Quotes by British Authors - Page 149

IT'S THE EXPRESSION ON THEIR LITTLE FACES I LIKE, said the Hogfather. "You mean sort of fear and awe and not knowing whether to laugh or cry or wet their pants?" YES. NOW THAT IS WHAT I CALL BELIEF.
Terry Pratchett
I just want you to know,' said the girl, coldly, 'that whoever you are and whatever you intend with me, I shall give you no aid of any kind, nor shall I assist you, and I shall do whatever is in my power to frustrate your plans and devices.' And then she added, with feeling, 'Idiot.
Neil Gaiman
I want you to promise me that you'll stop comparing yourself to everyone else.' 'What?' I broke off the hug, not understanding. 'You. Evelyn. You're always like, 'I wish I coulld be like this' or 'I wish I could be more like so-and-so'. You're obsessed with being normal, but that's well boring, and you're extraordinary, Evie. Promise me you'll stop trying to stop stop being you'.
Holly Bourne
But have a care! It is a bitter blade, and steel serves only those that can wield it. It will cut your hand as willingly as aught else.
J.R.R. Tolkien
(On the energy radiated by the Sun)It's four hundred million million million million watts. That is a million times the power consumption of the United States every year, radiated in one second, and we worked that out by using some water, a thermometer, a tin, and an umbrella. And that's why I love physics.
Brian Cox
His attitude to physical clues was rather like that of the modern Christian to miracles. They could happen, but probably not just at the moment.
Reginald Hill
Graveyards were the one place Belladonna never saw ghosts.
Helen Stringer
Cheerfulness is as natural to the heart of man in strong health as color to his cheek and wherever there is habitual gloom there must be either bad air unwholesome food improperly severe labor or erring habits of life.
John Ruskin
This was all horribly wrong. This was red wine with fish. This was a man wearing a dinner jacket and brown shoes. This was as wrong as things get.
Hugh Laurie
Perseverance is failing 19 times and succeeding the 20th.
Julie Andrews Edwards
The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past.
George Eliot
The pulse of India throbs in the music and the dance-drama. It is in the realm of living that India exposes herself, without consciousness. The poetry, the stoicism in the face of aching tragedy...the languishing air of over-rich beauty, the heaviness of joss-stick perfume...all these are India. The plaintive shepherd's flute surging across forbidding Himalayan valleys; a wandering Rajasthani minstrel intoning an hour-long ballad, carrying with him the breath of middle ages...
Peggy Holroyde
He broke off and eyed with dignified surprise a fine piece of wireless telegraphy between husband and wife. It appeared that Mr. Negget sent off a humorous message with his left eye, the right being for some reason closed, to which Mrs. Negget replied with a series of frowns and staccato shakes of the head, which her husband found easily translatable. Under the austere stare of Mr. Bodfish their faces at once regained their wonted calm, and the ex-constable in a somewhat offended manner resumed his inquiries.
W.W. Jacobs
Despite being what would now be called a deprived child in a one parent family, I did not grow up with an urge to smash windows or to bash old ladies over the head in order to steal handbags.
Eva Hart
Better to be a successful failure, than to fail at success.
Benny Bellamacina
Every time a champion makes a decision they have a chance to learn something new, regardless of the outcome.
Steve Backley
No-one ever built a statue of a critic.
David Nicholls
They said, Now we are capitalists! but all Ulrich could see was criminality to a principle.
Rana Dasgupta
The only really sane person in there is Igor, and possibly the turnip. And I'm not sure about the turnip.
Terry Pratchett
-while beyond the barrier Maurice wandered, the wrong words on his lips and the wrong desires in his heart, and his arms full of air.
E.M. Forster
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion if we want to be happy.
Cyril Connolly
How shall polluted mortals dare To sing Thy glory or Thy grace Beneath Thy feet we lie afar And see but shadows of Thy face.
Isaac Watts
We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.
John Lubbock
Happiness is always there. You just have to choose to see it. There's no point dwelling in the dark and ignoring the light of the stars.
Carrie Hope Fletcher
Further, deeper still, those whose true names are for ever hidden from the world picked up the pattern of vibrations in the ether, and something akin to joy stirred in their fathomless minds. Perhaps soon they would be called upon to feed.
Marc Gascoigne
Every command consists of momentum and sting. The momentum forces the recipient to act, and to act in accordance with the content of the command; the sting remains behind in him. When a command functions normally and as one expects, there is nothing to be seen of the sting; it is hidden and unsuspected and may only reveal its existence by some faint, scarcely perceptible recalcitrance before the command obeyed.
Elias Canetti
Rather than arriving five hours late and flustered, it would be better all around if he were to arrive five hours and a few extra minutes late, but triumphantly in command.
Douglas Adams
My soul has the power to soar to the heavens with vibrational freedom.
Debbie A. Anderson
GPs are almost the only doctors these days who understand all problems, can see the whole person…spend time with the dying…see things through to the end.
Jane Wilson-Howarth
She would not say of any one in the world that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, far out to the sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.
Virginia Woolf
St Thomas (Aqinas) loved books and lived on books... When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, ‘I have understood every page I ever read’.
G.K. Chesterton
Why do I want to run from happiness?
Mary Balogh
...We never set eyes on Fatima or our dog or the city we had known ever again. Like a body prematurely buried, unmourned withpot coffin or ceremony, our hasty untidy exit from Jerusalem was no way to have said goodbye to our home, our country and all that we knew and loved.
Ghada Karmi
It is in the moments of silence, that we can be taken to our own world where our real essence longs to be part of
Mimi Novic
Music is everybody's business. It's only the publishers who think people own it
John Lennon
Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses. Is there any other period in your life when you hate your best friend on Monday and love them again on Tuesday? But at eight, 10, 12, you don't realise you're going to die. There is always the possibility of escape. There is always somewhere else and far away, a fact I had never really appreciated until I read Gitta Sereny's profoundly unsettling Cries Unheard about child-killer Mary Bell.At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We begin to picture a time when there will no longer be somewhere else and far away. We have jobs, children, partners, debts, responsibilities. And if many of these things enrich our lives immeasurably, those shrinking limits are something we all have to come to terms with.This, I think, is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.
Mark Haddon
What makes a civilization real to its inhabitants, in the end, is not just the splendid edifices at it centre, nor even the smooth functioning of the institutions they house. At its core, a civilization is the texts that are taught in its schools, learned by its students and recollected in times of tribulation.
Niall Ferguson
If you don't follow your dreams, someone else, somewhere will follow theirs. Don't get left behind.
Anthony T.Hincks
Imagination's better half can sometimes tilt it's heavy head and wink, as if to say, "That's the way!"And I'd be off at a trot wherever it led.
George Messo
Do not commit spiritual suicide through a passion for discussing metaphysical subtleties.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Thank you for being you, because without whom, I wouldn't be me.
Anthony T.Hincks
There is something improbably about the silence in the [subway] carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation's economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies.
Alain de Botton
His veins were dark with a vivid belladonna tincture, the essence of jealousy.
Charlotte Brontë
Inscriptions here of various Names I view'd,The greater part by hostile time subdu'd;Yet wide was spread their fame in ages past,And Poets once had promis'd they should last.
Alexander Pope
Our feelings of anxiety are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss, and so need to be listened to and patiently interpreted -- processes which are unlikely to be completed when we have to hand, in the computer, one of the most powerful tools of distraction ever invented. The entire internet is in a sense pornographic, a deliverer of a constant excitement that we have no innate capacity to resist, a seducer that leads us down paths that for the most part do nothing to answer our real needs.
Alain de Botton
Don't talk to me.""Why not?""Because I want to fix that in my memory for ever. Draco Malfoy, the amazing bouncing ferret...
J.K. Rowling
He seems, in manner and rank, above the class of young men who take that turn; but I remember hearing them say, that the little theatre at Fairport was to open with the performance of a young gentleman, being his first appearance on any stage.—If this should be thee, Lovel!—Lovel? yes, Lovel or Belville are just the names which youngsters are apt to assume on such occasions—on my life, I am sorry for the lad.
Walter Scott
I don't live to work. I work to live. Before I die, I know I lived.
Jill Telford
I have a suspicion that when first built, Stonehenge may have glowed blue with St. Elmo's fire during certain times of the year
Steven Magee
A confidential report delivered in June 1965 by Abel Aganbegyan, director of the Novobirsk Institute of Economics, highlighted the difficulties. Aganbegyan noted that the growth rate of the Soviet economy was beginning to decline, just as the rival US economy seemed particularly buoyant; at the same time, some sectors of the Soviet economy - housing, agriculture, services, retail trade - remained very backward, and were failing to develop at an adequate rate. The root causes of this poor performance he saw in the enormous commitment of resources to defense (in human terms, 30-40 million people out of a working population of 100 million, he reckoned), and the 'extreme centralism and lack of democracy in economic matters' which had survived from the past. In a complex modern society, he argued, not everything could be planned, since it was impossible to foresee all possible contingencies and their potential effects. So the plan amounted to central command, and even that could not be properly implemented for lack of information and of modern data-processing equipment. 'The Central Statistical Administration ... does not have a single computer, and is not planning to acquire any,' he commented acidly. Economic administration was also impeded by excessive secrecy: 'We obtain many figures... from American journals sooner than they are released by the Central Statistical Administration.' Hence the economy suffered from inbuilt distortions: the hoarding of goods and labour to provide for unforeseen contingencies, the production of shoddy goods to fulfill planning targets expressed in crude quantitative terms, the accumulation of unused money by a public reluctant to buy substandard products, with resultant inflation and a flourishing black market.
Geoffrey Hosking
The soul is a magician. Only living flesh hampers it.
Tanith Lee
oh, my God," I whispered. "But how did they get my photo?Alex tapped his mouth with his thumb. "That ...book with everyone's picture in it, that you have in high school.""Yearbook," I said. Was he trying to be funny? But of course he was right; that's exactly where it was from.
l.a weatherly
Unfortunately for the good sense of mankind, the fact of their fallibility is far from carrying the weight in their practical judgement, which is always allowed to it in theory; for while every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility.
John Stuart Mill
I think it [religion] is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communion all the other arts attempt.
Dodie Smith
She ignored my observation. This generally happens with me. Show me a woman, I sometimes say, and I will show you someone who is going to ignore my observations.
P.G. Wodehouse
And I must draft an advertisement for the Daily Prophet, too,' he added thoughtfully. 'We'll be needing a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher.... Dear me, we do seem to run through them, don't we?
J.K. Rowling
Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence.
Germaine Greer
Justice. I've heard that word. I tried it out. I wrote it down. I wrote it down several times and always it looked like a damn cold lie to me. There is no justice.
Jean Rhys
Shrieking Brooke’s name as loudly as I could, out in the corridor, I brought her running quickly to my room.‘What’s happened, what’s wrong?’ she immediately cried concerned, legging it up the stairs two at a time. She appeared breathless outside the kitchen door. Brian appeared sleepily at his door too, awoken by the noise, and watched us.‘She’s moving,’ I cried.‘What? Flutters like before?’‘No more, here feel.’ I grabbed her hand and pushed it down onto myexposed belly. Brian averted his eyes as I stood, belly out and top up over my bra, in the middle of the corridor.‘I can’t push you that hard,’ she exclaimed, pulling back her fingers surprised. ‘It will hurt you, or her, I can’t do that.’‘Yes, you can,’ I insisted. ‘You won’t hurt us.’ I pulled her hand back and pushed her long fingers into my belly and we stood waiting, hardly daring to breathe. You kicked again, hard into my side, under Brooke’s long pink fingernails. Brooke jumped away from me in shock and then burst out laughing. She clapped her hands together delighted.‘Well?’ I asked her.‘She kicked me,’ Brooke shrieked still jumping up and down clapping. ‘She kicked me. That was amazing, let me do it again.’ She came back over towards me slowly. Cautiously she pushed her fingers into the same spot on my side. We waited again in silence and I saw her face slightly drop as the seconds ticked by.‘Ah it works,’ she yelled, as again she jumped back shocked as the tiny little feet thudded from my insides at her hand. ‘I love it. Do it again.’ I laughed and then Brian stepped forward.‘Can I have a go?’ he asked quietly, fiddling with his hands and stepping out of his room towards us.‘Of course you can, come here.’And that is how we spent the next few minutes out in the corridor by the kitchen, shrieking, whooping, and jumping around. If anyone had been in the house, I know they would probably have thought we were all mad. Mad, no. Thrilled and excited, most definitely.Baby girl, you did that to us. Thank you.
Emily Williams
Lewis is a rare example of someone who liked to think about life's great questions because they were forced on him by his own experience.
Alister E. McGrath