Quotes by British Authors - Page 220

I wish I had a hundred years," she said, very quietly. "A hundred years I could give to you.
Patrick Ness
We're on a planet, relax!
Benny Bellamacina
The highest function of humanity is belief, that activity of spirit that proceeds upon the pathway of reason, until it comes to some great promontory, and then spreads its wings, and upon the basis of its earlier journeying, takes eternity into its grasp.
G. Campbell Morgan
In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush radio in the corner of the living room and now he had a phone in his hand on which he could pretend to throw a scrunched-up piece of paper into a waste bin. The world had waited a long time for that.
Kate Atkinson
Well the other thing about lying is that the liar is banking on two things when telling the lie. They are hoping that the person being lied to is gullible enough to believe, and it’s also not even that they think they are gullible, it’s that they know the person they are lying to well enough that they know the person won’t push it any further because they know the person they are lying to wants to believe the lie.
Garry Crystal
Good to forgive Best to forget.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
In 1940, we knew who we were, we knew who the enemy was, we knew the dangers and the issues," he told me when I pressed him for a reading of the struggle against Islamic radicalism. "In our island, we knew we would prevail, that the Americans would be drawn into the fight. It is different today. We don't know who we are, we don't know the issues, and we still do not understand the nature of the enemy.
Bernard Lewis
You don't know, oh, ohYou don't know you're beautiful.
One Direction
Night air has the strangest flavourSpace to breathe it - time to savourAll that night air has to lend meTil the morning makes me angryIn the night air, the night air.I've acquired a kind of madnessDaylight fills my heart with sadnessAnd only silent skies can soothe meFeel that night air flowing through me In the night air, the night air.I don't need those car-crash coloursI control the stars above usClose my eyes to make the night fallThe comfort of world revolvingI can hear the earth in orbitIn the night air, in the night air.I've acquired a taste for silencedarkness fills my heart with calmnessand each thought like a thief is drivento steal the night air from the heavensIn the night air, in the night air...
Jamie Woon
The big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there's no room for romance anywhere.
Arthur Conan Doyle
The good life doesn't knock on the door. Joy is a job.
Lionel Shriver
The Agency was doubtful, because they had already sent a lot of nurses and nannies and governesses to Mr. and Mrs. Brown's family. 'The person you want,' they said, 'is Nurse Matilda.
Christianna Brand
Just as Prometheus delivered stolen fire to man, so Eve, and the serpent, delivered man into self-consciousness, setting him up, were it not for his short lifespan, as rival to God. At the same time, man’s self-consciousness removed him from nature into a life of toil, doubt, fear, guilt, shame, blame, enmity, loneliness, and frailty—and the product of this separation, the fruit and flower of this exile, is, of course, culture. ‘God,’ said the writer Victor Hugo, ‘made only water, but man made wine.
Neel Burton
Fritz was melancholic by nature, and could tolerate his own gloom. I do not think this is so with you, who are sanguine and impatient. In your case, remorse and despondency could be crippling.
John Christopher
If God be near a church, it must pray. And if he be not there, one of the first tokens of his absence will be a slothfulness in prayer.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
...that realisation that I was the oddity, the statistical probability, life was predictable.
Ruth Dugdall
I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion,' he resumed presently. 'They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.
Saki
I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.
C.S. Lewis
It was at Long Huruk that we encountered the vortex of the dream time of which we had so far only touched the periphery, for this was the semi-nomadic community of mystics and dream wanderers.
Lawrence Blair
Love? Love is like holding water in your hands. You might have it for a time, but it escapes, leaving you with nothing.
Laura Lam
As the beautiful does not exist for the artist and poet alone—though these can find in it more poignant depths of meaning than other men—so the world of Reality exists for all; and all may participate in it, unite with it, according to their measure and to the strength and purity of their desire.
Evelyn Underhill
Love. Passion. Belief. Duty. The lines blur sometomes. There are ove fifteen recognised mjor religions on this planet. One religion believes something different from another, and yet so often it's just the same thing with a different name, or a different form of worship, or a different headdress. But they will fight to protect what they believe in, no matter the cost. You've been here a while Jack. How many wars, how many lives squandered on religion. Then we get to science. Science versus creationism for instance. Two opposing stances on the same subject, neither of which has evidence to back it up
Gary Russell
The Sufi saying has it: "God, to the bee, is something which has TWO stings!
Idries Shah
Conventionality is not morality.
Charlotte Brontë
Animals are such agreeable friends they ask no questions pass no criticisms.
George Eliot
In the morning, when she walked to the consulate, carefully watching her sandals on the pavement, she glanced up and saw a Negro wearing a stack of panama hats. Maybe twelve. She never forgot the bandoeon of brims, the perfect stutter of hat.
Craig Raine
One is seldom unchanged by the death of those one loves. It gives me a deeper knowledge of them, and so of oneself in regard to them.
Elizabeth Goudge
When you let it get personal, the cost becomes personal too. You’re opening your own heart here. You sure you want to do that?
Michael Marshall Smith
It’s called the Pyxis,” said Raven. “Don’t let the fancy name intimidate you. It just means ‘box’ in one of those Old Earth languages, Roman or Spanish or Klingon…
Philip Reeve
Meow!" said the chicken.
Roger Hargreaves
He was distracted by a brief surge of adrenaline as he remembered the girl’s blood-soaked body. Flesh separated and puckered, he had left her in such a manner that her sacrification would be remembered.The recollection aroused him. Death and sensuality combined to create a unique vision of purity and abhorrence. Though he had experienced doubts since beginning, he knew the mission he had been tasked with was necessary. It had given him a purity of purpose. These women needed to be punished, all in her name. And yet he felt guilt. Not enough to consume him, but enough to have it niggling away in the back of his mind like a parasite infecting his very soul.May God forgive me for the deeds I committed on Kelly, no heart no heart.
David McCaffrey
The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events - that the world beyond the skins is actually an extension of our own bodies - and will end in destroying the very environment form which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends
Alan W. Watts
It's not a question of God `sending' us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.
C.S. Lewis
Love doesn’t rule the world. The lust for power and dominance over others is what drives men – always has, always will.
Jayne Castel
She learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart and her body were different things.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Fancy 'avin' to say you work for the Murder Squad, eh, Miss? Don't exactly warm folk to you, does it?
Jacqueline Winspear
My capacity for happiness," he added, "you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first
Douglas Adams
From a night of more sleep than she had expected, Marianne awoke the next morning to the same consciousness of misery in which she had closed her eyes.
Jane Austen
New converts displayed a most un-Roman concern for the sick man.
John Charles Pollock
There is a dialectic between common humanity and particular ways of being human.
Howard Morphy
The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.
Jeanette Winterson
The craving today is for something light and spicy, and few have patience, still less desire, to examine carefully that which would make a demand both upon their hearts and
Arthur W. Pink
Being a hero means ignoring how silly you feel.
Diana Wynne Jones
Shh! Listen! Someone’s coming! I think — I think it might be us!
J.K. Rowling
If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversity. They are denying not only the facts of biology but those of physics, geology, cosmology, archaeology, history and chemistry as well.
Richard Dawkins
To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.
Adam Phillips
This world is out of date
Kamila Shamsie
Blood Life is not hunger. It’s freedom.
Rosemary A. Johns
You be as angry as you need to be," she said. "Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Not your grandma, not your dad, no one. And if you need to break things, then by God, you break them good and
Patrick Ness
If we seem to get no good by attempting to draw near to Him, we may be sure we will get none by keeping away from Him.
John Newton
Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.
Bertrand Russell
In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving "as if" they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable.
Christopher Hitchens
The Greatest” is a bite-your-tongue-book. Ultimately a tragic tale it is also immensely uplifting and easily the best footballer biography I have ever read.
Mike Parry
Always be the very best you can be
Julie Hodgson
He had awoken too late for happiness, but not for strength, and could feel an austere joy, as of a warrior who is homeless but stands fully armed.
E.M. Forster
Don't worry, Evie; my heart isn't broken, only bruised.
Gillian Shields
The whole value of solitude depends upon oneself; it may be a sanctuary or a prison, a haven of repose or a place of punishment, a heaven or a hell, as we ourselves make it.
John Lubbock
Can he love her? Can the soul really be satisfied with such polite affections? To love is to burn - to be on fire, like Juliet or Guinevere or Eloise...
Emma Thompson
Might could would-they are contemptible auxiliaries.
George Eliot
The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.
Samuel Johnson