Quotes by British Authors - Page 17

As there was no form of government common to the peoples thus segregated, nor tie of language, history, habit or belief, they were called a Republic.
Evelyn Waugh
I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?
John Lennon
Love understands love it needs no talk.
Frances Ridley Havergal
Life is a wonderfully fine thing. Go live it.
Fennel Hudson
It is my expectation that if I call 911 for the police that I will be blatantly harassed.
Steven Magee
Where would I be (and what would happen to me), if I could see all round me and above and below at once ?
Nanamoli Thera
... history - the lamp which illumines national character...
Lawrence Durrell
He endured all that hell is on the cross, so that you would never know what hell is like.
Colin S. Smith
Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime
Samuel Butler
I shall have to go. But-" and here Frodo looked hard at Sam- "if you really care about me, you will have to keep that DEAD secret. See? If you don't, if you even breathe a word of what you've heard here, then I hope Gandalf will turn you into a spotted toad and fill the garden full of grass snakes." Sam fell on his knees, trembling. "Get up, Sam!" Said Gandalf. "I have thought of something better than that. Something to keep you quiet, and punish you properly for listening. You shall go away with Mr. Frodo!" "Me, sir!" cried Sam, springing up like a dog invited for a walk. "Me go and see Elves and all! Hooray!" he shouted, and then burst into tears.
J.R.R. Tolkien
One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact of what we call ‘the thing itself’. But we call it wrongly. The thing itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea.
C.S. Lewis
I wonder why he hastened to tell us that George Hearne was buried in the churchyard, and then added that naturally he was!''It's the natural place to be buried in,' said I.'Quite. That's just why it was hardly worth mentioning.'I felt then, just momentarily, just vaguely, as if my mind was regarding stray pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. The fancied ringing of the telephone bell last night was one of them, this burial of George Hearne in the churchyard was another, and, even more inexplicably, the ladder I had seen under the trees was a third. Consciously I made nothing whatever out of them, and did not feel the least inclination to devote any ingenuity to so fortuitous a collection of pieces. Why shouldn't I add, for that matter, our morning's bathe, or the gorse on the hillside? But I had the sensation that, though my conscious brain was presently occupied with piquet, and was rapidly growing sleepy with the day of sun and sea, some sort of mole inside it was digging passages and connecting corridors below the soil. ("Expiation")
E.F. Benson
There are only certain intervals of time when life of any sort is possible in an expanding universe and we can practise astronomy only during that habitable time interval in cosmic history.
John D. Barrow
Who made the world I cannot tell;'Tis made, and here I am in hell.
A.E. Housman
Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.
Joseph Conrad
The only thing that matters is everything.
David Hieatt
Open up the full capacity of the heart and mind.
Steven Redhead
New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises 'Why then are you not taking part in them?
H.G.Wells
Among men, sex sometimes results in intimacy; among women, intimacy sometimes results in sex.
Barbara Cartland
Sometimes I like to think I live with ghosts. Not from my past, but wispy bits of ideas and books that hang in the air like silk puppets. Sometimes I think I see my own ideas, floating around too, but they usually don't last that long. They're more like mayflies; they're born, big and gleaming, and then they fly around, buzzing like crazy before they fall to the floor, dead, about twenty four hours later.
Scarlett Thomas
I have heard the languages of apocalypse, and now I shall embrace the silence.
Neil Gaiman
And you,You can be meanAnd I,I'll drink all the time'Cause we're lovers,And that is a factYes we're lovers,And that is that
David Bowie
If I was president of the Slime Committee, I'd make it easier to come clean about shit. If coming clean is what you're supposed to do, then it should be made more fucken accessible, I say.
D.B.C. Pierre
We can't choose our fate, but we can choose others. Be careful in knowing that.
J.K. Rowling
Beauty is seeing,the world through colored glass,of seeing everything in its glory,it's all it ever asks.
Anthony T.Hincks
If we have faith, then we can see the beauty around us. If we don’t then we are just blind followers, not knowing why we are on the path.
Fennel Hudson
But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go.
Denise Levertov
A four-letter alphabet called DNA.
Matt Ridley
Nelly, I am Heathcliff - he's always, always in my mind - not as a pleasure, any more then I am always a pleasure to myself - but, as my own being.
Emily Brontë
I should never be able to fulfill what is,I understand, the first duty of a lecturer-to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever".
Virginia Woolf
The mind is constituted to accept the god of the more powerful. If you have to choose between the god of the slave owner and the god of the enslaved, naturally you will choose the former . . .
Barry Unsworth
Any capitalist . . . who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn't each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat. What I did you can do. Why don't you go and do it?
Charles Dickens
It’s better to be individual than a clone of someone else.
Fennel Hudson
Writing is 90% struggle. The other 10% is up to you.
Iain Cameron Williams
Of all the evil spirits abroad at this hour in the world insincerity is the most dangerous.
James Froude
Alcoholism is above all a disease of denial.
David Stafford
It was a thought, that. Not to attach yourself to a man, but to confront instead the open world, the wide fields of France and Spain, the ocean, anything. Not just to hitch a lift with the first fellow who looked as though he knew where he was going, but just to go.
Jo Baker
There was a pretty young woman I used to see pegging out sheets and I worried that she would grow old there and that no one would know how beautiful she was. And maybe she would die without ever having really lived.
Sebastian Faulks
Love’s language starts, stops, starts; the right words flowing or clotting in the heart.
Carol Ann Duffy
We . . . go out into the Waste Land of Experts, each knowing so much about so little that he can neither be contradicted nor is worth contradicting.
G.M. Young
Peace and love, peace and love!
Ringo Starr
Do you like my smile?” he asks, walking towards me.
tI kick off my heels, so that when he stands before me, I am suddenly much shorter than a moment ago. “It’s the best I’ve seen,” I say honestly. And, of course, he smiles at me. “You see these…” I reach up and touch his cheeks where dimples form when he’s happy, “…these are adorable. These…” I lightly touch his lips, “…well, I’d better not tell you what I’d like to do with these…” His smile widens. “And these…” I touch the edges of his eyes, “…they smile, too.
Annabel Fanning
Something I owe to the soil that grew--More to the life that fed--But most to Allah who gave me two Separate sides of my head. I would go without shirt or shoes, Friends, tobacco, or bread Sooner than for an instant lose Either side of my head.
Rudyard Kipling
Wit beyond measure is man’s greatest treasure.
J.K. Rowling
A solemn sadness reigns. A great peace is around us. In its light our cares of the working day grow small and trivial, and bread and cheese—ay, and even kisses—do not seem the only things worth striving for. Thoughts we cannot speak but only listen to flood in upon us, and standing in the stillness under earth's darkening dome, we feel that we are greater than our petty lives. Hung round with those dusky curtains, the world is no longer a mere dingy workshop, but a stately temple wherein man may worship, and where at times in the dimness his groping hands touch God's.
Jerome K. Jerome
Remembering to forget the past allows you freedom from a past that holds back your Christian growth.
Elizabeth George
It doesn't help anyone to judge their happiness or career by looking at where others may or may not be. Dad said it best: 'All the time you're looking left and right at other people, you're neglecting what's in front of you.If you focus on looking straight ahead, you can take the odd glance at the future.' He's got a way of saying things sometimes that just puts everything into perspective.
James Corden
Until now, I've been writing about "now" as if it were literally an instant of time, but of course human faculties are not infinitely precise. It is simplistic to suppose that physical events and mental events march along exactly in step, with the stream of "actual moments" in the outside world and the stream of conscious awareness of them perfectly synchronized. The cinema industry depends on the phenomenon that what seems to us a movie is really a succession of still pictures, running at twenty-five [sic] frames per second. We don't notice the joins. Evidently the "now" of our conscious awareness stretches over at least 1/25 of a second.In fact, psychologists are convinced it can last a lot longer than that. Take he familiar "tick-tock" of the clock. Well, the clock doesn't go "tick-tock" at all; it goes "tick-tick," every tick producing the same sound. It's just that our consciousness runs two successive ticks into a singe "tick-tock" experience—but only if the duration between ticks is less than about three seconds. A really bug pendulum clock just goes "tock . . . tock . . . tock," whereas a bedside clock chatters away: "ticktockticktock..." Two to three seconds seems to be the duration over which our minds integrate sense data into a unitary experience, a fact reflected in the structure of human music and poetry.
Paul Davies
Poetry, if it is not to be a lifeless repetition of forms, must be constantly exploring "the frontiers of the spirit." But these frontiers are not like the surveys of geographical explorers, conquered once for all and settled. The frontiers of the spirit are more like the jungle which, unless continuously kept under control, is always ready to encroach and eventually obliterate the cultivated area.
T.S Eliot
On his departure, he glanced swiftly back as he passed the furtive gaze of the gloved footmen.He was swept away in the momentum of shimmering glass....I had seen how the world turned, and I was beginning to feel my own power
Suzy Davies
If you're going to make the past your present, be prepared for a lifetime of dust ...
Lily Graham
Unemployment or the loss of income which will always affect some in any society is certainly less degrading if it is the result of misfortune and not deliberately imposed by authority.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Persistent effort is what will create the life you most desire.
Steven Redhead
It was strange how fear had gone,now that we knew the worst and had a fighting man by our side.
John Buchan
There are essentially three types of people: those who love life more than they fear it, those who fear life more than they love it, and those who have no clue what I'm talking about.
Neel Burton
The greatest gifts are those that say, “I know you”.
Fennel Hudson
He did not see any reason why the devil should have all the good tunes.
Rowland Hill
I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act but I do believe in a fate that falls on men unless they act.
G.K. Chesterton
Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it, or else, for ever and ever, the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.
C.S. Lewis
There’s no happy ending ... Nevertheless, we might well say that is exactly Harriet Beecher Stowe’s point. In 1852 slavery had not been abolished. Slaves were still on the plantations and many of them were in the hands of people like Legree. Her book was written to shame the collective conscience of America into action against an atrocity which was still continuing. So a happy ending would have been, frankly, a lie and a betrayal. ...Most of the charges are basically true. Stowe did stereotype. She did sentimentalize. She offered a role model which later offended African American pride. On the other hand, what she did worked. She wasn’t trying to provide a role model for African Americans. She was trying to make white Americans ashamed of themselves. ...Perhaps the short answer to her critics is to ask, “Do you want glory, approval, all those good things? Or do you want to achieve your goal?
Thomas A. Shippey