Quotes by British Authors - Page 193

Magic ran in the family. Even her mother's second cousin, who was adopted, did small spells on the side. She sold these from a stall in Kota Bharu. Her main wares were various types of fruit fried in batter, but if you bought five pisang or cempedak goreng, she threw in a jampi for free.
Zen Cho
running a business without marketing will kill it
Paul Cookson
Many scientific disciplines begin by not observing any sort of vital spark or consciousness in material events and proceed to deny that these things exist in living things, including themselves. Because consciousness does not fit into their mechanistic schemes they declare it illusory. Magicians make exactly the reverse argument. Observing consciousness in themselves and animals, they are magnanimous enough to extend it to all things to some degree—trees, amulets, planetary bodies, and all. This is a far more respectful and generous attitude than that of religions, most of whom won't even give animals a soul.
Peter J. Carroll
Saint-worship is not the same as hero-worship; it is a much less dangerous thing than hero-worship. For hero-worship generally means the absorption or transmutation of some part, at any rate, of one's own original ideas of goodness under the heat and hypnotism of some strong personality. But saint-worship, especially when it is a worship of saints whom we know little or nothing about, is simply the worship of that tradition of goodness in which the saint's name has been embalmed; and into that empty mould our own natural idealism can much more easily be poured.
G.K. Chesterton
The natural consequence of being connected to the depth, what I call the soul, or your essence, is the attribute of joy.
Tony Samara
For after the Battle comes quiet.
H.G.Wells
A sequence of random events isn't really random at all. It's just made to look that way so it will ensnare the unwary.
Anthony T.Hincks
Peter Pastmaster and the absurdly youthful colonel of the new force were drawing up a list of suitable officers in Bratts Club. 'Most of war seems to consist of hanging about,' he said. 'Let's at least hang about with our own friends.
Evelyn Waugh
I think it is just a matter of getting into the mind of the writer,” Vetinari went on, looking at a letter covered with grubby fingerprints and what looked like the remains of someone’s breakfast. He added: “In some cases, I imagine, there is a lot of room.
Terry Pratchett
Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets.
Jeanette Winterson
Exceptional talent does not always win its reward unless favoured by exceptional circumstances.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
The asylum, and later the national health service, warehoused thousands of patients made mad by the intrusions of a sexual predator. But these institutions had been dominated by the discredited Freudian fantasy that sexual abuse doesn’t happen - that it is our illicit desires that drive us crazy. A century ago, Freud recoiled from his own theory of the sexual seduction of children and projected the problem back into the patient. He claimed in his Aetiology of Hysteria that clients, typically women, were describing their fantasies, not facts, not ‘real events’. P3
Beatrix Campbell
If you let loose a law, it willdo as a dog does. It will obey its own nature, not yours. Suchsense as you have put into the law (or the dog) will be fulfilled.But you will not be able to fulfil a fragment of anything you haveforgotten to put into it.
G.K. Chesterton
Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the download with the breeze in your face.
Julian Barnes
To be a good diarist one must have a little snouty sneaky mind.
Harold Nicolson
For all his determination to keep her at arm's length, they had literally leaned on each other. He could remember exactly what it felt like to have his arm around her waist as they had meandered towards Hazlitt's Hotel. She was tall enough to hold easily. He had never fancied very small
Robert Galbraith
Anything is possible if you've got enough nerve
J.K. Rowling
Yes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit I have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what I had to do."The sign read:"Hold stick near center of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.""It seemed to me," said Wonko the Sane, "that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.
Douglas Adams
Such impulses have displayed themselves very widely across left and liberal opinion in recent months. Why? For some, because what the US government and its allies do, whatever they do, has to be opposed—and opposed however thuggish and benighted the forces which this threatens to put your anti-war critic into close company with. For some, because of an uncontrollable animus towards George Bush and his administration. For some, because of a one-eyed perspective on international legality and its relation to issues of international justice and morality. Whatever the case or the combination, it has produced a calamitous compromise of the core values of socialism, or liberalism or both, on the part of thousands of people who claim attachment to them. You have to go back to the apologias for, and fellow-travelling with, the crimes of Stalinism to find as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion as in the wrong-headed—and too often, in the circumstances, sickeningly smug—opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people from one of the foulest regimes on the planet.
Norman Geras
It was very quiet at the hotel, as if there had been a death in the family. When you have quit the Tour, nobody really knows what to say or do. (...) Everything I'd previously achieved meant nothing; all I was now was a pro rider who couldn't finish the Tour de France.
David Millar
It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.
Terry Eagleton
We owe something to extravagance for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Jennie Jerome Churchill
I had a vision.I lay half asleep in the dirt. The sunset Behind the hills and burnt my skin.And in the dream I saw a throne--my throne,Built on the tower of my life.When I woke all I could think of was myVision, etched so clearly on my mind.I worked for three days and three nightsWith no food or drink, until my visionHad become a reality--perfect in everyDetail. I pondered the significance of thisEdifice and shook off my trance....I felt tired,I felt lonely,I felt confused,I felt so bloody confused,I felt like a right prat!
Alan C. Martin
It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.
James Fenton
To practice with an end in view is to have one eye on the practice and the other on the end, which is lack of concentration, lack of sincerity.
Alan W. Watts
There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.
Theodore Dalrymple
There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while.
Nick Hornby
If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.
J.G. Ballard
[G]iving yourself some loving attention is not selfish. It is sensible. If you feel loved and cherished--even if it is only by yourself--then you will have more love to give to others, too. (83)
Penelope Quest
[T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.
Christopher Hitchens
You know (to adopt the easy or conversational style) that you and I belong to a happy minority. We are the sons of the hunters and the wandering singers, and from our boyhood nothing ever gave us greater pleasure than to stand under lonely skies in forest clearings, or to find a beach looking westward at evening over unfrequented seas. But the great mass of men love companionship so much that nothing seems of any worth compared with it. Human communion is their meat and drink, and so they use the railways to make bigger and bigger hives for themselves.
Hilaire Belloc
There hung about her the restrained energy of a whiplash.
Agatha Christie
I bought the Heartbreak Hotel, on my own with no investors. Closed it down and opened the Fuck You, Get Over It bed and breakfast.
Scroobius Pip
The sun is still there... even if clouds drift over it. Once you have experienced the reality of sunshine you may weep, but you will never feel ice about your heart again.
Elizabeth Goudge
That's where all the trouble in life comes from. Thinking.
Agatha Christie
For a while this seemed to do the trick, and I felt that whatever contamination I had helped to spread, the boundaries I had helped to break, sprinkling flakes of myself all over the surface of New York like so much fish food, had been forgiven.
Olivia Sudjic
[T]he greater the sense of awe with which a text was regarded, the more complete might be the amnesia as to the original circumstances of its composition.
Tom Holland
Change lays her hand not upon the truth.
Algernon Swinburne
All that is gold does not glitter,Not all those who wander are lost;The old that is strong does not wither,Deep roots are not reached by the frost.J.R.R. Tolkien
J.R.R. Tolkien
Don't you dare call me arrogant!If ever I had any at all-which I deny!- how much could I possibly have left after having been ridden over rough-shod by you and Thomas, do you imagine?
Georgette Heyer
It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man's sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover.
Graham Greene
That was a good straightforward point of view, no pretence that games were anything but an outlet for power and aggression; no stuff about their being enjoyable as such. You played a game to demonstrate that you did it better than someone else. If it came to that, I thought how few people do anything for its own sake, from making love to practising the arts.
Anthony Powell
The next thing Jordana says makes me realize that it's too late to save her. "I've noticed that when you light a match, the flame is the same shape as a falling tear." She's been sensitized, turned gooey in the middle. I saw it happening and I didn't do anything to stop it. From now on, she'll be writing diaries and sometimes including little poems and she'll buy gifts for her favourite teachers and she'll admire the scenery and she'll watch the news and she'll buy soup for homeless people and she'll never burn my leg hair again.
Joe Dunthorne
My mother tells me I do not chew my food enough; she says I am making it harder for my body to get the essential nutrients it needs. If she were here, I would remind her that I am eating a blueberry Pop-Tart.
Joe Dunthorne
In trying to justify the humanities, as in trying to live a life, what may turn out to matter most is holding one's nerve.
Stefan Collini
She sits there and feels the loneliness and the lack of him
Maggie O'Farrell
There are some fights none of us can win.
Amy Rae Durreson
Why do you have to be the same as the others? ...Most of them are stupid.
Ken Follett
Who you are in Christ is far more important and meaningful than what has taken place in your past.
Elizabeth George
So why do we worry? Why do we worry about food and clothing About finances and money? About security and the needs of life? We have Jehovah-Rohi! We have the Lord as our caring Shepherd. When fears regarding the cares of this world set in, we need to confidently lean on God's promise to care for us. Then we can declare to God, "Whenever I am afraid, I will trust in You" (Psalm 56:3)
Elizabeth George
Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.
George Orwell
The dead can read tears.
Louis de Bernières
Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself.
Edward Gibbon
If after all my Atheology turns out wrong and your Theology right I feel I shall always be able to pass into Heaven (if I want to) as a friend of G.K.C.'s. Bless you.
H.G.Wells
Courage is always the surest wisdom.
Wilfred Grenfell
Murder can sometimes seem justified, but it is murder all the same. You are truthful and clear-minded--face the truth, mademoiselle! Your friend died in the last resort, because she had not the courage to live. We may sympathize with her. We may pity her. But the fact remains--the act was hers--not another.
Agatha Christie
The purpose of bayonet training is to awaken your killer instincts. The killer instinct will make you strong. If the meek ever inherit the earth the strong will take it away from them. The weak exist to be devoured by the strong. Every Marine must pack his own gear. Every Marine must be the instrument of his own salvation.
Stanley Kubrick
Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.
Margaret Thatcher
Whenever people talk in the abstract about the pros and cons of immigration, one should not forget that immigrants are individual human beings whose lives happen not to fit neatly within national borders – and that like all human beings, they are all different.How different, though? Different better, or different worse? Such basic questions underlie whether people are willing to accept outsiders in their midst
Philippe Legrain
At least my happiness doesn't depend on Ron's goalkeeping ability.
J.K. Rowling