Quotes by British Authors - Page 188

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.
George Eliot
Ron's eyebrows rose so high that they were in danger of disappearing into his hair.
J.K. Rowling
Even if readers claim that they 'take it all with a grain of salt', they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be 'true in a way'.
Iris Murdoch
There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated is what you did not understand.
Jeanette Winterson
Romance is very pretty in novels, but the romance of a life is always a melancholy matter. They are most happy who have no story to tell.
Anthony Trollope
For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules-- it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Some people are born with tornadoes in their lives, but constellations in their eyes. Other people are born with stars at their feet, but their souls are lost at sea.
Nikita Gill
Is something the matter?” Calcifer asked. “Yes. My heart. There was a scarecrow at the door!” Sophie gasped. “What has a scarecrow to do with your heart?” Calcifer asked. “It was trying to get in here. It gave me a terrible fright. And my heart—but you wouldn’t understand, you silly young demon!” Sophie panted. “You haven’t got a heart.” “Yes I have,” Calcifer said, as proudly as he had revealed his arm. “Down in the glowing part under the logs. And don’t call me young. I’m a good million years older than you are! Can I reduce the speed of the castle now?
Diana Wynne Jones
You need two things to write a great book: imagination and inclination. Without one, your book will be boring; without the other, your book won't get finished at all.
Ellie Firestone
At one point, so many people had assembled on the bridge that linked the ship to the shore that the timbers began to creak and groan. Suddenly, there was a tremendous crack and a hundred or more people were plunged into the muddy river. Wiser heads might have seen this as a warning that Elizabethan technology did not always match its enthusiasm.
Giles Milton i Samurai William i
The old are a regular subject for sympathy.
Barney Norris
We were decadent in our intimacy. Leaving no inch of skin untouched lest a moment of rapture slip through our grasp. Thrusting and plunging, in dazed euphoria, the exquisite cravings for those carnal delights ravaged our souls until shamelessly, gasping lust tainted air, we discovered insatiability...
Virginia Alison
Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.
Jasper Fforde
To resist a compulsion with willpower alone is to hold back an avalanche by melting the snow with a candle. It just keeps coming and coming and coming.
David Adam
How is it that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
When the habitually even-tempered suddenly fly into a passion that explosion is apt to be more impressive than the outburst of the most violent amongst us.
Margery Allingham
We are who we are, be­cause of those we choose to love and be­cause of those who love us.
Kate Mosse
The encapsulated bird your conspirators sent you to fetch. The sterilized male chicken with the Creator DNA sequences. The plot capon. Where is it?
Charles Stross
If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for their books, although why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet and peaceful occupation I really don't know. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.
Leonora Carrington
Be strong, little one. There's a reason you are here. Like anyone with a dream, you have a purpose, big or small. Never lose hope that your glowing star will one day join the sky of winners. Never--stop believing.
Charles Lee
I say I write to you, but, truth be told, I prefer the American idiom: I write you. I'll write you friends say, as if, in writing, someone could be caused to appear, as if writing were a spell, some form of conjuration. So, I write you to bring you here, bring you back.
Julian Wolfreys
We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the “intolerable compliment.” Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life—the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child—he will take endless trouble—and would doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.
C.S. Lewis
the war taught me that nothing counts as much as loyalty" "Bullshit. you still haven't learned that when humans are under pressure, we're all willing to lie" "even to the people we care?" "we lie more to our loved ones, because we care about them so damn much. why do you think we tell the truth to priests and shrinks and total strangers we meet on trains? it's because we don't love them, so we don't care what they think.
Ken Follett
William Shakespeare: 'Close up this din of hateful decay, decomposition of your witches' plot! You thieve my brains, consider me your toy, my doting doctor tells me I am not!' Lilith: No! Words of power! William Shakespeare: 'Foul Carrionite specters, cease your show, between the points... ' [he looks to The Doctor for help] The Doctor: 761390! William Shakespeare: '761390! Banished like a tinker's cuss, I say to thee... ' [he again looks to The Doctor] The Doctor: Uh... [he looks to Martha] Martha Jones: Expelliarmus! The Doctor: Expelliarmus! William Shakespeare: 'Expelliarmus!' The Doctor: Good old JK!
Gareth Roberts
So? I know lots of beautiful women. Nova wanted to chase... I merely obliged her by running.
D.D. Chant
Free your mind, become who you are.. the mind is the biggest drug.. and everyone is addicted.
Jonathan Bailey
That best portion of a good man's life His little nameless unremembered acts Of kindness and of love.
William Wordsworth
Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.
Tom Stoppard
There isn’t anything I can tell you that you don’t already know,” Melly answered.“Yes, but if we already know it then you’re not telling us anything new,” Bea said, thinking her way through the carriages of fear on the witch’s train of thought, “and if we don’t tell you what we know and what we don’t know, then you won’t know if you’ve actually told us something we don’t know, and what you don’t know we don’t know won’t hurt you.”Melly stared at Bea, her cigarette hanging from her lip in defeat.“Did that make sense?” Joan asked.“Yes,” Melly said slowly, “but it probably shouldn’t have done.
F.D. Lee
I took ten days off and by 11 o’clock on the first morning I had drunk fourteen cups of coffee, read all the newspapers and the Guardian and then… and then what? By lunchtime I was so bored that I decided to hang a few pictures. So I found a hammer, and later a man came to replaster the bits of wall I had demolished. Then I tried to fix the electric gates, which work only when there’s an omega in the month. So I went down the drive with a spanner, and later another man came to put them back together again. I was just about to start on the Aga, which had broken down on Christmas Eve, as they do, when my wife took me on one side by my earlobe and explained that builders do not, on the whole, spend their spare time writing, so writers should not build on their days off. It’s expensive and it can be dangerous, she said.
Jeremy Clarkson
Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process
Elif Shafak
At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.
John Berger
To resist and subdue Nature is to make for one's self a personal and imperishable life: it is to break free from the vicissitudes of Life and Death.
Aleister Crowley
Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.
Kate Atkinson
Film-making has become a kind of hysterical pregnancy.
Richard Lester
He considered for a moment, then started to play a piece that was very familiar to Ruth, although she had no idea what it was. It was lilting and wistful, and she could have sung the melody if she had wished."Alright?" He raised his eyebrows inquiringly."Yes. Exactly."It was effortless and perfect, and he played it through to the end, closing with the softest and most delicate chords, which hung and faded in the quiet hall like the grains of dust raining through the evening light. Ruth was touched. It was all she had wanted. He did not move until there was complete silence again, then he closed the lid without saying anything, and stood up, shoving back the chair. ... "What was that piece?" "A Brahms waltz.""Hasn't it got a name?" she wanted it to remember."Number fifteen. Opus thirty-nine." It hadn't sounded like numbers to Ruth.
K.M. Peyton
When leaders acquire the skills that enable them to release the productive potential and tap the collective capabilities of the group, who knows what positive results will be achieved? Some of them may move mountains.
Thomas Gordon
The nose can’t help catchin’ what the ears get sick with. Yessir, rock bands just sweat evil. Evil’s been around for a long time, ever since rocks started getting real hot and making a lot of noise as they exploded out o’ the ground and evil spirits wisped out of hell. If a band ever uses a fog machine, hold your breath so you don’t become possessed by one.
M.C. Humphreys
I don’t believe he was deliberately taking indecent pictures, they’re too artistic; he’s managed to capture that magical moment when a child’s mind spins into a make-believe world. But actually, what Jack did is steal something – a child’s innocence – whilst creating something darker that will resonate with the adults looking at these photos: themes of sexuality and death, the leitmotifs that run through fairy tales, the stories that we tell ourselves about our children.
Sanjida Kay
The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.
Ian McEwan
I thought if you knew. you'd kill him.I nearly did. I nearly killed you too. The trouble with death is - his lips twisted - it's so final.
Marie Treanor
Private property and free trade stand on exactly the same footing, both being essential and indivisible parts of liberty, both depending upon rights, which no body of men, whether called governments or anything else, can justly take from the individual.
Auberon Herbert
I do not understand a man who does not want to know all that he can know. Why would anyone choose ignorance? If he chooses ignorance because he is lay, then he is a fool, for the ignorant are put to hard labor digging and hauling stones for masters who tell them they need no knowledge. If a man must labor from dawn to dusk to avoid a blow on the head and to earn a cup of grain, he has no time to gain knowledge and remains a slave to masters. I think, therefore, that is is a worthy vocation to free a man enough that he can learn who he is and what he is capable of, where he came from and what philosophies steer his life.
Kate Horsley
See it, feel it, trust it!
Steve Backley
I think it’s the books that you read when you’re young that live with you forever.
J.K. Rowling
This is the world in which everyone is sensitised to risk but indifferent to fate.
David Runciman
I’ve spoken to Sid,” she admits. “He says he’s never seen Charlie so bad. He won’t eat, he’s lost weight and he looks terrible. Sid says it’s the first time he’s ever been so bored by him that he’s considered smothering him.
Lily Morton
Every Autumn now my thoughts return to snow. Snow is something I identify myself with. Like my father, I am a snow person.
Charlie English
It is necessary to look forward to a harvest, however distant that may be, when some fruit will be reaped, some good effected.
Charles Darwin
A quick butchers shows up Old Bill three-handed, also a particularly nasty female grass–-and if looks were acid baths the two she collects from us would reduce her to gristle quicker than Mrs. Durand-Deacon.
Derek Raymond
Stir not the bitterness in the cup that I mixed for myself,' said Denethor. 'Have I not tasted it now many nights upon my tongue, foreboding that worse lay in the dregs?
J.R.R. Tolkien
I said, 'Yes theres a lot to look a head to. Like croaking iron at Widders Dump. We do the croaking and they get the iron.'He said, 'Riddley theres other things to do as wel.'I said, 'Yes and they all smel of cow shit dont they?
Russell Hoban
How hard it is, to be forced to the conclusion that people should be, nine tenths of the time, left alone! - When there is that in me that longs for absolute commitment. One of the poem-ideas I had was that one could respect only the people who knew that cups had to be washed up and put away after drinking, and knew that a Monday of work follows a Sunday in the water meadows, and that old age with its distorting-mirror memories follows youth and its raw pleasures, but that it's quite impossible to love such people, for what we want in love is release from our beliefs, not confirmation in them. That is where the 'courage of love' comes in - to have the courage to commit yourself to something you don't believe, because it is what - for the moment, anyway - thrills your by its audacity. (Some of the phrasing of this is odd, but it would make a good poem if it had any words...)
Philip Larkin
Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
Lionel Shriver
Perhaps the magic would last, perhaps it wouldn't. But then again, what does?
Terry Pratchett
He said "Love...as I have loved you." We cannot love too much.
Amy Carmichael
How do you eat your roots?
Kamila Shamsie
Certain unique books seem to be without forerunners or successors as far as their authors are concerned. Even though they may profoundly influence the work of other writers, for their creator they're complete, not leading anywhere.
Dodie Smith
I have the happiness of the passing moment and what more can mortal ask?
George R. Gissing
College mostly makes people like bladders—just good for nothing but t’ hold the stuff as is poured into ‘em.
George Eliot