Quotes by British Authors - Page 186

Here today, up and off to somewhere else tomorrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that's always changing!
Kenneth Grahame
These hotels are not consoling places. Far from it. Any number of people had hung up their hats on those pegs. Even the flies, if you thought of it, had settled on other people’s noses. As for the cleanliness which hit him in the face, it wasn’t cleanliness, so much as bareness, frigidity; a thing that had to be.
Virginia Woolf
One theme that runs through many [job hunting books] is just plain harmful: the advice to "just be yourself." Wrong. Remember that first day on your first job, when you went to get your first cup of coffee? You found the coffee machine, and there, stuck on the wall behind it, was a handwritten sign re
Martin Yate
What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.
Dean William R. Inge
The world is not perishing for the want of clever or talented or well-meaning men. It is perishing for the want of men of courage and resolution.
Robert J. McCracken
You sounded like Dolly parton on helium."(After kristy lee cook of season 7 on american idol,sang her country rendition of the Beatles'"Eight Days A Week.)
Simon Cowell
To see something marvellous with your own eyes - that’s wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you’ll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold an incomplete half of it, and that it won’t ever really exist as a whole until you’re together, talking or thinking about that moment ... that’s worth more than one plus one. It’s worth four, or eight, or some number so large we can’t even imagine it.
Alastair Reynolds
There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
Alain de Botton
The deeper interior you have the more you have in your library.
Jacqueline Bisset
I am not always good and noble. I am the hero of this story, but I have my off moments.
P.G. Wodehouse
Saying of the ProphetFoodNobody has eaten better food than that won by his own labour.
Idries Shah
Oh, right. I doubt this place has any delicious, fattening fast-food places, and maybe the Imperium doesn’t either. Yup, no McDonald’s, no Burger King, no Gino’s Pizza… Dear God, have I made a mistake coming here? I may be of small stature, but make no mistake: I am a glutton. On the other hand – possible franchise opportunity.
Giselle Simlett
Think little of yourselves, but do not think too little of your calling.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
The select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest.
George Eliot
Saint Augustine … insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity.
Karen Armstrong
Charlotte looked up doubtfully, wondering why, as she got older, she seemed to be more afraid of things, not less.
Penelope Farmer
I think before I act---and then think again. I am not entirely a coward, but I do not lose myself in action as you do.
John Christopher
Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them…digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analyses of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride comes from hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be ‘much not many.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
He has a mouth, lord," Gerbruht said."I envy him," I said."Envy him, lord?""Most of us have to lower our trews to shit.
Bernard Cornwell
what such people miscall their religion, is a vent for their bad humours and arrogance.
Charles Dickens
There is a monsterous deal of stupid quizzing, & common-place nonsense talked, but scarcely any wit.
Jane Austen
Make me immortal with a kiss.
Christopher Marlowe
Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed?
Arthur Conan Doyle
The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.
Hilary Mantel - Bring Up the Bodies
Jesus loved manhood so much, that He delighted to honour it; and since it is a high honour, and indeed, the greatest dignity of manhood, that Jesus is the Son of man,
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
... anyone can acquire wealth, the real art is giving it away.
Daisy Goodwin
The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children’s lunch boxes. The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies. What’s a kid to find out? Presumably we lord over them an exclusive deed to sex, but this pretense flies so fantastically in the face of fact that it must result from some conspiratorial group amnesia. […] In truth, we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut. The secret is there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its supression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.
Lionel Shriver
Cynicism, like gullibility, is a symptom of underdeveloped critical faculties.
Jamie Whyte
This is all a tale of an older world and a forgotten countryside. At this moment of time change has come; a screaming line of steel runs through the heather of no-man’s-land, and the holiday-maker claims the valleys for his own. But this busyness is but of yesterday, and not ten years ago the fields lay quiet to the gaze of placid beasts and the wandering stars. This story I have culled from the grave of an old fashion, and set down for the love of a great soul and the poetry of life.
John Buchan
Perhaps it also demonstrates that any young girl can live quite healthily on coarse bread and clear water – so long as she has fine clothes.
Ann Lawrence
A head can be beaten small enough until it fits the hat.
G.K. Chesterton
Choosing not only the battle but also the timing is the best way to deal with what may occur.
Steven Redhead
The opposite of busy in today's world is sustained, focused attention. It is deep engagement in activities that really matter to us, or in conversations with those we care about.
Tony Crabbe
Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over, and death is so certain an entrance to happiness – to glory?
Charlotte Brontë
To hear complaints is wearisome to the wretched and the happy alike.
Samuel Johnson
The risks in antiques fraud are relative. Other criminals risk the absolute. You've never heard of a fraudster involved in a shoot-out, of the "Come and get me, copper!" sort. Or of some con artist needing helicopter gunships to bring him. No, we subtle-mongers do it with the smile, the promise, the hint. And we have one great ally: greed. And make no mistake. Greed is everywhere, like weather.
Jonathan Gash
I fell into a restless sleep in which my dreams carried me away over misty valleys and moonlit woodlands toward a fairy glen, where I watched their beautiful midnight revels in silent awe as I whispered the words of my favorite poem. " 'You shall hear a sound like thunder, / And a veil shall be withdrawn, / When her eyes grow wide with wonder, / On that hill-top, in that dawn.
Hazel Gaynor
My Best Friend and I have spent plenty of time together, despite me being in my First Ever Relationship. This is because friends should always come first.
Holly Smale
It was not in her nature to stop short at half-measures, not to pause when once she had fixed her purpose. If she ever trembled on looking forward to the utter ruin she was about to encounter, her second emotion was to despise herself for such pusillanimity, and to be roused to renewed energy.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Hope springs eternal in the human breast.
Alexander Pope
A flicker of defiance flared very briefly in Rincewind's battered heart.
Terry Pratchett
Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision. Strong wind, earthquake-shock, and fire may pass by: but I shall follow the guiding of that still small voice which interprets the dictates of conscience.
Charlotte Brontë
We may indeed in counsel point to the higher road, but we cannot compel any free creature to walk upon it. That leadeth to tyranny, which disfigureth good and maketh it seem hateful.
J.R.R. Tolkien
If you were writing a book to be published, you might be restrained by the fear that your wild imaginings might drive some people crazy. As it is, you are free, you can go off in any direction whatsoever, so long as the flame in your mind burns that way.
Ted Hughes
O what we ben! And what we come to!
Russell Hoban
I hate to be what is called a clever girl—there are too many of that sort now!
Thomas Hardy
Some people are agents from birth, Monsignors -- he told them -- appointed to the work by the period of history, the place, and their own natural dispositions. In their cases, it was simply a question of who got to them first, Your Eminences: 'Whether it's us, whether it's the opposition, or whether it's the bloody missionaries.
John le Carré
He’s a vampire.” I laughed again, feeling there was no end to the outrageous, ridiculous excuses we were coming up with. “Seriously, it makes sense. He’s always tired and pale, and keeps himself away from people so he won’t bite them....Maybe that’s what he’s doing when he disappears. Getting his fix of blood.
J.M. Richards
The Church is composed of people, and people do terrible things and commit sin - it's what the Church has been telling us for two thousand years and continues to tell us, which is why the Church is here and essentially one of the major reasons why people hate it so much.
Michael Coren
I dare say it is rather hard to be a rat,” she mused. “Nobody likes you. People jump and run away and scream out: ‘Oh, a horrid rat!’ I shouldn’t like people to scream and jump and say: ‘Oh, a horrid Sara!’ the moment they saw me, and set traps for me, and pretend they were dinner. It’s so different to be a sparrow. But nobody asked this rat if he wanted to be a rat when he was made. Nobody said: ‘Wouldn’t you rather be a sparrow?
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Don't be a slave to society!
Anthony T.Hincks
In order for our minds to comprehend something, there must be an appropriately structured neural structure called a 'frame' that makes it possible to contextualize, make proper sense of, and mentally 'see' the thing. Our understanding of the world is frame dependent: frames are the accessories with which we think. Frames are the cognitive, conceptual structures that enable us to put together, amplify, and activate ideas. When truth is unseen it is because it is both unframed and unnamed; frames and names go together.
Paul Levy
And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don't like them as much as I do.
Nick Hornby
It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.
Zadie Smith
But between now and then, there was Life; and Bod walked into it with his eyes and his heart wide open.
Neil Gaiman
Eat, sleep & Breathe your business to ensure it's success
Paul Cookson
I also realized that there were lots of unacknowledged theater forms going on all around. Our lives are filled with performances that have been so woven into our daily routine that the artificial and performative aspect has slipped into invisibility.
David Byrne
Without trade the world will become what it was once—a hell where only the strongest arm and the heaviest lash was law. The meek will never inherit the earth. Aye, but at least they can be protected by law to live out their lives as they wish.
James Clavell
The artistic disposition is little more than an extreme form of sulking.
Mark Simpson
I would fight dragons, I would walk over flaming coals, I would enter the Valley of the Dead, if I thought I might have a chance of your heart.
Julian Fellowes