Quotes by British Authors - Page 214

Conse­quently the Wolfenden recommendations will be indefinitely rejected, police prosecutions will continue and Clive on the bench will continue to sentence Alec in the dock. Maurice may get off.
E.M. Forster
Take me! Well, not quite take me, love me now, take me eventually
Fay Weldon
There is no honor in cruelty.
Jocelyn Murray
For every Pharoah there is a Moses.
Idries Shah
Though language forms the preacher 'Tis "good works" make the man.
Eliza Cook
Thinking there is something better out there in the world, something worth more than you already have- of all my mistakes,that was my biggest.
Louise Candlish
We need to move from comparative advantage to perpetual advantage...
Max McKeown
All the world's a mass of folly Youth is gay age melancholy: Youth is spending age is thrifty Mad at twenty cold at fifty Man is nought but folly's slave From the cradle to the grave.
W. H. Ireland
I threatened to gouge one of his eyes out." Cathy
Dennis Kelly
That which is timeless is also the most timely.
Joseph Pearce
Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) is the most fascinating subject that I have ever encountered in human health!
Steven Magee
The wisest word man reaches is the humblest he can speak.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
Maybe we should always start everything from the inside and work to the outside, and not from the outside to the inside. What d'you think?
Aidan Chambers
A mist is rolling over the fields. Why is a summer mist romantic and autumn mist just sad?
Dodie Smith
Her brain is like a filing cabinet – everything neatly stored in categories. My brain is more like soup – everything all blended and mushed together.
Cat Clarke
I didn’t tell him that I grew up in an ugly city that taught me how to look between dust and rubbish and potholes to find a splinter of glass that looked like unmelting ice, beautiful in its defiance of the sun.
Kamila Shamsie
I just wonder… Isn’t it better to start as a monster and become a hero? Isn’t that what creates belief? The idea that someone can change?
F.D. Lee
Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire.
Joseph Conrad
Authentic gospel preaching always engages people with eternal issues.
Colin S. Smith
Your reality is based upon your beliefs.
Steven Redhead
To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.
Saki
I am surprised to see how much I have written; with stories even a page can take me hours, but the truth seems to flow out as fast as I can get it down. But words are very inadequate – anyway, my words are.
Dodie Smith
...I have decided that I shan't sweat the small stuff. Sense and sensibility will, I assume, come in their own time. If indeed they ought to come. And in the meantime, I shall continue to work my ass off... and whenever the opportunity arises... dance my ass off. ... As someone very smart once wrote, 'Those who were seen dancing were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music'.
Amy Mowafi
I sat in the darkness, where there is not any created thing, and to you I was only a voice commanding valour and an unnatural virtue. You heard the voice in the dark, and you never heard it again. The sun in heaven denied it, the earth and sky denied it, all human wisdom denied it. And when I met you in the daylight I denied it myself.… But you were men. You did not forget your secret honour, though the whole cosmos turned an engine of torture to tear it out of you. I knew how near you were to hell. I know how you, Thursday, crossed swords with King Satan, and how you, Wednesday, named me in the hour without hope.
G.K. Chesterton
It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.
Aldous Huxley
I never heard that it had been anybody’s business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to him. He had been adapted to the verses and had learnt the art of making them to such perfection. I did doubt whether Richard would not have profited by some one studying him a little, instead of his studying them quite so much.
Charles Dickens
One day you might just find something worth living an eternity for
Abigail Gibbs
The days draw out, the weather gets warmer, and it's what we call summer, with a bitter laugh when we've said it.
Stan Barstow
I get it,' said the prisoner. 'Good Cop, Bad Cop, eh?'If you like.' said Vimes. 'But we're a bit short staffed here, so if I give you a cigarette would you mind kicking yourself in the teeth?
Terry Pratchett
Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.
Tom Stoppard
WHY did she do this? She was a terrible drunk texter. All the things she wanted to say to people during the day came out at night, like a vampire.
Harriet Evans
Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.
Charles Darwin
There's pride and then there's stupidity.
Robert Galbraith
As you sit there watching a performance of a Shakespeare, Johnson, or Marlowe play, the crowd will fade into the background. Instead, you will be struck by the diction. There are words and phrases that you will not find funny, but which will make the crowd roar with laughter. Your familiarity with the meanings of Shakespeare's words will rise and fall as you see and hear the actors' deliveries and notice the audience's reaction. That is the strange music of being so familiar with something that is not of your own time. What you are listening to in that auditorium is the genuine voice, something of which you have heard only distant echoes. Not every actor is perfect in his delivery; Shakespeare himself makes that quite clear in his Hamlet. But what you are hearing is the voice of the men for whom Shakespeare wrote his greatest speeches. Modern thespians will follow the rhythms or the meanings of these words, but even the most brilliant will not always be able to follow both rhythm and meaning at once. If they follow the pattern of the verse, they risk confusing the audience, who are less familiar with the sense of the words. If they pause to emphasize the meanings, they lose the rhythm of the verse. Here, on the Elizabethan stage, you have a harmony of performance and understanding that will never again quite be matched in respect of any of these great writers.
Ian Mortimer
Spend the glittering moonlight therePursuing down the soundless deepLimbs that gleam and shadowy hair,Or floating lazy, half-asleep.Dive and double and follow after,Snare in flowers, and kiss, and call,With lips that fade, and human laughterAnd faces individual,Well this side of Paradise! . . .There's little comfort in the wise.
Rupert Brooke
Physicians do not systematically prescribe placebos to their patients. Hence they have no way of comparing the effects of the drugs they prescribe to placebos. When they prescribe a treatment and it works, their natural tendency is to attribute the cure to the treatment. But there are thousands of treatments that have worked in clinical practice throughout history. Powdered stone worked. So did lizard's blood, and crocodile dung, and pig's teeth and dolphin's genitalia and frog's sperm. Patients have been given just about every ingestible - though often indigestible - substance imaginable. They have been 'purged, puked, poisoned, sweated, and shocked', and if these treatments did not kill them, they may have made them better.
Irving Kirsch
...shiny trinkets and frivolous spending make people forget what world they're living in.
Beth Lewis
You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
John Morley
..... this isn't some LA country rock jam reminiscing on the pyschtotropic pot pansies of Haight Ashbury . This is the soot and smut of London mate !
Saira Viola
You're wondering if I really would slit your throat. To tell the truth, I don't know either, but think of the fun we could have finding out.
Terry Pratchett
Therefore, have done with this nonsense: you have no ground for hope: dismiss, at once, these hurtful thoughts and foolish wishes from your mind, and turn to your own duty, and the dull blank life that lies before you. You might have known such happiness was not for you.
Anne Brontë
I feel like I'm in a film about a struggling artist who keeps getting up at all hours of the night to look at his big, blank empty canvas. And in a way I am. Except that i'm not struggling. I'm Hector Kipling. I might be getting up at all hours of the night to look at my big, blank, empty canvas, but I am not fucking struggling.
David Thewlis
A great many worries can be diminished by realizing the unimportance of the matter which is causing anxiety.
Bertrand Russell
There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.
Julian Barnes
Saadi’s dictum, in the Bostan: ‘The Path is not in the rosary, the prayer-mat and the robe
Idries Shah
With a roof over his head he had ceased to work, living off his [war] pension and his wits, both hopelessly inadequate.
Spike Milligan
Intelligence is seeing the ups, downs, cycles and patterns in the game of life. Wisdom is not being played or a player - but being at one with life, dancing with life, being full of life, in flow with life - glad to be alive.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Colorful characters are the odd shaped pieces that fill the holes in life's puzzle.
Richard Stephens
If we are to survive on this planet there must be compromises.
Storm Jameson
The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness.
Arthur Stanley Eddington
You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists
G.K. Chesterton
He was asking for memories, too young himself to know that memories were only memories of memories.
Alan Hollinghurst
The God you worship will shape the values you hold, and the values you hold will shape the lifestyle that you choose.
Colin S. Smith
We can always count on people to hate and to fear.To harm one another and to be harmed.To kill and be killed.It is what opens the gate.
Simon Holt
People who ask for more than I'm willing to give end up with nothing.
Jane Davitt Alexa Snow
Some are born leaders, some achieve leadership, and some have leadership thrust upon them. Which of these are you, or would you rather not bother?
Maurice Flanagan
You can’t tell half a tale, Poison. You can’t write half a book. Whatever you choose to do next will completely change the aspect of what has gone before. if you decided to suddenly kill your friends as they slept –“ Why would I do that?” Poison interjected.Bear with me,” Fleet said patiently. “If you did, then the tale would take on a whole new light. Instead of being the journey of Poison from Gull to save her sister, it would be the terrible story of how a young girl became a cold-blooded killer. They way it would be written would be different. Do you see? Or you might die right now, and it would turn out that it wasn’t your tale all along it was Bram’s or Peppercorn’s, and you were just one of the sideline characters. The whole story has to be known before it can be recorded; otherwise it might suddenly change. That’s the beauty, Poison. You never know what’s going to happen next. When the tale is ended, then the writing will be visible to your eyes; until then it is unwritten.
Chris Wooding
God forgives us, as—when—we forgive them who injure us—and ourselves. These last weeks I think I have understood what many times in the past I thought I knew—but we never know—we never reach the end of understanding—the understanding of God—the mystery of his love...
Lucy Beckett
The summer passed quietly. I busied myself as best I could, reading a good deal.
Michael Cox
When a presidential candidate is publicly requesting help from the Russians, you know that there is something seriously going wrong in the USA.
Steven Magee