Quotes by British Authors - Page 129

The only problem they had ... was in drawing the fine differences between war-mass murder of people wearing a uniform not your own; justifiable loss-mass murder of your own troops, but with substantial gains; and criminal negligence-mass murder of your own troops, without appreciable benefit.
Richard K. Morgan
Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
Alain de Botton
Why God should want and need us is a mystery. But it is true: otherwise he would not have created us and life would ultimately have no meaning for us. It is good to remember that in God the is a constancy, a consistency of attitude which never changes, irrespective of what we are or how we act: he never changes in is wanting us or needing us.
Basil Hume
Imagine you’re diagnosed with epilepsy: what would you think if you weren’t referred to a specialist but taken to a psychiatrist to treat you for your ‘false illness beliefs’?This is what happens to Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) patients in the UK. They are told to ignore their symptoms, view themselves as healthy, and increase their exercise. The NHS guidelines amalgamate ME and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, assuming symptoms are caused by deconditioning and ‘exercise phobia’. Sufferers are offered Graded Exercise to increase fitness, and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to rid them of their ‘false illness beliefs’.
Tanya Marlow
I discovered that I felt at home and alive in the silence, which compelled me to enter my interior world and around there. Without the distraction of constant conversation, the words on the page began to speak directly to my inner self. They were no long expressing ideas that were simply interesting intellectually, but were talking directly to my own yearning and perplexity.
Karen Armstrong
Great restaurants are, of course, nothing but mouth-brothels. There is no point in going to them if one intends to keep one's belt buckled.
Frederic Raphael
When you have spent long years in the dark, there is joy in seeing the light and pleasure, above all, in the ordinary.
Sally Brampton
He is smitten on the brain, -he reads and writes verses! I caught him in the act! Fools might say he was inspired; but I know it is the first and worst symptom of lunacy. All other maniacs have lucid intervals; some are curable; but the madness of poets, dogs, and musicians, is past hope. Earth possesses no remedy, science no cure.
Edward John Trelawny
Structurally, by reason of their smaller numbers and greater resources, virtually all ruling classes enjoy an advantage over the ruled in their capacity for collective action. Their internal lines of communication are more compact; their wealth offers an all-purpose medium of power, convertible into any number of forms of domination; their intelligence systems scan the political landscape from a greater height. More numerous and more dispersed, less equipped materially, less armed culturally, subordinate classes always tend, in the sociologist Michael Mann’s phrase, to be ‘organisationally outflanked
Perry Anderson
I struggled to think pure thoughts, as Hector sucked out my psyche with his eyes.
Tahir Shah
Some mathematics problems look simple, and you try them for a year or so, and then you try them for a hundred years, and it turns out that they're extremely hard to solve. There's no reason why these problems shouldn't be easy, and yet they turn out to be extremely intricate. [Fermat's] Last Theorem is the most beautiful example of this.
Andrew John Wiles
She heard the snuffle of hypocrisy in her prayer. She had to cease to pray.
George Meredith
Some judge of authors' names, not works, and then nor praise nor blame the writings, but the men.
Alexander Pope
The creed of greed:Great Revenue Every Everlasting Day.(IN BANKS WE TRUST)
Anthony T.Hincks
So I care for this restless fluttering in my heart as if it were a bird with a broken wing, in the hope that it will one day heal and fly.
Hazel Gaynor
Can you imagine the reaction of a British tabloid newspaper if they found a small school in rural England hosting a party like this? A party? In a school? With children present? Where marijuana is openly smoked? And comdoms are given away at the door?Imagine the headlines! How much would the Daily Mail hate this? How much would the Daily Mail love to hate this?!
Dave Gorman
When things come to the worse they generally mend.
Susanna Moodie
Over the green squares of the fields and the low curves of a wood there rose in the distance a grey, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance like some fantastic landscape in a dream. Baskerville sat for a long time, his gaze fixed upon it, and I read upon his eager face how much it meant to him, this first sight of that strange spot where the men of his blood had held sway so long and left their mark so deep.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Well, aren't you just saying it's better to be neurotic, sensitive, and miserable than unimaginative, adjusted and content? Is it really better?
Malcolm Bradbury
That's the way life takes us,' Elleke once said. 'It takes us like this, then it turns us over and takes us like that.' What she didn't say was that through it all we manage to cling to something that makes sense.
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Remove yourself from temptation. Don't even look at something if you know you shouldn't have it.
Lucy Diamond
There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism
Alexander Hamilton
The happiest people don’t bother about whether life is unfair. They just concentrate on what they have.
Andrew Matthews
I have sat through an Italian opera til for sheer pain and inexplicable anguish I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded street to solace myself with sounds which I was not obliged to follow and get rid of the distracting torment of endless fruitless barren attention!
Charles Lamb
Gabriel pulled her over his body to lie on the bed beside him. His kisses pressed her down into the oblivion of the mattress as her hands explored his chest, his shoulders, his face."I want to lay my kill at your feet," he said, more growl than words, and held her tight by her hair as he marked her neck with his teeth.She writhed against him. She wanted to bite him, she wanted to rip the flesh from his back, but most terrible of all, she didn't want him to stop. Her back arched, her body shattered, she howled.
Annette Curtis Klause
But I will not tell you how long or short the way will be; only that it lies across a river. But do not fear that, for I am the great Bridge Builder.
C.S. Lewis
He who hates vice hates men.
John Morley
Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time he is not two men but one and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
G.K. Chesterton
Darwin caused controversy, not merely because his ideas contradicted Genesis, but because they fell foul of the way in which Genesis had been read by those influenced by the Enlightenment, for it was the Enlightenment that conceived of the human as almost exclusively rational and intellectual, and set the human at a distance from the animal.
Andrew Louth
It was like making a blunder at a party; there was nothing to do about it, it was dreadfully mortifying, but it showed a lack of sense to ascribe too much importance to it.
W Somerset Maugham
The whole world," he said, "is going Radical again. Fundamentally. In religion. In politics. In law. The Common Man has been trying to get his Radicalism said and done plainly and clearly for a hundred and fifty years. Now we take it on. Our movement. The new wave of attack." "And fill a ditch in our turn," said Irwell. "Maybe we're over the last ditch," said Rud. "There must be a last ditch somewhere..."All other revolutionary movements have been experiments so far, Christianity, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and more or less failures. They were experiments in liberation and they did not liberate. The old things wriggled back. But ours may be the experiment that succeeds. We may get to the Common-sense World State. Yes -- we -- in this room...Why not? It has to come somehow, somewhen... If it doesn't come pretty soon, there won't be much of humanity left to liberate.
H.G.Wells
You are the unchanging manifesting as the changefulness
Mooji
Imagination frames events unknown In wild fantastic shapes of hideous ruin And what it fears creates.
Hannah More
Life is magic.I knew, without having to ask, what she meant. Life was not the magic of spells or enchantments or sorcery; or, it was, but that was not the point. Life created magic as an accidental by-product, it wasn't, definite article, absolute statement, A=B, magic. Life was magic in a more mundane sense of the word; the act of living being magic all of its own.This was something we instinctively understood - it simply hadn't occurred to us that it might need explaining.
Kate Griffin
Reality is in the ether, a blend of present-day experiences infused with one’s memories and dreams. A life that is real to one is surreal to another.
Fennel Hudson
Real evil wasn't about bending the law to suit justice: evil was acting out of small, intensely personal expedience and losing sight of the bigger picture so often that you never got it back again.
Karen Traviss
Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.
George Orwell
The idea that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods, which most experience refutes. History is teeming with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not put down forever, it may be set back for centuries.
John Stuart Mill
Someone said it better than that; be true unto yourself. Self, right? No-one else. If everyone was true unto his or her self there might even be a chance of something better for us all.
Bryan Islip
The greater part of our lives is spent in dreaming over the morrow and when it comes it too is consumed in the anticipation of a brighter morrow and so the cheat is prolonged even to the grave.
Mark Rutherford
I am afraid I am going to drift into fiction, truthful but incomplete, for lack of some details which I cannot conjure up today and which might have enlightened us. This morning, the idea of the egg came again to my mind and I thought that I could use it as a crystal to look at Madrid in those days of July and August 1940—for why should it not enclose my own experiences as well as the past and future history of the Universe? The egg is the macrocosm and the microcosm, the dividing line between the Big and the Small which makes it impossible to see the whole. To possess a telescope without its other essential half—the microscope—seems to me a symbol of the darkest incomprehension. The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.
Leonora Carrington
But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.
David Mitchell
I'm miles from where you areI lay down on the cold groundAnd I, I pray that something picks me upAnd sets me down in your warm arms.
Snow Patrol
I disliked numbers, and they didn't think much of me either.
R.J. Anderson
Giving credence to persistent intuitions awakens the dormant heart consciousness.
Steven Redhead
The time that leads to mastery is dependent on the intensity of our focus.
Robert Greene
Never speak of a man in his own presence. It is always indelicate and may be offensive .
Samuel Johnson
The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.
Winston S. Churchill
The world tells us to be mean and bitter to survive. But I believe kindness is the very thing that makes us thrive.
Rachel Hamilton
The devil tempts us not; 'tis we who tempt him, beckoning his skill with opportunity.
George Eliot
Where there is personality, there is discord.
Terry Pratchett
During relaxation we drop our guard. Particularly in conversation. Relaxed conversation leads to openness. And in openness we often reveal what should never be revealed.
Edward Carey
No,' she said. 'No, I don't reckon that's what I do now. Are you watchin', Mrs Gogol? Are you watchin' real close?' Her gaze travelled the room and rested for just a fraction of a second on Magrat. Then she reached over, carefully, and thrust her arm up to the elbow into the burning torch. And the doll in Erzulie Gogol's hands burst into flame. It went on blazing even after the witch had screamed and dropped it on to the floor. It went on burning until Nanny Ogg ambled over with a jug of fruit juice from the buffet, whistling between her teeth, and put it out. Granny withdrew her hand. It was unscathed.
Terry Pratchett
While death and darkness girdle meI grope for immortality.
Lionel Pigot Johnson
Memory is the only afterlife I have ever believed in. But the forgetting inside us cannot be stopped. We are programmed to betray.
Michael Ignatieff
When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened
Winston S. Churchill
To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.
Virginia Woolf
Dreams go by opposites I was once told.
Anthony Burgess
O Thou who art my quietness, my deep repose,My rest from strife of tongues, my holy hill,Fair is Thy pavilion, where I hold me still.Back let them fall from me, my clamorous foes,Confusions multiplied;From crowding things of sense I flee, and Thee I hide.Until this tyranny be overpast,Thy hand will hold me fast;What though the tumult of the storm increase,Grant to Thy servant strength, O Lord, and bless with peace.
Amy Carmichael
Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.
Aldous Huxley