Quotes by British Authors - Page 195

I wasn't good enough. I had a little talent but not enough. There is nothing more discouraging than having just a little talent.
Rosamunde Pilcher
A man's state before God may always be measured by his prayers.
J.C. Ryle
An exile, said Zafar, is a refugee with a library.
Zia Haider Rahman
Don't expect others to hand success to you. Create it - with heart, energy and enterprise - and you'll make it come true
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We've seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.
Alan Moore
The Celebrity Charity Industrial Complex Makes a Mockery of Compassion
Dean Cavanagh
By this time I was nolonger very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed thelimit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost,and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything
H.G.Wells
The nature of the love of God for us is thereby revealed. It is not the love of an indulgent parent who gives into every whim of the child. In the end that is not the ‘love’ for the child but a form of self love for the parent. Despite the massive propaganda to the contrary, Our lord’s purpose for us is not to make us happy, but to make us holy. He loves us too much to leave us part saved, part remade, part sanctified. He wills our holiness, and since ‘suffering produces…’ (Rom 5:3), we may expect him to allow things in our lives which, in our self-centred pursuit of happiness, we ourselves would exclude. Yet even in the shadow of his love there is always mercy. Our sorrows are shared by him; he comes to us in our pain. The end of it all is not only his glory, which needs no justifying, but also our good.
Bruce Milne
The library door was thick and none of the ordinary sounds that might have reminded them, might have held them back, could reach them. They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future,
Ian McEwan
Englishmen rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest grief; whereas in some parts of the Continent the men shed tears much more readily and freely.
Charles Darwin
Whether you live a healthy or a toxic lifestyle, the end result will always be death.
Steven Magee
Ah but a man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for?
Robert Browning
May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.
J.R.R. Tolkien
...[T]here are days when emptiness is spacious, and non-existence elevating.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
Neil Gaiman
A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.
John Stuart Mill
Sensible people advise against drinking on an empty stomach, but to my mind it is the best sort of drinking.
Tom Hodgkinson
Heaven mocks the short-sighted views of man.
Horace Walpole
Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!
Lewis Carroll
You don't have to do something every day that scares you. There's no fun in being terrified. Do one thing every day that makes you happy.
Jodi Ann Bickley
Galaxies of nothing are going onin her eyes.
Caitlin Moran
Mindless action without a real understanding of the ramifications is only likely to result in serious miscalculations or a colossal waste of time. Avoid both by using your judgment, filtered through both knowledge and experience. Use common sense and logic as a counterbalance to emotion.
David Amerland
Neither of us had anything to say, or rather we had everything to say, but after all those nights of not saying a word, we suddenly found we had not one dollar of time left between us.
David Mitchell
There was no point in tears outliving eyes, so she let them fall.
Sarah Winman
He were found drowned. He were coming home very hopeless o' aught on earth. He thought God could na be harder than men; mappen not so hard; mappen as tender as a mother; mappen tenderer. I'm not saying he did right, and I'm not saying he didn't wrong. All I say is, may neither me nor mine ever have his sore heart, or we may do like things.
Elizabeth Gaskell
To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case.To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case – that is, to be killed.This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman.
Angela Carter
Those fine eyes of hers had a disconcertingly direct gaze, and very often twinkled in a manner disturbing to male egotism. She had common-sense too, and what man wanted the plainly matter-of-fact, when he could enjoy instead Sophia's delicious folly?
Georgette Heyer
She's going to keep up her public facade of stoicism and generosity and getting on with thungs. She knows she can do it, she can do the stiff upper lip thing. I will survive. But behind closed doors the going is rough. It's when she is alone that it hits her. And she is often alone, too often, she things no one should have to be alone as much as she is. It should have been me: her mind is a morass of old songs now, Errol Brown started it. It should have been me.
Kate Pullinger
Only one small, pale spot on her cheek was visible where her skin, free of blood, gleamed, as polished as bone.
Sanjida Kay
There is something about the defencelessness of youth that moves me to tears. Youth is so vulnerable. It is so ruthless--so sure. So generous and so demanding.
Agatha Christie
If everyone followed through on their resolutions, the conseqences for humanity would be dire: The fast food industry would collapse, the gyms would become unbearably crowded, and lifestyle magazines would have nothing left to say.
Amanda Foreman
I am bound to furnish my antagonists with arguments but not with comprehension.
Benjamin Disraeli
We all have two lives. The second one starts when we realize that we only have one.
Tom Hiddleston
You live and learn. At any rate, you live.
Douglas Adams
I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.
Jane Austen
If you are going to judge others it is wisest to do so individually not collectively and on your own direct experience of them personally. But first - and throughout - examine yourself closely. Blurred vision can often occur due to the lens, perspective and perceptions of the viewer projected onto the object that it sees. Be wary of taking to the judges seat. Above all meet at treat yourself and everyone else mindfully, compassionately with humanity.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
When the war ended in 1945, Robert Newton’s film career took off. And then he landed the part of Disney’s Long John Silver. “What accent do you want me to put on?” he asked Walt, in his natural thick West-country, ‘Cornwall/Devon/Dorset’ burr. Pointing at his face excitedly, “Why, that one.” Disney replied. And THE OFFICIAL PIRATE ACCENT was born. Newton went on to do another Long John Silver film, then a 26 part television series. He died early, aged 50, from chronic alcoholism, just the way a pirate would want to go. But he left the legacy of ‘the’ pirate accent ‘til the end of time. Every pirate ‘R’ or ‘Arrrgh’ joke you ever heard, owes its very life to the combination of Robert Newton, R. L. Stevenson, and Walt Disney. -- Renaissance Festival Survival Guide
Ian Hall
Of course what I'm about to share isn't true for me but...Friends, somebody said, are "god's apology for relations." (p. 129)
Christopher Hitchens
It's all about you, isn't it?
Anthony T.Hincks
I will go forth as a real outlaw," he said, "and as men do robbery on the highway I will do right on the highway; and it will be counted a wilder crime.
G.K. Chesterton
Curiouser and curiouser.
Lewis Carroll
Sometimes words aren't needed.
Gavin Extence
Do you want to die, or do you want to die trying? Give up or give it a shot.
Nick Trout
We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.
R.D. Laing
He does seem rather taken with you,” Jacques said, almost sending Ignatius off bleating with laughter. The man sounded quite perplexed and put out that the horseman had chosen another over him.“The same could be said of you,” Ignatius reminded him, thinking of a forced seduction by chicken.
Sharon Maria Bidwell
All approaches to a study or an individual may start with a desire for attention. However they start, they must never end up in this manner.
Idries Shah
Times have changed in research and if you are not using Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Wikipedia, Google, and the like, you will be left in the dark.
Steven Magee
He let her do it, then looked around for his fingers. There they were, curled like a bloody quotation mark on the lead. He laughed.
Philip Pullman
After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Yet it is also a tonic and an antidote to dullness to be with the Serbs. They possess the irresponsible gaiety that we traditionally connect with the Irish, with whom they have often been compared. Other less convenient sides of the Irish character are also typical in the Serbs, such as a cheerful contempt for punctuality in daily life and a ready willingness, arising clearly from politeness and good nature, to make promises that are not always fulfilled. But perhaps the most pronounced of these similarities is to be found in the songs of Serbia and Ireland. With both peoples the historic songs about the past are songs of sorrow, or noble struggles against overwhelming odds, of failure redeemed by unconquerable resolve. There is nothing strange in this combination of laughing gaiety and profound melancholy. It is often only those who are truly capable of the one emotion who also have the faculty for the other.
R.G.D. Laffan
Your function as a critic is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn't you are glad that someone else had, although obviously it might have been done better.
Stephen Potter
No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk.
Alastair Reynolds
Those days are gone, and good fucking riddance to them; unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it's just a drag, like a cold or having no money. If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.
Nick Hornby
New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.
Alistair Cooke
I didn't want to be educated. It wasn't the right time of my life for concentration, it really wasn't. The spirit of the age among the people I knew manifested itself as general drift and idleness. We didn't want money. What for? We could get by, living off parents, friends or the State And if we were going to be bored, and we were usually bored, rarely being self-motivated, we could at least be bored on our own terms, lying smashed on mattresses in ruined houses rather than working in the machine. I didn't want to work in a place where I couldn't wear my fur coat.
Hanif Kureishi
Life is a state of give and take.
Steven Redhead
Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.
Graham Swift
For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
Virginia Woolf
The mistakes we regret the most are the ones we were too scared to make
Ollie Slaney
One never said the things one wanted — one remembered them all an hour afterwards. On the other hand one usually said a lot of things one shouldn't, simply from a sense that one had to say something.
Henry James