B Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with B. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“But honestly... I just don't know what anyone's thinking. To me, that's scarier than any half-rotten ghoul trying to eat my flesh.”
Source: The Walking Dead, Vol. 2: Miles Behind Us
“But honesty was a dull blade to take into a knife fight with Richard Nixon — who was simply willing to lie.”
Source: Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
“But, honey, the worst mistake beats the hell out of never tryin”
Source: Devil and the Deep
“But Honeybun,' I would counter, 'you can't have real love without respect.' 'That is not true in Russia. You either love or you respect. You can not do both.' 'How do you mean?' 'With love you have jealousy, possessiveness, and many other emotions and passions which make respect impossible. We know that in Russia, therefore we accept it.”
Source: Dancing in the Light
“But hope got in, no matter how hard and fast I tried to stomp it out. Like these tiny fire ants we used to get in Portland. No matter how fast you liked them, there were always more, a steady stream of them, resistant, ever-multiplying. Maybe, the hope said. Maybe.”
“But hope has an astonishing resilience and strength. Its very persistence in our hearts indicates that it is not a tonic for wishful thinkers but the ground on which realists stand.”
“But hope, I can tell you, is an exhausting emotion; perhaps, along with fear, the most exhausting of all. It is like juggling eggs: the hope is the shell, and inside is despair. A single crack and the despair might spill everywhere, stain everything.”
“But hope is a difficult thing to kill, just a spark of it can start a fire...”
Source: Once Upon a Broken Heart
“But hope is just a wish made by the unprepared.”
Source: Smoke Signal
“But hope is no less realistic than despair. It is still our choice whether to live in light or lie down in darkness.”
Source: The Isle of Blood
“But hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises. Or perhaps studying the record more carefully leads us to expect miracles - not when and where we expect them, but to expect to be astonished, to expect that we don't know. And this is grounds to act.”
Source: Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
“But hope, like heroes, can prove hard to kill.”
Source: Marvel 1602
“But hope rises like water trapped by a dam, higher and higher, in increments that mean nothing until you face the flood.”
Source: The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic
“But Hope was terrible too,” Mother said, “because it made you believe that you could have things you could never have. Or be someone you could never be. And when a Hope failed to come true, it was worse than if you’d never had hoped at all.”
Source: We Shall Be Monsters
“But hope, you know? It’s like a boot that won’t break in. Hurts to walk in it, hurts worse to go barefoot.”
Source: For the Wolf
“But hopes are shy birds flying at a great distance, seldom reached by the best of guns.”
“But hoping," he said, "is how the impossible can be possible after all.”
Source: Heartless
“But...' Horace looked from one familiar face to another. 'How did you come to..?'
Before he could finish the question, Will interupted, thinking to clarify matters but only making them more puzzling...
'We were all in Toscana for the treaty signing,' he began, then corrected himself. 'Well, Evanlyn wasn't. She came later. But, when she did, she told us you were missing, so we all boarded Gundar's ship-you should see it. It's a new design that can sail into the wind. But anyway, that's not important. And just before we left, Selethen decided to join us-what with you being an old comrade in arms and all-and...'
He got no further. Halt, seeing the confusion growing on Horace's face, held up a hand to stop his babbling former apprentice...
Will stopped, a little embarrassed as he realized that he had been running off at the mouth.”
Source: The Emperor of Nihon-Ja
“But housekeeping is fun. It is one job where you enjoy the results right along as you work. You may work all day washing and ironing, but at night you have the delicious feeling of sunny clean sheets and airy pillows to lie on. If you clean, you sit down at nightfall with the house shining and faintly smelling of wax, all yours to enjoy right then and there. And if you cook—that creation you lift from the oven goes right to the table.”
“But how am I to get over the ten or twelve days that must yet elapse before they go? Yet why so long for their departure? When they are gone how shall I get through the months or years of my future life, in company with that man—my greatest enemy—for none could injure me as he has done? Oh! when I think how fondly, how foolishly I have loved him, how madly I have trusted him, how constantly I have laboured, and studied, and prayed, and struggled for his advantage; and how cruelly he has trampled on my love, betrayed my trust, scorned my prayers and tears, and efforts for his preservation—crushed my hopes, destroyed my youth's best feelings, and doomed me to a life of hopeless misery—as far as man can do it—it is not enough to say that I no longer love my husband—I hate him! The word stares me in the face like a guilty confession, but it is true: I hate him—I hate him!—But God have mercy on his miserable soul!—and make him see and feel his guilt—I ask no other vengeance! if he could but fully know and truly feel my wrongs, I should be well avenged; and I could freely pardon all; but he is so lost, so hardened in his heartless depravity that, in this life, I believe he never will.”
Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
“But how are you going to die one day, Narcissus, since you have no mother? Without a mother one cannot love. Without a mother one cannot die.”
“But how awful would that be? How terrible to live surrounded by the stark, sharp, hollowness of things that simply were enough?”
“But how beautiful these moments within the dissolve! What a temporary perfection we can find within this passing world! Everything good ever done! Everything good that was done today, and all the good people doing it, and back and back and forward and forward, all of that beauty within a universe unraveling.”
Source: The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe
“But how can an ordinary girl not know this? Had Varana's mother not bothered to teach her anything at all or just shouted complaints from a distance while her children fought and argued amongst themselves like wolf cubs?”
Source: Semper Fidelis
“But how can finite grasp Infinity?”
Source: The Poetical Works of John Dryden: Containing Original Poems, Tales, and Translations
“But how can he expect that others should Build for him, sow for him, and at his call Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all?”
Source: The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth: Together with a Description of the Country of the Lakes in the North of England, Now First Published with His Works ...
“But how can I get enough experience if they don't give me a chance to get experience?”
Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
“But how can I give to God what is rightfully His? There is only one way; that is in service to others.”
Source: God's Psychiatry: Healing for the Troubled Heart and Spirit
“But how can I let him just walk away with a smile on my face and a slap on his back when every cell in my body is tied painfully to him, and I can’t breathe when I think of him being away from me?!”
Source: Soccer Sweetheart
“But how can one be warm alone?”
Source: God Knows
“But how can someone who was raised to be the same as everyone else be told they're different because of something out of their control?”
Source: Sameness
“But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.”
Source: A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis
“But how can they just decide that we're animals? They don't even know us," I said.
"We know us," said Mother. "They're wrong. And don't ever allow them to convince you otherwise. Do you understand?”
Source: Between Shades of Gray
“But how can we know that dragons did not exist? We have never actually BEEN to the Dark Ages.”
“But how can we let such rampant criminal behavior go unprosecuted?”
“Sometimes, Obi-Wan, fate provides its own prosecution…”
“But how can we love someone if we don't like him? Easy-we do it to ourselves all the time. We don't always have tender, comfortable feelings about ourselves; sometimes we feel foolish, stupid, asinine, or wicked. But we always love ourselves: we always seek our own good. Indeed, we feel dislike toward ourselves, we berate ourselves, precisely because we love ourselves; because we care about our good, we are impatient with our bad.”
“But how can we venture to reprove or praise the universe! Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful nor noble, and has no desire to become any of these; it is by no means striving to imitate mankind! It is quite impervious to all our aesthetic and moral judgments! It has likewise no impulse to self-preservation or impulses of any kind; neither does it know any laws. Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to transgress...”
Source: A Nietzsche Reader
“But how can you be there for someone who doesn't need you? It's like trying to scale a wall without anyone on the top throwing you a rope. You just keep sliding down and eventually your muscles give out, and your energy and your will and your heart.”
Source: Middle Ground
“But how can you know anything of the impression made on others? Who can assure you that others do not draw therefrom incentives to evil? You do not know the depths of human frailty. . . Oh, how truly was it said that if some Christian women could only suspect the temptations and falls they cause in others with modes of dress and familiarity in behavior, which they unthinkingly consider as of no importance, they would be shocked by the responsibility which is theirs.”
“But how can you not like music? That's the same as not liking food! Or sex!”
Source: Us
“But how can you speed up the transformation of society in a country as large as Russia? Those sounding the moral outcry are the ones who are trying to dictate their standards from the outside. Of course, that isn't the right way to go either. One cannot impose democracy from the other side of national borders, which is something we ourselves experienced during the communist era. The West's policies toward Eastern Europe, the Helsinki process - none of that really helped us.”
“But how can you understand a war without any knowledge of the society where it happens? It's like trying to understand birth without knowing anything about pregnancy or conception. Or like trying to understand our current economic collapse without knowing what a derivative is.”
“But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?"
"Easy," said the cat. "Think of somebody walking around the world. You start out walking away from something and end up coming back to it."
"Small world," said Coraline.
"It's big enough for her," said the cat. "Spider's webs only have to be large enough to catch flies.”
Source: Coraline
“But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?”
Source: Coraline
“But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?" "Easy," said the cat. "Think of somebody walking around the world. You start out walking away from something and end up coming back to it." "Small world," said Coraline. "It's big enough for her," said the cat. "spiders' webs only have to be large enough to catch flies." Coraline shivered.”
Source: Coraline
“But how carve way i' the life that lies before, If bent on groaning ever for the past?”
Source: The Poetical Works of Robert Browning
“But how conceive a God supremely good/ Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,/ Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?
[Written after an earthquake in Lisbon killed over 15,000 people]”
Source: Poem Upon the Lisbon Disaster
“But how cool, how quiet is true courage!”
Source: Complete Works of Frances Burney (Delphi Classics)
“But how could anyone be grateful for what they have if they didn’t know what it was like not to have what they need?”
Source: Goddess
“But how could anyone who's ever seen a summer - big explosion of green and skies lit up electric with splashy sunsets, a riot of flowers and wind that smells like honey - pick the snow?”