Quotes by British Authors - Page 110

The mine is always bigger than the gem.
Idries Shah
He lived to near the things he loved to seem poetical.
E.M. Forster
Nothing is impossible, the word itself says 'I'm possible'!
Audrey Hepburn
One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.
Bill Bryson
I un-gritted my teeth to speak. "I need no more proof of tyranny.""Our only desire is the wellbeing of the common man.""I am not a man.
Rod Duncan
The advertisement is one of the most interesting and difficult of modern literary forms.
Aldous Huxley
There are so many sad people nowadays that sadness looks normal.
Kate Saunders
Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes.What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts.What precipitates acts? B
David Mitchell
A mystery is so much more exciting than a wrapped up answer, wouldn’t you say? A mystery carries on but an answer just ends.
Jonathan Renshaw
the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirror on every page
Peter Ackroyd
Protectionist measures may permit domestic industries to thrive, which under free trade would wither in the face of cheap imports. Imports may be opposed by the government in the public interest--for example because it thinks it imprudent to rely upon foreign suppliers of certain strategic goods such as staple foods, energy, or military equipment, or because it wishes to nurture an infant industry as yet too weak to compete internationally, or because it wishes to preserve traditional industries such as fishing in order to preserve employment and local communities.
Vaughan Lowe
To copy a virtue in another is more copying than it is virtue. Try to learn what that virtue is based upon.
Idries Shah
In 1803, President Jefferson oversaw the purchase of this land from the French for $15 million. It doesn't sound like much for an area three times the size of France itself but given that they'd stolen it from the Native Americans in the first place, I suppose they couldn't grumble. Once some debts had been wiped and estate agents had taken their commission, Napoleon's France ended up pocketing a little more than $8 million. Which is about how much it cost Pepsi Cola to secure the services of Britney Spears. Times have changed.
Dave Gorman
This is the thing: people think that magic doesn't exist, but it does, all the time. We use spells every day: the spell of forgiveness, the spell of thanks.
Nick Lake
I serve," should be the motto of all the princes of the royal family of heaven.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
History is a set of repeating circles, like the tide. The wind does blow through the ruins of tomorrow. But it is more a question of two steps forward, one step back. Humans and dragons make the same mistakes, again and again, but things do get better over time
Cressida Cowell
The consumer is not a moron she is your wife.
David Ogilvy
You are hiding something from me, I say and Sidney Grice shakes his head. 'No,' he tells me quietly. 'I am hiding a great many things'.
M.R.C. Kasasian
You were sizzling, like sausages in a frying pan.
Kristina Adams
When the sun grew too hot we went into the wood where waves of Bluebells dashed around the foot of the Oak in front of us... I never knew before, the delight of offering oneself up; I even longed for some self sacrifice, to have to give up something for her sake. It intoxicated me to think I was making another happy...
W.N.P. Barbellion
Deception and privileged secrets are common facets of politics.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Mr. Orage, one of the most active and intelligent reformers for the last generation in England, attempted this very thing. He, in his little intellectual review which was supported by so brilliant a group of writers for so many years, published week after week the ingredients of the English patent medicines and the cost of those ingredients. Not a single one of the newspapers followed suit, or dared publish so much as the fact that Orage was thus acting courageously in his own limited sphere for the public good.
Hilaire Belloc
Writer Brigid Brophy exposes [their motives] with great precision:"Whenever people say 'We mustn't be sentimental,' you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add 'We must be realistic,' they mean they are going to make money out of it. These slogans have a long history. After being used to justify slave traders, ruthless industrialists, and contractors who had found that the most economically 'realistic' method of cleaning a chimney was to force a small child to climb it, they have now been passed on, like an heirloom, to the factory farmers. 'We mustn't be sentimental' tries to persuade us that factory farming isn't, in fact, cruel. It implies that the whole problem had been invented by our sloppy imaginations.
Peter Cox
Men are mystifying creatures. For instance why do all men think their penis is a panacea for all the world’s problems?
Tyne O'Connell
I'm tired of being what everyone else wants.Tomorrow, I'm going to be what I want for a change.I'm going to be a rainbow.Now that's different!
Anthony T.Hincks
What one thinks finds expression in words, and what one says, happens.
Algernon Blackwood
Every discussion which is made from an egoistic standpoint is corrupted from the start and cannot yield an absolutely sure conclusion. The ego puts its own interest first and twists every argument, word, even fact to suit that interest.
Paul Brunton
The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
Bertrand Russell
And yet it was a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston's, secret opinions, he would betray him instantly to the Thought Police. So would anybody else for that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.
George Orwell
There is no question- love is the answer
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Boggle with sex addicts is up there with go-kart racing with junkies.
Russell Brand
So treasure your moments of happiness, the glimpses you see of truth, the nights you've been loved. That's all you've got.
Fay Weldon
You don’t understand!” she exclaimed bitterly.“That,” said his lordship, with a touch of acidity, “is a foolish accusation which lacks even the saving grace of originality! Every generation, my child, has said, or thought, that the preceding one was devoid of understanding or experience.
Georgette Heyer
... it is strange to know you would be cast off by the people who greet you so warmly, if they knew the whole truth about you.
Zen Cho
Our house was an old Tudor mansion. My father was very particular in keeping the smallest peculiarities of his home unaltered. Thus the many peaks and gables, the numerous turrets, and the mullioned windows with their quaint lozenge panes set in lead, remained very nearly as they had been three centuries back. Over and above the quaint melancholy of our dwelling, with the deep woods of its park and the sullen waters of the mere, our neighborhood was thinly peopled and primitive, and the people round us were ignorant, and tenacious of ancient ideas and traditions. Thus it was a superstitious atmosphere that we children were reared in, and we heard, from our infancy, countless tales of horror, some mere fables doubtless, others legends of dark deeds of the olden time, exaggerated by credulity and the love of the marvelous. ("Horror: A True Tale")
John Berwick Harwood
I don't understand German myself. I learned it at school, but forgot every word of it two years after I had left, and have felt much better ever since.
Jerome K. Jerome
Do not have your concert first and tune your instruments afterwards. Begin the day with God.
James Hudson Taylor
Twas doing nothing was his curse. Is there a vice can plague us worse?
Hannah More
Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.
Martin Amis
There's nothing on Earth like really nailing the last line of a big book. You have 200 pages to tickle their fancy, and seven words to break their heart.
Alex de Campi
Wolsey and Henry VIII, it has to be said, were not exceptional in their love of the table. The English of Tudor times had a reputation throughout Europe for gluttony. Indeed, overeating was regarded as the English vice in the same way that lust was the French one and drunkenness that of the Germans (although looking at the amount of alcohol consumed in England, I expect the English probably ran a close second to the Germans).
Clarissa Dickson Wright
We all have different lives, Martin believes – but in the end probably feel the same things, and regret the fear we thought might somehow sustain us.
Simon Van Booy
People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted and at seeing it practised.
Samuel Butler
...you have me,” Astrid said.“Do I?”“Yes.”That drained the anger and frustration from him like someone had pulled a plug. For a long moment he was lost, gazing into her eyes. She was very close. His heart shifted to a deeper rhythm that vibrated his whole body.There were just inches between them. He closed the distance by half, stopped.“I can’t kiss you with your little brother watching,” he said.Astrid stepped back, took Little Pete by the shoulders, and turned him so he was facing away.“How about now?
Michael Grant
The word “consciousness,” it seems to me, can only refer to what one might define provisionally as “the knowing that cannot know itself without intermediary and that cannot function in experience (of which it is an indispensable component) except negatively.”To the question “What is consciousness,” then, a low level provisional answer might be “It is the pure subjective” or “It is the bare knowing of what it is not that constitutes (orders) experience and allows it being.” It must be added that, when consciousness is, it seems to be individualized by what it knows. But on another (higher) level the “is” in the question has still to be questioned, and so the low-level (and logical) answer is only a conventional makeshift, a conventional view, nothing more. And this qualification applies not only to logically inductive and deductive statements necessitating use of the word “is,” but also to descriptive statements that appear in “logical” form, using that term, or any equivalent.
Nanamoli Thera
A teenage girl lay asleep on the sofa, curled up under a red-and-black knitted afghan. She was on her side, with one slender arm cradling a throw cushion nestled under her head. Long wavy blond hair spread across her back and her shoulders like a cape. Even though she was sleeping, Alex could see how pretty she was, with her delicate, almost elfin features. He stood in the doorway, watching the soft rise and fall of her chest.
l.a weatherly
I tried to convey to the boy how people’s lives are often altered by curved lines read slowly from paper, sand, or stone.
Simon Van Booy
Marilyn Monroe is pissing me off, Charlie Chaplin owes me twenty bucks, that fucker Shrek tried to fuck my girlfriend at Baskin Robbins.
David Louden
Never follow any impulse to teach, however strong it might be. The command to teach is not felt as an impulsion.
Idries Shah
He was lonely. I could see that. He was working his butt off-and mine, too-in the hope that a million rupees might sort out his sex life. I prayed to Buddha he would be successful. If he didn't get some action soon, I doubted I would, either.
Frank Kusy
You seem to have quite a taste for discussing these horrible subjects," she said, rather scornfully; "you ought to have been a detective police officer.""I sometimes think I should have been a good one.""Why?""Because I am patient.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
For the moment we might very well can them DUNNOS (for Dark Unknown Nonreflective Nondetectable Objects Somewhere).
Bill Bryson
We should be agnostic about those things for which there is no evidence. We should not hold beliefs merely because they gratify our desires for afterlife, immortality, heaven, hell, etc.
Julian Huxley
I am afraid that I rather give myself away when I explain," said he. "Results without causes are much more impressive.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Fake it may be, lies and deceptions, but this is the world in which we find ourselves, and here we must make our little lives.
Ian McDonald
Speech, so a wise old Frenchman said to me once, is an invention of man's to prevent him from thinking. It is also an infallible means of discovering that which he wishes to hide.
Agatha Christie
Nursing homes and rest homes are all the rage round here. Most of us will be in them before very long. Do you fancy that? Are you looking forward to it? No, neither am I. But I'm doing something about that. Just whisky and cigarettes, so far, mostly.
Andrew Davies
Invalid food choices lead to invalid people.
Mango Wodzak
And if insight were sufficient, if the inner life were the whole of life, their happiness has been assured.
E.M. Forster
To have my hopes raised and dashed again, it's like cold steel twisting in my gut.
Paula Hawkins