Quotes by British Authors - Page 177

Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.
P.D. James
To character and success two things contradictory as they may seem must go together-humble dependence and manly independence humble dependence on God and manly reliance on self.
William Wordsworth
The word spread. tIt began with the techno-literates: young summoners who couldn’t quite get their containment circles right and who had fallen back on Facebook to keep themselves occupied while the sacred incense was cooked in their mum’s microwaves; eager diviners who scoured the internet for clues as to the future of tomorrow, and who read the truth of things in the static at the corners of the screen; bored vampires who knew that it was too early to go out and hunt, too late still to be in the coffin. The message was tweeted and texted onwards, sent out through the busy wires of the city, from laptop to PC, PC to Mac, from mobile phones the size of old breeze blocks through to palm-held devices that not only received your mail, but regarded it as their privilege to sort it into colour-coordinated categories for your consideration. The word was whispered between the statues that sat on the imperial buildings of Kingsway, carried in the scuttling of the rats beneath the city streets, flashed from TV screen to TV screen in the flickering windows of the shuttered electronics stores, watched over by beggars and security cameras, and the message said: tWe are Magicals Anonymous. tWe are going to save the city.
Kate Griffin
No matter how much you revisit the past, there's nothing new to see.
Robert Tew
With today’s technology, social attitudes and appetite for self-actualisation, we’d ideally look upon our work with a sense of pride, involvement and accomplishment. But we’re rarely given the chance. Instead, we pretend to love our jobs with an almost idiotic zeal, while being secretly exhausted and insulted by them.
Robert Wringham
But the other Ministers considered that to employ a magician was one thing, novelists were quite another and they would not stoop to it.
Susanna Clarke
For myself, I favored the abstract. I collected not just obsolete terms and words, but ideas.
Jasper Fforde
We became six people at a table in Hampton Court. We rose and walked together down the avenue. In the thin, the unreal twilight, fitfully like the echo of voices laughing down some alley, geniality returned to me and flesh. Against the gateway, against some cedar tree I saw blaze bright, Neville, Jinny, Rhoda, Louis, Susan and myself, our life, our identity. Still King William seemed an unreal monarch and his crown mere tinsel. But we – against the brick, against the branches, we six, out of how many million millions, for one moment out of what measureless abundance of past time and time to come, burnt there triumphant. The moment was all; the moment was enough.
Virginia Woolf
What is worth pursuing is worth staying on course for.
Steven Redhead
I believe that just because something didn’t go the way you planned it once, it’s no reason not to try again.
Chantelle Shaw
The substance of what I have to say to the disadvantage of the theory and practice of universal suffrage is that it tends to invert what I should have regarded as the true and natural relation between wisdom and folly. I think that wise and good men ought to rule those who are foolish and bad. To say that the sole function of the wise and good is to preach to their neighbors, and that everyone indiscriminately should be left to do what he likes, should be provided with a ratable share of the sovereign power in the shape of the vote, and that the result of this will be the direction of power by wisdom, seems to me the wildest romance that ever got possession of any considerable number of minds.
James Fitzjames Stephen
Justice is truth in action.~ BENJAMIN DISRAELI, speech, Feb. 11, 1851
Benjamin Disraeli
Everyday can be extraordinaryAnd ripe,Like a flower burst,If the will is there.
Scott Hastie
Moving on was going to require leaving the woods and getting a friend set that didn’t have gray hairs, hip replacements and a few false teeth.
Rebecca Brooks
The good news is that Jesus is coming back. The bad news is that he's really pissed off.
Bob Hope
O Caledonia! stern and wild Meet nurse for a poetic child! Land of brown heath and shaggy wood Land of the mountain and the flood Land of my sires! what mortal hand Can e'er untie the filial band That knits me to thy rugged strand!
Walter Scott
Within each of us is a light, awake, encoded in the fibers of our existence. Divine ecstasy is the totality of this marvelous creation experienced in the hearts of humanity
Tony Samara
We can build upon foundations anywhere if they are well and truly laid.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
We are under the spell always of what is distant from us. It is not in our nature to desire passionately what is near at hand.
Alec Waugh
Waiting for a book to be published is like having a baby. It would be nine months before we heard the patter of tiny pages trotting through the letter box, and the bookcase shuffled it's shelves in boredom and I was a martyr to morning sickness.
Deric Longden
Aliena's brother, Richard, sometimes reminded her of her father, with a look or a gesture, and that was when she felt a surge of affection.
Ken Follett
Consistency also teaches us that some things do not change, though we may wish they would. Not everything bends to our personal preferences.
Kim John Payne
I believe there is an explanation for everything - although we shall never know the explanation for everything. Not everything in this world can be understood by us, nor should it be. It is not necessary.
Steve Augarde
Only after a person has their heart broken does the world appear as it truly is.
Michael Gilbert
Mac had many admirable qualities, but not tact. He was the sort of man who would have tried to cheer Napoleon up by talking about the Winter Sports at Moscow.
P.G. Wodehouse
Most Politicians Are The Whores at The Establishment Party, But We're The Ones Getting Fucked
Dean Cavanagh
Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It's made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!
Roald Dahl
All that sadness. All that anger. It is the smoke that gets into your eyes. If you do not blow it away, how can you hope to see?
Anthony Horowitz
It is not blindly pushing your own agenda that will really create rich opportunities in your life, career, business – and in the world. It’s is your ability to understand, appreciate, anticipate, address, add value to that of others that will.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Those old hypocrites. They talk about killing witches but the Good Book’s full of magic. Turning the Nile to blood and parting the Red Sea. What’s that if it’s not good old-fashioned magic? Want a little water into wine? No trouble! How about raising the dead man Lazarus? Just say the word!
Clive Barker
Unlike sport in business the win-win is the best possible score
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Use that fluff of yours you call a brain.
Agatha Christie
The book is almost always better than the movie. You could have no better case in point than FROM HELL, Alan Moore's best graphic novel to date, brilliantly illustrated by Eddie Campbell. It's hard to describe just how much better the book is.It's like, "If the movie was an episode of Battlestar Galactica with a guest appearance by the Smurfs and everyone spoke Dutch, the graphic novel is Citizen Kane with added sex scenes and music by your favourite ten bands and everyone in the world you ever hated dies at the end." That's how much better it is.
Warren Ellis
She said we all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don't to make it all bearable.
Neil Gaiman
But if you don't understand that story is character and not just idea, you will not be able to breathe life into even the most intriguing flash of inspiration.
Elizabeth George
Whatever he knows of his weaknesses, Private Mulvaney is wholly ignorant of his strength.
Rudyard Kipling
Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.
P.D. James
Everything I learned I learned from themovies.
Audrey Hepburn
There is no scientific answer for success. You can't define it. You've simply got to live it and do it.
Anita Roddick
I don't think she can see her husband very often, for he teaches the university students during the day, and works at the telescope at night. I wonder if she hopes for cloudy nights and then feels guilty.
Pippa Goldschmidt
I was just thinking how the purr of a contented cat is one of my favorite sounds in the world. There's something so comforting about it, isn't there?
Laura Lam
society has an embarrassing history of denial
Carolyn Spring
The smug mask of virtue triumphant could be almost as horrible as the face of wickedness revealed.
Terry Pratchett
Furnishing was not a priority in the Citadel. Shelves, stools, tables... There was a rumor among the novices that priests towards the top of the hierarchy had golden furniture, but there was no sign of it here. The room was as severe as anything in the novices' quarters although it had, perhaps, a more opulent severity; it wasn't the forced bareness of poverty, but the starkness of intent.
Terry Pratchett
I am not an angel,' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.
Charlotte Brontë
If you put a woman in a man's position she will be more efficient but no more kind.
Fay Weldon
After she married the Duke of York, she immediately transformed his life, bringing him love, understanding, sympathy and support for which he had always craved. She inspired him, she calmed him and she enabled him for the first time in his life to believe in himself. Her sense of humor awoke his own, her natural gaiety lightened him. Their marriage was a rare union in which each complemented and enhanced the other.
William Shawcross
The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.
Samuel Johnson
The quest of the alchemists to turn lead into gold is a metaphor for our attempts to turn the base metal of ourselves, that person hooked on consumerism, filled with angst and ambition, into the gold of what we can be and really are.
Chloe Thurlow
If words are to enter men's minds and bear fruit, they must be the right words shaped cunningly to pass men's defenses and explode silently and effectually within their minds.
J.B. Phillips
You are still thinking like a child, talking about friendship and crap. You’ll regret it when you see one of them die in front of you.
Charles Lee
Sometimes it lasts in love, But sometimes it hurts instead
Adele Adkins
A man must be a Salomon before his magical ring will work. (Hafiz)
Idries Shah
The only time you have no opportunities is when you decide to stop taking them.
Danny Wallace
We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.
Douglas Adams
But pecuniary interest is clearly not in your nature. How quaint. I have written about people who don't care for money, but I never expected to meet one. Therefor I conclude that the difficulty concerns integrity. People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appauling obsession with personal integrity." - Vida Winter
Diane Setterfield
I know that she deserves the best and purest love the heart of man can offer," said Mrs. Maylie; "I know that the devotion and affection of her nature require no ordinary return, but one that shall be deep and lasting.
Charles Dickens
Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.
Talli Roland
A rubber doll with a microchip can imitate human flesh without human feeling. Porn leaves an emptiness inside. Erotica sets up a vibration in the mind that sends pulsing waves through the body.
Chloe Thurlow
A brief life burns brightly.
Stephen Baxter