Quotes by British Authors - Page 15

The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it would lose its poetry. A little more - and it would be over into the abyss, and be dull and arty. It is her greatest book.
E.M. Forster
He that will not permit his wealth to do any good for others ... cuts himself off from the truest pleasure here and the highest happiness later.
Charles Caleb Colton
Would you like a cough drop Dolores?
J.K. Rowling
A robin redbreast in a cage Sets all heaven in a rage.
William Blake
It's like that quote: 'If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.' The choice between a duty or a principle, you know?
Zadie Smith
The Unexpected GiftTorn asunder from her slumberin the hour of half past threeThe child knew the tyrannical regimeand followed instinctively.-(slice from Enigmatic Evolution)
Muse
The gilded confines of the Beauty Hall were not my preferred habitat; like the chicken that had laid the eggs for my sandwich, I was more of a free-range creature.
Gail Honeyman
This idea struck me: the army is the body : I am the brain. Thinking is my fighting. (15 May 1940)
Virginia Woolf
...my ability to trust had been shattered into splinters, its fragmented shards slicing through every darkened recess of my mind, his absolution won my over all the more.
Jake Wood
[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.
Christopher Hitchens
I must have you. We must have each other. You know that, don't you? You'rein my blood, God help us both.
Sara Craven
By this time he had discovered that his neighbour was not very conversible; But whether her silence proceeded from pride, discretion, timidity, or idiotism, he was still unable to decide.
Matthew Lewis
The power of language. Preserving the ephemeral; giving form to dreams, permanence to sparks of sunlight.
Penelope Lively
The USA radio frequency (RF) radiation industry has turned zombie movies into reality.
Steven Magee
If your experiment needs a statistician, you need a better experiment.
Ernest Rutherford
When avarice takes the lead in a state, it is commonly the forerunner of its fall.
Alexander Hamilton
Saying of the ProphetDistributionGod it is who gives: I am only a distributor.
Idries Shah
Odd how we focus on studying wars at at school to form our 'education'. No wonder we know so little about making and forging peace as adults.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Like many who'd married in the war, my parents were finding it hard to survive the peace. This wasn't because they had discovered that they didn't love each other once their life together wasn't spiced with constant separations and the threat of death. Far from it. But they hadn't chosen each other so much against the social grain that they were tense, self-conscious, embattled, as though something was supposed to go wrong. Their families didn't like their marriage, nor did the village.
Lorna Sage
Will everyone stop eating dinosaurs?' she frowned.
Neale Osborne
I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Storyboarded by the West Coast’s finest, the ceiling celebrated the exploits of that most durable of action heroes—God.
Michael Marshall Smith
No you sick, stupid creep, I love you. I shouldn't. I shouldn't. You're sick inside, Caine, sick! But I love you. - Diana
Michael Grant
Fake friends are like shadows: always near you at your brightest moments, but nowhere to be seen at your darkest hourTrue friends are like stars, you don't always see them but they are always there.
Habeeb Akande
The human species – mammalian primates though undoubtedly (s)he is, and made out of the dust of exploded suns - does have the need for the transcendent, the numinous, even the ecstatic. I wouldn’t trust anyone who hadn’t had this. This has to do with landscape, light, music, love and an awareness of the transience of all things, and the melancholy that invests all this. So it isn’t just gaping happily at the sunset while listening to music, and doing that while knowing that it can’t last very long. But there is no need for the supernatural in this at all. There is no dimension of the supernatural of which this gives one a share.
Christopher Hitchens
I would never say snog. I would say osculate." She looks at me as if to say: why do you exist?
Joe Dunthorne
If you behave as if you are all right, then one day you will be. You have to go through the motions of surviving in order to survive.
Nicci French
The housewife is an unpaid worker in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee: hers is the reductio ad absurdum of the employee who accepts a lower wage in return for permanence of his employment. But the lowest paid employees can be and are laid off, and so are wives. They have no savings, no skills which they can bargain with elsewhere, and they must bear the stigma of having been sacked.
Germaine Greer
Sometimes, when it’s going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell. Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm.
David Nicholls
Sharpen and trust your judgement: learn when spending is a shrewd investment and when it is merely an indulgence
Rasheed Ogunlaru
If you want to kill serious crime, you have to kill serious criminals!
Andrew Barrett
The rest were nondescript, as yet undifferentiated—yet nondescripts, thought Harriet, were the most difficult of all human beings to analyze. You scarcely knew they were there, until—bang! Something quite unexpected blew up like a depth charge and left you marveling, to collect strange floating debris.
Dorothy L. Sayers
He who lives in the present lives in eternity.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
When a man's neck's in danger, he doesn't stop to think too much about sentiment.
Agatha Christie
Love does not last forever, then?""He asked me the same thing this morning," she said. "No, it does not - not love that has been betrayed. One realizes that one has loved a mirage, someone who never really existed. Not that love dies immediately or soon, even then. But it does die and cannot be revived.
Mary Balogh
Burlic screamed. He threw back his head and roared a single furious word into the night: “Waeccan.” The name erupted from him in a savage wail that rasped at his throat, over and over until he could shout no more.His howls echoed along the valley. In the village, the other hunters heard and exchanged glances, shook their heads and said nothing. The women clutched their talismans, told the children to go inside. They had tried to help, but there was nothing they could do for Burlic now.
Mikey Campling
By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream
Virginia Woolf
Lord Peter's library was one of the most delightful bachelor rooms in London. Its scheme was black and primrose; its walls were lined with rare editions, and its chairs and Chesterfield sofa suggested the embraces of the houris. In one corner stood a black baby grand, a wood fire leaped on a wide old-fashioned hearth, and the Sèvres vases on the chimneypiece were filled with ruddy and gold chrysanthemums. To the eyes of the young man who was ushered in from the raw November fog it seemed not only rare and unattainable, but friendly and familiar, like a colourful and gilded paradise in a mediæval painting
Dorothy L. Sayers
Mailer famously labeled writing the spooky art. He was right. There's a lot of frontal lobe blather, a lot of pencil-sharpening and knuckle-cracking and drafting and chat, but the big decisions are made in the locked subconscious, decisions not just on the writing but on the conditions for writing: I resolve on the one story I've never told and lo! Here I sit, holed up in a house that means nothing to me, bone-certain no other places will do. Art, even the humble autobiographer's, invokes occult necessities.
Glen Duncan
Te aseguro que no soy de las que quieren a medias. Mis sentimientos siempre son profundos y arraigados"...
Jane Austen
Problems arise when (especially) theologians use such metaphorical language without realizing that that is what they are doing, and without even realizing that there is a distinction between metaphor and reality – saying something like: ‘It is not important whether Jesus really fed the five thousand. What matters is what the idea of the story means to us.’ Actually it is important, because millions of devout people do believe the Bible is literally true.
Richard Dawkins
All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.""Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence."I claim them all," said the Savage at last.
Aldous Huxley
I can just close my eyes and let myself fall into oblivion. Maybe I'll hit the exact same rocks and my blood will mingle with his and maybe there's some kind of life after death and he's waiting for me there with his hand outstretched just like mine.But...I don't want to die.I try to twist my body backwards and pain shoots up my neck.It's too late.I chose life too late.
Cat Clarke
Meteorites don’t fall on the Earth. They fall on the Sun and the Earth gets in the way.” - John W. Campbell
Arthur C. Clarke
Perhaps we are all fictions, father, in the mind of God.
Graham Greene
The thoughts that come often unsought and as it were drop into the mind are commonly the most valuable of any we have.
John Locke
He could not remember a time when she had not been in his life. Their first meeting seemed like an eternity away. 'Love at first sight' everyone said, and she often teased him about his inability to form coherent words when he gazed into her eyes, so profound was his love. They had never spent a day apart, and there had never been a day when he forgot to tell her how much she meant to him...Today was no exception...
Virginia Alison
This man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.
G.K. Chesterton
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
George Eliot
Father was an atheist; he had even joined the Skeleton Army - a club of men who went about in masks or black faces, with ribald placards and a brass band, to make war upon the Salvation Army.
A.E. Coppard
Chuck Norris is the only human being to display the Heisenberg uncertainty principle -- you can never know both exactly where and how quickly he will roundhouse kick you in the face.
Oliver Oliver Reed
I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
John Keats
She was tall and dark-skinned and looked like a Nigerian sculpture. She moved like a lioness, her every step bristling with suppressed violence.
Bonnie Greer
I don't know about you, but I celebrate being in love with life by smiling.
Anthony T.Hincks
Spurred by Amy’s death I’ve tried to salvage unwilling victims from the mayhem of the internal storm and am always, always just pulled inside myself.
Russell Brand
He had seen how the spirit, the reserves in [Bond], could pull him out of badly damaged conditions that would have broken the normal human being. He knew how a desperate situation would bring out those reserves again, how the will to live would spring up again in a real emergency. He remembered how countless neurotic patients had disappeared for ever from his consulting rooms when the last war had broken out. The big worry had driven out the smaller ones, the greater fear the lesser. He made up his mind. He turned back to M. "Give him one more chance.
Ian Fleming
The chess-board is the world the pieces are the phenomena of the universe the rules of the game are what we call the Laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair just and patient. But also we know to our cost that he never overlooks a mistake or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.
Thomas Huxley
This is a lovely party," said the Bursar to a chair, "I wish I was here.
Terry Pratchett
Down to Gehenna or up to the throne He travels the fastest who travels alone.
Rudyard Kipling
Certainly seems it when she half-turns in his arms and he just leans right down into her and kisses and kisses. Oh, how syrupy-slow his kisses are. She could live in those warm, wet pulls.
Charlotte Stein