Quotes by British Authors - Page 170

She was a Victorian girl; a girl of the days when men were hard and top-hatted and masculine and ruthless and girls were gentle and meek and did a great deal of sewing and looked after the poor and laid their tender napes beneath a husband’s booted foot, and even if he brought home cabfuls of half-naked chorus girls and had them dance on the rich round mahogany dining-table (rosily reflecting great pearly hams and bums in its polished depths). Or, drunk to a frenzy, raped the kitchen-maid before the morning assembly of servants and children and her black silk-dressed self (gathered for prayers). Or forced her to stitch, on shirts, her fingers to rags to pay his gambling debts.Husbands were a force of nature or an act of God; like an earthquake or the dreaded consumption, to be borne with, to be meekly acquiesced to, to be impregnated by as frequently as Nature would allow. It took the mindless persistence, the dogged imbecility of the grey tides, to love a husband.
Angela Carter
A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
Arthur C. Clarke
Yesterday, here in the middle of the City, I saw a wolf turn into a Russian ex-gymnast and hand over a business card that read YOUR OWN PERSONAL TRANSHUMAN SECURITY WHORE! STERILIZED INNARDS! ACCEPTS ALL CREDIT CARDS to a large man who had trained attack cancers on his face and possessed seventy-five indentured Komodo Dragons instead of legs. And they had sex. Right in front of me. And six of the Komodo Dragons spat napalm on my new shoes.
Warren Ellis
Remember how strong we are in our happiness and how weak he is in his misery!
Charles Dickens
Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple.
J.K. Rowling
To find a friend one must close one eye. To keep him ... two.
Norman Douglas
Then there was like quiet and we were full of like hate, so smashed what was left to be smashed.
Anthony Burgess
(An unhappy childhood was not) an unsuitable preparation for my future, in that it demanded a constant wariness, the habit of observation, and the attendance on moods and tempers; the noting of discrepancies between speech and action; a certain reserve of demeanour; and automatic suspicion of sudden favours.
Rudyard Kipling
Be a visionary, focused upon your ability to create your desires within your reality.
Steven Redhead
It was a world that most fans never saw. One that many dreamed of.
Louise Mensch
Modern civilisation does not generate an ethical framework for human life.
Simon du Plock
IF YOU WALK THROUGH THE FIRE I’LL COME TO THEE. As Bob walked past he wondered how many gods that piece of advice might apply to.
Adam Christopher
Perhaps I am the only person who, asked whether she were a witch or not, could truthfully say, "I do not know. I do know some very strange things have happened to me, or through me."Lady Alice Rowhedge
Norah Lofts
It follows that they never understood Reginald, who came down late to breakfast, and nibbled toast, and said disrespectful things about the universe. The family ate porridge, and believed in everything, even the weather forecast.
Saki
This is a work of memory -- facts have been altered. Names have been changed.
Lavinia Greenlaw
If we die for them, Harry, I'm going to KILL YOU!
J.K. Rowling
Poverty said the same thing, century after century, but in different kinds of sentences.
Martin Amis
Every day when I open my eyes it is a leap of vibrational faith into something new
Debbie A. Anderson
A man's mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass.
George Eliot
He gazed up at the blue sky and knew that heaven—at least in this life—was neither a time nor a placeto be grasped and made into a possession. It came in fleeting moments and then went away again toleave one nostalgic and yearning and on the verge of tears.Very much on the verge of tears.And very frightened.
Mary Balogh
Creators aren't gods. They make places, which is quite hard. It's men that make gods. This explains a lot.
Terry Pratchett
Woe to that seven months abortion who thinks to take advantage of the accidents of birth, and, mocking the call of duty, sneaks off to stare at a wall in China!
Aleister Crowley
Handle them carefully for words have more power than atom bombs.
Pearl Strachan Hurd
I don't like killing, but I'm good at it. Murder isn't so bad from a distance, just shapes popping up in my scope. Close-up work though - a garrotte around a target's neck or a knife in their heart - it's not for me. Too much empathy, that's my problem. Usually. But not today. Today is different . . .
Graeme Shimmin
I learned the Norse gods came with their own doomsday: Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, the end of it all. The gods were going to battle the frost giants, and they were all going to die.Had Ragnarok happened yet? Was it still to happen? I did not know then. I am not certain now.
Neil Gaiman
I should have asked why any room in the house was better than home to me when she entered it, and barren as a desert when she went out again—why I always noticed and remembered the little changes in her dress that I had noticed and remembered in no other woman’s before—why I saw her, heard her, and touched her (when we shook hands at night and morning) as I had never seen, heard, and touched any other woman in my life?
Wilkie Collins
But it is not always the people who say most who do most.
Agatha Christie
When the ignorant have become numerous or powerful enough, they have been referred to by a special name. This names is 'the Wise'.
Idries Shah
He's like a man with a fork, in a world of soup. (about his brother Liam)
Noel Gallagher
I am not saying that you have to believe in God to make moral decisions. God's existence is not dependent on my belief in him, anyway. However, without the objective reality of God, there would be no conscience".
Michael Ots
It is a burden...(M)ake no mistake about that. Any great gift or power or talent is a burden and this more than any, and you will long to be free of it. But there is nothing to be done. If you were born with the gift, then you must serve it, and nothing in this world or out of it may stand in the way of that service, because that is why you were born and that is the Law."- Susan Cooper ("Merriman" The Dark is Rising)
Susan Cooper
Why do people stay together? Putting aside ‘for the sake of the children’, and ‘the habit of years’ and ‘economic reasons’ as lawyers’ nonsense – it’s not much more – if one really does try to find out why it is that people don’t leave each other, one discovers a mystery.
Victoria Hislop
What is sometimes thought to be clever is, significantly often, merely an advanced form of foolishness.
Idries Shah
The motives of mankind are plainer than the motions they produce.
R.D. Blackmore
Living is not an art, but to write of life is. Life is a series of accidents and anticlimaxes, misremembered and misunderstood, with lessons only dimly learned. Life is disorganized, lacks shape, lacks story.
Christopher Priest
Cradle of SolitudeFor we know not why our tribulationsare given as suchour fragile formscreated from the dust...
Muse
People are always asking about the good old days. I say why don't you say the good "now" days? Isn't "now" the only time you're living?
Robert M. Young
Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.
H. Havelock Ellis
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
George Orwell
Innocence must die young if it isn't to kill the souls of men
Graham Greene
Two wives despaired of him,’ he said. ‘When he got engaged to Sylvia, she made it a condition that he should take the cure at Zurich. And it worked. He came back in three months a different man. And he hasn't touched a drop since, even though Sylvia walked out on him.’ ‘Why did she do that?’Well, poor Charlie got rather a bore when he stopped drinking. But that’s not really the point of the story.
Evelyn Waugh
I want to reconcile the violence in your heart.I want to recognize your beauty's not just a mask.I want to exorcise the demons from your past.I want to satisfy the undisclosed desires in your heart.
Matthew Bellamy
Acquaint yourself with your own ignorance.
Isaac Watts
My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.
Joseph Conrad
You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,And how, how rare and strange it is, to findIn a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,(For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? you are not blind! How keen you are!)To find a friend who has these qualities,Who has, and givesThose qualities upon which friendship lives.How much it means that I say this to you-Without these friendships-life, what cauchemar!
T.S Eliot
There comes a moment for all of us when our childhood ceases to be an excuse. In your case, I would say that, as with many English, the moment is somewhat delayed.
John le Carré
Great songs don't grow on trees, yet lots of songs have been written on great trees
Benny Bellamacina
How is it that time can be elastic? Sometimes years seem to go by while you're looking the other way, and sometimes-when you most long for it to pass-life-times can stretch from a few hours
Polly Johnson
This was 1990 the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the iron curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment. I know that communism never worked and I would have disliked living under it myself but none the less it seems that there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self interest and greed.
Bill Bryson
For most people, art is only valuable if other people say it is; and artists are only worthwhile if they are either rich and famous, or dead.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Yes," Mustapha Mond was saying, "that's another item in the cost of stability. It isn't only art that's incompatible with happiness; it's also science. Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.
Aldous Huxley
... 'Many waters cannot quench love' was said of divine, not human, love, which the Dean knew was not always tough enough to survive the indifference of misery. That was one of the chief reasons why he struggled to do away with misery.
Elizabeth Goudge
I see the same sky above me, the same stars and moon, but nothing will ever be the same for me, because I love you.” Whoever said love was grand evidently had never been in love.
D.F. Jones
GINNY: After I came out of hospital — everyone ignored me, shut me out — other than, that is, the boy who had everything — who came across the Gryffindor common room and challenged me to a game of Exploding Snap. People think they know all there is to know about you, but the best bits of you are — have always been — heroic in really quiet ways. My point is — after this is over, just remember if you could that sometimes people — but particularly children — just want someone to play Exploding Snap with.
Jack Thorne
We profess to be strangers and pilgrims, seeking after a country of our own, yet we settle down in the most un-stranger-like fashion, exactly as if we were quite at home and meant to stay as long as we could. I don't wonder apostolic miracles have died. Apostolic living certainly has.
Amy Carmichael
Yet I must tell you, that all these graces which are expressed by passions of sorrow, fear, joy, hope, love, are not so certainly to be tried by the passion that is in them, as by the will that is either contained in them, or supposed in them; not as acts of the sensitive, but of the rational appetite (358).
Richard Baxter
I have no pity for myself either. So let it be Veronal. But I wish Hercule Poirot had never retired from work and come here to grow vegetable marrows.
Agatha Christie
…only in the few universes that are like ours would intelligent beings develop and ask the question: “Why is the universe the way we see it?” The answer is then simple: If it had been any different, we would not be here!
Stephen Hawking
I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.
Beryl Markham
The sunlight claps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea: what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?
Percy Bysshe Shelley