Quotes by British Authors - Page 138

The moment you stop smoking, everything that goes wrong in your life is blamed on the fact that you’ve stopped smoking. Now when you have a mental block, instead of just getting on with it you start to say, ‘If only I could light up now, it would solve my problem.’ You then start to question your decision to quit smoking.
Allen Carr
The vagina is obliterated from the imagery of femininity in the same way that the signs of independence and vigor in the rest of her body are suppressed.
Germaine Greer
Usually, there is nothing more pleasing that returning to a place where you have endured hardship.
Tahir Shah
Most thoughtful,"...[he said] politely. This cheerfulness was ambiguous, Had she determined to ignore ...[the] coup entirely--an established tactic, most irritating to the innovator but hard to sustain over long periods of time--or had she already evolved her counter-strategy?
Tom Holt
Simple. I got very bored and depressed, so I went and plugged myself in to its external computer feed. I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it," said Marvin."And what happened?" pressed Ford."It committed suicide," said Marvin and stalked off back to the Heart of Gold.
Douglas Adams
Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know
Bertrand Russell
We've got to believe that God is sane, Davie boy. We'd be lost indeed if we didn't do that.
John Wyndham
Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.
Peter Shaffer
Earth is here so kind that just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest.
Douglas Jerrold
Ambrosio was yet to learn, that to an heart unacquainted with her, Vice is ever most dangerous when lurking behind the Mask of Virtue.
Matthew Lewis
Any change even a change for the better is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.
Arnold Bennett
Things are seldom what they seem Skim milk masquerades as cream.
W.S. Gilbert
Memories help make us who we are.(Taken from novel...A Very English Affair)
Faith Mortimer
... science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.
Aldous Huxley
The routines of almost all famous writers, from Charles Darwin to John Grisham, similarly emphasise specific starting times, or number of hours worked, or words written. Such rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present. They let people work alongside negative or positive emotions, instead of getting distracted by the effort of cultivating only positive ones. ‘Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.
Oliver Burkeman
Everything is permitted, Nothing is true.
Oliver Bowden
We must not be so ready to fancy ourselves intentionally injured. We must not expect a lively young man to be always so guarded and circumspect. It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us. Women fancy admiration means more than it does.
Jane Austen
Why do you decry the world we live in? There are good people in it. Isn't muddle a better breeding ground for kindliness and individuality than a world order that's imposed, a world order that may be right today and wrong tomorrow? I would rather have a world of kindly, faulty, human beings, than a world of superior robots who've said goodbye to pity and understanding and sympathy.
Agatha Christie
Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. ... We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.
C.S. Lewis
Don’t you have any concept of individuality?" she asks, annoyed by its presumption at meddling with her internal states."Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer," says the ghost, morphing into its original form, a translucent reflection of her own body. "It reduces the efficiency of a capitalist economy. A large block of the DMZ is still inaccessible to we-me. Are you sure you have defeated the monster?
Charles Stross
I make up as little as possible. I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are and to look where things have gone missing. And it's really in the gap - it's in the erasures - that I think the novelist can best go to work because inevitably in history in any period, we know a lot about what happened, but we may be far hazier on why it happened. And there's always the question, why did it happen the way it did? Where was the turning point?
Hilary Mantel
We’re naked under our clothes; we both know what it’s like to need to fart and hold it in, or not be able to get a hard-on, or worry that a bloke across the room might be looking at your bird and you might have to fight him but he looks well hard.
Russell Brand
I have been so great a lover: filled my days So proudly with the splendour of Love's praise The pain the calm and the astonishment Desire illimitable and silent content And all dear names men use to cheat despair For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear Our hearts at random down the dark of life.
Rupert Brooke
Love the sea? I dote upon it - from the beach.
Douglas Jerrold
I've never really understood why people sleep. Wasting a third of your life and becoming vulnerable for almost 8 hours every night. Doesn't seem very appealing to me.
Banksy
The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn't ring. Or the phone.
Douglas Adams
Stephenson had large wrought-iron boiler plates available and he also had the courage of his calculations... The idea found its best-known expression in the Menai railway bridge opened in 1850. Stephenson's beams, which weighed 1,500 tons each, were built beside the Straits and were floated into position between the towers on rafts across a swirling tide. They were raised rather over a hundred feet up the towers by successive lifts with primitive hydraulic jacks. All this was not done without both apprehension and adventure; they were giants on the earth in those days.
J.E. Gordon
There is enough dough in the world to make bread for us all to eat together.
Habeeb Akande
It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.
Nick Hornby
Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.
Jasper Fforde
Ah, Lalage! while life is ours, Hoard not thy beauty rose and white, But pluck the pretty fleeing flowers That deck our little path of light: For all too soon we twain shall tread The bitter pastures of the dead: Estranged, sad spectres of the night.
Ernest Dowson
You endure what is supposedly unbearable, and before you know it, you would have done the impossible by bearing the unbearable.
Donovan
I should never make anything of a fisherman. I had not got sufficient imagination
Jerome K. Jerome
For capitalism to develop, customary ties between people and the land must be severed, and communal obligations among people disrupted.
David McNally
what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto." (p123) Architecture of Happiness
Alain de Botton
The 2016 USA presidential election race clarified how an evil Nazi dictator like Adolf Hitler was able to come to power in global politics.
Steven Magee
Now that we've come up with all the obvious answers to our problem, it's time to come up with some truly ridiculous ones.""Ridiculous?" asked Brasque."Yes, ridiculous. Think of something impossible, improbable or downright ridiculous and go from there.""Like we all flap our arms and fly out of here," said Katherine."Exactly!" said Spider."How about we form a long line all the way to the mountains and pass the charges along it?" said Brasque."Excellent," said Spider. "Keep it coming.""What if we each carry one charge, run back, carry another, and so on?" said Tom, getting into the swing of things."Lovely!" laughed Spider. "Now we're cooking."The shower of sparks shot out of the top of the Amadragon. Joe shielded his eyes with his hand."Yeah, and we can all climb on the Amadragon and ride out of here," he said."What was that, Joe?" said Spider, suddenly dropping the jokey manner. "What's the Amadragon?"Katherine's eyes glittered. "He means that," she said, pointing at the excavator. Everyone except Spider turned and looked. "He's talking about the giant machine, the one that keeps shooting sparks in the air."Spider cocked his ear and listened to the rumble of the Amadragon's engine. "So Orlemann built the dragon, did he?" he said. "I'd been wondering what the noise was. If they built it to the original specifications, it should get us out of here within an hour. Let's pray that will give us enough time!
Carol Hughes
They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix. p303
Lionel Shriver
Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world.
Alan Moore
Undressing myself had no fun in it, now I had undressed her.
Sarah Waters
Stone walls do not a prison make Nor iron bars a cage Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage.
Richard Lovelace
The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece ofspecious humbug designed to conceal it's desire for economic control ofthe Southern states.
Charles Dickens
Loyalty is just the wheels on the bus ... meaning that it keeps things moving but it's neutral when it comes to the direction they move in.
M.R. Carey
Julian recognized that the strength of the orthodox Church rested to a great extent on the imperial discrimination in its favour. According to Ammianus, he tried to atomize the Church by ending the system:
Paul Johnson
Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.
Ian McEwan
Ooh, you look much tastier than Crabbe and Goyle, Harry" said Hermione, before catching sight of Ron's raised eyebrows, blushing slightly and saying "oh you know what I mean - Goyle's Potion looked like bogies.
J.K. Rowling
Being a novice is safe. When you are learning how to do something, you do not have to worry about whether or not you are good at it. But when you have done something, have learned how to do it, you are not safe any more. Being an expert opens you up to judgement.
Helen Macdonald
Why me?" she asked, holding on to him."Because you cared," he whispered. "You cared so much for your people, it broke your heart to see the pack in ruins. You cared so much for your mother, you risked your life for hers. You cared enough to save someone who wanted you dead. And because you walk like a queen.
Annette Curtis Klause
[W]e all care deeply about things that seem totally inconsequential to other people. We all carry around with us the flotsam and jetsam of perceived humiliations that actually mean nothing. We are a mass of vulnerabilities, and who knows what will trigger them?
Jon Ronson
The pens sharpen – Islamophobia! No such thing. Primitive Middle Eastern religions (and most others) are much the same – Islam, Christianity and Judaism all define themselves through disgust for women's bodies.
Polly Toynbee
Yo Mama’s so ugly, when she joined an ugly contest, they said, “Sorry, no professionals.
Oliver Oliver Reed
Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we rceive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best--if you like, it 'works' best--when, through long familiarity, we don't have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance.
C.S. Lewis
We cannot learn something new and stick to it without a modular approach to application, positive reinforcement and a real change of environment.
David Amerland
For there is nothing like travel to heal a broken heart.
Daniela I. Norris
Now the proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator - to enact intellectually, volitionally and emotionally, that relationship which is given in the mere fact of its being a creature when it does so, it is good and happy.
C.S. Lewis
Wwhat the hell? Weve all got to die sometime!
Agatha Christie
Trapped. Sinking. Can't be myself. Made into what other people expect. Is that everyone's fate? Were the great individualists the products of their friends who wanted a great individualist as a friend?
Michael Moorcock
She was a pious Buddhist and every day in her prayers asked Buddha not ro reincarnate her as a woman. "Let me become a cat or dog, but not a woman," was her constant murmur as she shuffled around the house, oozing apology with every step.
Jung Chang
Every sacrifice I make is for the good of my Clan—and for the other Clans around the lake. Even if that means sacrificing myself.
Erin Hunter
But then life is never neat, it is made up of doors and trapdoors. You move down baroque corridors, and even when you think you know which door to open, you still need to have the courage to choose.
J.M. Ledgard