Quotes by British Authors - Page 20

Luke is the sort of boy Taylor Swift could get at least three songs out of.
Beth Garrod
Literature itself is a species of code. You line up symbols and create a simulacrum of life.
Marcel Theroux
As palaeontologist Andrew Knoll once said, "Animals might be evolution's icing, but bacteria are really the cake.
Ed Yong
A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.
Sebastian Faulks
Who can ever affirm, or deny that the houses which have sheltered us as children, or as adults, and our predecessors too, do not have embedded in their walls, one with the dust and cobwebs, one with the overlay of fresh wallpaper and paint, the imprint of what-has-been, the suffering, the joy?
Daphne du Maurier
She generally gave herself very good advice (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a came of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people.
Lewis Carroll
And as I looked at the star, I realised what millions of other people have realised when looking at stars. We’re tiny. We don’t matter. We’re here for a second and then gone the next. We’re a sneeze in the life of the universe.
Danny Wallace
It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can’t afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You’ve got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you’ve got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you’re compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.
Nick Hornby
Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious. It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings. It will not develop our awareness or add to the sum of our knowledge and intelligence. Read parts of a newspaper quickly or an encyclopaedia entry, or a fast-food thriller, but do not insult yourself or a book which has been created with its author's painstakingly acquired skill and effort, by seeing how fast you can dispose of it.
Susan Hill
Progress in evil was quick and easy; Apollyon was not a chap who hid himself and he gave every assistance in his power. The growth in goodness was so slow, at times so flat, so dull, and like the White Queen one had to run so fast to stay where one was, let alone progress; and there were few men who dared to say they had found God. It was easy to be a clever sinner, for the race to an earthly visible goal was short to run, so impossibly hard to be a wise saint, with the goal set at so vast a distance from this world and clouded with such uncertainty.
Elizabeth Goudge
I have always felt,” he said, “that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats
Neil Gaiman
The greatest tragedy of life is not that men perish but that they cease to love.
W Somerset Maugham
I am in a moment of pretty wellness.
Horace Walpole
Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!
Emily Brontë
We were young, thoughtless - carried away with our own cleverness
J.K. Rowling
My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you – I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again – my Life seems to stop there – I see no further. You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving – I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you … I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion – I have shudder’d at it – I shudder no more – I could be martyr’d for my Religion – Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you.
John Keats
Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
Samuel Butler
We have potential. Who needs medals? I'd rather have potential than medals any day.
Neil Gaiman & Michael Reaves
Renewed hope followed renewed effort: It shone like the former for some weeks, then, like it, faded, flickered: Not a line, not a word reached me. When half a year wasted in vain expectancy, my hope died out, and then I felt dark indeed.
Charlotte Brontë
The Sufi teacher’s mission is to be in the service of those who can learn.
Idries Shah
The degree of your mindset will confine you - just as the breadth of your open-heartedness will set you free
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Within our emotions lie answers, truths and instructions.
Sam Owen
Everyone's afraid of what they don't understand," Ringil said quietly.
Richard K. Morgan
Where magic is the essence of existence and those who wield it, rarely what they seem
Kathryn Royce-Martin
We are all in such a hurry, we want everything at once. We believe that all truth can be stated in a few minutes. The answer to that is that it cannot.
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
In the mind of all, fiction, in the logical sense, has been the coin of necessity;—in that of poets of amusement—in that of the priest and the lawyer of mischievous immorality in the shape of mischievous ambition,—and too often both priest and lawyer have framed or made in part this instrument.
Jeremy Bentham
I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn't mean anything? What then?
Neil Gaiman
I listen to the silenceand yearn to be more me,swimming in the sea of myself,learning eternally -finding out where the rocks areand smoothing them into sand.
Jay Woodman
The more deference there is, the narrower the band of judgements on which organisations rely. Deference acts like the fatty deposits that build up in arteries, restricting the flow of fresh, oxygen-enriched blood across the system.
Robin Ryde
There are no whole truths. All truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.
Alfred North Whitehead
The atmosphere of the place soothed her automatically; the rich lantern lights, the sheer scent of paper and leather, and the fact that everywhere she looked, there were books, books, beautiful books.
Genevieve Cogman
Pippin glanced in some wonder at the face now close beside his own, for the sound of that laugh had been gay and merry. Yet in the wizard's face he saw at first only lines of care and sorrow; though as he looked more intently he perceived that under all there was a great joy: a fountain of mirth enough to set a kingdom laughing, were it to gush forth.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Ο θάνατος είναι πάντα από μόνος του μια απόδειξη ειλικρίνειας.
Graham Greene
That is her style of beauty.
George Orwell
If the Good Lord had intended us to crawl, he'd have given us a hundred legs and an exosqueleton.
Tom Holt
All of our descriptive statements move within an often invisible network of value-categories, and indeed without such categories we would have nothing to say to each other at all. It is not just as though we have something called factual knowledge which may then be distorted by particular interests and judgements, although this is certainly possible; it is also that without particular interests we would have no knowledge at all, because we would not see the point of bothering to get to know anything. Interests are constitutive of our knowledge, not merely prejudices which imperil it. The claim that knowledge should be 'value-free' is itself a value-judgement.
Terry Eagleton
To drown in treacle is just as unpleasant as to drown in mud.People today are in danger of drowning in information; but because they have been taught information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be.If they could handle information, they would not have to drown at all.The lightning said to the oak tree: 'Stand aside, or take what is coming to you!
Idries Shah
God, nevertheless, required a little help from men, and what he mostly got was hindrance.
Ellis Peters
Perhaps the House had heard Harvey wishing for a full moon, because when he and Wendell traipsed upstairs and looked out the landing window, there--hanging between the bare branches of the trees--was a moon as wide and as white as a dead man's smile.
Clive Barker
How I hate the sight of an umbrella!
Jane Austen
Time is the only actual true barrier to success.
Steven Redhead
If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.
Christopher Hitchens
Free to move, speak, extemporize, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, an exploration there, but we are brought round full circle to face again the single immutable fact --
Tom Stoppard
Nothing good was learnt too swiftly. Knowledge should be a purposeful accumulance of observed experience, applied and tested to the full.
Jane Borodale
There is a good deal too strange to be believed nothing is too strange to have happened.
Thomas Hardy
Ironically your greatest spiritual asset is what appears to be your greatest obstacle: your obsession with yourself. Today we live in the age of individualism. – Richard Harvey
Richard Harvey
If there's no sea-gull there's no meeting, Wicklow had said. No sea-gull means abort. That's my epitaph, thought Barley. 'There was no sea-gull, so he aborted.
John le Carré
To not use a talent to the best of your ability is to stifle the thing that makes you most special. It is like plucking the wings off a butterfly.
Fennel Hudson
I walked back to the window to look down at the people who shared this city with me. The people who made every day a series of mediocrities.The unreformed murderers masquerading as businessmen in borrowed suits and debt-laden cars. The voluptuous bimbos floating around in an inexplicable mix of vacuity and despair. The crumbling face of my building looked pretty enough from across the street, but from here I could see how worn it was. I peeled off a satisfying chunk of paint, cement and matter. And I let it fall to the street below.
Nasri Atallah
Don't choose the one who's beautiful to the world, but rather, choose the one who makes your world beautiful.
Harry Styles
Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
Samuel Butler
They don’t give Olympic medals out for talking a good game.
Steve Backley
[The fine structure constant] ... defines how firmly atomic nuclei bind together and how all the atoms on Earth were made. Its value controls the power from the Sun and, more sensitively, how stars transmute hydrogen into all the atoms of the periodic table.
Martin J. Rees
I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
Neil Gaiman
Is food a substitute for love? No, love is a substitute for food. And a pretty poor substitute at that.
Rohan Candappa
This world is all vanity. It is a tempest hurling us from one sorrow to another.
Jocelyn Murray
The essence of the Revolution is to abolish the attainment of unqualified power of man over man either by vote-getting, money-pressure or crude terror. The Revolution repudiates profit or terror altogether as methods of human intercourse. It turns the attention of men and women back from a frantic and futile struggle for the means of power, a struggle against our primary social instincts, to an innate urgency to make and to a beneficial competition for preeminence in social service. It recalls man to a clean and creative life from the entanglements and perversion of secondary issues into which he has fallen. It replaces property and official authority by the compelling prestige of sound achievement. Eminent service remains the only source of influence left in the world . . .
H.G.Wells
Revenge is self-defeating. It will eat away you until there is nothing left.
Chris Bradford
One moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don't exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which the did happen.
Philip Pullman
It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.
Arthur Conan Doyle