Quotes by British Authors - Page 190

It's not lying when you do it to officers!
Terry Pratchett
Today is yesterday's effect and tomorrow's cause.
Phillip Gribble
We are here in a wood of little beeches: And the leaves are like black lace Against a sky of nacre. One bough of clear promise Across the moon. It is in this wise that God speaketh unto me. He layeth hands of healing upon my flesh, Stilling it in an eternal peace, Until my soul reaches out myriad and infinite hands Toward him, And is eased of its hunger. And I know that this passes: This implacable fury and torment of men, As a thing insensate and vain: And the stillness hath said unto me, Over the tumult of sounds and shaken flame, Out of the terrible beauty of wrath, I alone am eternal. One bough of clear promise Across the moon
Frederic Manning
Prayer will make a man cease from sin, or sin will entice a man to cease from prayer.
John Bunyan
It pleases him how Spell is how the word is made but also, in the hands of the magician, how the world is changed. One letter separates Word from World, and that letter is like the number one, or an 'I', or a shaft of light between almost closed curtains. There is an old letter called a thorn, which jags and tears at the throat as it's uttered. Later he learns that Grammar and Glamour share the same deeper root, which is further magic, and there can be neither magic without that root, nor plant. He's lost in it like Chid in Child, or God reversed into Dog. Somewhere inside him is a colon. A sentence can last for life.
Charles Lambert
You must not fear that clutching at your dreams will shatter them so they run through your fingers like sand. That way lies a life spent in yearning. But yearning is only a season of dreaming, for dreams, if nurtured, become strong.
Alexia Casale
His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future—haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth—ready to break the Enemy’s commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other—dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.
C.S. Lewis
We have access to practical, ethical and scientifically established methods of birth control. So I think that is the most ethical way to reduce our population.
Christian de Duve
Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.
Nick Land
Everyone represses everything. Do you think any of these "normal" human beings really do exactly what they want to do all the time? 'Course not. It's just the same. We're middle-class and we're British. Repression is in our veins.
Matt Haig
Revenge may be wicked, but it’s natural.
William Makepeace Thackeray
The idea that any of their offspring could possibly be accused of involvement in criminal activities caused deep offence, even to parents who believed that property was theft.
Amanda Craig
It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven...
Virginia Woolf
She brought a chair into the room and placed it alongside the top of his bed. Then she held his hand as he drifted off to sleep. It was so small in her own hand, and it felt warm and dry. She pressed his hand gently, and his fingers returned the pressure, but only just, as he was almost asleep by then. She remembered, but not very well, what it was to fall asleep holding the hand of another; how precious such an experience, how fortunate those to whom it was vouchsafed by the gods of Friendship, or of Love. She thought she had forgotten that, but now she remembered.
Alexander McCall Smith
In difficult moments it’s sometimes a good idea to ask yourself what it is you most want to be doing and consider how it can be achieved. If it can’t, move on to the second best thing.
Ian McEwan
A righteous wife is a respectful wife.
Habeeb Akande
I ken who you are! You're Strathfearn's granddaughter. Julie Stuart, is it? Och, aye, Lady Julia! Well then, Lady Julia, tell me -- who don't you deserve a glass of water?
Elizabeth Wein
We are all worms, But I do believe that I am a glow worm.
Winston S. Churchill
Now for the hitch in Jane's character,' he said at last, speaking more calmly than from his look I had expected him to speak. 'The reel of silk has run smoothly enough so far; but I always knew there would come a knot and a puzzle: here it is. Now for vexation, and exasperation, and endless trouble!
Charlotte Brontë
No man is a man until he has been a soldier.
Louis de Bernières
As I stare at it,I can feel little invisible strings,silently tugging me toward it. I have to touch it. I have to wear it. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
Sophie Kinsella
Distract yourself, that's what Margaret always told him. When you start getting anxious, give your mind something else to think about. He had become an expert at distracting himself. He had distracted himself so much, he found himself drowning in distractions, and all the little details in the world seemed to join up together in his head and make a whole new problem to worry about.
Joanna Cannon
If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, without having himself tortured and executed in payment—thereby, incidentally, condemning remote future generations of Jews to pogroms and persecution as 'Christ-killers': did that hereditary sin pass down in the semen too?
Richard Dawkins
Death is the most sophisticated form of beauty, and the most difficult to accept.
Simon Van Booy
It can't be more than a quarter of a mile to the finish, but it seems to go on forever. Do I really have to do this? My legs are entirely dead. Would it really matter if I stopped here?But I know I'd regret it if I did, so I plod leadenly on, distracting myself...with the thought that, whatever troubles I may have been carrying around in my head before the race, I have now entirely forgotten what they were. This thought is rather refreshing. Whatever physical pains it has involved, this ordeal has utterly absorbed me, forcing my brain to focus on the kind of concerns for which it evolved - navigation, survival, balance, digging deep - rather than on the fretful urban anxieties to which it has become habituated. Reconnecting with your inner animal, I suppose you could call it; and it feels good. Especially when, blissfully, I catch sight of the finish.
Richard Askwith
They are a couple in love, and anyone but a fool would see it is simply that, nothing more- and certainly nothing less.
Philippa Gregory
My Muse sits forlornShe wishes she had not been bornShe sits in the coldNo word she says is ever told.
Stevie Smith
Mr. Attlee is a very modest man. But then he has much to be modest about.
Winston Churchill
Lazy people live lonely lives.
Habeeb Akande
It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language
Jane Austen
The first years of man must make provision for the last.
Samuel Johnson
... that kind of patriotism which consists in hating all other nations ...
Elizabeth Gaskell
After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism Leninism
Niall Ferguson
It was a sacrifice worthy of her and dreams are made to be killed.
David Louden
Ah, wonderful sleep. I love to sleep. It's one of the things I'm really good at.
Kate Johnson
I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.
Margaret Thatcher
Have any sheep been seen walking out of the Library with seagoing adventurers clinging to their wool?
Lindsey Davis
Is It Frightening To Be Free?""You said it.""You Say To People 'Throw Off Your Chains' And They Make New Chains For Themselves?""Seems to be a major human activity, yes.
Terry Pratchett
We and future generations should never forget them, Always remember them.
Davan Yahya Khalil
the fact that there was this capacity even in a paranoiac for intelligence, even in a devil worshipper for love; the fact that the ground of all being could be totally manifest in a flowering shrub, a human face; the fact that there was a light and that this light was also compassion.
Aldous Huxley
Civilization is only possible for deeply unpleasant animals. It is only an ape that can be truly civilized.
Mark Rowlands
But it's easier to say 'I love you',than 'Yours, sincerely' I suppose.
Elvis Costello
It is true that our everyday view of the world is not quite naively realistic, but that is what it would like to be. Common-sense is naively realistic wherever it does not think that there is some positive reason why it should cease to be so. And this is so in the vast majority of its perceptions. When we see a tree we think that it is really green and really waving about in precisely the same way as it appears to be. We do not think of our object of perception being 'like' the real tree, we think that what we perceive is the tree, and that it is just the same at a given moment whether it be perceived or not, except that what we perceive may be only a part of the real tree.
Charlie Dunbar Broad
Eh bien, then, you are crazy, or appear crazy or you think you are crazy, and possibly you may be crazy.
Agatha Christie
Who really owns the Earth?Corporations? Governments?Charity Organizations?Or...Should it be the people?You decide!
Anthony T.Hincks
Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet ... and y
Terry Pratchett
A leaf cannot return to the bud- bluestar to fireheart and greystripe
Erin Hunter
Writing isn't something you do because you feel like it. You never feel like it. You write because there's a rat in your brain chewing up the spirals of your DNA and you want to get the words down before they disappear.
Chloe Thurlow
Sometimes I felt the bloated Toad, hideous and pampered with the poisonous vapours of the dungeon, dragging his loathsome length along my bosom: Sometimes the quick cold Lizard rouzed me leaving his slimy track upon my face, and entangling itself in the tresses of my wild and matted hair: Often have I at waking found my fingers ringed with the long worms which bred in the corrupted flesh of my Infant.
Matthew Lewis
I have faults enough, but they are not, I hope, of understanding. My temper I dare not vouch for. It is, I believe, too little yielding— certainly too little for the convenience of the world. I cannot forget the follies and vices of other so soon as I ought, nor their offenses against myself. My feelings are not puffed about with every attempt to move them. My temper would perhaps be called resentful. My good opinion once lost, is lost forever.
Jane Austen
The highest reward for man's toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it.
John Ruskin
But was any future, anyone's future, unfraught by hazards of some sort? The only security was death. So long as one wanted to go on living on had to accept the risks. Well, she accepted them...
Winston Graham
Creative people depend on the generosity and graces of strangers.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.
E.M. Forster
If you believe that humans are animals, there can be no such thing as the history of humanity, only the lives of particular humans. If we speak of the history of the species at all, it is only to signify the unknowable sum of these lives. As with other animals, some lives are happy, others wretched. None has a meaning that lies beyond itself.
John N Gray
Perhaps it started as a whisper in some white wilderness ... ' Jaycee's voice.The pain and the consciousness flooded back as the semantic trigger threw off the protective blackout. The mongol's eyes widened, and a vicious thrust to the solar plexus made Bron scream with what little breath he still retained.' ... a broken body, cradled in cold, crying futility unto a futile wind.''Jaycee, for God's sake stop it! Let me go.' He made no attempt at subvocalizing. It was as much as he could do to form the words at all. She was playing with him, deliberately using the trigger to keep him conscious so that his awareness of the torment would continue. Again and again the blows fell savagely.' ... the mind mazed not by the searing steel, the nibbling nerve ... ''Jaycee, in the name of pity!' He no longer cared whether he lived or died. All he wanted was release from the scientific and merciless battering which his body was taking.' ... some maimed martyr, crazed upon the cross, held up his head and cried unto the heavens: LORD, WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME?
Colin Kapp
The flip side of the coin of which Good and Evil are but one side.
Terry Pratchett
There are secrets in all families, you know.
Jane Austen
In the flailing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances
Virginia Woolf
When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, ‘It’s all in Plato’ — meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afterlife.]
Philip Pullman