Quotes by British Authors - Page 192

How awful it was, thought Tessa, remembering Fats the toddler, the way tiny ghosts of your living children haunted your heart; they could never know, and would hate it if they did, how their growing was a constant bereavement.
J.K. Rowling
Flying in a modern jet airplane doses the human with levels of radiation comparable to those found in nuclear disaster zones.
Steven Magee
Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.
Arthur Conan Doyle
I would recommend a solo flight to all prospective suicides. It tends to make clear the issue of whether one enjoys being alive or not.
T.H. White
I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children . . . do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer.
Neil Gaiman
Bowie talks in great, voluble torrents, darting from one topic to the next, parenthesizing and then parenthesizing the parentheses, as if he has too many ideas for one conversation.
Sean Egan
society is unconcerned with the aftermath of sensation.
John le Carré
jThe notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.
Angela Carter
Master Nathaniel looked at him. The fixed stare, the slightly-open mouth, the rigid motionless body, fettered by a misery too profound for restlessness — how well he knew the state of mind these things expressed! But there must surely be relief in thus allowing the mood to mould the body's attitude to its own s
Hope Mirrlees
For really there is nothing like wings for getting you into trouble. But, on the other hand, if you are in trouble, there is nothing like wings for getting you out of it.
E Nesbit
By reflecting a little on this subject I am almost convinced that those numberless small Circuses we see on the moon are the works of the Lunarians and may be called their Towns.
William Herschel
[D]oing nothing meant leaving things exactly the way they were, and that was unacceptable.
Caroline Goode
[On Jane Austen] She was fully possessed of the idealism which is a necessary ingredient of the great satirist. If she criticized the institutions of earth, it was because she had very definite ideas regarding the institutions of heaven.
Rebecca West
Love me sweet With all thou art Feeling, thinking, seeing; Love me in the Lightest part, Love me in full Being.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
Weeping for the dead's a waste of breath -they're lucky, they can't die again.
Tony Harrison
This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said. "There is noth-ing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes tocondemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!
Charles Dickens
Invest in the future because that is where you are going to spend the rest of your life.
Habeeb Akande
If you expect the worse, you're only denying someone a chance to be better
Sangu Mandanna
Get busy achieving all the things in life you want to achieve, because one day you'll be fine and the next ...
S.J. Watson
and yet…' he said, 'and yet, father, I am terribly afraid. I am afraid that the things the Landlord really intends for me may be utterly unlike the things he has taught me to desire.''they will be very unlike the things you imagine. But you already know that the objects which your desire imagines are always inadequate to that desire. Until you have it, you will not know what you wanted.
C.S. Lewis
That's the truth about people with obsessively organised plans: we're not trying to control everything in our lives. We're trying to block out the things we can't.
Holly Smale
a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes.
George Orwell
Why is compassion not part of our established curriculum, an inherent part of our education? Compassion, awe, wonder, curiosity, exaltation, humility - these are the very foundation of any real civilization.
Yehudi Menuhin
We are betrayed by our maps of salience. They plot our narratives, identify our enemies and then coat them in distorting layer of loathing and dread. We feel that hunch - withdraw - and then conduct a post factum search for evidence that justifies it. We are motivated to fight our foes because we are emotional about them, but emotion is the territorial scent-mark of irrationality.
Will Storr
Shopping is really complicated if you are a girl.
Helen Salter
The school teacher is certainly underpaid as a child minder but ludicrously overpaid as an educator.
John Osborne
Is that how you’re supposed to find your soulmate and fall in love these days? By flirting in 140 character tweets and stalking each other’s social media pages?
Alexandra Potter
It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse.
Christopher Hitchens
It was not the first time - it was far from the firs time - that Damask had suspected that there was something queer, something quite out of the ordinary about her mind. Most people had minds which dealt with one thought, and then another, one at a time. Hers very often dealt with two, even three, all at the same time."Damask Greenway from Afternoon of an Autocrat
Norah Lofts
Almost everything that I've ever worried about has never happened ..
Ian Tucker
But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.
G.K. Chesterton
They stood together in a false intimacy, a nervous contact. And he was in love with her.
D.H. Lawrence
If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The longer you live in the past, the less future you have to enjoy.
Robert Tew
Making love requires no thought. You move as the fronds of a palm tree move in the breeze. It is all instinct. All wonder. When you love someone, your lips are incomplete until they are oiled by a kiss. You can say ‘I love you’ a thousand ways but you can say it better with silence and a kiss.
Chloe Thurlow
Have you ever met someone for the first time, but in your heart you feel as if you’ve met them before?
JoAnne Kenrick
Even if false gold makes a man happy:At the mint it will be identified.
Idries Shah
Being gay is not just what I do, but who I am. It is part of how I choose to live my life even if I never chose.
Johnny Rich
we've reached utopia and it sucks
Richard Tomkins
Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.
Ronald A. Fisher
She should pull away, even though she had begged for it with her smart mouth. She should punish him for every crime he’d perpetrated. For being too good-looking, too sexy, too everything. But the kiss was like him—just too damn good. Warm and brutal, providing answers to questions she never knew she had. He teased with his tongue along the seam of her mouth, seeking that last nudge of acceptance as if it was his God-given right.She parted her lips, and like a predator hinged on her threshold, he took.
Kate Meader
We are all worms but I do believe that I am a glow-worm.
Winston Churchill
Then marble soften'd into life grew warm.
Alexander Pope
Roger edged past the chief, only just avoiding pushing him with his shoulder. The yelling ceased, and Samneric lay looking up in quiet terror. Roger advanced upon them as one wielding a nameless authority.
William Golding
You know I don’t listen to market gossip,” she began,“but it is hard not to hear it when my daughter’s name is mentioned.
Tracy Chevalier
The way God squandered Himself had always hurt her; and annoyed her too. The sky full of wings and only the shepherds awake. That golden voice speaking and only a few fishermen there to hear; and perhaps some of the words He spoke carried away on the wind or lost in the sound of the waves lapping against the side of the boat. A thousand blossoms shimmering over the orchard, each a world of wonder all to itself, and then the whole thing blown away on a southwest gale as though the delicate little worlds were of no value at all. Well, of all the spendthrifts, she would think and then pull herself up. It was not for her to criticize the ways of Almighty God; if He liked to go to all that trouble over the snowflakes, millions and millions of them, their intricate patterns too small to be seen by human eyes, and melting as soon as made, that was His affair and not hers. All she could do about it was to catch in her window, and save from entire waste, as much of the squandered beauty as she could.
Elizabeth Goudge
Sometimes opportunities float right past your nose. Work hard, apply yourself, and be ready. When an opportunity comes you can grab it.
Julie Andrews Edwards
Worse than madness. Sanity.
William Golding
Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says 'you're next.' Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries.
Christopher Hitchens
A Vulgar Mechanick can practice what he has been taught or seen done, but if he is in an error he knows not how to find it out and correct it, and if you put him out of his road he is at a stand. Whereas he that is able to reason nimbly and judiciously about figure, force, and motion, is never at rest till he gets over every rub.(from a letter dated 25 May, 1694)
Isaac Newton
It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of te chest beneath that makes them seem so.
C.S. Lewis
Everything ritualistic must be strictly avoided, because it immediately turns rotten. Of course a kiss is a ritual too and it isn't rotten, but ritual is permissible only to the extent that it is as genuine as a kiss.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I don't want other people to decide what I am. I want to decide that for myself.
Emma Watson
We sat in his library. amidst his beloved books, whose company I knew he would rather seek than that of most of his acquaintances, did they but know it.
Linda Buckley-Archer
Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
George Orwell
You must push through the negativity and self-criticism that dam up your creativity and just let it flow. Be your authentic self. Write or sing or dance or paint with your whole being, without guardedness or cynicism and without trying to second-guess an audience.
Felicity Everett
Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
How people die remains in the memory of those who live on.
Cicely Saunders
Where are they, the American fiction writers whose works are interested in the question “What do these people have to do with us?” and “What are we doing out there in the world?
Kamila Shamsie
Woodget glanced into the dim shadows behind the trees. "What you be hiding fer?" he called."On such a night as this even the greatest may hide and not be ashamed," came the response.
Robin Jarvis