B Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with B. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“But the star thing I can live with. The music I can't live without. And that's how it lays out for me, you know. I got as big an ego and enjoy the attention.”
“But the stars that marked our starting fall away. We must go deeper into greater pain, for it is not permitted that we stay.”
Source: The inferno
“but the starting point should be about you feeling great with him.”
Source: Anything Could Happen
“But the statue attracted a middle-aged, brown-haired, overweight White guy. Clearly drunk, he climbed onto the tiny stage and started fondling Buddha before his laughing audience of drunk friends at a nearby table. I had learned a long time ago to tune out the antics of drunk White people doing things that could get a Black person arrested. Harmless White fun is Black lawlessness.”
Source: How to Be an Antiracist
“But the strains of the doleful song stirred such powerful nostalgia for lost loves and for things lost over the course of one's life and for lives, like my grandfather's, that had come long before mine that I was suddenly taken back to a poor, disconsolate universe of simple folk like Mafalda's ancestors, fretting and scurrying in the tiny vicoli of an old Naples whose memory I wanted to share word for word with Oliver now, as if he too, like Mafalda and Manfredi and Anchise and me, were a fellow southerner whom I'd met in a foreign port city and who'd instantly understand why the sound of this old song, like an ancient prayer for the dead in the deadest of languages, could bring tears even in those who couldn't understand a syllable.”
Source: Call Me by Your Name
“But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if you're lucky, a doctor who has an unusual amount of sense-stranger than the hallucinations, or the voices, or the anxiety-is the way you begin to experience the edges of the mind itself... in a way other people just can't.”
“But the strong base and building of my love is as the very centre of the earth, drawing all things to it.”
Source: The plays and poems of William Shakspeare
“But the strongest scent was also the oldest – it was the perfume of his transgressions. There were other smells, too, some of which she could name – incense, books, sweat – and far, far more that she had no name for.”
Source: The Scarlet Gospels
“But the stuff that I do is more like all the comic roles like in The Merry Widow and Die Fledermaus and I just did this Offenbach operetta at the LA Opera. I love it. I just love it. For me, it's like a great mesh of musical theatre and my classical oboe background to be standing on these huge stages with a full orchestra and all the opulence. I'm a complete sucker for the over-the-topness.”
“But the stupidity which is common to all such "explanations" is, of course, simply that of proceeding as though the merits of a theory - such things as truth, or probability, or explanatory power - could not possibly be among the reasons for its currency.”
Source: On Enlightenment
“But the subordination must be to the armed vanguard of all the exploited, of all the toilers, i.e., to the proletariat. Measures must be taken at once, overnight, to substitute for the specific methods of "official administration" by state officials the simple functions of "workmen and managers," functions which are already fully within the capacity of the average city dweller and can well be performed for "workmen's wages.”
Source: The State and Revolution
“But the suit I wear is my work attire, and nothing else.”
“But the summer city herself had been emptied of her laughter and offered me only bent and shining backs. In the evening, in the crudely lighted cafes where I took refuge, I read my age in faces I recognized without being able to name them. I merely knew that they had been young with me and that they were no longer so.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“But the summits of poetry are mysteries; they are shiftingly veiled, and those who catch the glimpses see different aspects of the transcendental; but they have seen something, and they come down with the glory lingering on them.”
Source: Collected Poems
“But the sun itself, however beneficent, generally, was less kind to Coketown than hard frost, and rarely looked intently into any of its closer regions without engendering more death than life. So does the eye of Heaven itself become an evil eye, when incapable or sordid hands are interposed between it and the thing it looks upon to bless.”
Source: Hard Times
“But the sun was out now, as she neared the station, and it seemed that she had been looking at the place wrong all these years.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“But the sunlight had faded, and now she would enjoy the twilight-turned-evening from the beauty of the garden.
Her garden. Was it even possible that might be true? She still thought of the space as belonging to her mother. That she might now possess the place herself was at once an honor and an overwhelming responsibility: this place where red-and-pink camellia petals fluttered to the ground as though creating a carpet for fairies.”
Source: Paint and Nectar
“But the sunshine aye shall light the sky, As round and round we run; And the truth shall ever come uppermost, And justice shall be done.”
Source: Voices from the Mountains and from the Crowd
“But the supreme teacher in the Church is the Roman Pontiff. Union of minds, therefore, requires, together with a perfect accord in the one faith, complete submission and obedience of will to the Church and to the Roman Pontiff, as to God Himself.”
Source: A Light in the Heavens: Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII
“But the surface of the Earth was meant for man. He wasn't meant to live in a hole in the ground.”
“But the system of prices ruling the market not only transmits information in the light of which economic agents can mutually adjust their actions, it also provides them with an incentive to exercise economy in terms of money.”
Source: The Republic of Science, Its Political and Economic Theory: A Lecture Delivered at Roosevelt University, January 11, 1962
“But the tale or narrative set in the past may have its particular time-free value; and the candid reader will not misunderstand me, will not suppose that I intend any preposterous comparison, when I observe that Homer was farther removed in time from Troy than I am from the Napoleonic wars; yet he spoke to the Greeks for 2,000 years and more.”
“but the tears behind my silent smile, no one ever bypassed that and believe me no one even tried to.”
Source: When Roses are Crushed
“But the technology was accessible, which suggests incompetence on the part of our counterintelligence community and the Clinton Administration, and may in fact rise to the level of treason.”
“But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Illustrated)
“But the thing about a cry for help is that someone else needs to be around to hear it.”
Source: Every Day
“But the thing about pain is that, when it's with you all the time, it starts to lose meaning. The difference between a three and a six is inconsequential. Stabbing or throbbing, it doesn't matter. All that matters is you can't think clearly. Everything you know is through the fabric of pain. Music is muffled. Flowers look wilted. Clouds look gray.”
Source: I Am the Cage
“But the thing about people, Kell had discovered, is that they didn't really want to know. They thought they did, but knowing only made them miserable.”
Source: A Darker Shade of Magic
“But the thing about proving things? Your jaggedness just goads you on – it makes you sharper and harder. It gives you swagger.”
“But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.”
Source: The Things They Carried
“But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories.”
Source: The Things They Carried
“But the thing about the truth was that once you learned it, it became impossible to unlearn.”
Source: The Dazzling Heights
“But the thing I felt most strongly about, and put at the end of one of the prison diaries, was education.”
“But the thing I remember most about the screening in October twenty years ago was the moment Julian grasped my hand that had gone numb on the armrest separating our seats. He did this because in the book Julian Wells lived but in the movie's new scenario he had to die. He had to be punished for all of his sins. That's what the movie demanded. (Later, as a screenwriter, I learned it's what all movies demanded.) When this scene occurred, in the last ten minutes, Julian looked at me in the darkness, stunned. "I died," he whispered. "They killed me off." I waited a bit before sighing, "But you're still here." Julian turned back to the screen and soon the movie ended, the credits rolling over the palm trees as I (improbably) take Blair back to my college while Roy Orbison wails a song about how life fades away.”
Source: Imperial Bedrooms
“But the thing is, I didn't make my friends happy and they didn't make me happy. All we did was get stoned out of our minds. That didn't have anything to do with happiness.”
Source: Last Night I Sang to the Monster
“But the thing is, if you do survive, when it's all said and done, you still have to live with yourself.”
Source: 96 Miles
“But the thing is if you've got an hour to sit down in front of a television, then the likelihood is that you've probably got two hours. So why wouldn't you, if you're enjoying it not want to watch the other one? And so, this is the future. Ten episodes at once is what everyone wants, and then it's up to you how you spread those out”
“But the thing is, there's a part of me that's scared. There's a part of me that doesn't want to grow, or change, or let anyone help me get through this stupid problem. Because sometimes it feels like it's everything I have. Or everything I even am. And sometimes, like the nights before shows and the moments after eating something I know I really shouldn't have and when I'm counting my ribs as I'm lying in bed, I can't think of who I'd be without it.”
Source: Four Weeks, Five People
“But the thing is, from the perspective of a novelist there is a brand of lying that feels more honest than the actual facts of an event. Lying as a way to move closer to the truth, or to illuminate ow something actually feels in a way the mere facts cannot.”
“But the thing is, I was never looking at a strategic way of gaining fame. That's not why I'm doing this.”
“But the thing I’m finding out is some people don’t really appreciate it when you’r trying to be helpful.”
“But the thing of it is, I need to be kept.
There's work enough to do—there's always that;
But behind's behind. The worst that you can do
Is set me back a little more behind.
I shan't catch up in this world, anyway.”
Source: North of Boston
“But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit.”
Source: The complete works of George Orwell: Animal farm
“But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus this so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life.”
Source: Kora in Hell: Improvisations
“But the thing that was great about Capablanca was that he really spoke his mind, he said what he believed was true, he said what he felt. He [Capablanca] wanted to change the rules [of chess] already, back in the twenties, because he said chess was getting played out. He was right. Now chess is completely dead. It is all just memorisation and prearrangement. It's a terrible game now. Very uncreative.”
“But the thing that will always occupy me the most is music.”
“But the thing we do know is whatever it costs to save and protect American lives in this conflict, we're going to spend.”
“But the thing which had made him fall for her, fall properly, was the way she seemed so calm and so quiet and so sad. Surrounded by noisy bankers showing off, and their variously pushy or beady or anxious or competitive wives, she seemed to be from somewhere else; a place where people carried their own burdens; a grander and realer and more honourable place. Roger didn't know that Matya spent a lot of that evening thinking about home, but he could tell that she was thinking about something, and it was that other thing which, for him, did it.”
Source: Capital
“But the thing with a best friend is that you’re never talking about nothing. Even when you’re talking about nothing, it’s something. The times when you think you’re talking about nothing, you’re actually talking about how you have someone with whom you can talk about nothing, and it’s fine.”
Source: Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee
“But the thing with secrets and lies... is that they have a habit of becoming complicated very quickly. They pile up, they become twisted and convoluted, until you can't remember what is real anymore”
Source: A Duke to Remember