Quotes by British Authors - Page 121

Now fair and marvellous was that vessel made, and it was filled with a wavering flame, pure and bright; and Earendil the Mariner sat at the helm, glistening with dust of elven-gems, and the Silmaril was bound upon his brow. Far he journeyed in that ship, even into the starless voids; but most often was he seen at morning or at evening, glimmering in sunrise or sunset, as he came back to Valinor from voyages beyond the confines of the world.
J.R.R. Tolkien
In truth, ideas and principles are independent of men; the application of them and their illustration is man's duty and merit. The time will come when the author of a view shall be set aside, and the view only taken cognizance of. This will be the millennium of Science.
Edward Forbes
Ah! The English language was a wonderful thing! You could always find the right word. He only wished he could speak the language.
Terry Jones
Working hard is important, but there's something that matters even more. Believing in yourself. Think of it this way: Every great wizard in history has started out as nothing more than we are now. Students. If they can do it, why not us?
J.K. Rowling
To see the beautiful and mystical in the other worlds, one first must see the beauty of one's soul
Mimi Novic
There was this about vampires : they could never look scruffy. Instead, they were... what was the word... deshabille. It meant untidy, but with bags and bags of style.
Terry Pratchett
She had generated alternative versions of herself. She had insisted at brutal cost on these conversions. Layering her life, only to strip it bare. Only to be alone in the end. Her life had been paired down to its solitary components.
Jhumpa Lahiri
If you can still write in spite of the fact that you're not getting paid, that nobody cares about what you're writing, that nobody wants to publish it, that everybody is telling you to do something else, and you still want to and you still enjoy it and you can't stop doing it...then you're a writer.
Joanne Harris
Things are often exactly as they seem. Confusing isn't it.
Richard Butchins
These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, acording to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly - despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public - to put him to bed, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of his colon.
Christopher Isherwood
Some people would say- you're only a drop, your word-breaking is only a drop, it wouldn't matter. But all the evil in the world's made up of little drops. It's silly talking about the unimportance of the little drops. The little drops and the ocean are the same thing.
John Fowles
He was as obsequious as a Japanese ivy plant. Wringing his hands as if he hoped to squeeze the milk of human kindness from his fingernails, ...
Philip Kerr
There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.
Matt Haig
Freedom is found within.
Beth Kempton
…the greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects, we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.
C.S. Lewis
Rosie get off your desk, and please put your beard away.
Louise Rennison
An act of God was defined as "something which no reasonable man could have expected."
A.P. Herbert
I mean that it's all right to go to bed with an asshole but don't ever have a baby with one.
David Gilmour
I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched ... Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer, and heard the rustling of the leaves and the chirping of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The word ‘pranayama’, often referred to as alternate breathing, comes from the Sanskrit meaning ‘extension of life force’ or ‘extension of breath’. At times, we are going to have days where we are bombarded with one task after another. This simple yet effective meditation only takes a couple of minutes and its calming qualities can be felt almost immediately. It is one of the easiest meditation techniques to apply. This practice is well worth applying at least three or four times a day (somewhere private) to develop emotional balance and evenness of mind, especially in the working environment.
Christopher Dines
And that luck was only fate's cheating, giving an illusion of power. But that illusion lingered, and I became restless. I decided to act, to challenge fate. (...) I gained courage; every afternoon I walked a little farther. And one day I got there.
V.S. Naipaul
Who needs drugs when you have Takeshi's Castle?
Craig Charles
Look at all that rubbish," she said, watching the electric van slowly whirr from bin to bin, little men in gloves removing it all."They're taking it away," I said. "Where to?" she said. "It just gets moved around dearie, that's all.
Jeanette Winterson
You want someone in the ballpark and then you grow together. Thats what a relashionship's about: changing each other.
Grayson Perry
Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture.
Aldous Huxley
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
Virginia Woolf
Equality of opportunity is an equal opportunity to prove unequal talents.
Viscount Samuel
A break up is the closest thing to bereavement
Lindsey Kelk
Aedan had never felt embarrassed about his imagination. Without it there was no magic.
Jonathan Renshaw
There is nothing so actively alive as the dead.
Jessie Douglas Kerruish
Relationships are all about trust and equality. If one person shares, then the other person should share, too.
Sophie Kinsella
When you enter heaven you shall find Him there bearing the dew of His youth; and through eternity the Lord Jesus shall still remain the perennial spring of joy, and life, and glory to His people.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive than hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved… Of all powers he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all.
C.S. Lewis
The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of Franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore.
Stephen Fry
... and then beginning to go back to what you can't even remember.
Graham Greene
Sometimes it feels like someone else is wearing my body.
Warsan Shire
Nothing can be rightly known, if God be not known; nor is any study well managed, nor to any great purpose, if God is not studied. We know little of the creature, till we know it as it stands related to the Creator: single letters, and syllables uncomposed, are no better than nonsense. He who overlooketh him who is the 'Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending,' and seeth not him in all who is the All of all, doth see nothing at all. All creatures, as such, are broken syllables; they signify nothing as separated from God. Were they separated actually, they would cease to be, and the separation would be annhiliation; and when we separate them in our fancies, we make nothing of them to ourselves. It is one thing to know the creatures as Aristotle, and another thing to know them as a Christian. None but a Christian can read one line of his Physics so as to understand it rightly. It is a high and excellent study, and of greater use than many apprehend; but it is the smallest part of it that Aristotle can teach us.
Richard Baxter
That men, who might have tower'd in the vanOf all the congregated world, to fanAnd winnow from the coming step of timeAll chaff of custom, wipe away all slimeLeft by men-slugs and human serpentry,Have been content to let occasion die,Whilst they did sleep in love's Elysium.
John Keats
Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good words for the lips.
Charles Dickens
Each generation ... rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as 'the lunatic fringe.
Christopher Hill
Puns are the highest form of literature.
Alfred Hitchcock
From the first, Istanbul had given him the impression of a town where, with the night, horror creeps out of the stones. It seemed to him a town the centuries had so drenched in blood and violence that, when daylight went out, the ghosts of its dead were its only population.
Ian Fleming
We are the unknown, he says, and you will join us.
Andrew Crumey
If you keep wanting to get back in the nest, you're missing the amazing experience of coming out to play at life for a while.
Jay Woodman
Unreal friendship may turn to real But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended
T.S Eliot
Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.
William Ewart Gladstone
People who say they don't have time to read simply don't want to.
Julie Rugg
Our anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strengths.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
They climbed the wide stairways. Their footsteps echoed and echoed through the house. "What on earth will you be doing with something so large?" said Mum."I shall live in it with my servants, of course," said Mina. "Or I shall establish a school.""A school, my lady?""Yes. A school for the writing of nonsense and the pursuit of extraordinary activities.
David Almond
Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.
Jo Walton
Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table.
C.S. Lewis
I believe that ideas such as absolute certitude, absolute exactness, final truth, etc. are figments of the imagination which should not be admissible in any field of science... This loosening of thinking seems to me to be the greatest blessing which modern science has given to us. For the belief in a single truth and in being the possessor thereof is the root cause of all evil in the world.
Max Born
SilenceTHERE is a silence where hath been no sound,t There is a silence where no sound may be,t In the cold grave—under the deep, deep sea,t Or in wide desert where no life is found,t Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;t No voice is hush'd—no life treads silently,t But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free,t That never spoke, over the idle ground:t But in green ruins, in the desolate wallst Of antique palaces, where Man hath been,t Though the dun fox or wild hyæna calls,t And owls, that flit continually between,t Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan—t There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone.
Thomas Hood
And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun/ And she forgot the blue above the trees,/ And she forgot the dells where waters run,/ And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;/ She had no knowledge when the day was done,/ And the new morn she saw not: but in peace/ Hung over her sweet basil evermore,/ And moisten'd it with tears unto the core.
John Keats
Inside our skulls are fish, reptile and shrew brains, as well as the highest centers that allow us to integrate information in our unique way; and some of our newer brain components talk to each other via some very ancient structures indeed. Our brains are makeshift structures, opportunistically assembled by Nature over hundreds of millions of years, and in multiple different ecological contexts.
Ian Tattersall
Loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of objective meaning from the universe.
Neel Burton
I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare but then I thought Why should I? He never reads any of mine.
Spike Milligan
I used to think a drug addict was someone who lived on the far edges of society. Wild-eyed, shaven-headed and living in a filthy squat.That was until I became one...
Cathryn Kemp
The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revulsions. It is the finite divorced from the Eternal. It is multiplicity in isolation from its non-dual Ground. It is time apprehended as one damned thing after another. It is a system of verbal categories taking the place of the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars which constitute reality. It is a notion labelled 'God'. It is the Universe equated with the words of our utilitarian vocabulary.
Aldous Huxley
If you want to know the age of the Earth—look upon the sea in a storm. But what storm can fully reveal the heart of a man? Between Suez and the China Sea are many nameless men who prefer to live and die unknown. This is the story of one such man. Among the great gallery of rogues and heroes thrown up on the beaches and ports—no man was more respected or more damned than—Lord Jim.
Joseph Conrad