Quotes by British Authors - Page 201

Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.
W Somerset Maugham
You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe - when it knocked down our buildings it did not replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.
Charles
We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.
H.G.Wells
Bodies lay in the sun. Bodies stood in the sun.
N.J. Hallard
SNAPE: Sometimes costs are made to be borne.
Jack Thorne
This was the real thing, boys in the flesh. All the prohibitions, especially the ones that stayed unvoiced, had made boys much more exotic; it was as though we'd never met one. The whole school hummed with excitement and the headmistress's aspect softened with anticipation, for she was about to let the dangerous genie of adolescent sex out of its bottle and tame it. She spoke in veiled, suggestive terms in assembly of freedom and responsibility, and we giggled uneasily - it was all vaguely shocking, like being tickled by a policeman.
Lorna Sage
If you surrender your free will, then someone is bound to take the reins and lead you to a place that is not of your own true desire.
Steven Redhead
I used to rush into strange dreams at night: dreams many-coloured, agitated, full of the ideal, the stirring, the stormy--dreams where, amidst unusual scenes, charged with adventure, with agitating risk and romantic chance, I still again and again met Mr. Rochester, always at some exciting crisis; and then the sense of being in his arms, hearing his voice, meeting his eye, touching his hand and cheek, loving him, being loved by him--the hope of passing a lifetime at his side, would be renewed, with all its first force and fire. Then I awoke. Then I recalled where I was, and how situated. Then I rose up on my curtainless bed, trembling and quivering; and then the still, dark night witnessed the convulsion of despair, and heard the burst of passion.
Charlotte Brontë
Healey’s First Law Of Holes: When in one, stop digging.
Denis Healey
All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
George Orwell
I want to look at you as you kill me.
Curtis Jobling
I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith.
Evelyn Waugh
Money and time are the heaviest burdens of life . . . the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use.
Samuel Johnson
Life for both sexes--and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement--is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority-- it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney-- for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination-- over other people.
Virginia Woolf
Simon's brain tried to comprehend the situation. 'Was an international supermodel really holding Doc Gutson, leader of the infamous Bloodworth Gang, captive?
Clare Havens
Sometimes people with low self-esteem will try to punish you for caring about them.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Oxygen deprivation and supplemental oxygen are both bio-hazards for Mauna Kea workers
Steven Magee
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and doleUnequal laws unto a savage race,That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
Alfred Tennyson
New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list.
Cory Doctorow
We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.
William Golding
Here the whole world (stars, water, air,And field, and forest, as they wereReflected in a single mind)Like cast off clothes was left behindIn ashes, yet with hopes that she,Re-born from holy poverty,In lenten lands, hereafter mayResume them on her Easter Day."(Epitaph for Joy Davidman)
C.S. Lewis
Once lay down the rule that the job comes first and you throw that job open to every individual, man or woman, fat or thin, tall or short, ugly or beautiful, who is able to do that job better than the rest of the world.
Dorothy L. Sayers
People carry on whole conversations in proverbs. But they are not LIVING the proverbs.
Idries Shah
And imagine acquiring a new language and only learning the words to describe a wonderful world, refusing to know the words for a bleak one and in doing so linguistically shaping the world that you inhabit.
Rosamund Lupton
I think what's most interesting about me is the work that I do.
Susie Orbach
Other than sports, only war and catastrophe can create this sort of national unity.
Simon Kuper
There's solace in the thought that I will never finish missing her.
Jim Crace
I don't believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book.
J.K. Rowling
Death is the last enemy: once we've got past that I think everything will be all right.
Alice Thomas Ellis
Humans are often credited with having real foresight, in distinction to the rest of biology which does not. For example, Dawkins compares the 'blind watchmaker' of natural selection with the real human one. 'A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection . . . has no purpose in mind'.I think this distinction is wrong. There is no denying that the human watchmaker is different from the natural one. We humans, by virtue of having memes, can think about cogs, and wheels, and keeping time, in a way that animals cannot. Memes are the mind tools with which we do it. But what memetics shows us is that the processes underlying the two kinds of design are essentially the same. They are both evolutionary processes that give rise to design through selection, and in the process they produce what looks like foresight.
Susan Blackmore
[I]t is typical of Zen that its style of action has the strongest feeling of commitment, of "follow-through." It enters into everything wholeheartedly and freely without having to keep an eye on itself. It does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
Alan W. Watts
The cracks in your heart are there so the light can shine through.
Elizabeth Noble
[Referring to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde] ... Will civilization never reach humane ideals? Will men always punish most severely the sins they do not understand and which hold forth for them no temptation? Did Jesus suffer in vain?
Frank Harris
At that instant a dazzling claw of lightning streaked down the length of the sky. The hedge and the distant trees seemed to leap forward in the brilliance of the flash. Immediately upon it came the thunder: a high, tearing noise, as though some huge thing were being ripped to pieces close above, which deepened and turned to enormous blows of dissolution. Then the rain fell like a waterfall. In a few seconds the ground was covered with water and over it, to a height of inches, rose a haze formed of a myriad minute splashes. Stupefied with the shock, unable even to move, the sodden rabbits crouched inert, almost pinned to the earth by the rain.
Richard Adams
Just because we are capable of art didn't what lay in front of him could be dismissed as aberration, that we could take what we admired and fence that off as human, dismissing the rest as monstrous. The same hands committed both. Brains don't undermine the savagery. They made us better at it.
Michael Marshall
Prejudice is a product of ignorance that hides behind barriers of tradition.
Jasper Fforde
Dudley thought for a moment. It looked like hard work.
J.K. Rowling
Didn’t you find it all … rather unsatisfying?”“Yes, but I couldn’t seem to see a way out. It was like being three different people, and they all wanted to go different ways.”A slight smile. “The result was I went nowhere.
Pat Barker
The mother is always at fault. so is the wife, really. Women are supposed to control men, isn't that how it goes? what's that saying again: 'behind every great man is a great woman.' we're supposed to be the ones holding them back. forget having our own lives. forget our own careers and loves and losses. we're the matriarchs.
Sarah A. Denzil
I remember at that time I went to the hairdresser's. I did this regularly, but I remember that visit for two particular reasons. The first was that next to me was a young mother with a little girl aged about three. The child, whose hair was about to be cut for the first time, screamed with terror and clung to her mother. The hairdresser stood by gravely, comb in hand: he recognised that this was a serious moment. The mother, blushing, tried to comfort the child who had suddenly plunged into despair; all around the shop women smiled in sympathy. What impressed me, and what I particularly remember, was the child's passionate attempt to re-enter her mother, the arms locked around the woman's neck, the terrified cries of unending love. So dangerous is it to be so close! I had tears in my eyes, witnessing that bond, seeing that closeness, of which only a sorrowful memory remained in my own life. One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages: hotly, despairingly, with tears of passion. One grows up, one becomes civilised, one learns one's manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions - sorrow and anger - adequately.
Anita Brookner
If you want to talk about it with someone, then I`m happy to listen, or try and help, but you should only tell me if you want to.
Jane Green
[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.", Issue 64, Winter 1975)
P.G. Wodehouse
Thirty-four, still undecided on a name, sat practicing his Realm tongue with Draker, although much of the lesson seemed to consist of the correct use of profanity. "No," the big man shook his shaggy head. "Pig-fucker not fuck-pigger.
Anthony Ryan
Lucy, you're as transparent as a pane of glass, and there's not a speck of guile to be seen in you. Yet in a way you're a mystery to me.
Madeleine Brent
Child, [death] is with us always,” said Cadfael, patient beside him. “Last summer ninety-five men died here in the town, none of whom had done murder. For choosing the wrong side, they died. It falls upon blameless women in war, even in peace at the hands of evil men. It falls upon children who never did harm to any, upon old men, who in their lives have done good to many, and yet are brutally and senselessly slain. Never let it shake your faith that there is a balance hereafter. What you see is only a broken piece from a perfect whole.” “Such justice as we see is also but a broken shred. But it is our duty to preserve what we may, and fit together such fragments as we find, and take the rest on trust.
Ellis Peters
Miles away, down through an opening in the hills, he could catch glimpses of a road where motor-cars sometimes passed, and yet here, so removed from the arteries of the latest civilization, was a bat-haunted old homestead, where something unmistakably like witchcraft seemed to hold a very practical sway.
Saki
If you are not yourself people will look right through you and see the pale shadow of someone else
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class life-style will never write anything but crap.
Derek Raymond
This time, something different happens, though. It’s the daydreaming that does it. I’m doing the usualthing—imagining in tiny detail the entire course of the relationship, from first kiss, to bed, to moving intogether, to getting married (in the past I have even organized the track listing of the party tapes), to howpretty she’ll look when she’s pregnant, to names of children—until suddenly I realize that there’snothing left to actually, like, happen. I’ve done it all, lived through the whole relationship in my head.I’ve watched the film on fast-forward; I know the whole plot, the ending, all the good bit. Now I’ve gotto rewind and watch it all over again in real time, and where’s the fun in that?And fucking … when’s it all going to fucking stop? I’m going to jump from rock to rock for the rest ofmy life until there aren’t any rocks left? I’m going to run each time I get itchy feet? Because I get themabout once a quarter, along with the utilities bills. More than that, even, during British Summer Time.I’ve been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you andme, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains.
Nick Hornby
Scenery is fine -but human nature is finer
John Keats
Integrity of life is fame's best friend,Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end.
John Webster
Editing one’s writing is as easy as lighting a match while riding a bicycle.
Fennel Hudson
I do wish," said Lucy, "now that we're not thirsty, we could go on feeling as not-hungry as we did when we were thirsty.
C.S. Lewis
To me you are a work of art, and I would give you my heart - that's if I had one.
Morrissey
We set out to save the Shire, Sam and it has been saved - but not for me.
J.R.R. Tolkien
There are some souls, bright and precious, which, like gold and silver, may be subdued by the fiery trial, and yield to new moulds; but there are others, pure and solid as the diamond, which may be shivered to pieces, yet in every fragment retain their indelible characteristics.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
I am an ordinary sort of fellow, not braver than other people, but I hate to see a good man downed, and that long knife would not be the end of Scudder if I could play the game in his place.
John Buchan
I confess I found it somewhat insipid when I last went....it was all so prosy - so bonnety - so whisty and teacuppy - you see, the adjectives for it do not even exist, and I must invent them.
Jude Morgan
The good news is, shame has a kryptonite. Shame cannot survive under the power of love. Love defeats shame, every time. Love says that no matter what you did which may have caused guilt, you are loved. You are lovable. You are love itself. That is the truth. And because of that, you have nothing to be ashamed of.
Stephen Lovegrove
And how easy it is to recognize the revenant shapes that the old unchanging enemies—racism, leader worship, superstition—assume when they reappear amongst us (often bodyguarded by their new apologists).
Christopher Hitchens