Quotes by British Authors - Page 21

I'm trying to remember how you tell the time by looking at the sun." -"I should leave it for a while, it's too bright to see the numbers at the moment.
Terry Pratchett
There rolls the deep where grew the treeO earth, what changes hast thou seen!There where the long street roars hath been.The stillness of the central sea.
Alfred Tennyson
I can chase you, and I can catch you,but there is nothing I can do to make you mine.
Morrissey
I’ve been living on the edge for so long, my friends call me Cliff
Benny Bellamacina
Only by binding together as a single force will we remain strong and unconquerable.
Chris Bradford
I could not tell anymore how much of the screaming came from my own mouth. I was borne up on the swell of it, I was the sound. We were all howling together, the poor and the quality, the boxing girl and the beast inside my breast. If she was a madwoman, then we were all of us with her, and I had never felt such savage elation, nor known that it existed.
Anna Freeman
Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves.
Terry Pratchett
Youth to youth, like the dragon-flies chasing each other, and love like the sun warming them through and through.
John Galsworthy
I am no faint-heart when it comes to the unpleasant truth. Indeed I have always taken a bracing sort of pleasure in facing it.
Jude Morgan
It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory
Christopher Hitchens
WHORES.Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.
Julian Barnes
Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.
G.K. Chesterton
Don't be afraid. You are never really alone. Just be yourself. You don't ever have to pretend you are someone else. If you try to do that, then you don't have anything to give the world. Accept and give your gifts with love.
Jay Woodman
Harry... take my body back, will you? Take my body back to my parents...
J.K. Rowling
In politics a week is a very long time.
Harold Wilson
-I am willing to die for my own clan.-Fireheart
Erin Hunter
All around him the branches of the trees had frozen solid, reaching out white fingers of glass that looked as if they would shatter in any breeze, or chime like musical bells. The world looked strangely magical.
Alex Nye
He thought of the deep crevasses and windy caves of Underlay, and the stories of the creatures that dwelt there. Of course, he didn’t believe in them. He’d told them, because the handing on of an oral mythology was very important to a developing culture, but he didn’t believe in supernatural monsters. He shivered. He hoped they didn’t believe in him.
Terry Pratchett
Letitia! What a name. Halfway between a salad and a sneeze.
Terry Pratchett
The mole dug its way deep, deep down, under the foundations of the wall. No magical alarm sounded, though I did hit my head five times on a pebble.Once each on five different pebbles. Not the same pebble five times. Just want to make that clear. Sometimes you human beings are so dense.
Jonathan Stroud
Her lips trembled, and so did his. It was never known which lips were the first to move towards the other lips; but they kissed tremblingly, and then they moved apart.The rain was dashing against the window-panes as if an angry spirit were within it, and behind it was the great swoop of the wind; it was one of those moments in which both the busy and the idle pause with a certain awe.
George Eliot
Grace isn't a little prayer you chant before receiving a meal. It's a way to live.
Jacqueline Winspear
The children walk away from me, flick flickety off at a tangent between thin blotched beech trunks, then turn like yo-yos at the end of their strings and come back to me" from the poem "In a BishopsWood Clearing
Jay Woodman
Finding this, she was much perplexed as to Henchard's motives in opening the matter at all; for in such cases we attribute to an enemy a power of consistent action which we never find in ourselves or or in our friends...
Thomas Hardy
FAUSTUS. [Stabbing his arm.] Lo, Mephistophilis, for love of thee,I cut mine arm, and with my proper bloodAssure my soul to be great Lucifer's,Chief lord and regent of perpetual night!
Christopher Marlowe
Biological databases impose particular limitations on how biological objects can be related to one another. In other words, the structure of a database predetermines the sorts of biological relationships that can be 'discovered'. To use the language of Bowker and Star, the database 'torques,' or twists, objects into particular conformations with respect to one another. The creation of a database generates a particular and rigid structure of relationships between biological objects, and these relationships guide biologists in thinking about how living systems work. The evolution of GenBank from flat-file to relational to federated database paralleled biologists' moves from gene-centric to alignment-centric to multielement views of biological action.
Hallam Stevens
Time erodes us all.
Meg Rosoff
Innocent and joyfulI take your handfor I know you judge not,you simply understand.You are my companionon this voyage of discovery,singing sweet soft musicto the universe inside of me.
Jay Woodman
You can die of a broken heart -- it's scientific fact -- and my heart has been breaking since that very first day we met. I can feel it now, aching deep behind my rib cage the way it does every time we're together, beating a desperate rhythm: Love me. Love me. Love me.
Abby McDonald
In the early days, I might have gotten on stage and begun to sing as a desperate attempt to communicate, but now I found that singing was both a physical and emotional joy. It was sensuous, a pure pleasure, which didn't take away from the emotions being expressed—even if they were melancholic. Music can do that; you can enjoy singing about something sad.
David Byrne
A good message will always find a messenger.
Amelia Barr
Scientists are the true driving force of civilization.
James Burke
... It is not possible, says Weber, to confer the objective validity of facts on the basis of a value-judgement; and second, it is not possible to judge the value of values through the use of scientific reason. This leads him to maintain a distinction between science and ethics, the former dealing with questions of fact, the latter with questions of value.
Nicholas Gane
I’m a maker of ballads right prettyI write them right here in the streetYou can buy them all over the cityyours for a penny a sheetI’m a word pecker out of the printersout of the dens of Gin LaneI’ll write up a scene on a counter- confessions and sins in the main, boysconfessions and sins in the mainThen you’ll find me in Madame Geneva’skeeping the demons at bayThere’s nothing like gin for drowning them inbut they’ll always be back on a hanging day, on a hanging dayThey come rattling over the cobblesthey sit on their coffins of blackSome are struck dumb, some gabbletop-heavy on brandy or sackThe pews are all full of fine fellowsand the hawker has set up her shopAs they’re turning them off at the gallowsshe’ll be selling right under the drop, boysselling right under the dropThen you’ll find me in Madame Geneva’skeeping the demons at bayThere’s nothing like gin for drowning them inbut they’ll always be back on a hanging day, on a hanging day
Mark Knopfler
The Devil answer'd: bray a fool in a morter with wheat, yet shall not his folly be beaten out of him; if Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree; now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of ten commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbaths God? murder those who were murder'd because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labor of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defense before Pilate? covet when he pray'd for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments; Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.
William Blake
You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women.
Neil Gaiman
What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew
Robert Browning
For a short while she considered the idea of orchestral courtesy. Certainly one should avoid giving political offence: German orchestras, of course, used to be careful about playing Wagner abroad, at least in some countries, choosing instead German composers who were somewhat more ... apologetic.
Alexander McCall Smith
I've found that one must try and teach people that there's no top limit to disaster-that, so long as breath remains in your body, you've got accept the miseries of life. They will often seem infinite, insupportable. They are part of the human condition.
Ian Fleming
Art can only progress towards its own self-annihilation.
Richard Appignanesi
You can see the people who thought they could come to London, bend over and pick gold off the streets. They’re all lying on benches in Trafalgar Square with hernias and cans of Special Brew.
Garry Crystal
Plainly it isn't an exact science, despite it being a complex interaction of micro-decisions and corresponding thought; perhaps it doesn't always work and we pass by some potential soulmates like the proverbial ships in the night, never quite connecting. Then again, perhaps the system is tenacious and continues to run like a computer program on infinite loop, so that if at first you don't meet, you are drawn back together for another try.
Simon Pegg
In the bazaar today I noticed a shopkeeper sitting cross-legged on the platform of his shop making up his ledger. A common sight - but there was something wrong, I could not at first see what. Then I understood: what was his heavy ledge resting on? It was lying open before him, on his stomach, but unsupported by his free hand, not resting against his knees. What on earth was propping it up?The problem teased my mind so much that I had to retrace my steps for another look. There he was, comfortably scribbling away in the large ledger, which was standing up, apparently unsupported, in his lap. Then, as I stared, he closed it, and got to his feet - and the mystery was explained. He had elephantiasis of the scrotum, and had been utilising this huge football of tissue as a book-rest.
J.R. Ackerley
Just as there are phantom limbs there are phantom histories, histories that are severed and discarded, but linger on as thwarted possibilities an compelling nostalgias.
Adam Phillips
Perhaps she was just looking for love in the wrong places. In all the safe places. What if love was not safe at all?
Mary Balogh
I’m doing the absolute opposite of giving myself away. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll be completely visible. If the painting sells, I’ll be in Paris, hanging on a wall. If anything, I’m being selfish. It’s perfect; all the freedom of creation, with none of the fuss.
Jessie Burton
Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic...
J.K. Rowling
The fires of hell were seventy times hotter than the fires of the iron.
Ruth Ahmed
So much for a “Happy Halloween!” I thought sarcastically. I should wear a huge sign around my neck from now onwards that reads: ‘Stay clear of me if you want your party to survive the night’!
Adele Rose
I stared out of the window at the bright-blue Swiss sky and I told him a story of two people. Two people who shouldn’t have met, and who didn’t like each other much when they did, but who found they were the only two people in the world who could possibly have understood each other. And I told him of the adventures they had, the places they had gone, and the things I had seen that I had never expected to. I conjured for him electric skies and iridescent seas and evenings full of laughter and silly jokes. I drew a world for him, a world far from a Swiss industrial estate, a world in which he was still somehow the person he had wanted to be. I drew the world he had created for me, full of wonder and possibility. I let him know a hurt had been mended in a way that he couldn’t have known, and for that alone there would always be a piece of me indebted to him. And as I spoke I knew these would be the most important words I would ever say and that it was important that they were the right words, that they were not propaganda, an attempt to change his mind, but respectful of what Will had said. I told him something good...
Jojo Moyes
His suffering was no more real than he was.
Johnny Rich
In the cramped confines of the toilet I had trouble getting out of my wet trousers, which clung to my legs like a drowning man. The new ones were quite complicated too in that they had more legs than a spider; either that or they didn't have enough legs to get mine into. The numbers failed to add up. Always there was one trouser leg too many or one of my legs was left over. From the outside it may have looked like a simple toilet, but once you were locked in here the most basic rules of arithmetic no longer held true.
Geoff Dyer
It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet.
Lytton Strachey
You shall not hear their mirth:You shall not come to think them well contentBy any jest of mine. These men are worthYour tears:You are not worth their merriment.
Wilfred Owen
Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife he is always proud of himself as the source of it.
Samuel Johnson
If someone thinks that peace and love are just a cliche that must have been left behind in the 60s, that's a problem. Peace and love are eternal.
John Lennon
Reputation takes decades to make. And can be lost in one tweet. Think about that before you press the send button.
David Hieatt
Don't eat the bread unless you want to leave bread crumbs.
Anthony T.Hincks
No one conquers fear easily, Robert. It takes a brave heart to win great battles.
Peter Bunzl
Even a broken heart doesn't warrant a waste of good paper.
Dodie Smith