Quotes by British Authors - Page 119

How wonderful it must be, to be unable to remember things that once caused us distress. Yet we should embrace all our memories, whether joyful or painful. They're all we ever really own in this life.
Isabel Wolff
Solitude is such a potential thing. We hear voices in solitude, we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life; we receive counsels and comforts, we get under no other condition . . .
Amelia E. Barr
There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal as a human being to human beings; remember your humanity, and forget the rest.
Bertrand Russell
The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence
T.S Eliot
She scarcely spoke at all and might have been one of those huge dolls which, when inclined backwards, say "Ma-ma" or "Pa-pa": though impossible to imagine in any position so undignified as that required for the mechanism to produce these syllables.
Anthony Powell
The realm of liberation is absolutely incommensurable with the relativities of higher and lower, better and worse, gain and loss, since these are all disadvantages of the ego.
Alan W. Watts
In the mid–path of my life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood,' writes Dante, in The Divine Comedy, beginning a quest that will lead to transformation and redemption. A journey through the dark of the woods is a motif common to fairy tales: young heroes set off through the perilous forest in order to reach their destiny, or they find themselves abandoned there, cast off and left for dead. The road is long and treacherous, prowled by wolves, ghosts, and wizards — but helpers also appear along the way, good fairies and animal guides, often cloaked in unlikely disguises. The hero's task is to tell friend from foe, and to keep walking steadily onward.
Terri Windling
The change was made in me; the thing was done. Well or ill done, excusably or inexcusably, it was done.
Charles Dickens
What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together
Julian Barnes
Humility is a teacher of itself. It is learnt by means of its practise.
Idries Shah
There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learned to separate them.
J.D. Bernal
It needs but one foe to breed a war, and those who have not swords can still die upon them.
J.R.R. Tolkien
We are all a slave to our passions
Emily Williams
Hence, when his name was casually mentioned by neighboring yeomen, the listener said, "Ah, Clym Yeobright: what is he doing now?' When the instinctive question about a person is, What is he doing? it is felt that he will not be found to be, like most of us, doing nothing in particular. There is an indefinite sense that he must be invading some region of singularity , good or bad. The devout home is that he is doing well. The secret faith is that he is making a mess of it...So the subject recurred: if he were making a fortune and a name, so much the better for him, if he were making a tragical figure in the world, so much the better for a narrative
Thomas Hardy
I will write in words of fire.I will write them on your skin.I will write about desire.Write beginnings, write of sin.You’re the book I love the best,your skin only holds my truth, you will be a palimpsest lines of age rewriting youth. You will not burn upon the pyre. Or be buried on the shelf. You’re my letter to desire: And you’ll never read yourself. I will trace each word and comma As the final dusk descends, You’re my tale of dreams and drama, Let us find out how it ends.
Neil Gaiman
And so it was that Michael built a brown castle on the peak of his mountain, Gabriel built a golden pyramid in the midst of his plain, saying it was both a holy temple in my praise and an edifice that would guide him on his pattern for his future work, though I knew that only he would ever understand it, to my amusement, and Raphael built a silver palace to sparkle above the trees of his forests, as his home and celestial workshop, and I was well pleased with their work, as ever it was better than what I had hoped for. "That was the First Age, the Archangel Age, long over. I can speak in much detail about each stage in my creation, and my scribes have written all my words on each stage in the books I gave to the angel courts, for study and meditation and for prayer, but such details are for my sons and daughters most interested in them, when they are of an age, with the understanding, to comprehend such things.
Philip Dodd
Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.
Clive Barker
Buy calmly and with meaning.
Sophie Kinsella
I put in no claims either for happiness, for gratification, or even for the common comforts of life: yet, surely, I had a right to exist!
Mary Hays
I couldn't possibly repeat the words he used .They were so unsettling that I sent Nancy indoors to find my spectacles.
John Bude
Our stomachs live in towns," said Mma Potokwani, patting the front of her dress. 'That is where the work is. Our stomachs know that. But our hearts are usually somewhere else.
Alexander McCall Smith
A girl should set her sights on a man who has money; or if not, who can expect to come into money; or if not, who has moneyed connections.
Jude Morgan
It is for people we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children we are exacting and would rather see. them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records that though He has often rebuded us, condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexcusable sense.
C.S. Lewis
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.
J.K. Rowling
It's a sad fact that most people can't even spot a story when they see one. Most people don't know that stories aren't confined by the covers of books or by half-hour slots on TV. The world is made of stories. The world is driven by stories. When a sunburned-friend tells you about their holiday, it's not a straight list of everything that happened to them - it's a story, an anecdote with a plot, a beginning, a middle and an end. Each one of their holiday snaps is a story too. When you're making a decision, and you imagine the possible outcomes - what are you doing if not telling yourself a story? History is a story. Society is a story. Countries are stories. Your plans are stories. Your desires are stories. Your own memories are stories - narratives selected, trimmed and packaged by the hidden machinery in your mind. Human beings are story engines. We have to be - to understand stories is to understand the world.
Steven Hall
When you have a personal relationship with God, it’s like being close friends with the most powerful and influential people in the world who have keys to open every door for you.And best of all, knowing the One helps us to know ourselves and make sense of who we are, why we’re here and what life is all about.
Michael Mackintosh
S.M."Social Media or Social Menace?I'll leave it to you to work out.
Anthony T.Hincks
I would say that since the war, our methods-out and those of the opposition-have become much the same. I mean you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's 'policy' is benevolent, can you now?
John le Carré
Censorship may promote the lies, but it does not alter the truth.
Anthony T.Hincks
There is always a choice." "You mean I could choose certain death?" "A choice nevertheless, or perhaps an alternative. You see I believe in freedom. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.
Terry Pratchett
You start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few good jokes.
David Nicholls
Either you go to America with Mrs. Van Hopper or you come home to Manderley with me.""Do you mean you want a secretary or something?""No, I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool.
Daphne du Maurier
There was a certain struggling fury that went with being jobless, and persevering, and being turned down, that was different from simply being jobless.
Doris Lessing
Nonsense has taken up residence in the heart of public debate and also in the academy. This nonsense is part of the huge fund of unreason on which the plans and schemes of optimists draw for their vitality. Nonsense confiscates meaning. It thereby puts truth and falsehood, reason and unreason, light and darkness on an equal footing. It is a blow cast in defence of intellectual freedom, as the optimists construe it, namely the freedom to believe anything at all, provided you feel better for it.
Roger Scruton
Without the queen pulling your strings, you’re nothing but thoughts and dreams. Such things are easily destroyed." ~ General Kael, City of Fae #2
Pippa DaCosta
Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain.
E.M. Forster
She was half running away from the hall, and she knew that she had done something cataclysmic, and she wanted nothing more than to be swallowed up by the darkness and to disappear forever.
J.K. Rowling
You may right now be nursing a broken heart. Friends will say, "Aren't you glad you had the experience anyway?" And you may say "No." Eventually, unbelievably, you may not remember the boy that triggered it all. You'll recall all the places you visited, but not how you got there. You'll remember the songs that you listened to.
Emma Forrest
A concern with the perfectibility of mankind is always a symptom of thwarted or perverted development.
Hugh Kingsmill
You don't learn about war by sitting in libraries. Though if people spent more time in libraries, maybe there would be fewer wars.
Joanne Hall
I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills When all at once I saw a crowd A host of golden daffodils Beside the lake beneath the trees Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
William Wordsworth
Ignorance of ourselves must be folly.
A.L.O.E.
The brain works in a holistic, cooperative way that makes our basest desire or most abject fear as expressive of who we are as abstract thinking of the highest order. That means that we are all equal part snakes, monkeys, and spacemen.
David Amerland
Sometimes maybe you need an experience. The experience can be a person or it can be a drug. The experience opens a door that was there all the time but you never saw it. Or maybe it blasts you into outer space...All that negative stuff. All the pain...It just floted away from me, I just floated away from it...up and away...
Melvin Burgess
When a man becomes a Christian, he becomes industrious, trustworthy and prosperous. Now, if that man when he gets all he can and saves all he can, does not give all he can, I have more hope for Judas Iscariot than for that man!
John Wesley
Truth has rough flavors if we bite it through.
George Eliot
Earth changes but thy soul and God stand sure.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
Yes, our old age is not going to be sunny orchard drowse. By shutting down the fire curtain, though, I find I can live in the moment; which is good; why yield a moment to regret or envy or worry? Why indeed? (24 December 1940)
Virginia Woolf
Oh, it was 1775.” “What?” “1775. The Battle of Bunker Hill.” “Oh.” I laughed. “We learned about it the day we met,” he added. “Another red-letter day in history.
J.M. Richards
No more bells ringing in the middle of the afternoon demolishing the rest of the day. No more waiting for the situation to change.
Jhumpa Lahiri
When you try to build Heaven on earth you end up building ghetto's of Hell
Dean Cavanagh
The secret of discipline is motivation. When a man is sufficiently motivated discipline will take care of itself.
Sir Alexander Paterson
In the end I didn't know who I was crying for, but it was something my body wanted to do, as though trying to digest grief.
Simon Van Booy
What? Quinn's one of them? I just thought he was an a*shole!
Simon Holt
Perhaps thought really is prayer.
Ellis Peters
Panic attacks are a lot like being drunk in some ways, you lose self-control. You cry for seemingly no reason. You deal with the hangover long into the next day.
Sara Barnard
I have heard many a young unmarried lady exclaim with a bold sweep of conception, “Ah me! I wish I were a widow!” Mrs. Keith was precisely the widow that young unmarried ladies wish to be. With her diamonds in her dressing-case and her carriage in her stable, and without a feather’s weight of encumbrance, she offered a finished example of satisfied ambition.
Henry James
We stood, separated by space, certainly, in identical conditions of pleasant uncertainty and anticipation, and we both held our heart in our hands, all pink and palpitating and ready for pleasure and pain, and we were about to throw these hearts in each other's faces like snowballs, or cricket balls (How's that?) or, more accurately, like great bleeding wounds: "Take my wound". Because the last thing one ever thinks at such moments is that he (or she) will say: Take my wound, please remove the spear from my side. No, not at all; one simply expects to get rid of one's one.
Doris Lessing
I think of literature - she wrote - as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch up.
Alan Bennett
Blessed are those who can give without remembering and take without forgetting.
Elizabeth Asquith Bibesco