Quotes by British Authors - Page 185

Love I never associated with the senses, it was not even passion that I wanted; it was a conscious, subtle, elaborate sensuality, which I knew not how to procure.
Arthur Symons
Margaret had often wondered at the disturbance that takes place in the world's waters when Love, who seems so tiny a pebble, slips in. Whom does Love concern beyond the beloved and the lover? Yet his impact deluges a hundred shores,
E.M. Forster
Is the undertaker joyous when his turn comes around? All those years holding the door open. To pass through - does it feel like a privileged?
Richard Smyth
If you were lucky, very lucky indeed, there were one or two people in your life who you could tell the unvarnished truth too, shell and egg. And that these people held the essence of you inside them. The rest would be conversations that ended when night fell, or the dinner part ended.
Julia Gregson
Our power of being happy lies a good deal in ourselves, I believe.
Charlotte Brontë
A drainless shower of light is poesy 'tis the supreme of power 'tis might half slumb'ring on its own right arm.
John Keats
Sometimes all the players get a bad hand. You just have to be determined enough to see the game through.
Dean F. Wilson
Remember diamonds are created under pressure so hold on, it be your time to shine soon.
Sope Agbelusi
And the poor lady, so small in her black satin, shrivelled up and sallow, with her funny corkscrew curls, took the little boy on her lap and put her arms around him and wept as though her heart would break. But her tears were partly tears of happiness, for she felt that the strangeness between them was gone. She loved him now with a new love because he had made her suffer.
W Somerset Maugham
Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life
Martin Amis
It's red hot, mate. I hate to think of this sort of book getting in the wrong hands. As soon as I've finished this, I shall recommend they ban it.
Tony Hancock
Not his match! And have you not the heart in you to be anything but best? How many are his match? How many in this world do you think stand in the front rank? Are all the rest of us to give up and sit on our hands rather than serve humbly where we deserve?
Edith Pargeter
He is an old bore even the grave yawns for him.
Herbert Beerbohm Tree
Well we've left behind the 200X's, and we move onto the 20XX's. Maybe that will finally make us feel like we're living in the future, rather than a media controlled slave state where an iPhone is worth substantially more than a human life. Happy new year.
Yahtzee Croshaw
How ya doin'?' I always think, What kind of a question is that?, and I always reply, 'A bit early to tell.
Christopher Hitchens
We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading.
C.S. Lewis
In matters of religion and matrimony I never give advice, because I will not have anybody's torments in this world or the next laid to my charge.
Philip Dormer Stanhope
Mathematics effectively began when a few Greek friends got together to talk about numbers and lines and angles.
C.S. Lewis
[What Rushdie took away from reading Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum]: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be ruthless. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping like sand, through our fingers.
Salman Rushdie
You are human and fallible.
Charlotte Brontë
Mon cher docteur! Do you not think I know the female mentality? The village gossip, it is based always, always on the relations of the sexes. If a man poisons his wife in order to travel to the North Pole or to enjoy the peace of a bachelor existence—it would not interest his fellow-villagers for a minute!
Agatha Christie
We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them.
Samuel Butler
The factor that made him so powerful was also his greatest liability.
Peter Heather
Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
Cyril Connolly
Wealth, if not a mere flash in the pan, compels the wealthy to become wealthier.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Life can be moulded anyway that you would like.
Steven Redhead
A pair of jeans makes you feel good.A pair of Levis make you feel special!
Anthony T.Hincks
We used to talk and smile seven days ago when I was wearing a suit. Now I'm dressed in a beard and smell of dog shit I don’t even get eye contact. I ask her how her week is going, and she looks to her friend behind the counter as if to say: I think this creep is hitting on me. Shall we call the police?
Craig Stone
Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body.
Aldous Huxley
I never knew anyone actually buy cakes when they were hot ...
Ruth Rendell
A meal should always lie lightly on the estomac," said Poirot. "It should not be so heavy as to paralyze thought.
Agatha Christie
It is more important that you should know about the reverses than about the successes of the war. We shall have all eternity to celebrate the victories, but we have only the few hours before sunset in which to win them. We are not winning them as we should, because the fact of the reverses is so little realized, and the needed reinforcements are not forthcoming, as they would be in the position were thoroughly understood...So we have tried to tell you the truth the uninteresting, unromantic truth.
Amy Carmichael
Walk the streets by moonlight, if you dare, and you will see sinners then. Watch when the night is dark, and the wind is howling, and the picklock is grating in the door, and you will see sinners then. Go to jail and walk through the wards, and see the men with heavy, over-hanging brows, men whom you would not like to meet out at night, and there are sinners there. Go to the Reformatories, and see those who have betrayed an early and a juvenile depravity, and you will see sinners there. Go across the seas to the place where a man will gnaw a bone upon which is reeking human flesh, and there is a sinner there. Go you where you will, and ransack earth to find sinners, for they are common enough; you may find them in every lane and street, of every city and town, and village and hamlet. It is for such that Jesus died. If you will select me the grossest specimen of humanity, if he be but born of woman, I will have hope of him yet, because the gospel of Christ is come to sinners, and Jesus Christ is come to seek and to save sinners. Electing love has selected some of the worst to be made the best. Redeeming love has bought, specially bought, many of the worst to be the reward of the Savior's passion. Effectual grace calls out and compels to come in many of the vilest of the vile.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I will not serve God like a labourer, in expectation of my wages.
Idries Shah
Never, never, never give in!
Winston S. Churchill
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
Walter Bagehot
Today is the day after my wedding. And nothing is the way I expected it to be.
Rachel Abbott
The gateway to the underworld is seen as part antiquity and part theatre. Welcome to the lower depths.
Peter Ackroyd
People get it wrong when they talk about innocence: they think it’s something to do with ignorance about the facts of sex and all the nasty things that happen in the world. But facts don’t change people: it’s understanding how the facts feel that does.
Alexia Casale
How things change,’ I say, ‘how strange that, even when all is lost, we can still find beauty in simple things.
Judith Arnopp
...and who must have had something real about her, or she could not have existed, but it certainly was not her hair, or her teeth, or her figure, or her complexion.
Charles Dickens
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every living organism to live beyond its income.
Samuel Butler
What I am going to propose is that you write a novel.As you know, the practical advantages of being able to write out your thoughts fluently are very great. For one thing, when you are used to writing them out, they present themselves, one after another. When you are not used to writing them out, they mill around among themselves usually and you see nothing but heads and tails of them when you sit down to get them on paper. I know from my own experience that the first two or three hours of every exam I ever took were spent simply getting my pen warmed up, and by then it was too late.
Ted Hughes
I realize that it's not that difficult to remember what people like, especially when you care about them.
Anna Bell
We'll teach it that the humblest insect measuring out its miserable days by the pug-wuggery and skull duggery of the old Slug of Time is worth far more than this defecating bubble!
John Cowper Powys
I have been crying," she replied, simply, "and it has done me good. It helps a woman you know, just as swearing helps a man.
Horace Annesley Vachell
Always ensure to keep focus on what you desire and not what others want you to focus upon.
Steven Redhead
He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence.
William Blake
...But I do like the idea of household gods--shall we get some? A set of little statues and bring the boys up to believe in them?""I hope they believe in something," said Elspeth. 'Imagaine believing in nothing at all--not even in love, or justice, or any of the things that can make people passionate.""Such as a country?"Elspeth thought about this. "I suppose there are lots of people who believe in Scotland. Or the European Union, for that matter. Their belief anables them to ... well, to talk about the future with enthusiasm. They don't like things as they are and they are convinced that things will be much improved once they are otherwise.""Well, why not?" asked Matthew."I didn't say there was any reason why not. I'm just commenting on that sort of belief. The trouble is that it might make discussion difficult. If somebody believes to strongly in one particular solution to the world's problems, then it may obscure the nuances. That's all I was saying." Elspeth paused. "They may not see that there are others who have a different view. You can love things in a whole lot of different ways, can't you?
Alexander McCall Smith
When first I set eyes on The Isle of Wight Polar Bear, my world was filled, in that instant, with the magic and wonder of childhood - Suzy Davies, Author, "Snugs The Snow Bear
Suzy Davies
Your red dress,’ she said, and laughed.But I looked at the dress on the floor and it was as if the fire had spread across the room. It was beautiful and it reminded me of something I must do. I will remember I thought. I will remember quite soon now.
Jean Rhys
Mellow doesn't describe me. I'm hungry every day.
Alan Rickman
In the beginning was the word, and primitive societies venerated poets second only to their leaders. A poet had the power to name and so to control; he was, literally, the living memory of a group or tribe who would perpetuate their history in song; his inspiration was god given and he was in effect a medium.
Kevin Crossley-Holland
The ocean was back in the pond, and the only knowledge I was left with, as if I had woken from a dream on a summer's day, was that it had not been long ago since I had known everything. I looked at Lettie in the moonlight. "Is that how it is for you? I asked. "Is what how it is for me?" "Do you still know everything, all the time?" ...She wrinkled her nose. "Everybody did. I told you. It's nothing special, knowing how things work. And you really do have to give it all up if you want to play." "To play what?" "This," she said. She waved at the house and the sky and the impossible full moon and the skeins and the shawls and clusters of bright stars.
Neil Gaiman
A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.
Penelope Fitzgerald
My mother said I broke her heart...but it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, but it's all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us...but within that inch we are free.
Alan Moore
But a woman should not marry where there is no respect. Respect is the most important thing.
Zen Cho
Dwarfs were not a naturally religious species, but in a world where pit props could crack without warning and pockets of fire damp could suddenly explode they'd seen the need for gods as the sort of supernatural equivalent of a hard hat. Besides, when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it's nice to be able to blaspheme. It takes a very special and strong-minded kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other armpit and shout, "Oh, random-fluctuations-in-the-space-time-continuum!" or "Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!
Terry Pratchett
Religion is what you do with your solitude.
William Temple
I guess that's where faith comes in, the faith of a child to believe in Santa, the faith of an adult to believe in God, maybe faith is what makes something real? Maybe Rose had believed enough to create her own afterlife, maybe that's the reward of faith...
Gillibran Brown