Quotes by British Authors - Page 144

A waitress, bringing Finkler more hot water, interrupted Treslove's answer. Finkler always asked for more hot water no matter how much hot water had already been brought. It was his way of asserting power, Treslove thought. No doubt Nietzsche, too, ordered more hot water than he needed.
Howard Jacobson
I have a sort of . . . thing, I suppose, for certain words. They spark inside me, somehow, turning me to touchpaper, but I don't know what they are until someone says them.
Alexis Hall
Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities – but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.
Winston S. Churchill
The Word is alive. We have always known it. But it needs to be uttered, aloud or in the mind of a reader. Without a consciousness to tickle them into life, those books were dead.
Marcel Theroux
It's frustrating to witness how popular Fairtrade bananas, coffee and tea have become with shoppers and supermarkets while plenty of unfair trade goes on, largely unnoticed, in our own back yard.
Rose Prince
Ohhhh are you coming?” he asks me. “Oh God Mallory, I can feel you doing it around my cock. I can feel you – that’s it, baby. Fuck yourself on me.
Charlotte Stein
The truth is, he was so glad at being free from his long enchantment that all dangers seemed a game in comparison. But the rest found it an eerie journey.
C.S. Lewis
Your distress about life might mean you have been living for the wrong reason not that you have no reason for living.
Tom O'Connor
they're so fond of Liberty in this part of the globe, that they buy her and sell her and carry her to market with 'em. They've such a passion for Liberty, that they can't help taking liberties with her.
Charles Dickens
The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God's love for us does not.
C.S. Lewis
It is not easy to be sure that being yourself is worth the trouble but [we do know] it is our sacred duty.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.
Virginia Woolf
Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind as of opening the mouth is to shut it again on something solid.
G.K. Chesterton
The kind of truth that can be asserted by argument had lost all glamour, all lustre, for him, seeming no more now than another aspect of that ancient urge - much older than the desire for truth - to command attention, dominate one's fellows.
Barry Unsworth
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
George Orwell
The past can't now be altered, the future has yet to be lived, and consciously to experience every moment of the present is the only way to gain at least the illusion of immortality.
P.D. James
He knew...there was no redemption for the damned.
Alan Kinross
Don't be stupid, it's a flying house!
J.K. Rowling
He knew how intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors, how weeks of patient work night and day could be cast aside by such a man
John le Carré
It's what the loss uncovers in you that brings on despair, not the loss itself.
Nicci French
Look to the past to see what the future holds.
Celia Conrad
Farther down the riverbank sat a young man dressed all in white. He was the only person in sight. His hair was white, his skin chalk pale, and he sat and stared up and down the river, as if he were admiring the view. He looked like how Victorian Romantic poets looked just before the consumption and drug abuse really started to cut it." --Good Omens pg.191-192
Terry Pratchett
The king is a saint and cannot rule, and his son is a devil and should not.
Philippa Gregory
I saved a man's life once,' said Granny. 'Special medicine, twice a day. Boiled water with a bit of berry juice in it. Told him I'd bought it from the dwarves. That's the biggest part of doct'rin, really. Most people'll get over things if they put their minds to it, you just have to give them an interest.'She patted Esk's hand as nicely as possible. 'You're a bit young for this,' she said, 'but as you grow older you'll find most people don't set foot outside their own heads much.
Terry Pratchett
Life is indeed terribly complicated—to a man who has lost his principles.
G.K. Chesterton
Every man paddles his own canoe.
Frederick Marryat
Yours is a true heart, Vespertilio. Beware of it, for it is surely too large for thy chest to contain.
Robin Jarvis
And in the past, Archie wondered, was it just that fewer people cheated? Were they more honest, and did they leave their front doors open, did they leave their kids with the neighbors, pay social calls, run up tabs with the butcher? The funny thing about getting old in a country is people always want to hear that from you. They want to hear it really was once a green and pleasant land. They need it.
Zadie Smith
Surely a good therapist should produce a Dorian Gray-style portrait from under the couch so the patient can see the person they really are.
Rosamund Lupton
He says, 'Anything could be happening down there, but up here you just wouldn't know it.'I know what he means. It could be pandemonium in all those little houses, everyone's dreams in a mess. But up here feels peaceful. Clean.
Jenny Downham
No experience is ever wasted.
Marilyn L Rice
Some people call street lights 'Crime Lights', as they are associated with an increased level of criminal activity.
Steven Magee
I speak as if he had no secrets from me. Well, then, you must know I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself.
Angela Carter
There are horizons through the brickwork, you wait and see.
Jessie Burton
Cultivate a spirit of joy and praise. Not only will you light up your own heart, but the hearts of those around you.Always look for the good in people. In most cases you will find it.
Loretta Livingstone
Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.
Neil Gaiman
Distrust all those who love you extremely upon a very slight acquaintance and without any viable reason.
Lord Chesterfield
..."I Love You."...Means the same to me now as it did when I first said it to you.
Anthony T.Hincks
Letting go of a craving is not rejecting it but allowing it to be itself: a contingent state of mind that once arisen will pass away. Instead of forcibly freeing ourselves from it, notice how its very nature is to free itself. To let it go is like releasing a snake that you have been clutching in your hand. By identifying with a craving ('I want this," don't want' that"), you tighten the clutch and intensify its resistance. Instead of being a state of mind that you have, it becomes a compulsion that has you. As with understanding anguish, the challenge in letting go of craving is to act before habitual reactions incapacitate us.
Stephen Batchelor
I begin to be impatient of solitude - to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me.
Virginia Woolf
It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.
A.S. Byatt
Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory.
Oliver Sacks
For the inexperienced, however, it is very difficult to distinguish passionate love from mere sex hunger; especially is this the case with well-brought-up girls, who have been taught that they could not possibly like to kiss a man unless they loved him.
Bertrand Russell
Don't get too lost in consumerism or materialism. As for ownership, the ultimate test of it is were you born with it and can you take it with you when you leave?
Rasheed Ogunlaru
A child develops best when, like a young plant, he is left undisturbed in the same soil. Too much travel, too much variety of impressions, are not good for the young, and cause them as they grow up to become incapable of enduring fruitful monotony.
Bertrand Russell
Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
John Fowles
Memories sharp enough to cut himself on - the smells, the sounds, the feel of the air on his skin, the desperate hope and mad anger.
Joe Abercrombie
Everything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see.
Ernst F. Schumacher
The past never leaves you. You carry it around with you for as long as you live, like a pale, stubborn worm lodged there in your gut, keeping you up at night.
George Bishop
On ladies' nights they watch frozen-faced while their men embrace and fool about commenting to each other that they are all overgrown boys. Of the love of fellows they know nothing. They cannot love each other in this easy, innocent, spontaneous way because they cannot love themselves.
Germaine Greer
The problem with the so-called bloody surveillance state is that it’s hard work trying to track someone’s movements using CCTV – especially if they’re on foot. Part of the problem is that the cameras all belong to different people for different reasons. Westminster Council has a network for traffic violations, the Oxford Street Trading Association has a huge network aimed at shop-lifters and pickpockets, individual shops have their own systems, as do pubs, clubs and buses. When you walk around London it is important to remember that Big Brother may be watching you, or he could be having a piss, or reading the paper or helping redirect traffic around a car accident or maybe he’s just forgotten to turn the bloody thing on.
Ben Aaronovitch
I like work it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.
Jerome K. Jerome
Writer's block? I've heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write, yes? Then that person isn't a writer anymore. I'm sorry, but the job is getting up in the fucking morning and writing for a living.
Warren Ellis
Only way to live here is day by day, same as anywhere.
Barry Unsworth
What’s it gonna be like, dying? To go to sleep and never, never, never wake up.Well, a lot of things it’s not gonna be like. It’s not going to be like being buried alive. It’s not going to be like being in the darkness forever.I tell you what — it’s going to be as if you never had existed at all. Not only you, but everything else as well. That just there was never anything, there’s no one to regret it — and there’s no problem. Well, think about that for a while — it’s kind of a weird feeling when you really think about it, when you really imagine.[The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are ]
Alan W. Watts
I am who I am firstly because of genetics, and, running a very close second, because of choices: ones my parents made, such as choosing to emigrate to America; ones their parents made, like my Papa Butler opting to ignore medical advice and instead warming my mum in the oven to keep her alive; and very conscious ones that I've made for myself.
John Barrowman
People who judge you are often themselves craving approval.
Emma J. Bell
A boy is a creature of odd feelings.
H.G.Wells
[P]olitics is always a Kampfplatz.
Perry Anderson
All around the world, tourist boards advertise trips to Britain with images of the great castles and cathedrals that occupy the commanding heights of our landscape. They seem timeless and typically English. It is rarely mentioned that they are predominately French - proud monuments to the invasion that signals the end of England's 'dark age'.
Robert Winder