B Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with B. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“But nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read.”
“But nothing here was what it seemed. Even the grey stone of the buildings hid within itself a score of secret tints, to be revealed only by one momentary strand of light. At first, the tide of secrecy that rippled through the streets had made him tense and watchful, but in time he realised that in a city of clandestine passions, everyone was a spy.”
Source: Night Soldiers
“But nothing in human life is unmixed, and honors inevitably balance themselves with self-doubt. Everyone knows that medals are rubber”
Source: Essays After Eighty
“But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.”
“But nothing in life was set in stone and nothing in life is promised us. Not happiness, not joy, not love. Everything was variable and mutable and inconstant.”
Source: Jane Yellowrock World Companion: (InterMix)
“But nothing in my previous work had prepared me for the experience of reinvestigating Cleveland. It is worth — given the passage of time — recalling the basic architecture of the Crisis: 121 children from many different and largely unrelated families had been taken into the care of Cleveland County Council in the three short months of the summer of 1987. (p18)
The key to resolving the puzzle of Cleveland was the children. What had actually happened to them? Had they been abused - or had the paediatricians and social workers (as public opinion held) been over-zealous and plain wrong? Curiously — particularly given its high profile, year-long sittings and £5 million cost — this was the one central issue never addressed by the Butler-Sloss judicial testimony and sifting of internal evidence, the inquiry's remit did not require it to answer the main question. Ten years after the crisis, my colleagues and I set about reconstructing the records of the 121 children at its heart to determine exactly what had happened to them... (p19)
Eventually, though, we did assemble the data given to the Butler-Sloss Inquiry. This divided into two categories: the confidential material, presented in camera, and the transcripts of public sessions of the hearings. Putting the two together we assembled our own database on the children each identified only by the code-letters assigned to them by Butler-Sloss.
When it was finished, this database told a startlingly different story from the public myth. In every case there was some prima fade evidence to suggest the possibility of abuse. Far from the media fiction of parents taking their children to Middlesbrough General Hospital for a tummy ache or a sore thumb and suddenly being presented with a diagnosis of child sexual abuse, the true story was of families known to social services for months or years, histories of physical and sexual abuse of siblings and of prior discussions with parents about these concerns. In several of the cases the children themselves had made detailed disclosures of abuse; many of the pre-verbal children displayed severe emotional or behavioural symptoms consistent with sexual abuse. There were even some families in which a convicted sex offender had moved in with mother and children. (p20)”
Source: Creative Responses to Child Sexual Abuse: Challenges and Dilemmas
“But nothing inspired me more than the fights for equal rights at the center of our history. Each generation, it became clear, was defined by whether they expanded equality, welcoming and including people who had once been excluded or rejected.”
Source: Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality
“But nothing is all black in nature.”
“But nothing is as neon-bright as a denial no one was asking for.”
Source: Utan personligt ansvar
“But nothing is better than a truth which appears not to have the semblance of truth. There is always something incomprehensible about the great heroic deeds performed by humanity because they rise so far beyond the mediocre measure of mere mortals; but it is always only because of the incredible feats that human beings have accomplished that humanity recovers its faith in itself.”
“But nothing is more estimable than a physician who, having studied nature from his youth, knows the properties of the human body, the diseases which assail it, the remedies which will benefit it, exercises his art with caution, and pays equal attention to the rich and the poor.”
Source: Voltaire – The Philosophical Works: Treatise On Tolerance, Philosophical Dictionary, Candide, Letters on England, Plato’s Dream, Dialogues, The Study of Nature, Ancient Faith and Fable, Zadig…: From the French writer, historian and philosopher, famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion and freedom of expression
“But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.”
Source: The Mayor of Casterbridge
“But nothing is more opaque
than absolute transparency.”
Source: Morning in the Burned House
“But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other's presence. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character --- the way a person took on and recognized in himself the smile of a lover. Individuals are seen only in the context of these swirling social tides.”
Source: Running in the Family
“But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don't need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life.”
“But nothing is yet clear on the subject of the intellect and the contemplative faculty. However, it seems to be another kind of soul, and this alone admits of being separated, as that which is eternal from that which is perishable, while it is clear from these remarks that the other parts of the soul are not separable, as some assert them to be, though it is obvious that they are conceptually distinct.”
“But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.”
“But nothing makes a room feel emptier than wanting someone in it.”
Source: All the Time
“But nothing on this earth is guaranteed, when you get right down to it, you know ? I've been thinking about that. About how your kids aren't really YOURS, they're just these people that you try to keep an eye on, and hope you'll all grow up someday to like each other and still be in one piece. What I mean is, everything you get is really just on loan. Does that make sense?" Sure,"I said. "Like library books. Sooner or later they've all got to go back into the nightdrop.”
“But nothing really clicked for me until I gave up completely on hitting the overlap and just did what I loved, even when I thought nobody else in the world would be interested.”
“But nothing's really free, is it? People always make you pay one way or another.”
Source: The Bette Davis Club
“But nothing seems to do any good.”
Source: The Big Sleep & Farewell, My Lovely
“But nothing surprises me now. I’ve grown used to living in a world that is out of joint, as if it has been struck by an enormous earthquake so that the roads are no longer flat, nor the building straight.”
Source: March Violets
“But nothing warps time quite like childhood”
“But nothing was a important as escaping Evernight or the ‘destiny’ my parents and teachers had decided for me. I had only one chance to be free and to be with the guy I loved. I intended to take it.”
“But nothing will ever change if we keep pretend. People 'live out loud', as you say, not merely for themselves but for a more honest future.”
“But nothing will persuade me that the mere fact of being in a place is enough in itself to justify the effort of getting out of bed to become a tourist, or even a traveller. I don't have the slightest wish to be intrepid. I don't want to prove myself to myself or anyone else. I don't care if no one thinks me brave or hardy. I have no concern at all that I did not have whatever it is I should have had to take a dive out of a plane or off a building. None of that matters to me in the least.”
“But nothing will suit him now but the best! He's got on wonderfully, and naturally he wants something to show for it, but many's the time I wonder where it will end.”
Source: The Seven Dials Mystery
“But nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight / Got to kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight.”
“But notwithstanding when Miss Price on the following Sunday offered to take him to the Louvre Philip accepted. She showed him Mona Lisa. He looked at it with a slight feeling of disappointment, but he had read till he knew by heart the jewelled words with which Walter Pater has added beauty to the most famous picture in the world; and these now he repeated to Miss Price. (311)”
“But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.”
“But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it. A novel's whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme.”
“But now - look, I have to take care of myself. I work out every day. I'm a dancer. I've always been an athlete, and I'm one of those people who start to go crazy if they don't run or do something.”
“But now all the natural secrets have been exposed, and it is likely that the turtles have been sold to laboratory scientists who want to remove their shells so that they can wire electrodes to the turtles' skin in order to monitor their increasing terror at the loss of their shells.”
“But now Americans, they felt a sense of peace and protection because they've been separated by so many thousands of miles of ocean. And you know, the fact that it's come to the U.S. like this is so sad, and yet you know, what can you do? It's here.”
“But now at last the sacred influence
Of light appears, and rom the walls of Heav'n
Shoots far into the bosom of dim Night
A glimmering dawn; here Nature first begins
her farthest verge, and Chaos to retire
As from her outmost works a broken foe
With tumult less and with less hostile din,”
Source: Paradise lost
“But now, at this moment, you can't hook your boat to mine, 'cause I'm liable to sink us both.”
Source: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
“But now behold,
In the quick forge and working-house of thought,
How London doth pour out her citizens!”
“But now, digital technology was to return the Nasdaq to its former glory and beyond.”
Source: Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
“But now, each time I fall asleep, and each time I wake up again, I see those faces. Their pale skin, their closed mouths, their legs stretched out straight...it's so clear, so vivid, it's like they're really there. Just like the face of the man with blood dripping from his jaw, his eyes half closed...etched into the insides of my eyelids. Inside, where I can't get at it. Where I'll never be able to scrape it off.”
Source: Human Acts
“But now he knew: you always sacrificed something. The question was what you sacrificed.”
Source: A Little Life
“But now he understood why someone would write things like 'she walked in beauty like the night' and so forth. Because poetry was a barrier against raw emotions. It distilled them into bearable music, allowed one to accommodate them a little at a time.”
Source: What I Did for a Duke
“But now he was dreaming, he was wildly imagining things.”
Source: The Green Knight
“But now he wondered if the Asian girl at the end of the commercials was not there to sell the Hostess spurting pastry or whatnot, but rather to sell America. Like the Statue of Liberty showing off her armpit at the end of the Sure commercial, the girl spoke more to a Cold War ideal of America--look who we let in! Hardworking Asians! Whereas a Vinod-type presence in one of his white V-neck sweaters (all three brothers wore them on special occasions, cute as lambs) might have confused the audience. Why isn't that Brown guy selling us a taco shell that won't break?”
Source: Our Country Friends
“But now, he would no longer be mine. I was letting him go.
He would belong to this earth, and I would belong to the stars.”
Source: Counting Stars
“But now her tears dried because so many terrible emotions and speculations demanded her attention.”
Source: The Green Knight
“But now, here she was, very wishful to pray, while not knowing how to explain her dilemma: ‘I’m terribly unhappy, dear, unprobable God—’ would not be a very propitious beginning.”
Source: The Well Of Loneliness
“But now here the notes were, in his hands, bringing his secret life bursting into the present and reminding him of how happy he'd been each time he'd unfolded one of them. It was this happiness that had first inspired him to become a postman; in quite a simple way he'd thought that by delivering mail he'd get to spend his life making other people happy.”
Source: The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle
“But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.”
Source: The Lathe Of Heaven: A Novel