Quotes by British Authors - Page 135

So a good man can be a bad Christian?""I suppose so.""Then a bad man," I said, "can be a good Christian?
Bernard Cornwell
The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it all the past as well as all the future.
Joseph Conrad
The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.
Charles Dickens
Our treatment of animals, in every department, is deeply and systematically immoral. Becoming a vegetarian is only the most minimal ethical response to the magnitude of the evil.
Colin McGinn
I have always thought of Christmastime, when it has come round...as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.
Charles Dickens
Idleness is the holiday of fools.
Lord Chesterfield
I don't know what I'm playing at. I feel so romantic and furious all the time.
Gwendoline Riley
And her lips: so inviting, bathed in shimmering wet, dark red gloss. They were meant for only two things, kissing and making love to your cock.
A.V. Roe
Were God to show grace to all of Adam's descendants, men would at once conclude that He was righteously compelled to take them to heaven as meet compensation for allowing the human race to fall into sin. But the great God in under no obligation to any of his creatures, least of all to those who are rebels against him.
Arthur W. Pink
That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.
Nick Hornby
Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge.
Jane Austen
Definition of a Jewish nymphomaniac: A woman who will make love the same day she has her hair done.
Maureen Lipman
Trying not to believe things when in your heart you are almost sure they are true, is as bad for the temper as anything I know.
E Nesbit
So I've come to the conclusion that it is thus my own fault when these people I have been talking about finally stop saying "Ah" and tell me it's a pity I always do such odd things.
Barbara Wright
I liked the idea of a person shedding their life, and someone else putting it on. -Oliver Harris on writing The Hollow Man for Crime Time online magazine
Oliver Harris
[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
Alan Bennett
He was wearing a gleaming cream-coloured linen suit, and a Panama hat. The weirdest thing about this was that he was not the most outlandish-looking person in the room by a long way. Not that Little Miss Dresses-Like-Bogart over here has a right to complain
Alexis Hall
The hard part is putting one word after another.
Jo Linsdell
You said you knew the perfect place to run to. A place that was empty of people, and buildings, and far, far away. A place covered in blood-red earth and sleeping life. A place longing to come alive again. It's a place for disappearing, you'd said, a place for getting lost... and for getting found.I'll take you there, you'd said.And I could say that I agreed.
Lucy Christopher
Get busy achieving all the things in life you want to achieve, because one day you'll be fine and the next ....
S.J. Watson
For you will certainly carry out God's purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.
C.S. Lewis
I was saying yes because when you're in love, the world is full of possibilities, and when you're in love, you want to take every single one of them.
Danny Wallace
As long as you hate, there will be people to hate.
George Harrison
Constitutions should consist only of general provisions the reason is that they must necessarily be permanent and that they cannot calculate for the possible change of things.
Alexander Hamilton
And now he was dead, his soul fled down to the Sunless Country and his body lying cold in the cold mud, somewhere in the city's wake.
Philip Reeve
Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.
John Stuart Mill
You’re wasted on the occasional bout of missionary sex with a disinterested man.
Kitty French
Night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a child.
E.M. Forster
No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.
George Eliot
I move from dreamer to dreamer, from dream to dream, hunting for what I need. Slipping and sliding and flickering through the dreams; and the dreamer will wake, and wonder why this dream seemed different, wonder how real their lives can truly be.
Neil Gaiman
My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.
Virginia Woolf
And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.
George Eliot
[Regarding mathematics,] there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reasons or bad, as profitable and praiseworthy. This may be true; indeed it is probable, since the sensational triumphs of Einstein, that stellar astronomy and atomic physics are the only sciences which stand higher in popular estimation.
G H Hardy
He pulled my head back further, and I could hear his ragged breathing as his mouth came close to my ear, sounding so desperate for me. God, I was turned on so much…
Fiona Thrust
A lifetime isn't enough to know how a person will behave.
Jessie Burton
Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. I say all this because I want very much to talk about the human side of discovery and progress, and it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most non-scientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve.
Jacob Bronowski
I am afraid of losing what I have already valued.
Rosie Thomas
The world of shadows and superstition that was Victorian England, so well depicted in this 1871 tale, was unique. While the foundations of so much of our present knowledge of subjects like medicine, public health, electricity, chemistry and agriculture, were being, if not laid, at least mapped out, people could still believe in the existence of devils and demons. And why not? A good ghost story is pure entertainment. It was not until well into the twentieth century that ghost stories began to have a deeper significance and to become allegorical; in fact, to lose their charm. No mental effort is required to read 'The Weird Woman', no seeking for hidden meanings; there are no complexities of plot, no allegory on the state of the world. And so it should be. At what other point in literary history could a man, standing over the body of his fiancee, say such a line as this: 'Speak, hound! Or, by heaven, this night shall witness two murders instead of one!'Those were the days.(introduction to "The Weird Woman")
Hugh Lamb
They chose to regard it as a miraculous preservation.
E.M. Forster
REMIND ME AGAIN, he said, HOW THE LITTLE HORSE-SHAPED ONES MOVE.
Terry Pratchett
Words were insufficient for the elevation of his [Mr Collins'] feelings; and he was obliged to walk about the room, while Elizabeth tried to unite civility and truth in a few short sentences.
Jane Austen
The less instructed atheist will ask whether God can make a weight so heavy that He cannot lift it, in the happy belief that, whichever answer we give, we shall admit that there is something God cannot do. But the question is literally meaningless: a weight than an omnipotent Being cannot lift is as complete a contradiction in terms as a four-sided triangle. In either case the words are English, but do not mean anything because they cancel each other out. There is no point in piling together a lot of words, regardless of their meaning, and then asking triumphantly: 'Can God make that?' God can do anything, but a contradiction in terms is not a thing at all. It is nothing. God Himself could not make a four-sided triangle or a weight that Almighty power could not lift. They are inconceivable, they are nothing; and nothing--to give a slightly different emphasis to Scripture--is impossible to God.
Frank Sheed
He gave it its present name, and lived here shut up: day and night poring over the wicked heaps of papers in the suit, and hoping against hope to disentangle it from its mystification and bring it to a close. In the meantime, the place became dilapidated, the wind whistled through the cracked walls, the rain fell through the broken roof, the weeds choked the passage to the rotting door. When I brought what remained of him home here, the brains seemed to me to have been blown out of the house too; it was so shattered and ruined.
Charles Dickens
An uncorked kid to me is an expression as to who they truly are and isn't it that that as adults we strive to achieve throughout our whole lives?
Lehla Eldridge
It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building.
John Ruskin
O my soul, is not this enough? Dost thou need more strength than the omnipotence of the United Trinity? Dost thou want more wisdom than exists in the Father, more love than displays itself in the Son, or more power than is manifest in the influences of the Spirit?
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.
Jane Austen
It is not always the motives behind an action that make it noble. Sometimes it is as simple as the action itself.
Jocelyn Murray
The more importance we place on avoiding unpleasant feelings in life, the more our life tends to go downhill.
Russ Harris
It is a mere cowardice to seek safety in negations. No character becomes strong in that way. You will be thrown into the world some day and then every rational satisfaction your nature that you deny now will assault like a savage appetite.
George Eliot
Without relying on any deities, mantras, or mandalas, without having to master the intricacies of any doctrine or philosophy, I vividly understood what it meant to be a fragile, impermanent creature in a fragile, impermanent world. The mindfulness sharpened my attention to everything that was going on within and around me. My body became a tingling, pulsing mass of sensations. At times when I sat outside I felt as though the breeze were blowing through me. The sheen of the grass was more brilliant, the rustling leaves were like a chorus in an endlessly unfolding symphony. At the same time there was a deep stillness and poise at the core of this vital awareness.
Stephen Batchelor
Fiction is dangerous because it lets you into other people's heads. It shows you that the world doesn't have to be like the one you live in." At the first nationally recognized science fiction convention in China in 2007, Gaiman took a party official aside and said, "While not actually illegal, science fiction is regarded as dangerous and subversive in China. Why did you say yes to a science-fiction convention?"The party official answered, "In China, we're really good at making things people bring to us, but we don't invent, we don't innovate." When Chinese party officials visited Google, Apple and Microsoft, they asked what the executives read as children. The official continued: "They all said, 'We read science fiction. The world doesn't have to be the way it is right now. We can change it.' " "That," said Gaiman, "is the big dangerous thing.
Neil Gaiman
Think about it; the quicktank is given a job most of us would laugh out of town. Build a sophisticated camera capable of full 3-D input and peripheral pickup, using only water and jelly.Build an eye.
Warren Ellis
Perhaps the most irrational fashion act of all was the male habit for 150 years of wearing wigs. Samuel Pepys, as with so many things, was in the vanguard, noting with some apprehension the purchase of a wig in 1663 when wigs were not yet common. It was such a novelty that he feared people would laugh at him in church; he was greatly relieved, and a little proud, to find that they did not. He also worried, not unreasonably, that the hair of wigs might come from plague victims. Perhaps nothing says more about the power of fashion than that Pepys continued wearing wigs even while wondering if they might kill him.
Bill Bryson
Identity is theft, don’t trust anyone whose state vector hasn’t forked for more than a gigasecond, change is the only constant, et bloody cetera.
Charles Stross
His laws once broken, His justice and the very nature of those laws bring the immutable retribution; but if we turn penitently to Him, He enables us to bear our punishment with a meek and docile heart, ‘for His mercy endureth forever.
Elizabeth Gaskell
Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
C.S. Lewis
Make my happiness--I will make yours.
Charlotte Brontë
A funny yet interesting read, Will Self knowa his stuff and must do a lot of deep research.
Will Self
If a pen can communicate our thoughts, dreams, and emotions and be the voice of our soul, then ink is the medium that carries the message.
Fennel Hudson