Quotes by British Authors - Page 116

Well, what was luck for if it was never to be tempted?
Mary Stewart
I wanted books and made no distinction between good books or bad, only between the ones I loved, the ones that spoke to my soul, and the ones I merely liked. I did not care how a story was written. There were no bad stories: every story was new and glorious.
Neil Gaiman
The gods had a habit of going round to atheists' houses and smashing their windows.
Terry Pratchett
An Act of Dissent is simply a way of saying, 'No, I do not accept this and, as my silence may be construed as acquiescence, I would like to make a small gesture to indicate that you can all go fuck yourselves.
Mark Thomas
I suppose that's one of the ironies of life doing the wrong thing at the right moment.
Charlie Chaplin
Forever encased in the amber of a writer's prose.
Robert Galbraith
What’s the most difficult thing you can do? Live simply. ‘Cause in order to be self-sufficient, you got to get well near everybody else to work for you.
M.C. Humphreys
You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.
W.H. Auden
The seed of all impulse is a feeling bursting to express itself in action.
Chloe Thurlow
Other pressing problems with the current medical model [of mental disorder] is that it encourages false epidemics, most glaringly in bipolar disorder and ADHD, and the wholesale exportation of Western mental disorders and Western accounts of mental disorder. Taken together, this is leading to a pandemic of Western disease categories and treatments, while undermining the variety and richness of the human experience.
Neel Burton
The nations which have put mankind and posterity most in their debt have been small states - Israel Athens Florence Elizabethan England.
Dean William R. Inge
And so even the righteous heart is besieged by the blinding light of false knowledge. Falsity is like an ocean that presses around solitary moments of truth, treatening to overwhelm or blind the seekers of knowledge, to eradicate them in an instant of self-deceiving brilliance.Knowledge is power; it guards our souls - guard it well.
C.S. Goto
A man faced death, but when death drew back forgot it until the next time.
John Christopher
The pain is kind of challenge your mind presents - will you learn how to focus and move past boredom, or like a child will you succumb to the need for immediate pleasure and distraction?
Robert Greene
I looked up, and I really wished I hadn’t. My obsession with those eyes was playing a taunting game with me. His mesmerising gaze was like none other I had ever experienced in my life. It was almost as if he could reach into my soul and pick out all of my sins. Sins I didn’t want him to know about. Sins that would ultimately destroy me if they ever got out. If he knew my sins, he wouldn’t be kneeling beside me with my hand in his. He wouldn’t be sharing with me that look of promises to come. He would be disgusted with me. I was disgusted with me.
Jaimie Roberts
When they told him this, Ransom at last understood why mythology was what it was -- gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility.
C.S. Lewis
Jamal stared at the dog in his arms. "Why I am I holding a dog full of angels?
Diana Wynne Jones
The conventional parabola--sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness--was to him shameful and hypocritical.
Ian Fleming
I'm not really a Jew just Jew-ish not the whole hog.
Jonathan Miller
If a man hasn't what's necessary to make a woman love him, it's his fault, not hers.
W Somerset Maugham
Responsibility is not doing as we are told, that's obedience. Responsibility is doing what is right.
Simon Sinek
You're rarer than a can of Dandelion & BurdockAnd those other girls are just post-mix lemonade
Arctic Monkeys
Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.
Joanne Harris
Allah tests our patience and our fortitude. He tests out strength of faith. be patient and there will endless rewards for you, insha'Allah" - Utaz Badr
Leila Aboulela
The battle with the bottle is nothing so novel.
Elvis Costello
The President is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the President on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm.
Christopher Hitchens
To succeed in the digital realm, technology has to provide a strong disruptive element right from the start. If things cannot be done differently , a transition to digital is not going to be compelling enough for a wide enough adoption to create sustainability.
David Amerland
Madness has no sense of humour
Adam Foulds
I realised that the moon was not a safe place. It knew a thousand ways to kill you if you were stupid, if you were careless, if you were lazy, but the real danger was the people around you. The moon was not a world, it was a submarine. Outside was death. I would be sealed in with these people. There was no law, no justice: there was only management. The moon was the frontier, but it was the frontier to nothing. There was nowhere to run.
Ian McDonald
But that I should have ended up in a place like this seems too custom-made a nightmare to be the work of mere ill fortune.
Zoë Heller
It's more than words & somehow more than actions could ever show. It's hard to explicate this feeling I have for you, but it's one I could live out the rest of my days trying to make you understand.
David Reeves
The most important question I ask myself as a parent is this. How can I best help my children be fully themselves and happy with who they are in the world, however they show up.
Lehla Eldridge
The great thing and the hard thing is to stick to things when you have outlived the first interest and not yet got the second which comes with a sort of mastery.
Janet Erskine Stuart
In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.
Jeanette Winterson
In females, the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement.
Ben Goldacre
Men are pigs, darling. I really have every sympathy for women that they actually have to choose one of these arrogant, stupid morons to settle down with and marry.
Michael Winner
The earth in its rapid motion round the sun possesses a degree of living force so vast that, if turned into the equivalent of heat, its temperature would be rendered at least one thousand times greater than that of red-hot iron, and the globe on which we tread would in all probability be rendered equal in brightness to the sun itself.
James Prescott Joule
I hate this complete obsession with class, especially at this place, you can hardly say 'hello' to anyone before they are getting all prolier-than-thou and telling you about how their dad's a one eyed chimney-sweep with rickets, and how they've still got an outside loo, and have never been on a plane or whatever, all that dubious crap, most of which is usually lies anyway, and I'm thinking why are you telling me this? Am I meant to feel guilty? D'you think it's my fault or something, or are you just feeling pleased with yourself for escaping your pre-determined social role or some self congratulatory bullshit? I mean, what does it matter anyway? People are people, if you ask me, and they rise or fall by their own talents and merits, and their own labours, and blaming the fact they've got a settee rather than a sofa, or eat tea rather tan dinner, that's just an excuse, it's just whining self-pity and shoddy thinking.... I don;t make judgements about other people because of their background and I expect people to treat me with the same courtesy... It's my parent's moeny and its not as if they got it from nicking people's dole or running sweatshops in Johannesburg or something. They worked fucking hard for what they've got. It's a privilege and they treat it as such and they do their best to give something back. But if you ask me, theres no snob like an inverted snob... Im just so fucking bored of people trying to pass plain old envy off as some sort of virtue.
David Nicholls
God's presence is not the same as the feeling of God's presence and He may be doing most for us when we think He is doing least.
C.S. Lewis
Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him.
C.S. Lewis
Life is one long struggle to disinter oneself to keep one's head above the accumulations the ever deepening layers of objects ... which attempt to cover one over steadily almost irresistibly like falling snow.
Rose Macaulay
Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognised during the lifetimes of its creators.
Alastair Reynolds
For 3 million you could give everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we could dig a hole so deep we could hand her over to Satan in person. (on Margaret Thatcher)
Frankie Boyle
Young people do not like to be always thwarted.
Jane Austen
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.
Walter Pater
And this way, l'll leave everything behind before it gets the chance to do the same to me.
Holly Smale
It is a secret in the Oxford sense. You may tell it to only one person at a time.
Oliver Franks
Popular feeling is very often sentimental, muddle-headed, and eminently unsound, but it cannot be disregarded for all that.
Agatha Christie
I was there, the day that Horus killed the Emperor
Dan Abnett
A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied he is content.
Alfred North Whitehead
We can depend on nobody in this world, and sometimes we even betray ourselves
Dean Cavanagh
Different creatures have different eyes. Human eyes (unlike, say, a cat's eyes, or an octopus's) are only made to see one version of reality at a time.
Neil Gaiman
All organisms vary. It is in the highest degree improbable that any given variety should have exactly the same relations to surrounding conditions as the parent stock. In that case it is either better fitted (when the variation may be called useful), or worse fitted, to cope with them. If better, it will tend to supplant the parent stock; if worse, it will tend to be extinguished by the parent stock.If (as is hardly conceivable) the new variety is so perfectly adapted to the conditions that no improvement upon it is possible,—it will persist, because, though it does not cease to vary, the varieties will be inferior to itself.If, as is more probable, the new variety is by no means perfectly adapted to its conditions, but only fairly well adapted to them, it will persist, so long as none of the varieties which it throws off are better adapted than itself.On the other hand, as soon as it varies in a useful way, i.e. when the variation is such as to adapt it more perfectly to its conditions, the fresh variety will tend to supplant the former.
Thomas Henry Huxley
If there is one thing I dislike, it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine.
P.G. Wodehouse
It felt like one of those movies where a bunch of misfits, each gifted in his own way - one in explosives, another in disguise, another in forgery or karate- are thrown together to achieve a dangerous mission.
Philip Delves Broughton
War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?" he said. "Dunno, Sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?""Absol—well, okay." "Defending yourself against a totalitarian aggressor?""All right, I'll grant you that, but—""Saving civilization from a horde of—" "It doesn't do any good in the long run is what I'm saying, Nobby, if you'd listen for five seconds together," said Fred Colon sharply. "Yeah, but in the long run, what does, Sarge?
Terry Pratchett
[T]hrough bitter experience I have learned that it is best to promise little and then to reward hard work with generosity.
Tahir Shah
The devil prince of this world, but this world don’t last so long for mortal man.
Jean Rhys
Most people are only doing the best that they know how to do.Blaming and holding grudges only brings more pain.
Maggie Cox
Never hold any one by the button or the hand in order to be heard out for if people are unwilling to hear you you had better hold your tongue than them.
Lord Chesterfield