Quotes by British Authors - Page 180

Tyler was just like any other girl now. She was manipulative and greedy. She was a witch in fucking sexy high heels.
Jaimie Roberts
In those sticky summer nights in South London our windows stay open and our tiny apartment becomes our secret garden. The magic of the secret garden is that it exists in our imagination. There are no limits, no borderlines. The secret garden leads to the marigolds of Mogadishu and the magnolias of Kingston and when the heat turns us sticky and sweet and unwilling to be claimed by defeat we own the night. We own our bodies. We own our lives.
Diriye Osman
Hell-on-skis, can you hear me? This is flying cupcake.
Joss Stirling
One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness.
Iris Murdoch
I can dip the pen in my own blood if I choose.
Marie Corelli
In grief more than in joy, man longs to know that the universe turns around him.
Mary Renault
She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
When you fall short of your goals and dreams ask yourself is it your mindset, perspective, expectations, effort, approach, acceptance, company or a blend of these that needs to change.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
You let go. It's as simple and as complicated as Antonia had told me. You cry. You come. You sing. You laugh. You scream. You let go. No one needs to hang on to a first edition. Whoever wrote it; even if it was Moses. I looked back up at the sky, blinking at the lustrous beauty of the ascending and departing demons. They formed an alphabet I was beginning to learn to read. They were fire in the sky.
Graham Joyce
of the few certainties I've come across in life, one of them is that when a person says money is no object, the opposite is most likely true. Money is the only object—or will be.
James Anderson
Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language or music without atmosphere.
James Martineau
When we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we grow up, and we were free to travel around the counry, we would always go and find it in Norfolk...And that's why years and years later, that day Tommy and I found another copy of that lost tape of mine in a town on the Norfolk coast, we didn't just think it pretty funny; we both felt deep down some tug, some old wish to believe again in something that was once close to our hearts.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Life isn't about just talking, it's about thinking too.
Marie Symeou
We want your skull! Make no bones about it!
Anthony T.Hincks
In some remote regions of Islam it is said a woman caught unveiled by a stranger will raise her skirt to cover her face.
Raymond Mortimer
The Who got paid 4000 pounds during those days, but we always smashed our equipment that cost more than 5000 pounds.
Pete Townshend
It was safe to assume he'd not only read the play but then re-read it, cross-referenced the annotations, and probably joined an online chat group called Buds of the Bard or something equally nerdy
Simon Holt
What we see depends mainly on what we look for.
John Lubbock
My love translated sounds like a dead language.
Salma Deera
Stale beer sticks to wobbling tables. The cigarette machine flashes in the corner, mocking smokers who never have any change on them. There’s no natural light in this pub, so it’s dark and gloomy. The pain on the face of the staff tells its own story: overworked, underpaid, exploited and treated as expendable. I feel at home with them. They’re so scared they will be fired from their terrible jobs, every time I order a beer they ask me if I want any peanuts or crisps, in case between drinks I’ve turned into the dreaded mystery shopper. The air is chewy and weighs heavy on the skin. The fruit machines in the corners don’t make a sound, aware this is the last stop saloon for the drunk few who can’t afford to gamble properly. Everyone here is down to their last pint and pound.
Craig Stone
Be as promiscuous as the rabbits!' said Hammond. 'Why not? What's wrong with rabbits? Are they any worse than a neurotic, revolutionary humanity, full of nervous hate?
D.H. Lawrence
Hush my dear lie still and slumber Holy angels guard thy bed! Heavenly blessings without number Gently falling on thy head.
Isaac Watts
It is these big-hearted sons of the soil, no matter what their cast or creed, who will one day weld the contending factions into a composite whole, and make of India a great nation.
Jim Corbett
If I was a cynic I would be wondering if sooner or later some charismatic douche-bag might stomp all over this Little House on the Prairie dream of yours.
Stephen Baxter
The demons were scary, but girls - Well, girls are really terrifying
Darren Shan
We had so many dreams as children. Where do they go when we grow? Are they swallowed up by the mundane things of everyday life? Or do we lose them, leave them behind us in the dust, for new children to find and take up?
Helen Hollick
The safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope soft underfoot without sudden turnings without milestones without signposts.
C.S. Lewis
Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.
Aldous Huxley
I knew, of course, that I should be well paid for my services, but I would gladly have accepted half the sum I expected if I could have had it that night, for our little treasury was wholly exhausted, and we had not sixpence to purchase a breakfast for the following day. When the great hall door shut upon me, and I found myself on the pavement, with all the luxury and splendour on one side, and I and my desolation on the other, the contrast struck me cruelly, for I too, had been rich, and dwelt in illuminated palaces, and had a train of liveried servants at my command, and sweet music had echoed through my halls. I felt desperate, and drawing my hat over my eyes I began pacing the square, forming wild plans for the relief or escape from my misery. ("The Italian's Story")
Catherine Crowe
Yes; he had done it. She was in the carriage, and felt that he had placed her there, that his will and his hands had done it, that she owed it to his perception of her fatigue, and his resolution to give her rest. She was very much affected by the view of his disposition towards her, which all these things made apparent. This little circumstance seemed the completion of all that had gone before. She understood him. He could not forgive her, but he could not be unfeeling. Though condemning her for the past, and considering it with high and unjust resentment, though perfectly careless of her, and though becoming attached to another, still he could not see her suffer, without the desire of giving her relief. It was a remainder of former sentiment; it was an impulse of pure, though unacknowledged friendship; it was a proof of his own warm and amiable heart, which she could not contemplate without emotions so compounded of pleasure and pain, that she knew not which prevailed.
Jane Austen
If you can't get everyone on your side, make sure they're right behind you.
Benny Bellamacina
Be frank and explicit. That is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and to confuse the minds of others.
Benjamin Disraeli
Music. A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.
C.S. Lewis
You ought to give up detecting and try fantasy writing, Strike
Robert Galbraith
I was a slave, but never a fool. This empire is vast beyond imagining and we have killed only a fraction of the force they will bring against us. They will kill us, all of us, for we are slaves and we cannot be allowed even the barest hope of freedom. Without us, they have no empire.
Anthony Ryan
Every profession is an island whose inhabitants earn a precarious living by taking in each other’s washing.
Amanda Craig
No amount of expertly choreographed PR could prevail, in the end, against Armageddon. It strolled over the barricades and took its pleasure.
M.R. Carey
The smallest issues can become the most important things in life and reality slips away.
David Millar
Are you afraid in there?" she said softly, as the men called out for them."No," he said. "I'm not afraid. You lock me in. They won't get me."She closed the door on the little white face, turned the key in the lock. Then she slipped the key into her pocket. The lock was hidden by a pivoting device shaped like a light switch. It was impossible to see the outline of the cupboard in the paneling of the wall. Yes, he'd be safe there. She was sure of it.The girl murmured his name and laid her palm flat on the wooden panel."I'll come back for you later. I promise.
Tatiana de Rosnay
I’d love to be tried out,’ I said, with a suggestive smile. ‘One should always explore something, before one goes in deeper.’I saw a little flicker of fun in his eyes.
Fiona Thrust
Friendship is seldom lasting but between equals or where the superiority on one side is reduced by some equivalent advantage on the other.
Samuel Johnson
… what I’m saying is that if we and all the other species on earth are the only life forms in the universe and if there are no gods and let’s face it apart from a few tired scrolls written 300 years after the death of Jesus and his disciples there is no actual proof of a God or gods then we, the humans, who are meant to be at the height of the evolutionary tree, are in fact at the bottom because no other species on this planet is enslaved to the economy. Every other species is born free and lives free. We humans are born into economic slavery and life crippling debt.
Arun D. Ellis
It's just because I have picked a little about mystics that I have no use for mystagogues. Real mystics don't hide mysteries, they reveal them. They set a thing up in broad daylight, and when you've seen it it's still a mystery. But the mystagogues hide a thing in darkness and secrecy, and when you find it, it's a platitude.
G.K. Chesterton
and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves as one, but every child was conducting itself like forty.
Charles Dickens
Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.
J.B. Priestley
Have a scaffold erected in the square. We shall hang a traitor or two before dinner. And perhaps afterwards as well.
Thaddeus White
If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
P.D. James
A race preserves its vigour so long as it harbours a real contrast between what has been and what may be and so long as it is nerved by the vigour to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
Alfred North Whitehead
Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.
Virginia Woolf
Make good use of bad rubbish.
Elizabeth Beresford
Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.
Alan Keightley
She had received ideas which disposed her to be courteous and kind to all, and to pity every one, as being less happy than herself.
Jane Austen
Democracy provides the institutional framework for the reform of political institutions (other than this framework). It makes possible the reform of institutions without using violence, and thereby the use of reason in the designing of new institutions and the adjusting of old ones. It cannot provide reason. The question of the intellectual and moral standard of its citizens is to a large degree a personal problem. (The idea that this problem can be tackled, in turn, by an institutional eugenic and educational control is, I believe, mistaken ; some reasons for my belief will be given below.) It is quite wrong to blame democracy for the political shortcomings of a democratic state. We should rather blame ourselves. In a non-democratic state, the only way to achieve reasonable reforms is by the violent overthrow of the government, and the introduction of a democratic framework. Those who criticize democracy on any ' moral ' grounds fail to distinguish between personal and institutional problems. It rests with us to improve matters. The democratic institutions cannot improve themselves. The problem of improving them is always a problem of persons rather than of institutions.
Karl R. Popper
For London, Blampied claimed, was of all cities in the world the most autumnal —its mellow brickwork harmonizing with fallen leaves and October sunsets, just as the etched grays of November composed themselves with the light and shade of Portland stone. There was a charm, a deathless charm, about a city whose inhabitants went about muttering, "The nights are drawing in," as if it were a spell to invoke the vast, sprawling creature-comfort of winter.
James Hilton
To do something you're afraid of, especially for the sake of somebody else, is the very definition of courage.
Michelle Harrison
Ambition: it is the last infirmity of noble minds.
J.M. Barrie
We are small but we are manyWe are many we are smallWe were here before you roseWe will be here when you fall
Neil Gaiman
I don't know how you hear music. I imagine that if you like music at all then it has, in your head, some kind of third dimension to it, a dimension suggesting space as well as surface, depth of field as well as texture.Speaking for myself, I used to hear "buildings"... three-dimensional forms of architectural substance and tension. I did not "see" these buildings in the classic synaesthetic way so much as sense them. These forms had "floors", "walls", "roofs", "windows", "cellars". They expressed volume. Music to me has always been a handsome three-dimensional container, a vessel, as real in its way as a Scout hut or a cathedral or a ship, with an inside and an outside and subdivided internal spaces.I'm absolutely certain that this "architecture" had everything to do with why music has always exerted such a hold over me. I think music was the structure in which I learned to contain and then examine emotion.
Nick Coleman
How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.
Julian Barnes
Fear is the denomination of the Old Testament belief is the denomination of the New.
Benjamin Whichcote