Quotes by British Authors - Page 172

Verily, I say unto thee, many are the adepts that have looked upon the back parts of my father, and cried, "our eyes fail before the glory of thy countenance.
Aleister Crowley
I used my mental illness as a springboard to the rest of my life.
Clive Culverhouse
It could be said of him that while others chased the mirage of happiness, he was happy with being content.
Neel Mukherjee
The key is to silence the mind long enough to tune into the intuition of the heart.
Steven Redhead
Maybe sometimes we don't do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don't want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it's dangerous. We're more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right.
Philip Pullman
Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.
Joseph Conrad
You can coddle your rage, or you can fully engage.
Tony Cleaver
Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?
J.R.R. Tolkien
No matter how ill we may be nor how low we may have fallen we should not change identity with any other person.
Samuel Butler
We’ve searched all of the homes and carried the food to Ralph’s,” Sam continued. “The problem is that all the fruit and veggies spoiled while we were all filling up on chips and cookies. The meat all rotted. People were stupid and careless, and there’s nothing we can do about that now.” Sam swallowed the bitterness he felt, the anger he felt at his own foolishness. “But we have food sitting out in the fields. Maybe not the food we’d like, but enough to carry us for months—many months—if we bring it in before it rots and the birds eat it.”“Maybe we’ll get rescued, and we won’t have to worry,” another voice said.“Maybe we’ll learn to live on air,” Astrid muttered under her breath but loudly enough to be heard by at least a few.“Why don’t you go get our food back from Drake and the chuds up there?”It was Zil. He accepted a congratulatory slap on the back from a creepy kid named Antoine, part of Zil’s little posse.“Because it would mean getting some kids killed,” Sam said bluntly. “We’d be lucky to rescue any of the food, and we’d end up digging more graves in the plaza. And it wouldn’t solve our problem, anyway.
Michael Grant
And when he surfaces to a cramped hand, a crick in the neck, the sunlight shifted across the floor, a sore blink, he knows that even to have written this little is an excess, it is an overflowing, an excretion. Too many words. There are just too many words. Nobody wants them; nobody needs them. And still they keep on, keep on, keep on coming..
Jo Baker
I wondered: if I was so hell-bent on chaos, why would I adopt a military rank? Perhaps there was a part of me that needed rules, needed regulations and order.
Steven Poore
In their vanity men focus on what they wish to hear and miss the hidden meaning, the lurking threat.
David Hewson
You make me a sinner if you stop me giving you hospitality.
Idries Shah
We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.
Winston S. Churchill
In Nepal, the quality of conversation is much more important than accuracy of the content. Maybe we get overexcited about information in England?
Jane Wilson-Howarth
Orthodoxy is my doxy - heterodoxy is another man's doxy.
William Warburton
I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about!
Thomas Hardy
Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
Alan Bennett
Power loves not the light of day, nor the attention of curious eyes. In darkness it thrives most...A lord may send his army hither and thither, but the true testing of his power is in those places where his army is not...Has he sent its long fingers far enough through the backstreets and alleys, into the drinking dens and the lending-houses, so that he may gather them unto himself and hold them firm without a single swordsman?
Brian Ruckley
Courage and clemency are equal virtues.
Mary Delariviere Manley
Was his life nothing? Had he nothing to show, no work? He did not count his work, anyone could have done it. What had he known, but the long, marital embrace with his wife. Curious, that this was what his life amounted to! At any rate, it was something, it was eternal. He would say so to anybody, and be proud of it. He lay with his wife in his arms, and she was still his fulfillment, just the same as ever. And that was the be-all and the end-all. Yes, and he was proud of it.
D.H. Lawrence
He had but one eye and the pocket of prejudice runs in favour of two.
Charles Dickens
Divinity is great enough to be divine; it is great enough to call itself divine. But as humanity grows greater, it grows less and less likely to do so. God is God, as the Moslems say; but a great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it. That is the paradox; everything that is merely approaching to that point is merely receding from it.
G.K. Chesterton
Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods.
C.S. Lewis
One must choose between Obscurity with Efficiency and Fame with its inevitable collateral of Bluff.
William McFee
We may learn things from one who preaches, or we may find their pontificating a waste of time—often enough, a hypocritical waste of time. What child ever preaches? Yet time spent open-heartedly with a child is never wasted.
Quentin S. Crisp
He smiled at me shyly and took a step closer. I froze, heart pounding, as he put one hand on my cheek and leaned toward me. I swallowed, gazing up at him with what I hoped was an expectant (and not alarmed) expression. He bent his head toward mine and...
J.M. Richards
With a bound, the sun of a molten fiery red cam above the horizon, and immediately thousands of little birds sang out for joy, and a soft chorus of mysterious, glad murmurs came forth from the earth; the low whispering wind left its hiding-place among the clefts and hollows of the hills, and wandered among the rustling herbs and trees, waking the flower-buds to the life of another day.
Elizabeth Gaskell
That when we live no more, We may live ever
Anne Bradstreet
The more we nurture the planet, the better and more natural a life we'll have.
Chris d'Lacey
The Sufi is one who does what others do – when it is necessary. He is also one who does what others cannot do – when it is indicated.
Idries Shah
And now leave me in peace for a bit! I don't want to answer a string of questions while I am eating. I want to think!""Good Heavens!" said Pippin. "At breakfast?
J.R.R. Tolkien
This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.
David Nicholls
I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones.
Joseph Conrad
Discord on one level is harmony on another
Alan W. Watts
Decision is a sharp knife that cuts clean and straight indecision a dull one that hacks and tears and leaves ragged edges behind it.
Gordon Graham
You are to consider that a certain melancholy and often a certain irascibility accompany advancing age: indeed it might be said that advancing age equals ill-temper. On reaching the middle years a man perceives that he is no longer able to do certain things, that what looks he may have had are deserting him, that he has a ponderous great belly, and that however much he may yet burn he is no longer attractive to women; and he rebels. Fortitude, resignation and philosophy are of more value than any pills, red, white or blue.
Patrick O'Brian
Akil, humans have these wonderful little things we like to cling onto, called souls. The jury’s still out as to whether demons have them, I sincerely doubt you do." ~ Muse.
Pippa DaCosta
My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness.
Neil Gaiman
Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future.
Matt Ridley
Carelessness is not fatal to journalism nor are cliches for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once a journalist has to accept the fact that his work by its very todayness is excluded from any share in tomorrow.
Cyril Connolly
Mr Brocklehurst: Do you know where the wicked go after death?Jane Eyre: They go to hell, was my ready and orthodox answer.. . . Mr: What must you do to avoid it? Jane: [Thinking] I deliberated a moment; my answer, when it did come was objectionable: " I must keep in good health , and not die.
Charlotte Brontë
It is the right of a traveller to vent their frustration at every minor inconvenience by writing of it to their friends.
Susanna Clarke
It (modernization) is just another jungle closing in.
Evelyn Waugh
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful or to discover something that is true.
William Ralph Inge
I do not look at myself. I have given up myself. I had to, you know, after the murder. That was what it did for me. And that was how everything began
C.S. Lewis
An open flask of industrial liquid gas that is venting into the indoor environment should be thought of as the same as a smoldering fire, as they both create a dangerous oxygen deficient environment for the human.
Steven Magee
You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read.
Nick Hornby
Most hate is more common and more complicated, with as many varieties as there are varieties of love. Just as there is possessive love and needy love; family love and friendship; romantic love and unrequited love; passion and respect, affection and obsession, so hatred has its shadings. There is hate that fears, and hate that merely feels contempt; there is hate that expresses power, and hate that comes from powerlessness; there is revenge, and there is hate that comes from envy. There is hate that was love, and hate that is a curious expression of love. There is hate of the other, and hate of something that reminds us too much of ourselves. There is the oppressor's hate, and the victim's hate. There is hate that burns slowly, and hate that fades. And there is hate that explodes, and hate that never catches fire.
Andrew Sullivan
Everybody said, "Follow your heart". I did, it got broken
Agatha Christie
For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth".
A.S. Byatt
The integrity of men is to be measured by their conduct not by their professions.
Junius
It’s one of the things I love about the sea, the way you can see weather afar. It’s like looking at the future.
Carol Birch
... I love him... not because he's handsome... but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same...
Emily Brontë
I'm sure anyone who likes a good crime, provided it is not the victim.
Alfred Hitchcock
And he smote the Balrog upon the mountainside.
J.R.R. Tolkien
She had never had a friend like this, in her private room, combing her hair, listening to her, talking about silly nonsense and the uselessness of one's parents; how the future was perfect, because they hadn't lived it yet.
Jessie Burton
Then as we passed down this Passage we were knocked against certain Women of the Town, who gave us Eye-language, since there were many Corners and Closets in Bedlam where they would stop and wait for Custom: indeed it was known as a sure Market for Lechers and Loiterers, for tho' they came in Single they went out by Pairs. This is a Showing-room for Whores, I said.And what better place for Lust, Sir Chris. replied, than among those whose Wits have fled?
Peter Ackroyd