devastation.”
Source: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“But empirically I've come to understand that my photographs really don't do any harm.”
“But endurance had always been my virtue, and I kept on”
Source: Circe
“But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.”
Source: Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
“But enough joking. I am singing. This is all my life.”
“But enough of me. Lets talk about you. What do you think of me?”
“But entering a life wasn't the same as entering an emotion.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?”
Source: Rigor & imagination: essays from the legacy of Gregory Bateson
“But equal treatment in an unequal society could still foster inequality. Because black men were disproportionately incarcerated and black women disproportionately evicted, uniformly denying housing to applicants with recent criminal or eviction records still had an incommensurate impact on African Americans.”
Source: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“But eradicating corruption is not enough to sustain a country.”
“But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called -- called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.”
Source: The Call of the Wild and White Fang
“But especially, you know, I love the music. This is my purpose. I don't do anything else but music.”
“But eternal liveliness is what counts: what does "eternal life" matter, or life at all?”
“But eternity is not temporality at a standstill. What is oppressive about the concept of the eternal is the justification, incomprehensible to us, that time must undergo in eternity and the logical conclusion of that, the justification of ourselves as we are.”
Source: The Blue Octavo Notebooks
“But Eugene was untroubled by any thought of a goal. He was mad with such ecstasy as he had never known. He was a centaur, moon-eyed and wild of mane, torn apart with hunger for the golden world. He became at times almost incapable of coherent speech. While talking with people, he would whinny suddenly into their startled faces, and leap away, his face contorted with an idiot joy. He would hurl himself squealing through the streets and along the paths, touched with the ecstasy of a thousand unspoken desires. The world lay before him for his picking – full of opulent cities, golden vintages, glorious triumphs, and lovely women, full of a thousand unmet and magnificent possibilities. Nothing was dull or tarnished. The strange enchanted coasts were unvisited. He was young and he could never die.”
Source: Look Homeward, Angel
“But Evangeline had learned that love was more than a feeling. And it didn't have to be the safe choice, because love was also more powerful than fear. It was the ultimate form of hope.”