Quotes by British Authors - Page 181

The sun was beginning to set and the water was sparkling in the low light as the onshore breeze that had built up through the heat of the day rippled across the reflective surface, breaking it into a million diamonds of yellow-white light.
Emma Bamford
The sky darkened, the air grew colder, but he didn't mind. It didn't occur to him to move. This was the right place. This was where he had wanted to be.
Pat Barker
Mollycoddling was the mother's duty; the father's lay elsewhere. As a consequence, his four older children feared and respected him, as they had been taught to do, and the love the professed to feel, had they been asked and had they answered truthfully or even had access to the truth, was of a duty-bound, obligatory kind too, a love issuing from commandment and tradition and the notion of family, not one from the tides of the heart or the unbridled, inexplicable pull of feelings. If painted, that love would take the form of a polite and manicured wash of pleasant colours, not the hurl-and-splatter of impastoed reds.
Neel Mukherjee
She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy.
Graham Greene
I certainly don’t like the idea of missionaries. In fact, the whole business fills me with fear and alarm. I don’t believe in God, or at least not in the one we’ve invented for ourselves in England to fulfill our peculiarly English needs, and certainly not in the ones they’ve invented in America, who supply their servants with toupees, television stations, and, most important, toll-free telephone numbers. I wish that people who did believe in such things would keep them to themselves and not export them to the developing world.
Douglas Adams
A question is far more subversive, biblically, than a statement.
Os Guinness
You can't buy love but you can pay heavily for it.
Henny Youngman
And although the space they occupy isn’t like normalspace, nevertheless they are packed in tightly. Not a cubic inch there but is filled by a claw, a talon, a scale, the tip of atail, so the effect is like one of those trick drawings andyour eyeballs eventually realize that the space between eachdragon is, in fact, another dragon.
Terry Pratchett
Do the thing that scares you.
Jill Telford
She had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly.
Thomas Hardy
Combinations of people, who should have nothing to say to each other. Yet, with hearts that do not recognize it.
Tracy Rees
Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word "glory" a meaning for me.
C.S. Lewis
Only fate would decree how it reached its destiny, which always waited just around the corner, over the hill...
Virginia Alison
Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature— at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it comes— is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune.
Lewis Carroll
I love your body 'cause I've lost my mind If you want someone to talk to, you're wasting your time If you want someone to share your life, you need someone who's alive And if every relationship is a two-way street, I have been screwing in the back whilst you driveI never said I was deep, but I am profoundly shallow My lack of knowledge is vast, and my horizons are narrow I never said I was big, I never said that I was clever And if you're waiting to find what's going on in my mind, you could be waiting forever Forever and everI can dance you to the end of the night 'cause I'm afraid of the dark I have to confess: I'm out of my depth You're going over my head and straight through my heartSome girls like to play it dirty, some girls want to be your mum Me, I disrespected you whilst we were waiting for the taxi to come My morality is shabby, my behaviour unacceptable No, I'm not looking for a relationship, just a willing receptacleI never said I was... I never said I was... I never said I was...I never said I was deep, but I am profoundly shallow My lack of knowledge is vast, and my horizons are narrow Oh, yeah. I never said I was big, I never said that I was clever And if you're waiting to find what's going on in my mind, you could be waiting forever Forever and ever
Jarvis Cocker
Guilt is a feeble emotion. It surrenders too easily
Deborah McKinlay
There is nothing so rewarding as to make people realize that they are worthwhile in this world.
Bob Anderson
Evolutionary psychologists suggest that, just as the eye is an evolved organ for seeing, and the wing an evolved organ for flying, so the brain is a collection of organs (or 'modules') for dealing with a set of specialist data-processing needs.
Richard Dawkins
There is a strong disposition in youth, from which some individuals never escape, to suppose that everyone else is having a more enjoyable time than we are ourselves;
Anthony Powell
O that I were a man, or that I had powerTo execute my apprehended wishes!I would whip some with scorpions.
John Webster
My armor is like tenfold shields, my teeth are swords, my claws spears, the shock of my tail a thunderbolt, my wings a hurricane, and my breath death!
J.R.R. Tolkien
The mind which renounces once and forever a futile hope has its compensations in ever-growing calm.
George R. Gissing
Spain, for so long a mere geographical expression, was somehow transformed into an historical fact.
J.H. Elliott
Being crazy lets me do some pretty insane things.
Anthony T.Hincks
There are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it.
Jeanette Winterson
The heresy of an age of reason,' or some such slovos [words]. 'I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.
Anthony Burgess
I want my name to mean me.
Mark Haddon
I asked him if it were a mirage, and he said yes. I said it was a dream, and he agreed, But said it was the desert's dream not his. And he told me that in a year or so, when he had aged enough for any man, then he would walk into the wind, until he saw the tents. This time, he said, he would go on with them.
Neil Gaiman
Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is, and not so much a matter of being real.
Laurence Olivier
The future is just a memory that has yet to be born
Dean Cavanagh
Marcia was silent a moment. Then a sort of softer gleam came into her angry eye."Tell me some more about her," she said.Adele clapped her hands."Ah, that's splendid," she said. "You're beginning to feel kinder. What we would do without our Lucia I can't imagine. I don't know what there would be to talk about.""She's ridiculous!" said Marcia relapsing a little."No, you mustn't feel that," said Adele. "You mustn't laugh at her ever. You must just richly enjoy her.""She's a snob!" said Marcia, as if this was a tremendous discovery."So am I: so are you: so are we all," said Adele. "We all run after distinguished people like--like Alf and Marcelle. The difference between you and Lucia is entirely in her favour, for you pretend you're not a snob, and she is perfectly frank and open about it. Besides, what is a duchess like you for except to give pleasure to snobs? That's your work in the world, darling; that's why you were sent here. Don't shirk it, or when you're old you will suffer agonies of remorse. And you're a snob too. You liked having seven--or was it seventy?--Royals at your dance.""Well, tell me some more about Lucia," said Marcia, rather struck by this ingenious presentation of the case."Indeed I will: I long for your conversion to Luciaphilism. Now to-day there are going to be marvellous happenings...
E.F. Benson
Trillian did a little research in the ship's copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It had some advice to offer on drunkenness. "Go to it," it said, "and good luck.
Douglas Adams
There is nothing more painful than the untimely death of someone young and dear to the heart. The harrowing grief surges from a bottomless well of sorrow, drowning the mourner in a torrent of agonizing pain; an exquisite pain that continues to afflict the mourner with heartache and loneliness long after the deceased is buried and gone.
Jocelyn Murray
Watch for subjects as you go but the city or the country. Keep your eyes and ears open, and you will hear and see angels.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
The good life as I conceive it is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Bertrand Russell
Christmas works like glue, it keeps us all sticking together.
Rosie Thomas
It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.
Arnold Bennett
After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?
Russell Hoban
Finally, I could see with startling clarity that the time I had spent experiencing pain on a run was outweighed by the amount of time that I felt good about it. I was aglow. I was invincible. I was thinking I might be able to do it again.
Alexandra Heminsley
I'm a man of few words, most of them end in off!
Kensington Gore
I live for sex. I celebrate it, and relish the electricity of it, with every fibre of my being. I can see no better reason for being alive.
Fiona Thrust
The charm of your society, my Sparrow, lies in not knowing what you will say next – though one rapidly learns to expect the worst!
Georgette Heyer
Some breakfast food manufacturer hit upon the simple notion of emptying out the leavings of carthorse nose bags, adding a few other things like unconsumed portions of chicken layer's mash, and the sweepings of racing stables, packing the mixture in little bags and selling them in health food shops.
Frank Muir
I find that if you just talk, your mouth comes up with stuff.
Karl Pilkington
The motor car with its blinds drawn and an air of inscrutable reserve proceeded towards Piccadilly, still gazed at, still ruffling the faces on both sides of the street with the same dark breath of veneration whether for Queen, Prince, or Prime Minister nobody knew. The face itself had been seen only once by three people for a few seconds. Even the sex was now in dispute. But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand's-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and only time, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth. The face in the motor car will then be known.
Virginia Woolf
The heart is greater than the universe, for it can find pity in it for everything in the universe, and the universe itself can feel no pity. The heart is greater than a King, because a heart can know a King for what he is, and still love him. And once you give your heart, you cannot take it back.
Neil Gaiman
For what is done or learned by one class of women becomes by virtue of their common womanhood the property of all women.
Elizabeth Blackwell
Then there are the optimists. The story continues, but it stays the same. The princess lives happily ever after with her prince, probably pops out a few kids and carries on the bloodline. Marriages survive, families continue, and good prevails over evil. These are the people who cannot bear deviations from the rule. Everything fits into neat little boxes. When bad things happen, they ignore it, or use some quote about everything happening for a reason, or what doesn't kill us make us stronger. They carry on without even talking about their bad experiences, pretending everything is all right.
Sarah Dalton
I was tired of being me.
Rachel Ward
Accepting trial and error means accepting error. It means taking problems in our stride when a decision doesn't work out, whether through luck or misjudgment. And that is not something human brains seem to be able to do without a struggle.
Tim Harford
If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
C.S. Lewis
I would have offered you a forest of truth, but you wish to speak of a single leaf
David Gemmell
Some might question whether it makes sense to talk about setting up the experiment and running it again with exactly the same conditions--that it is, in fact, impossible. Locally, you might get the conditions exactly the same, but you have to embed the experiment in the universe, and that has moved on. You can't rewind the wave function of the universe and rerun it. The universe is a one-time-only experiment that includes us as part of its wave function, and there's no going back.
Marcus du Sautoy
The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.
Jeanette Winterson
The world is God's world after all.
Charles Kingsley
Sometimes I turn around and catch the smell of you and I cannot go on I cannot fucking go on without expressing this terrible so fucking awful physical aching fucking longing I have for you. And I cannot believe that I can feel this for you and you feel nothing. Do you feel nothing?
Sarah Kane
I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.
Jeanette Winterson
The secret to living a strong life is right in front of you, calling to you every day. It can be found in your emotional reaction to specific moments in your life.
Marcus Buckingham
To shrink back from all that can be called Nature into negative spirituality is as if we ran away from horses instead of learning to ride. There is in our present pilgrim condition plenty of room (more room than most of us like) for abstinence and renunciation and mortifying our natural desires. But behind all asceticism the thought should be, ‘Who will trust us with the true wealth if we cannot be trusted even with the wealth that perishes?’ Who will trust me with a spiritual body if I cannot control even an earthly body? These small and perishable bodies we now have were given to us as ponies are given to schoolboys. We must learn to manage: not that we may some day be free of horses altogether but that some day we may ride bare-back, confident and rejoicing, those greater mounts, those winged, shining and world- shaking horses which perhaps even now expect us with impatience, pawing and snorting in the King’s stables. Not that the gallop would be of any value unless it were a gallop with the King; but how else— since He has retained His own charger—should we accompany Him?
C.S. Lewis
Any flights would be taken business class, since Roger thought that the whole point of having money, if it had to be summed up in a single point, which it couldn't, but if you had to, the whole point of having a bit of money was not to have to fly scum class.
John Lanchester