Quotes by British Authors - Page 112

Before passing through the gates of a town I've never visited, I take a minute to salute its saints - the dead and the living, the known and the hidden. Never in my life have I arrived at a new place without getting the blessing of its saints first. It makes no difference to me whether that place belongs to Muslims, Christians, or Jews. I believe that the saints are beyond such trivial nominal distinctions. A saint belongs to all humanity.
Elif Shafak
I wear makeup and I don dramatic attire because I like control. I’m not interested in controlling others but I’m invested in strict self-governance. This is why I don’t do many face-to-face interviews. I don’t like being caught off-guard. It all goes back to that attempt to create order amidst disorder. One of the most frightening things about losing your mind is that you feel like your body, your brain, every part of your essence is being invaded. There is such a palpable helplessness to that narrative and I hate the sense of victimhood that it implies. Certainly, this is how I felt during my moments of psychological disquiet. I felt like my personhood was under attack. Performativity is important to me because I’m the teller of my own stories. I have been performing these multiple roles for so long that they have bled into my identity. I have become the man that I always wanted to be.
Diriye Osman
Maybe we're all ongoing stories, defined at various stages of life, or whenever people oblige us to declare ourselves. Fiction is marvelous for studying this, allowing the writer and reader to leap decades in a sentence. No other art lets you bend time as much.
Tom Rachman
There came an awful day when I picked up the phone and knew at once, as one does with some old friends even before they speak, that it was Edward. He sounded as if he were calling from the bottom of a well. I still thank my stars that I didn't say what I nearly said, because the good professor's phone pals were used to cheering or teasing him out of bouts of pessimism and insecurity when he would sometimes say ridiculous things like: 'I hope you don't mind being disturbed by some mere wog and upstart.' The remedy for this was not to indulge it but to reply with bracing and satirical stuff which would soon get the gurgling laugh back into his throat. But I'm glad I didn't say, 'What, Edward, splashing about again in the waters of self-pity?' because this time he was calling to tell me that he had contracted a rare strain of leukemia. Not at all untypically, he used the occasion to remind me that it was very important always to make and keep regular appointments with one’s physician.
Christopher Hitchens
Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off forever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.
Anthony Burgess
I have noticed that the solar radiation reflections from rippled privacy windows cause greatly accelerated growth patterns in plants
Steven Magee
We are all disciples of the light.
Steven Magee
The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.
G.K. Chesterton
It is your duty to do your best. It is not, however, your birth-right to prevail.
Idries Shah
I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.
Emily Brontë
Sometimes it's good just to be seduced by the particular cheeses spread out in front of you on a cheese counter.
Nigella Lawson
I don't think a single one of them had any clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They still belonged to the beginnings of time—
Joseph Conrad
Lying," he said out loud, hoping no one would hear. "I need to lie. Teach me, quickly."I wouldn't if I were you, came the response. For a start, it's a variable concept here. You are in a culture where ambiguity has been raised to a high level. Let me give an example: depending on phrasing, circumstance, expression, body movement, intonation and context, the statement "I love you" can mean I love you; I don't love you; I hate you; I want to have sex with you; I do, in fact, love your sister; I don't love you any more; leave me alone, I'm tired, or I'm sorry I forgot your birthday. The person being talked to would instantly understand the meaning but might choose to attribute an entirely different meaning to the statement. Lying is a social act and the nature and import of the lie depends in effect on an unspoken agreement between the parties concerned. Please note that this description does not even begin to explore the concept of deep lies, in which the speaker simultaneously says something he knows to be untrue and genuinely believes it nonetheless: politicians are particularly adept at this.
Iain Pears
Perfume is the key to our memories
Kate Lord Brown
He was just about to turn the light off, when there was a heavy, “Tappety, tap, tappety, tap,” on the door. It was the kind of loud sound that could only be made with a hoof. A moose’s hoof, that is." - Snugs The Snow Bear
Suzy Davies
When the Higher Man does something worthy of admiration, it is an evidence of his Mastership, not the object of it.
Idries Shah
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
Winston Churchill
I want her beyond reason. I need to own, consume, worship, devour. What I've made of her in my mind cannot live in flesh.
Mark Lawrence
Are you quite sure that you want to hear it?" he asked. "Sometimes, Maria, a story that one hears starts one off doing things that one would not have had to do if one had not heard it.
Elizabeth Goudge
She knew that pleasure, to be pleasure, must come to an end.
Elizabeth Goudge
Neither have they hearts to stay Nor wit enough to run away.
Samuel Butler
There is never a need to justify anything to others, only yourself.
Steven Redhead
In short, to enter the lists of literature is wilfully to expose yourself to the arrows of neglect, ridicule, envy, and disappointment. Whether you write well or ill, be assured that you will not escape from blame...
Matthew Lewis
Like light and shadow, love and hate were inseparable. One could not exist without the other.
David Gemmell
I cannot, however, but think that the world would be better and brighter if our teachers would dwell on the Duty of Happiness as well as the Happiness of Duty; for we ought to be as cheerful as we can, if only because to be happy ourselves is a most effectual contribution to the happiness of others.
John Lubbock
I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.
George Eliot
We can only guess at the thoughts and emotions of our neighbors. Each one of us is a prisoner in a solitary tower and he communicates with the other prisoners, who form mankind, by conventional signs that have not quite the same meaning for them as for himself.
W Somerset Maugham
Truly, the old maid is a most useful person, one of the reserve forces of the community. They talk of the superfluous woman, but what would the poor superfluous man do without her kindly presence?
Arthur Conan Doyle
No man likes to acknowledge that he has made a mistake in the choice of his profession, and every man, worthy of the name, will row long against wind and tide before he allows himself to cry out, 'I am baffled!' and submits to be floated passively back to land.
Charlotte Brontë
No one would deny that all wars and battles are regrettable acts of human folly, causing unjustifiable agony and distress to combatants and non-combatants alike-but these considerations should not preclude their serious study, if only to avoid the mistakes of the past which make such tragedies inevitable.
David G. Chandler
The world is come upon me, I used to keep it a long way off, But now I have been run over and I am in the hands of the hospital staff.
Stevie Smith
I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the horses the new strength of fear for the last mill so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.
C.S. Lewis
The mind is a complex and many-layered thing, Potter... or at least, most minds are...
J.K. Rowling
When we did eventually get to the party - me walking next to Dad's Volvo driving at five miles an hour - I had a horrible time. Everyone laughed at first but then more or less ignored me. In a mood of defiant stuffed oliveness I did have a dance by myself but things kept crashing to the floor around me. The host asked if I would sit down. I had a go at that but it was useless. In the end I was at the gate for about an hour before Dad arrived.
Louise Rennison
And Aziz in an awful rage danced this way and that, not knowing what to do, and cried: "Down with the English anyhow. That's certain. Clear out, you fellows, double quick, I say. We may hate one another, but we hate you most. If I don't make you go, Ahmed will, Karim will, if it's flfty-flve hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then "—he rode against him furiously— "and then," he concluded, half kissing him, "you and I shall be friends.
E.M. Forster
A brilliant epigram is a solemn platitude gone to a masquerade ball.
Lionel Strachey
The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth.
Marina Warner
Life is a prison in which we find ourselves.
Anthony T.Hincks
We see, at least with intellect, that beyond both true and false is truth; that there is beauty beyond our present views on the beautiful and ugly; that pleasure-pain can now alike be transcended, and that some day we shall truly see that 'form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form'.
Christmas Humphreys
But the inexplicability of the General's conduct dwelt much on her thoughts. That he was very particular in his eating, she had, by her own unassisted observation, already discovered; but why should he say one thing so positively, and mean another all the while, was most unaccountable. How were people, at that rate, to be understood?
Jane Austen
Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.
Samuel Johnson
He was as incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving the pain he caused others.
Graham Greene
A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification. He can be destroyed or locked up. But if you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can't stop you, then you become something else entirely
Christopher J. Nolan
That's the trouble with you young people. You think because you ain't been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forgot more than you ever know.
Neil Gaiman
My father had a lifelong terror, phobia whatever, about hospitals. Makes a lot of sense in hindsight. He was so scared of doctors, he passed that on to me. That's what parents exist for: to pass their phobias on generation to generation.
Jackie Kay
I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.
Susan Hill
Don't trust people who tell you other people's secrets.
Dan Howell
The beauty and music...It is a call...And some are not strong.
Richard Llewellyn
Boredom is the very opposite of beauty and truth. Life has been sacrificed to profit, and the result is boredom on a massive scale.
Tom Hodgkinson
There is something so special in the early leaves drifting from the trees - as if we are all to be allowed a chance to peel, to refresh, to start again.
Ruth Ahmed
When you fall asleep after a big lunch you're really just saving up energy to work off all the calories later on.
Elizabeth Jane Howard
We are the lucky ones for we shall die, as there is an infinite number of possible forms of DNA all but a few billions of which will never burst into consciousness.
Frank Close
Oh my gosh, don’t you both look pretty!” We looked like rejects from the auditions for The Sound of Music.“I will have to buy them – they are meant to be yours!” Karla waved her credit card around like a wand.“What a shame they didn’t have one in green for me. But then, it is a young girl’s style. I would’ve looked foolish.
Joss Stirling
No one gets up after death-there is no applause-there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's death.
Tom Stoppard
Like the pagans of old, unaffected by climate, the British were now dancing around a giant phallus. Unlike the pagans theirs was a sterile phallus, disarmed by condoms and pills - the first heathen sexual cult to be based around sterility rather than fertility.
Peter Hitchens
You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don't you?
Terry Pratchett
But with dogs, we do have "bad dog." Bad dog exists. "Bad dog! Bad dog! Stole a biscuit, bad dog!" The dog is saying, "Who are you to judge me? You human beings who’ve had genocide, war against people of different creeds, colors, religions, and I stole a biscuit?! Is that a crime? People of the world!""Well, if you put it that way, I think you’ve got a point. Have another biscuit, sorry.
Eddie Izzard
Satisfaction is a treasure which does not decay.Proverb
Idries Shah
No, its the poor I tell you, and the poor only, as does such things for the poor. Don't think to come over me with th' old tale, that the rich knows nothing of the trials of the poor; I say, if they don't know, they ought to know. We're their slaves as long as we can work; we pile up their fortunes with the sweat of our brows, and yet we are to live as separate as if we were in two worlds..." Chap. 1, p. 12
Elizabeth Gaskell
I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.
Charlotte Brontë