Quotes by British Authors - Page 146

Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances.
Richard Hughes
I stand and grab a hefty bottle of perfume from the bathroom shelf and return to the bedroom door. It’s not much of a weapon, I know, but it’s heavy and square, and hitting someone over the head with a glass brick has got to be better than bitch-slapping them.
Nick Alexander
Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself.We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful moment we remember that we forget.
G.K. Chesterton
You foul, lying, evil little cockroach!
J.K. Rowling
Have you no wish for others to be saved? Then you're not saved yourself, be sure of that!
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Oh, I know that she's disgusted,cause she's feeling so abused.She gets tired of the lust,but it's so hard to refuse.
Elvis Costello
Those is seek to profit from the torment of others will eventually pay the piper
Tony Alleyne
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre.
George Orwell
He was following the Earth through its days, drifting with the rhythms of its myriad pulses, seeping through the webs of its life, swelling with its tides, turning with its weight.
Douglas Adams
No truer word, save God's, was ever spoken,Than that the largest heart is soonest broken.
Walter Savage Landor
Without an informed electorate, politicians will continue to use the bottom billion merely for photo opportunities, rather than promoting real transformation.
Paul Collier
The sergeants are shunted forward and they blink and stare up at Gonzo as he leans on the edge of his giant mixing bowl. MacArthur never addressed his troops from a mixing bowl--not even one made from a spare geodesic radio emplacement shell--and certainly de Gaulle never did. But Gonzo Lubitsch does, and he does it as if a whole long line of commanders were standing at his shoulder, urging h
Nick Harkaway
Who was there to guard youth from pain and death - youth who could not, who had never been able to, guard itself? Did they know too little? Or was it that they knew too much, and therefore thought they knew it all?
Agatha Christie
I had tried, as best I could, to forget the people who had said they loved me, and I had been able to do so only by replacing their memory with hatred for them and their crimes. Time is no healer. It scabs the wound until the injury is forgotten, but the infection festers, eating away, spreading.
Wesley Stace
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaIntellectual: One who knows no craft.
Idries Shah
You can have anything you want if you want it desperately enough. You must want it with an inner exuberance that erupts through the skin and joins the energy that created the world.
Sheila Graham
The world of being is unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life. The world of existence is fleeting, vague, without sharp boundaries, without any clear plan or arrangement, but it contains all thoughts and feelings, all the data of sense, and all physical objects, everything that can do either good or harm, everything that makes any difference to the value of life and the world. According to our temperaments, we shall prefer the contemplation of the one or of the other.
Bertrand Russell
I think Mrs. Leidner seems happier already from just talking about it. That's always a help, you know. It's bottling things up that makes them get on your nerves.
Agatha Christie
I'm not involved, not involved," I repeated. It has been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action – even an opinion is a kind of action.
Graham Greene
The streams which would otherwise diverge to fertilize a thousand meadows must be directed into one deep narrow channel before they can turn a mill.
Anna Jameson
By 1870, Britain’s steam engines generated 4 million horsepower, equivalent to the work of 40 million men, who—if industry had still depended on muscles—would have eaten more than three times Britain’s entire wheat output.
Ian Morris
Dan didn’t want to say anything, but the words were unstoppable. “I fucking love you. Don’t leave me. You’ve got to find me.” Again, fucking tears. Vadim shook his head, then pressed his face into the crook of Dan’s shoulder, hoped to hide his weakness and felt like a man condemned to die. “I will... find you. If it’s the last thing I’ll do, I’ll come back. Nothing will stop me.
Aleksandr Voinov
 “Your Tim is so unmistakably a healthy extravert type. Mens stulta in corpore sano, and all that.”“Exactly,” she agreed.
John Wyndham
No reason to feel depressed about being depressed. A depression can be a golden opportunity to collect the pieces and build ourselves anew. Global Souls are always on the move, nomads at heart, connected to various cities, commuters between cultures, both from here and everywhere.
Elif Shafak
When I was your age, if a boy behaved badly, one simply scored his name out from one's dance card.(Sadie Lancaster - to Lara Lington)
Sophie Kinsella
But in the daytime it was all right. And when you'd had a drink you knew it was the best way to live in the world because anything might happen. I don't know how people live when they know exactly what's going to happen to them each day.
Jean Rhys
But a good wife—a good unworldly woman—may really help a man, and keep him more independent.
George Eliot
Like the rest of Holy Week, Easter is also a terrific story. It starts as tragedy: the hero broken and bloody, against all expectation dead, his followers' joyful hope in him entombed with his corpse, the rock rolled into place, sealing their despair.But the curtain doesn't fall there. The next morning at dawn they discover the rock has been rolled back. The tomb is empty, the body's gone! A missing corpse? Great stuff. A whisper of comedy. Now a touch of farce as Mary Magdalen and the guys chase frantically around looking for help, or the corpse, when suddenly, out of nowhere, up it pops—alive!Of course it's Jesus, who's done the impossible and beaten death.And they're so amazed they think he's the gardener! It's a payoff way beyond the Hollywood ending: all the flooding emotion and uplift of a tragedy followed by all the bubbling joy and optimism of a comedy.Is that possible? Not just to live happily ever after but to die—and still live happily ever after? It's the most audacious claim of Christianity, the one element that marks the brand indelibly, that trumps the claims of all other major faiths.
Tony Hendra
Sometimes it is hard not to say "God forgive God." Sometimes, it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn't. He crucified Him.
C.S. Lewis
For when I trace back the years I have liv'd, gathering them up in my Memory, I see what a chequer'd Work Of Nature my life has been. If I were now to inscribe my own History with its unparalleled Sufferings and surprizing Adventures (as the Booksellers might indite it), I know that the great Part of the World would not believe the Passages there related, by reason of the Strangeness of them, but I cannot help their Unbelief; and if the Reader considers them to be but dark Conceits, then let him bethink himself that Humane life is quite out of the Light and that we are all Creatures of Darknesse.
Peter Ackroyd
Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
E.M. Forster
So you’re the little smart ass from Poleglass.”I wanted to point out he sounded like Dr. Seuss but bit my lip and remembered the warning the old lady gave me.
David Louden
You are my heart. Even if you are a broken heart
Philippa Gregory
What we think and feel and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and our viscera.
Aldous Huxley
But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.
Tim Parks
Within he felt that faint stirring of derision for the whole business of life which is the salt of the American mentality. Outwardly they are sentimental and enthusiastic and inwardly they are profoundly cynical.
H.G.Wells
This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small,large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force;never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
Winston Churchill
To be self-compassionate is not to be self-indulgent or self-centred. A major component of self-compassion is to be kind to yourself. Treat yourself with love, care, dignity and make your wellbeing a priority. With self-compassion, we still hold ourselves accountable professionally and personally, but there are no toxic emotions inflicted upon and towards ourselves.
Christopher Dines
An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. . . . We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness.
C.S. Lewis
You mean you've been in this same set of rooms here for... two hundred years?' murmured Richard. 'You'd think someone would notice, or think it was odd.''Oh, that's one of the delights of the older Cambridge colleges,' said Reg, 'everyone is so discreet. If we all went around mentioning what was odd about each other we'd be here till Christmas.
Douglas Adams
Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breedsAlong the pebbled shore of memory!Many old rotten-timber'd boats there beUpon thy vaporous bosom, magnifiedTo goodly vessels; many a sail of pride,And golden keel'd, is left unlaunch'd and dry.
John Keats
I am not Iron-Man, I am Forest-Man!
Steven Magee
Dogma in power does have a unique chilling ingredient not exhibited by power, however ghastly, wielded for its own traditional sake.
Christopher Hitchens
We can't fix, only support each other to process, manage, transform, make life-journeys in own way.
Jay Woodman
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.
Neil Gaiman
All God's giants have been weak men who did great things for God because they reackoned on God being with them.
James Hudson Taylor
Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm it moves stones it charms brutes. Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity and truth accomplishes no victories without it.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
To act without rapacity to use knowledge with wisdom to respect interdependence to operate without hubris and greed are not simply moral imperatives. They are an accurate scientific description of the means of survival.
Barbara Ward
Perhaps she had received diamonds, Strike thought; she had always said she didn't care for such things, but when they argued the glitter of all he could not give her had sometimes been flung back hard in his face...
Robert Galbraith
God uses the flawed, the failures, and the imperfect to accomplish His perfect will.
Elizabeth George
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
T.S Eliot
I would feel infinitely more comfortable in your presence if you would agree to treat gravity as a law, rather than one of a number of suggested options.
Neil Gaiman
Statements of fact are after all statements, which presumes a number of questionable judgements: that those statements are worth making, perhaps more worth making than certain others, that I am the sort of person entitled to make them and perhaps able to guarantee their truth, that you are the kind of person worth making them to, that something useful is accomplished by making them, and so on.
Terry Eagleton
A small child being dragged to bed peered curiously at me as it passed, then waved. We waved back, not being entirely sure how else to respond to small creatures like that.
Kate Griffin
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
William Blake
I think that being on my knees between your legs is the right place for me, Sir.And what might you do for me, Rosie, while you are down there?
Rachel de Vine
The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.
T.S Eliot
We all do it (or I used to-yes, once in a while, Franklin, what did you think?), we all know we all do it, but it isn't customary to say, "Honey, could you keep an eye on the spaghetti sauce, because I'm going to go masturbate.
Lionel Shriver
If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.
H.G.Wells