Quotes by British Authors - Page 128

Life is like a plate of chillies, what you do today might just burn your ass tomorrow!
Hazim Bangwar
We need stories in order to understand ourselves, for good or bad, to be inspired or horrified, it's how we cope with being human and how we decide what type of person we will become.
Lily Graham
When the war's over, I'll be kind.
Kamila Shamsie
Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
Virginia Woolf
If you are setting a goal without understanding the reason for it, then maybe you should reevaluate the goal in general.
Tina Brown
The horse is by Nature a very lazy animal whose idea of heaven is an enormous field of lush grass in which he can graze undisturbed until his belly is full, and after a pleasant doze can start filling himself up all over again.
Elwyn Hartley Edwards
Calcutta's the only city I know where you are actively encouraged to stop strangers at random for a quick chat.
Tahir Shah
Art like life is an open secret.
Lawrence Durrell
I peer through the spectral, polluted, nicotine-sodden windows of my sock at these old lollopers in their kiddie gear. Go home, I say. Go home, lie down, and eat lots of potatoes. I had three handjobs yesterday. None was easy. Sometimes you really have to buckle down to it, as you do with all forms of exercise. It's simply a question of willpower. Anyone who's got the balls to stand there and tell me that a handjob isn't exercise just doesn't know what he's talking about. I almost had a heart-attack during number three. I take all kinds of other exercise too. I walk up and down the stairs. I climb into cabs and restaurant booths. I hike to the Butcher's Arms and the London Apprentice. I cough a lot. I throw up pretty frequently, which really takes it out of you. I sneeze, and hit the tub and the can. I get in and out of bed, often several times a day.
Martin Amis
to understand pretending," Ombric was fond of saying, "is to conquer all barriers of time and space.
William Joyce
Ah! it is well for the unfortunate to be resigned, but for the guilty there is no peace.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Love is a connection with another person, either through birth or through something else that I cannot even explain. It is often just an attraction at first. But it goes far deeper than that. It is a determination to care for the other person no matter what and to allow oneself to be cared for in return. It is a commitment to make the other happy and to be happy oneself. It is not possessive, but neither is it a victim. And it does not always bring happiness. Often it brings a great deal of pain, especially when the beloved is suffering and one feels impotent to comfort. It is what life is all about. It is openness and trust and vulnerability.
Mary Balogh
Then Tak looked upon the stone and it was trying to come alive, and Tak smiled, and wrote All things strive.And for the service the stone had given, he fashioned it into the first Troll, and delighted in the life that came unbidden.
Terry Pratchett
I know that age, it's a particularly obstinate one, and a thousand bogies won't make you fear the future. A pity we can't change over.
Daphne du Maurier
Martin Luther used to say temptation is the best teacher for a minister.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
seven times down, eight times up
Chris Bradford
I was angry with my friend:I told my wrath, my wrath did end.I was angry with my foe:I told it not, my wrath did grow.
William Blake
...Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul. Power’s comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballet box, diktat, and accident of birth, are the plot of history. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.” Immaculée Constantin now looks up at me. “Power will notice you. Power is watching you now. Carry on as you are, and power will favor you. But power will also laugh at you, mercilessly, as you lie dying in a private clinic, a few fleeting decades from now. Power mocks all its illustrious favorites as they lie dying…
David Mitchell
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
R.D. Laing
He spoke as if the answer were a matter of indifference to him. But it was not so. For all his pain, he longed to see the author of it. Although he hated Margaret at times, when he thought of that gentle familiar attitude and all the attendant circumstances, he had a restless desire to renew her picture in his mind--a longing for the very atmosphere she breathed. He was in the Charybdis of passion, and must perforce circle and circle ever nearer round the fatal centre.
Elizabeth Gaskell
The more you condemn yourself for thinking or feeling a certain way, the more you feel stuck within your own body and mind.. What if you went the other way and embraced it so totally that it was as if there was never any alternative experience to be reached for? What happens when the conflict ends?
Adam Oakley
be lawful for the Queen, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate and House of Commons, to make Laws for the Peace, Order, and Good Government of Canada
The British North America Act
The consistent thinker ... is either a walking mummy or else if he has not succeeded in stifling all his vitality a fanatical monomaniac.
Aldous Huxley
[T]he scale of a man's evil is not entirely to be measured by its practical consequences. Men commit evil within the scope available to them.
Theodore Dalrymple
When there are two PhD's in a developing country one is Head of State and the other is in exile.
Lord Samuel
Families are wonderful institution," he said. "I value mine more than I can possibly say. But each of us has an individual life to live, our own path to tread, our own destiny to forge. You can imagine, if you will, how my family wished to shelter and protect me and do my living for me so that I would never again know fear or pain or abandonment. Eventually I had to step clear of them-or I might have fallen into the temptation of allowing them to do just that.
Mary Balogh
You must learn to control your dreams or your dreams will forever control you.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Your heart's Brain has independent thought which can create a life of tranquil bliss.
Steven Redhead
All reality about me now appeared to be in tatters, taken down and reduced to the civil war of its particles. I held on very, very tight indeed.
Sebastian Faulks
Every night I build a fire for you, Alowa. Every night I dance on the rooftop for you. Look at the flames, Alowa. Aren’t they beautiful? Look at the smoke. I’m dancing in the smoke, Alowa.
Glenn Haybittle
People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.
Diane Setterfield
What you take from the earth, you must give back. That's nature's way.
Chris d'Lacey
I am pointing to you that under these conditions--mental strain, physical malaise--it is highly probable that dislikes that were before merely mild and disagreements that were trivial might suddenly assume a more serious note. The result of pretending to be a more amiable, a more forgiving, a more high-minded person than one really is, has sooner or later the effect of causing one to behave as a more disagreeable, a more ruthless and an altogether more unpleasant person than is actually the case! If you dam the stream of natural behavior, mon ami, sooner or later the dam bursts and cataclysm occurs.
Agatha Christie
God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.
J.M. Barrie
The tendency to variation in living beings, which all admitted as a matter of fact; the selective influence of conditions, which no one could deny to be a matter of fact, when his attention was drawn to the evidence; and the occurrence of great geological changes which also was matter of fact; could be used as the only necessary postulates of a theory of the evolution of plants and animals which, even if not at once, competent to explain all the known facts of biological science, could not be shown to be inconsistent with any.
Thomas Henry Huxley
The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.
Ian McEwan
But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist, it is they who keep the life in those which already existed.
John Stuart Mill
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
G.K. Chesterton
Abide not with dualism,Carefully avoid pursuing it;As soon as you have right and wrong,Confusion ensues, and Mind is lost. (172)
Edward Conze
The boy was a model pupil, forgettable and easily forgotten, and he sent much of his spare time in the back of the English class where there were shelves of old paperbacks, and in the school library, a large room filled with books and old armchairs, where he read stories as enthusiastically as some children ate.
Neil Gaiman
Rest and peace should not be left until you're deceased. They are two vital life incredients everybody needs and seeks.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Now we, if not in the spirit, have been caught up to see our earth, our mother, Gaia Mater, set like a jewel in space. We have no excuse now for supposing her riches inexhaustible nor the area we have to live on limitless because unbounded. We are the children of that great blue white jewel. Through our mother we are part of the solar system and part through that of the whole universe. In the blazing poetry of the fact we are children of the stars.
William Golding
Most people are resistant to ideas, especially new ones. But they are fascinated by character. Extravagance of personality is one way in which the pill can be sugared and the public induced to look at works dealing with ideas.
Paul Johnson
You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn.
T.H. White
The person that you feel yourself to be, according to the Sufis, is a false person, which has no true reality.
Idries Shah
He's given me enough homework to last ten years. I'm gonna die of nerdism.
Mark A. Cooper
Money isn't everything - but it's a long way ahead of what comes next.
Edmund Stockdale
A faith that does not result in activity of any kind is a dead faith; it is empty, worthless, insincere.
Derek Prince
The love of aman is like a drop of color into something clear.
Simon Van Booy
Rule 36: There is always more fucked-up shit than what you just saw.
Jamie Bartlett
What's fame, after all? It can be what someone writes on your tombstone.
Peter Duncan
Your call is clear, cold centuries across;You bid me follow you, and take my cross,And daily lose myself, myself deny,And stern against myself shout ‘Crucify’.My stubborn nature rises to rebelAgainst your call. Proud choruses of hellUnite to magnify my restless hateOf servitude, lest I capitulate.The world, to see my cross, would pause and jeer.I have no choice, but still to persevereTo save myself – and follow you from far,More slow than Magi-for I have no star.And yet you call me still. Your crossEclipses mine, transforms the bitter lossI thought that I would suffer if I cameTo you- into immeasurable gain.I kneel before you, Jesus, crucified,My cross is shouldered and my self denied;I’ll follow daily, closely, not refuseFor love of you and man myself to lose.
John R.W. Stott
One reason why I don't drink is because I wish to know when I am having a good time.
Nancy Astor the Viscountess Astor
I hate beyond hate.
John Fowles
Cruel, Clever Cat.Sally, having swallowed cheese,Directs down holes the scented breeze,Enticing thus with baited breathNice mice to an untimely death.
Geoffrey Taylor
For many, lack of achievement is more a consequence of fear of taking a chance and getting uncomfortable.
Steve Backley
We're more broken if we don't have each other. Let me put us back together again. I need you, Olivia. Desperately. You're making my world light
Jodi Ellen Malpas
We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as affectively as by bombs.
Kenneth Clark
[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.
Samuel Butler
And your will shall decide your destiny," he said: "I offer you my hand, my heart, and a share of all my possessions." You play a farce, which I merely laugh at." I ask you to pass through life at my side--to be my second self, and best earthly companion." For that fate you have already made your choice, and must abide by it." Jane, be still a few moments: you are over-excited: I will be still too." A waft of wind came sweeping down the laurel-walk, and trembled through the boughs of the chestnut: it wandered away--away--to an indefinite distance--it died. The nightingale's song was then the only voice of the hour: in listening to it, I again wept. Mr. Rochester sat quiet, looking at me gently and seriously. Some time passed before he spoke; he at last said - Come to my side, Jane, and let us explain and understand one another." I will never again come to your side: I am torn away now, and cannot return." But, Jane, I summon you as my wife: it is you only I intend to marry." I was silent: I thought he mocked me. Come, Jane--come hither." Your bride stands between us." He rose, and with a stride reached me. My bride is here," he said, again drawing me to him, "because my equal is here, and my likeness. Jane, will you marry me?
Charlotte Brontë