Quotes by British Authors - Page 109

When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?
George Orwell
Making money is fun but it's pointless if you don't use the power it brings.
John Bentley
It's extraordinary, the amount of misunderstandings there are even between two people who discuss a thing quite often - both of them assuming different things and neither of them discovering the discrepancy.
Agatha Christie
I must have your soul ; must have it mine, and mine for ever.
Matthew Lewis
He accused me of being Dumbledore's man through and through.""How very rude of him.""I told him I was."Dumbledore opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again. Fawkes the phoenix let out a low, soft, musical cry. To Harry's intense embarrassment, he suddenly realized that Dumbledore's bright blue eyes looked rather watery, and stared hastily at his own knee. When Dumbledore spoke, however, his voice was quite steady. "I am very touched, Harry.
J.K. Rowling
A person who has resolved to ‘think positive’ must constantly scan his or her mind for negative thoughts – there’s no other way that the mind could ever gauge its success at the operation – yet that scanning will draw attention to the presence of negative thoughts.
Oliver Burkeman
Rain don't fall on a with if she doesn't want it to, although personally I prefer to get wet and be thankful.""Thankful for what?" said Tiffany."That I'll get dry later.
Terry Pratchett
Given the blatant deceit regarding the biologically harmful effects of antenna towers, cell phones and WiFi radiation, one can only wonder what is going on with all of the other forms of radiation.
Steven Magee
I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing.
W Somerset Maugham
It's only since it's been made impossible that it's been made so damn easy. It's got like prohibition, with bums and crooks making fortunes out of hooch, everyone who might have had a palate losing it, nobody caring how you hold your liquor, you've been smart enough if you get it at all. You can't make good wine in a bathtub in the cellar, you need sun and rain and fresh air, you need pride in a job you can tell the world about. Only you can live without drink if you have to, but you can't live without love.
Mary Renault
You cannot be kind unless you have all the other virtues.
C.S. Lewis
Take care. If you do not speak – I shall claim you as my own in some strange presumptuous way. Send me away at once, if I must go; – Margaret! –
Elizabeth Gaskell
Science is simply common sense at its best - that is rigidly accurate in observation and merciless to fallacy in logic.
T. H. Huxley
Power is lonely. Power stands apart. I have power. Therefore, I'm lonely.
Lesley Howarth
All concepts of politics, of whatever kind, are about conflict──how to contain it, or abolish it.
Ralph Miliband
Humanity can be divided into madmen and cowards. My personal tragedy is in being born into a world where sanity is held to be a character flaw.
Mark Lawrence
They're not doing much for themselves. I'm sure they'd rather slip away, relax their fingers and float, but they can't. They're not allowed. Effort is so painful; our knuckles are white, yet we keep clinging. The alternative is suicide- and we are too fearful for that.
Wesley Stace
Men are very sensitive, Mma Makutsi. You would not always think it to look at them, but they are. They do not like you to point out that they are wrong, even when they are. That is the way things are, Mma--it just is.
Alexander McCall Smith
But of course, when they ask for a "lead from the church," most people mean they want the clergy to put out a political program. That is silly. The clergy are those particular people within the whole church who have been specially trained and set aside to look after what concerns us as creatures who are going to live forever. And we are asking them to do a quite different job, for which they have not been trained. The job is really on us- on the laymen.
C.S. Lewis
My non American viewers. Who understand that the world does not consist solely of a single nation sailing across an infinite sea of migrant workers. Will no doubt have heard that the waters surrounding Brisbane got tired of waiting for people to hit the beach and decided to bring the party to us.
Yahtzee Croshaw
He had never seen the ocean before; he knew it only as the featureless blue void between the detailed continents on his father’s old globe. But now he saw that it was anything but featureless; distant blue swells rising and falling, like great lungs tasked to power the surging and receding of the foamy waves washing across the shoreline beyond them.
Jack Croxall
What has happened to create this doubt is that a problem (such as a deep conflict or a bad experience) has been allowed to usurp God's place and become the controlling principle of life. Instead of viewing the problem from the vantage point of faith, the doubter views faith from the vantage point of the problem. Instead of faith sizing up the problem, the situation ends with the problem scaling down faith. The world of faith is upside down, and in the topsy-turvy reality of doubt, a problem has become god and God has become a problem.
Os Guinness
The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them.
Emily Brontë
Mental discipline, prayer and remoteness from the world and its disturbing visions reduce temptation to a minimum, but they can never entirely abolish it. In medieval traditions, abbeys and convents were always considered to be expugnable centres of revolt against infernal dominion on earth. They became, accordingly, special targets. Satan, issuing orders at nightfall to his foul precurrers, was rumoured to dispatch to capital cities only one junior fiend. This solitary demon, the legend continues, sleeps at his post. There is no work for him; the battle was long ago won. But monasteries, those scattered danger points, become the chief objectives of nocturnal flight; the sky fills with the beat of sable wings as phalanx after phalanx streams to the attack, and the darkness crepitates with the splintering of a myriad lances against the masonry of asceticism.
Patrick Leigh Fermor
No, my friend, I am not drunk. I have just been to the dentist, and need not return for another six months! Is it not the most beautiful thought?--Poirot
Agatha Christie
Nobody wanted your dance,Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your flounderingDrowning life and your effort to save yourself,Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,Looking for something to give.
Ted Hughes
You ask a lot of little kids today what they want to be when they grow up and they say "I want to be famous." You ask them for what reason and they don't know or care. I think Andy Warhol got it wrong: in the future so many people are going to become famous that one day everybody will end up being anonymous for fifteen minutes.
Banksy
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be;In “Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat,” his first speech as Prime Minister to the House of Commons May 13, 1940 quoted by Jeffrey R. Holland in “However Long and Hard the Road” BYU Devotional 18 Jan 1983
Winston S. Churchill
In hatred as in love we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe we graft into our very soul.
Mary Renault
It's not the depth of your intellect that will comfort you or transform your world. Only the richness of your heart and your generosity of spirit can do that
Rasheed Ogunlaru
We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.
C.S. Lewis
Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
Daphne du Maurier
All her tormentings of me turned suddenly into sweetnesses, and who could torment like this exquisite fury, wondering in sudden flame why she could give herself to anyone, while I wondered only why she could give herself to me. It may be that I wondered over-much. Perhaps that was why I lost her.
J.M. Barrie
Finally, there was the impediment of his nature. In the secret parts of his peculiar brain, those unhappy and inextricable tangles which he felt at the roots, the boy was disabled by something which we cannot explain. He could not have explained either, and for us it is all too long ago. He loved Arthur and he loved Guenever and he hated himself. The best knight of the world: everybody envied the self-esteem which must surely be his. But Lancelot never believed he was good or nice. Under the grotesque, magnificent shell with a face like Quasimodo’s, there was shame and self-loathing which had been planted there when he was tiny, by something which it is now too late to trace. It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.
T.H. White
the balance of power between the sexes had been destabilized, and relations between mothers and their children transformed from a natural and accepted one to a mere option.
Peter Hitchens
My childhood in Corfu shaped my life. If I had the craft of Merlin, I would give every child the gift of my childhood.
Gerald Durrell
Radio Wave Sickness and Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity are easily preventable and one can only wonder how much longer the insanity of modern governments is going to be allowed to continue in this area.
Steven Magee
Inside my head / or in a distant / Galaxy / Soft I hear it / Calling me." from the song "In the Blackness" in the poetry collection "Terra Affirmative".
Jay Woodman
Many questing young people and stressed older people nowadays seek relaxation through meditation. They look for it in Hindu, Buddhist and other Eastern religions. They are often surprised to learn that there is such a way within the Christian tradition, a way that is known as contemplation.
Ray Simpson
Application is why we study the Bible.
Elizabeth George
If our logic is to find the common world intelligible, it must not be hostile, but must be inspired by a genuine acceptance such as is not usually to be found among metaphysicians.
Bertrand Russell
She whispers in my ear: ‘"Tell me that you wan' fuck me hard, make me sweat." In the excitement, she misses out a word. "I want to fuck you so hard that your body drips with sweat," I say, grammatically.
Joe Dunthorne
It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Let every hindrance to joy become the soil out of which joy blossoms.
Elizabeth George
Then Jip went up to the front of the ship and smelt the wind; and he started muttering to himself,"Tar; Spanish onions; kerosene oil; wet raincoats; crushed laurel-leaves; rubber burning; lace-curtains being washed--No, my mistake, lace-curtains hanging out to dry; and foxes--hundreds of 'em--cubs; and--""Can you really smell all those different things in this one wind?" asked the Doctor."Why, of course!" said Jip. "And those are only a few of the easy smells--the strong ones. Any mongrel could smell those with a cold in the head. Wait now, and I'll tell you some of the harder scents that are coming on this wind--a few of the dainty ones."Then the dog shut his eyes tight, poked his nose straight up in the air and sniffed hard with his mouth half-open.For a long time he said nothing. He kept as still as a stone. He hardly seemed to be breathing at all. When at last he began to speak, it sounded almost as though he were singing, sadly, in a dream."Bricks," he whispered, very low--"old yellow bricks, crumbling with age in a garden-wall; the sweet breath of young cows standing in a mountain-stream; the lead roof of a dove-cote--or perhaps agranary--with the mid-day sun on it; black kid gloves lying in a bureau-drawer of walnut-wood; a dusty road with a horses' drinking-trough beneath the sycamores; little mushrooms burstingthrough the rotting leaves; and--and--and--""Any parsnips?" asked Gub-Gub."No," said Jip. "You always think of things to eat. No parsnips whatever.
Hugh Lofting
There he got out the luncheon-basket and packed a simple meal, in which, remembering the stranger's origin and preferences, he took care to include a yard of long French bread, a sausage out of which the garlic sang, some cheese which lay down and cried, and a long-necked straw-covered flask wherein lay bottled sunshine shed and garnered on far Southern slopes.
Kenneth Grahame
The Church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity.
J.I. Packer
Closure is just as delusive-it is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief.
Stephen Grosz
The Gelaming regarded themselves as a force for good, and in many ways they were, but they were also inexorable and their compassion could often feel like oppression.
Storm Constantine
But she had learnt, in those solemn hours of thought, that she herself must one day answer for her own life, and what she had done with it; and she tried to settle that most difficult problem, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working.
Elizabeth Gaskell
They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but absence also dulls the memory and then we tend to forget who we were missing in the first place.
Anthony T.Hincks
Wonderful adventures await for those who dare to find them.
Hazel Gaynor
I am worn out with civility. I have been talking incessantly all night, and with nothing to say. But with you there may be peace. You will not want to be talked to. Let us have the luxury of silence.
Jane Austen
Do not confuse kindness with weakness. Kindness is a dying art. It is the single most important quality in this world and one which is sorely lacking.
James Rhodes
I have seen what comes of being patient," Amanda said with a boding look. "And I have no opinion of it.""What does come of it?" Inquired Sir Gareth."Nothing!
Georgette Heyer
Going to marry her? Impossible! You mean a part of her; he could not marry her all himself. It would be a case, not of bigamy but trigamy; there is enough of her to furnish wives for the whole parish. One man marry her! - it is monstrous! You might people a colony with her; or give an assembly with her; or perhaps take your morning's walk round her, always provided there were frequent resting places, and you were in rude health. I once was rash enough to try walking round her before breakfast, but only got half way and gave it up exhausted. Or you might read the Riot Act and disperse her; in short, you might do anything but marry her!
Sydney Smith
Have courage to go your own way and fulfil the dreams that are unique and important to you.
Fennel Hudson
He who ceases to pray ceases to prosper.
Sir William Gurney Benham
When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.
C.P. Snow
Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.
Richard Dawkins