Quotes by British Authors - Page 16

Innovators are inevitably controversial.
Eva Le Gallienne
Nature to all things fixed the limits fitAnd wisely curbed proud man's pretending wit.As on the land while here the ocean gains.In other parts it leaves wide sandy plainsThus in the soul while memory prevails,The solid power of understanding failsWhere beams of warm imagination play,The memory's soft figures melt awayOne science only will one genius fit,So vast is art, so narrow human witNot only bounded to peculiar arts,But oft in those confined to single partsLike kings, we lose the conquests gained before,By vain ambition still to make them moreEach might his several province well command,Would all but stoop to what they understand.
Alexander Pope
He called it potentia because there's nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact you're making it up as you go along.
Ben Aaronovitch
If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.
Samuel Butler
Either I've always spoken to her from the heart in times like this, or I never have and I don't know what it means.
Ian McEwan
He never even thought of tenderness and emotion; his considerations about Durham remained cold. Durham didn't dislike him, he was sure. That was all he wanted. One thing at a time. He didn't so much as have hopes, for hope distracts, and he had a great deal to see to.
E.M. Forster
I am the only real truth I know.
Jean Rhys
Sometimes a lie builds until the truth does more harm than good
Luke Scull
It is only when you touch the higher that you realize how low we may be among the possibilities of creation.
Arthur Conan Doyle
The crowning blessing of life - to be born with a bias to some pursuit.
S. C. Tallentyre
Femininity itself has become a brand, a narrow and shrinking formula of commoditised identity which can be sold back to women who have become alienated from their own power as living, loving, labouring beings.
Laurie Penny
Most of our misfortunes are comments of our friends upon them.
Charles Caleb Colton
But if you were investigating a crime,” said Lady Swaffham, “you’d have to begin by the usual things, I suppose — finding out what the person had been doing, and who’d been to call, and looking for a motive, wouldn’t you?”“Oh, yes,” said Lord Peter, “but most of us have such dozens of motives for murderin’ all sorts of inoffensive people. There’s lots of people I’d like to murder, wouldn’t you?”“Heaps,” said Lady Swaffham.
Dorothy L. Sayers
...the arts and criminality have always flourished side by side.
J.G. Ballard
What the eye does not see, the stomach does not get upset over
Jerome K. Jerome
Christ the Lord is risen today Sons of men and angels say. Raise your joys and triumphs high Sing ye heavens and earth reply.
Charles Wesley
My love will last until I'm oldAnd even dead it won't grow cold.
Suzie Wilde
Getting what you want means making the decisions you need to make to get what you want.Not the decisions those around you think you should make.Making the safe decision is full, predictable and elads nowhere new.The unsafe decision causess you to think and respond in a way you hadn't thought of.And that thought will lead to other thoughts which will help you achieve what you want.Start taking bad decisions and it will take you to a plce where others only dream of being.
Paul Arden
The path of memory is neither straight or safe, and we travel down it at our risk.
Neil Gaiman
But when women are asked when they're going to have children, there is, in actually, another darker, more pertinent question lying underneath it.
Caitlin Moran
Egoism holds, therefore, is that each man's happiness is the sole good--that a number of different things are each of them the only good thing there is--an absolute contradiction! No more complete and thorough refutation of any theory could be desired.
G.E. Moore
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
T.S Eliot
Saying of the ProphetThe BequestI have nothing to leave you except my family.
Idries Shah
I was a king for a while. I wasn't a very good one. I wanted all kinds of things. I wanted, well, you know. Power. Glory. To be feared. All that good stuff. But you know what? When the gaiaphage did it to me, when she made me cry and grovel and beg for mercy, I realized: There's no end to this for me. There's no end to the FAYZ. If we get out alive, there's still no end. And what happens to me out there in the world?" "No, you're wrong they can't blame you for everything that happened." He laughed. "Yeah, well, actually, they can. A king, warrior, whatever I was, I want to go out in a blaze of glory. I've risen as high as I'm ever going to. And if I survive, I'm just going to end up as prisoner number three-one-two-whatever. You coming to see me on visiting days." "But I will come see you. And I will wait for you." "No," he said firmly. "I get my big finish. And you get your life. Move on, Diana.
Michael Grant
Nationalist (forces around the world) could now more readily communicate and share their grievances, viewing themselves as similar groups, engaged in a common struggle for greater autonomy against control exerted from London or Paris.
Charles Emmerson
I've always said, stuff the engagement ring! Just build me a really big library.
Emma Watson
This, for both Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, is the central tragedy of human life; if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of which is the history of the world; above all, what presumptuous nonsense it is to claim to perceive an order merely on the strength of believing desperately that an order must exist, when all one actually perceives is meaningless chaos –a chaos of which the heightened form, the microcosm in which the disorder of human life is reflected in an intense degree, is war.
Isaiah Berlin
I don't write to chase away my demons ~I wield my pen as a weapon...calling those bastards to war!
Muse
Quick-loving hearts ... may quickly loathe.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
ATHEIST is really a thoroughly honest, unambiguous term, it admits of no paltering and no evasion, and the need of the world, now as ever, is for clear-cut issues and unambiguous speech.
Chapman Cohen
you knowI knowyou knowI'll remember youand I knowYou knowI knowyou'll remember me
One Direction
It's clever, but is it art?
Rudyard Kipling
If you are against abortions, don't have one.
Scott Andrews
It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particuarly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.
Neil Gaiman
That night, I dream. And when I wake up I remember watching a film with Nannan about a ventriloquist who went mad, his dummy coming to life and speaking for itself. My dream is like the end of the film where the ventriloquist and the dummy are in the madhouse, all these mad devil-faces pressed against the iron bars of the cell door, laughing as the dummy gets up off his chair and walks towards the ventriloquist who screams. The dummy strangles him. I can’t remember in the dream if I was the ventriloquist or the dummy. I’m in a funny mood all day. I don’t say much. I don’t feel like it.
Dean Lilleyman
When I was cooking I enjoyed a sense of being ‘out’ of myself. The action of dicing vegetables and warming oil made my hands tingle and my thoughts switch to a different hemisphere, right brain rather than left, or left rather than right. In my mind there were many rooms and, just as I still got lost in the labyrinth of corridors at college, I often found myself lost, with a sense of déjà vu, in some obscure part of my cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that plays a key role in perceptual awareness, attention and memory. Everything I had lived through or imagined or dreamed appeared to have been backed up on a video clip and then scattered among those alien rooms. I could stumble into any number of scenes, from the horrifically sexual, horror-movie sequences that were crude and painful, to visualizing Grandpa polishing his shoes.
Alice Jamieson
... "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked". The Christians describe the Enemy as one "without whom Nothing is strong". And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them ...
C.S. Lewis
The greatest admission a human can make is that perhaps he does not have the intelligence, the vision, the grasp to fully understand the universe, and that perhaps no human ever will. To put it all down to some omnipotent deity is a cop-out. Factor in fairy tales of an afterlife and it becomes a comforting cop-out.
Neal Asher
Up goes the rocket. Its golden grain falls, fertilising, upon the rich soil of my imagination.
Virginia Woolf
I couldn't keep myself from wondering how on earth I got to have such demented parents".
Bella Forrest
But it's not Kit's physique that I'm talking about. It's the way he is, the confidence he has that is beyond his years. He speaks softly-I've never seen him lose his temper or shout-and when he walks into a room, It's like he's a magnet and everything, including the air, is drawn to him. Although I know he can strip an automatic weapon in under ten seconds and is trained to lea d men in battle, I've also seen him siniging lullabies to his baby nieces while he cradles them in his arms, and jump off a pier to save a drowning dog.
Mila Gray
Granny Weatherwax had a primal snore. It had never been tamed. No one had ever had to sleep next to it, to curb its wilder excesses by means of a kick, a prod in the small of the back, or a pillow used as a bludgeon. It had had years in a lonely bedroom to perfect the knark, the graaah, and the gnoc, gnoc, gnoc unimpeded by the nudges, jabs, and occasional attempts at murder that usually moderate the snore impulse over time
Terry Pratchett
So there we have it. I get up in the morning determined to do something approximating to the right thing, and with in two hours find something to feel guilty about.
Nick Hornby
He had lovely eyes, really—not assessing, at all, but big and dark and…waiting.
Charlotte Stein
I will, however, establish that success in love, as in all other aspects of life, belongs, as a rule, to the persistent and fiber man. Chaucer had reason to make the Old Bath confess: 'The truth is, more or less, we always succumb to attention and perseverance'.
Frank Harris
I now view life as a complex and unpredictable affair that cannot be mastered. It can be embraced. It can be negotiated more or less skillfully. But mastered? Not a chance.
Gary Hayden
You say that this society will come to an end, because societies always have done so. I wonder whether they have ended because they were not really societies at all.
Idries Shah
He is a man-beast, carnivore incarnate, motivated by carnal avarice and wearing only the mask of civility. She could sip from that cup. It is his presumption that deters her: his belief that he has already caught Maud in his paw.
Emmanuelle de Maupassant
All life is theatre,' he said. 'We are all actors, you and I, in a play which nobody wrote and which nobody will see. We have no audience but ourselves....
Susan Cooper
Even when your life is full of color, you still need to be reminded that things come in black and white.
Anthony T.Hincks
In 1789 the French rebelled and found an emperor. The Americans found their freedom from the British and enslaved the Africans. The Arab Spring bloomed and the military and the jihadists seized power. The internet gave us all the power of speech, and what did we discover? That victory goes to he who shouts the loudest, and that reason does not sell.
Claire North
The revolutionary woman knows the world she seeks to overthrow is precisely one in which love between equal human beings is well nigh impossible. We are still part of the ironical working-out of this, our own cruel contradiction. One of the most compelling facts which can unite women and make us act is the overwhelming indignity or bitter hurt of being regarded as simply ‘the other’, ‘an object’, ‘commodity’, ‘thing’. We act directly from a consciousness of the impossibility of loving or being loved without distortion. But we must still demand now the preconditions of what is impossible at the moment. It is a most disturbing dialectic, our praxis of pain.
Sheila Rowbotham
I'll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one'll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you... We'll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams... And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they wont' just be able to take one, they'll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we'll be joined so tight...
Philip Pullman
I don’t actually think “true love” is such a good term because love can only be true. If it isn’t true it can’t be love.
Aidan Chambers
Lust, pure gorgeous lust: the sacred energy that elevates us, and makes us feel so special.
Fiona Thrust
With languages, you are at home anywhere.
Edward De Waal
Dickens writes that one of his characters, "listened to everything without seeming to, which showed he understood his business.
Charles Dickens
Just when you thought you knew everything about someone, they had to go one better.
Lindsey Kelk
Stella, the only planet of my light,Light of my life, and life of my desire,Chief good, whereto my hope doth only aspire,World of my wealth, and heav'n of my delight:Why dost thou spend the treasure of thy sprite,With voice more fit to wed Amphion's lyre,Seeking to quench in me the noble fireFed by thy worth, and kindled by thy sight?And all in vain, for while thy breath most sweet,With choicest words, thy words with reasons rare,Thy reasons firmly set on Virtue's feet,Labor to kill in me this killing care:Oh, think I then, what paradise of joyIt is, so fair a Virtue to enjoy.
Philip Sidney
What better place to kill time than a library?
Diane Setterfield