Quotes by British Authors - Page 115

Every task you are given, no matter how menial, offers opportunities to observe this world at work. No detail about the people within it is too trivial. Everything you see or hear is a sign for you to decode. Over time, you will begin to see and understand more of the reality that eluded you at first. For instance, a person whom you initially thought had great power ended up being someone with more bark than bite. Slowly, you begin to see behind the appearances. As you amass more information about the rules and power dynamics of your new environment, you can begin to analyze why they exist, and how they relate to larger trends in the field. You move from observation to analysis, honing your reasoning skills, but only after months of careful attention.
Robert Greene
Potter is mocked by a faculty member for the idea that there is evil in the world from which even children need to learn to defend themselves by the actual practice of doing so rather than familiarity with theory.
J.K. Rowling
I never wanted a too die for house, or a too die for car. I always wanted a too die for life.If you were to die tomorrow would you feel like you did everything you wanted to? Loved everyone and meant it? Lived with honesty and integrity? Stood up for what you believed in? Did you work to live or did you live to work? Those that hurt you or upset you did you try to work it out? Did you still love them from a distance even if they hurt you so bad? If not work to change and make it right before it's too late.Remember the house, the car, the money and the material possessions you can't take with you when your gone. All you have is YOU and what YOU were about. Remember that.
Jill Telford
To say that the first casualty of war is truth is to miss the rather more important point that a principal weapon of war is lies.
Harry M. Collins
To imagine that I was pleased would have been an understatement, if I was a dog, my tail would be wagging my arse off.
Gary Edward Gedall
Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else.
G.K. Chesterton
One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too old.
George Orwell
The desires you aspire to need strong chains of intent.
Steven Redhead
To stand against the enemy is to rest in what Jesus has already done.
Pedro Okoro
The first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.
Salmon Rushdie
The best beauty treatment of all is time spent quietly before the Lord.
Elizabeth George
Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.
Samuel Butler
Calamity is the test of integrity.
Richardson
There comes a time when a man must stand up and do what he knows is Wrong.
Tom Holt
The idea that He would take his attention away from the universe in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds is just so unlikely I can't go along with it.
Quentin Crisp
Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you. What are you afraid of? Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret?
C.S. Lewis
Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it. Praise in due order; of Him as the giver, of her as the gift. Don’t we in praise somehow enjoy what we praise, however far we are from it? I must do more of this.
C.S. Lewis
If from Society we learn to live Tis Solitude should teach us how to die It hath no flatterers.
Lord Byron
There is one thing certain namely that we can have nothing certain therefore it is not certain that we can have nothing certain.
Samuel Butler
I am floating, I thought, completely without anchor, at the mercy of the wind.
S.J. Watson
You come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners. You think of the children you might have had but didn’t. When the midwife says, ‘It’s a boy,’ where does the girl go? When you think you’re pregnant, and you’re not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that never worked after the opening lines.
Hilary Mantel
You smiled then, and your whole face changed with it. It kind of lit up, like there were sunbeams coming from inside you.
Lucy Christopher
Fate is a fickle bitch. Just when you believe you've secured the goose that lays the golden egg, she back heels you in the bollocks.
Ken Scott
He was unique to her among men because he’s impressed her as being not her admirer her superior. In some mysterious way he was becoming a part of her conscience as one woman who’s nature is an object of reverential belief may become a new conscience to a man.
George Eliot
And yet it seems so full of comfort and of strength, the night. In its great presence, our small sorrows creep away, ashamed. The day has been so full of fret and care, and our hearts have been so full of evil and bitter thoughts, and the world has seemed so hard and wrong to us. Then night, like some great loving mother, gently lays her hand upon our fevered head, and turns our little tear-stained face upto hers, and smiles, and though she does not speak, we know what she would say, and lay our hot flushed cheek against her bosom, and the pain is gone.Sometimes, our pain is very deep and real, and we stand before her very silent, because there is no language for our pain, only a moan. Night's heart is full of pity for us: she cannot ease our aching; she takes our hand in hers, and the little world grows very small and very far away beneath us, and borne on her dark wings, we pass for a moment into a mightier presence than her own, and in the wondrous light of that great presence, all human life's like a book before us, and we know that Pain and Sorrow are but the angels of God.
Jerome K. Jerome
Strange that men, from age to age, should consent to hold their lives at the breath of another, merely that each in his turn may have a power of acting the tyrant according to the law! Oh, God! give me poverty! Shower upon me all the imaginary hardships of human life! I will receive them with all thankfulness. Turn me a prey to the wild beasts of the desert, so I be never again the victim of man, dressed in the gore-dripping robes of authority! Suffer me at least to call life, the pursuits of life, my own! Let me hold it at the mercy of the elements, of the hunger of the beasts, or the revenge of barbarians, but not of the cold-blooded prudence of monopolists and kings!
William Godwin
Extraordinary what the body remembers. The bones loded with love, grief silting the arteries, fear the bowels' recurring mould. Who would have thought mere flesh and blood could hold so much of psyche's ghostly script?
Glen Duncan
The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like talking thunder; like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken; like the men singing the Corn Song, beautiful, beautiful, so that you cried.
Aldous Huxley
Penny rolled over, got to her feet, trying to get control of her scattered mind, but Quinn was behind her now and had his powerful arm around her neck.“I will snap your neck, Penny. I swear to God, I will snap your neck. Nothing you can do will stop me.”Penny went limp. “You think the king will let you get away with this, Quinn?” she hissed.“Anyone messes with me, Penny, you or anyone else, and I go on strike. See how well you enjoy life without me and my crews. Without food.
Michael Grant
Beautiful girls are not a decoration, arm candy, an object. They are, whether they know it or not, the very essence of our humanity.
Chloe Thurlow
Time moved for you not in quotidian beats, but in the slow rhythm the ages keep –
Aldous Huxley
I do benefits for all religions. ... I'd hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.
Bob Hope
Be individual, break free from the flock to avoid the predictable midsummer haircut.
Fennel Hudson
Hatred and food were served up in equal proportions at the Connor dining table as he was growing up.
Bill Ward
For us (Muslims) death is an incident: for them (the Europeans), the end.
Marmaduke William Pickthall
In his heart, some tiny piece of what hadn't happened would lodge.
Simon Van Booy
Charlie dear, it is I who have to be proud of you. And I am very, very proud of you. You have called me pretty; and as long as I am pretty in your eyes, I am happy. You, dear old Charlie, are not handsome, but you are good, which is far more noble.
George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
Life's generally artless, but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind yor back, and before you know it you're in a final act of a lousy movie. A lousy horror-movine, usually...
Glen Duncan
But this gives no proper idea of my feelings at all; and no one that has not lived such a retired stationary life as mine, can possibly imagine what they were: hardly even if he has known what it is to awake some morning, and find himself in Port Nelson, in New Zealand, with a world of waters between himself and all that knew him.
Anne Brontë
...our species is one, and each of the individuals who compose it are entitled to equal moral consideration.
Michael Ignatieff
It is my assessment that most police officers who spend their days driving around USA cities will have some levelof radiation sickness and this is concerning!
Steven Magee
Pieces of your heart broke every day when you were a mother.
Dianna Hardy
Ours is a world controlled by the warrior and the sword.
Jayne Castel
The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do.
Edward Verrall Lucas
No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it
Karl R. Popper
It is not difficult to stand above the conventions when we leave no hostages among them; men can always be more unconventional than women, and a bachelor of independent means need encounter no difficulties at all.
E.M. Forster
His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say, ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, 'God can.' It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.
C.S. Lewis
It was long after midnight and the stars looked damp and chilly; the air was full of the busy silence of the night, which is created by hundreds of small furry things treading very carefully in the hope of finding dinner while avoiding being the main course.
Terry Pratchett
Let me tell you what I want,' he said fiercely. 'For a start, I want you. I told you that, but perhaps I didn't make myself clear. I want the whole package, hang-ups, fears and phobias, as well as the good parts.
Joanna Mansell
If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will - that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings - then we may take it (that) it is worth paying.
C.S. Lewis
But maybe it's what the world needs. A little less sense, and a little more faith.
Rachel Joyce
I'm sorry I started all this by trying to fly and I'd take it back if I could but I can't, so please think of it from my point of view: if you die I will have a dead brother and it will be me instead of you who suffers.Justin thought of his brother on that warm summer day, standing up on the windowsill holding both their futures, light and changeable as air, in his outstretched arms.Of course, Justin thought, I'm part of his fate just as he's part of mine. I hadn't considered it from his point of view. Or from the point of view of the universe, either. It's just a playing field crammed full of cause and effect, billions of dominoes, each knocking over billions more, setting off trillions of actions every second. A butterfly flaps its wings in Africa and my brother in Luton thinks he can fly.The child nodded. A piano might fall on your head, he said, but it also might not. And in the meantime you never know. Something nice might happen.
Meg Rosoff
Acting is not very hard. The most important things are to be able to laugh and cry. If I have to cry I think of my sex life. And if I have to laugh well I think of my sex life.
Glenda Jackson
[Shakespeare realized that] Women are able to understand themselves better on a personal level and survive in the world if they dress in men's clothing, thus living underground, safe (...). The presence of women disguising themselves as men dictates that the play be a comedy; women remaining in their frocks, a tragedy. In four great tragedies -Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear- almost all the women die (...). How much the women have to adhere to the rules and regulations of their enviroment makes a large difference. Once Rosalind [disguised as a man in As You Like It] has run away from the court, she has no institutional structures to deal with. Ophelia [in her frocks] is surrounded tightly by institutional structures of family, court, and politics; only by going mad can be get out of it all.
Tina Packer
Is there a more pitiable spectacle than that of a wife contending with others for that charm in her husband's sight which no philters and no prayers can renew when once it has fled forever?Women are so unwise. Love is like a bird's song beautiful and eloquent when heard in forest freedom, harsh and worthless in repetition when sung from behind prison bars.You cannot secure love by vigilance, by environment, by captivity. What use is it to keep the person of a man beside you if his soul be truant from you?
Ouida
Jail has become the biggest mental health hospital.
Steven Magee
You only really know what a smile means when you own the face behind it. Everyone else just sees the smile they expect it to be.
Nathan Filer
The world is like a mirror frown at it and it frowns at you. Smile and it smiles too.
Herbert Samuel
Coralie Casey was the kind of woman calories were made for; that dewy peaches-and-cream complexion, glossy cherry lips, the succulence of her body beneath that orange, silky dress. A cornucopia of curves, you could say, except it was probably better not to think about horns of plenty.
Christine Stovell
Words were only an approximation of meaning. The meaning escaped between the words, dissolved, disappeared, like fog fading away between iron bars.
Charlotte Lamb