Quotes by British Authors - Page 212

By puberty I learned that nothing worth having could be easily attained and to succeed one must be single minded.
Russell Brand
My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky.
William Wordsworth
I didn't know his age or how he liked his tea, I was wearing a terrible coat and I was drunk as a stoat - but this moment felt like it. The one I'd been waiting patiently for since I was a little girl. I'd worked so hard, for so long, at being ok with being single, but all of the things I'd told myself about independence were disappearing rapidly into the cold night. Right now, he felt like the only person who mattered in the whole world.
Lucy Robinson
Go to any small village anywhere in the world, and see what they remember. Everything. It's all there -- passed on like a precious piece of information, some secret imparted from one who knew to one who yearns to know. Taken good care of.
Alexander McCall Smith
Mrs Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her clenliness more umcomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.
Charles Dickens
We form our impression not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally, by comparing ourselves to people in the same boat as ourselves.
Malcolm Gladwell
People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.
Terry Pratchett
People who speak or act in an ordinary fashion are most likely to be those who have been the recipients of higher experiences. But because they do not rage around, wild-eyed, people think that they are very ordinary folk and therefore not aware of anything unknown to the general run of man.
Idries Shah
Let us not take it for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.
Virginia Woolf
Fireheart tensed, waiting for whatever had hunted down these apprentices to emerge from the trees and attack, but nothing stirred. Feeling as if his legs hardly belonged to him, he sprang down and stumbled across to Swiftpaw.The apprentice lay on his side, his legs splayed out. His black-and-white fur was torn, and his body was covered with dreadful wounds, ripped by teeth far bigger than any cat's. His jaws still snarled and his eyes glared. He was dead, and Fireheart could see that he had died fighting.
Erin Hunter
When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.
Jane Austen
It is in his obsessions that mankind most closely resembles his machines.
Matthew De Abaitua
It does not matter much what a man hates provided he hates something.
Samuel Butler
I felt like I was falling in love but maybe not just with her, with something else, another world, but maybe that's always what falling in love is like.
Benjamin Markovits
But I begin to fancy you don't like me. How strange! I thought, though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me. (Catherine Linton, nee Earnshaw)
Emily Brontë
Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.
Virginia Woolf
If peace had a smell,it would be the smell of a library full of old, leather-bound books.
Mark Pryor
I believe,' Muswell once said, 'that mental isolation is the essence of weird fiction. Isolation when confronted with disease, with madness, with horror and with death. These are the reverberations of the infinity that torments us.("The White Hands")
Mark Samuels
Had I catalogued the downsides of parenthood, "son might turn out to be a killer" would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this:1. H
Lionel Shriver
In my early teens, [my grandfather] would sometimes stomp around his living room, where he used to shave towards mid-day with bowl, brush and open razor, deriding my ignorance and mocking the made-up discipline of sociology, which I at one stage claimed to be studying. 'What is sociology?' he roared derisively, twisting and rolling the silly word on his Hampshire tongue. I knew, alas, that he was quite right.
Peter Hitchens
Violence is the repartee of the illiterate
Alan Brien
Ancient boundaries are meaningless, except for political purposes; old divisions of clan and tribe are sentimental remnants of the pre-atomic age; neither creed nor color nor place of origin is relevant to the realities of modern power to utterly seek and destroy.
Sydney J. Harris
Authority, when first detecting chaos at its heels, will entertain the vilest schemes to save its orderly facade.
Alan Moore
Trauma is a unique phenomenon all on its own, as if it is an entity in and of itself.
Paul Levy
Bellybuttons are our link with the past.
Anthony T.Hincks
The beliefs which we have the most warrant for have no safeguard, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.
John Stuart Mill
One way to express the answer is that it might happen by 'chance'. But 'chance' is just a word expressing ignorance. It means 'determined by some as yet unknown, or unspecified, means'.
Richard Dawkins
I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. It might be dying, and there might be a lot of dirt in the air you breathe, but this is where it's happening.
John Lennon
For the next century, no elf is to be banished to the human world. No more Star Wars, no more Harry Potter, no more Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and no more body-doubling for Tom Cruise. Elves shouldn't be treated like shit. We're not Mexicans.
Adam Millard
It is ill to offer God one duty stained with the blood of another.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Reduce inflammation to treat the root of many issues. If your gut isn't working right it can cause so many other issues.
Jay Woodman
I wish Merry was here," he heard himself saying, and quick thoughts raced through his mind, even as he watched the enemy come charging to the assault. "Well, well, now at any rate I understand poor Denethor a little better. We might die together, Merry and I, and since die we must, why not? Well, as he is not here, I hope he'll find an easier end. But now I must do my best.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I love the quaint saying of a dying man, who exclaimed, "I have no fear of going home; I have sent all before me; God's finger is on the latch of my door, and I am ready for Him to enter.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
The world is on fire, young man. As writers, it is only proper that we do what we can to warn people.But in telling the truth to the world, don't lie to yourself. Write whatever you want. Tell the truth. Just don't imagine that you are changing anything.Like I said, people just want to have a good time. -Snagglepuss
Mark Russell
Security and safety were the reward of dullness.
Hanif Kureishi
I love being able to see an un-written future.
Michael Jones
The doctor looked shifty. “He’s still breathing,” he said. “Look, his pulse is nearly humming and he’s got a temperature you could fry eggs on.” He hesitated, aware that this was probably too straightforward and easily understood; medicine was a new art on the Disc, and wasn’t going to get anywhere if people could understand it. “Pyrocerebrum ouerf culinaire,” he said, after working it out in his head. “Well, what can you do about it?” said Arthur. “Nothing. He’s dead. All the medical tests prove it. So, er…bury him, keep him nice and cool, and tell him to come and see me next week. In daylight, for preference.""But he’s still breathing!” “These are just reflex actions that might easily confuse the layman,” said the doctor airily. Chidder sighed. He suspected that the Guild, who after all had an unrivalled experience of sharp knives and complex organic compounds, was much better at elementary diagnostics than were the doctors. The Guild might kill people, but at least it didn’t expect them to be grateful for it.
Terry Pratchett
You don’t come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn’t a strong aspect of your personality. 'A reality shaped around your own desires' — there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
Zadie Smith
An avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the state for the acquisition of wealth.No. 75
Alexander Hamilton
No violence, gentlemen — no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture!
Arthur Conan Doyle
A wise parent humors the desire for independent action, so as to become the friend and advisor when his absolute rule shall cease.
Elizabeth Gaskell
Only allow what contributes positively into your life.
Steven Redhead
Every act and choice you make is creating the real you and shaping your real life.
Elizabeth George
There are some laws that are coded into the very nature of the universe, and one is: There Is Never Enough Shelf Space.
Terry Pratchett
We're not very different from one another, not different at all, in fact. We're all just people with the same needs, the same desires, the same feelings. It's a lie about us being different. It's something they cooked up so we'd be fighting one another instead of them, the ones who keep us down and make their fortunes off our labor, the same ones who send us off to war when they get to fighting among themselves over the spoils. You'll find that out someday. They'll be calling on you to go to war for them, you can be sure of that, because there's going to be lots more wars in the future. I got in one myself, as you know. I saw men getting killed and wounded and crippled, and I must have killed a lot of men myself, and I'm just sick every time I think of it. Why? Because we were fighting one another instead of those who'd sent us out there. Oh, they're clever, those capitalists. It's hard to beat them at their game. They've fooled us with words like patriotism and duty and honor, and they've got us divided up into classes and religions so that each one of us figures he's better than the other. But it'll all change, 'arry. Believe me, it will. People get smarter. The human brain has a potential for development. Someday it will grow big enough so that everybody will see and understand the truth, and then we won't act like a bunch of sheep, and then that wall that separates the two sides of our street will crumble.
Harry Bernstein
Blake said Milton was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it. I am of the Devil's party and know it.
Philip Pullman
What is human is immortal!
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
You should be aiming to illuminate your indoor daytime environment with natural outdoor light, not electrical lighting products.
Steven Magee
The unity of all science consists alone in its method, not in its material.
Karl Pearson
Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation, that the senate and the people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedoms.
Edward Gibbon
Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.
Winston S. Churchill
The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.
P.G. Wodehouse
The body is the outermost layer of the mind.
David Mitchell
There are normal times when it is wholly admirable to be steadfast, resolute, unconflicted, and therefore when integrity is unmistakenly a virtue. The person of integrity knows what to do, and does it. But as we have been exploring, there are also times when certainty and single-mindedness indicate something less admirable: a deafness to voices that should be heard or a blindness to aspects of a situation that need to be considered.
Simon Blackburn
Hades is evolved to the highest state of simplicity.
J.M. Ledgard
Stories aren't facts, Cait, they're not details. Stories are feelings. You've got your feelings, haven't you?""Too many," I said."Well, that's all you need." He put his hand on mine. "Cry yourself a story, love. It works. Believe me."So that's what I did, I cried myself a story.And this is it.
Kevin Brooks
You have shared your secret. I think you will find it to be an unburdening in many other ways. You have very considerable natural advantages. You have nothing to fear from life. A day will come when these recent unhappy years may seem no more than that cloud-stain over there upon Chesil Bank. You shall stand in sunlight—and smile at your own past sorrows.
John Fowles
It is unfortunate that for some, kindness is an unwarranted expenditure, compassion an avoidable weakness, and love an unnecessary gamble.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
He could not stand. It was notThat he could not thrive, he was bornWith everything but the will –That can be deformed, just like a limb.Death was more interesting to him.Life could not get his attention.
Ted Hughes
Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.
Neil Gaiman