Quotes by British Authors - Page 225

The rape of justice anywhere ,violates justice everywhere
Colin Tegerdine
I spent most summers in Italy as a child either in Tuscany or at the Amalfi coast.
Celia Conrad
In the vestibule of the Manchester Town Hall are placed two life-sized marble statues facing each other. One of these is that of John Dalton ... the other that of James Prescott Joule. ... Thus the honour is done to Manchester's two greatest sons—to Dalton, the founder of modern Chemistry and of the atomic theory, and the laws of chemical-combining proportions; to Joule, the founder of modern physics and the discoverer of the Law of Conservation of Energy.One gave to the world the final proof ... that in every kind of chemical change no loss of matter occurs; the other proved that in all the varied modes of physical change, no loss of energy takes place.
Henry Enfield Roscoe
There is eloquence in the tonguelesswind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of thereeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to somethingwithin the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathlessrapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, likethe enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one belovedsinging to you alone.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
It was a nasty look. It made me feel as if I were something the dog had brought in and intended to bury later on, when he had time.
P.G. Wodehouse
I don’t know exactly what life has in store for me, but my travels have helped me formulate a better idea of my immediate next move. Europe is where my heart lies, now; here in Paris, at a gallery or museum, or possibly Rome, where Alexander took me last winter.
Pippa Croft
Somewhere, all the people we have loved and lost are still among us, in the house that we call history.
Graham Masterton
To say that the frozen silence contracted itself into a yet higher globe of ice were to under-rate the exquisite tension and to shroud it in words. The atmosphere had become a physical sensation. As when, before a masterpiece, the acid throat contracts, and words are millstones, so when the supernaturally outlandish happens and a masterpiece is launched through the medium of human gesture, then all human volition is withered at the source and the heart of action stops beating. Such a moment was this. Irma, a stalagmite of crimson stone, knew, for all the riot of her veins that a page had turned over. At chapter forty? O no! At chapter one, for she had never lived before save in a pulseless preface. How long did they remain thus? How many times had the earth moved round the sun? How many times had the great blue whales of the northern waters risen to spurt their fountains at the sky? How many reed-bucks had fallen to the claws of how many leopards, while that sublime unit of two-figure statuary remained motionless? It is fruitless to ask. The clocks of the world stood still or should have done.
Mervyn Peake
The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.
G.K. Chesterton
Don't Stare Into Your i-Phone Too Long Lest The Abyss Stares Back at You
Dean Cavanagh
If you have to be in a soap opera try not to get the worst role.
Boy George
True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good--and we all know how rare that is...
Jasper Fforde
Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.
Geoff Dyer
Haw! Haw! Inconceivable stupidity is just what you're going to get! (Brigadier-General Henry Wilson, on being challenged in 1910 about the likelihood of a European war)
Max Hastings
Even if there were pains in Heaven, all who understand would desire them.
C.S. Lewis
I'm not very good at being alive. Sometimes I despair of ever mastering it, getting it right. When I'm old, perhaps.
Tanith Lee
Maybe it's just easier to hold onto resentment and bitterness.But when you hold onto them, you're imprisoning yourself, not the other person. Not forgiving is pretty heavy baggage to carry around.
Cathy Bryant
You dreamed like all mothers do.Until he began to speak aloud,Your boy,calling for justice in the market place,Demanding integrity and fair playin the courts and halls of business.Declaring the Realm of GodImminent,Manifest . . .Jesus leapt into the swelling crowdslike an axe into wood,Uncompromising and unrelentingin his passionate callfor peace and justice.Jesus, your boy,causing havoc in public,critiquing and condemningthe status quo,breaking rule after rule . . .And with every speech, with every act of defiance, with every call to liberation, with every amazing deed,Your dreams of peace and liberation,Your dreams of a secure old age,Your dreams of grandchildren—Evaporated.
Edwina Gateley
All I know is, being away from you......makes it hard to breathe. I miss you so much
Samantha Towle
Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
Winston S. Churchill
And yet this self, containsTides, continents and stars―a myriad selves,Is small and solitary as one grass-bladePassed over by the windAmongst a myriad grasses on the prairie.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Sometimes in life there's no problem and sometimes there solution. Within this space - between these apparent poles - life flows.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Much of the geographical work of the past hundred years... has either explicitly or implicitly taken its inspiration from biology, and in particular Darwin. Many of the original Darwinians, such as Hooker, Wallace, Huxley, Bates, and Darwin himself, were actively concerned with geographical exploration, and it was largely facts of geographical distribution in a spatial setting which provided Darwin with the germ of his theory.
David R. Stoddart
That's the mark of true friends. That we might not see each other for a year but when we do it's as if we were never apart.
Jane Green
None but the most blindly credulous will imaging the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits.
Edmund Crispin
In the centre of Bond was a hurricane-room, the kind of citadel found in old-fashioned houses in the tropics. These rooms are small, strongly built cells in the heart of the house, in the middle of the ground floor and sometimes dug down into its foundations. To this cell the owner and his family retire if the storm threatens to destroy the house, and they stay there until the danger is past. Bond went to his hurricane room only when the situation was beyond his control and no other possible action could be taken. Now he retired to this citadel, closed his mind to the hell of noise and violent movement, and focused on a single stitch in the back of the seat in front of him, waiting with slackened nerves for whatever fate had decided for B. E. A. Flight No. 130.
Ian Fleming
That is a terrifically intimate thing, you know? Letting a stranger light your cigarette. Leaning forward so he can hold a flame to your lips. Pausing to breathe in before you pull back again.
Elizabeth Wein
There was a patient who sat with her family in a circle around her, all holding hands. Sister Philomena asked if they would like to join her for prayers and they said yes, they would. They closed their eyes as Sister Philomena whispered the words and I thought this must be the nearest humans get to whatever God is, when they hold hands and listen.
Rachel Joyce
I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.
Virginia Woolf
And then our Mum and Dad were in love and they were truly dry-stone strong and durable and people speak of ease and joy and spontaneity and the fact that their two smells became one smell, our smell. Us.
Max Porter
Martin is your best friend, isn't he?' a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us were present: it was the only time I ever felt awkward about this precious idea, which seemed somehow to risk diminishment if it were uttered aloud.
Christopher Hitchens
Love is not a spaceship you construct and then fly off together into the stars. Love is a soap bubble that bursts in the air. Love is the first winter snowflake that falls into you palm, a mirage that glows in the sun and fades in the shadows.
Chloe Thurlow
Virtually all organisations known to you work largely by means of your greed. They attract you because... they appeal to your greed.
Idries Shah
Smoke rose from the barrel of the gun like a serpent crawling up from its wicker basket
Andrew Lennon
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
Bertrand Russell
Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful... Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race.
Charles Bradlaugh
Until you know that life is interesting and find it so you haven't found your soul.
Geoffrey Fisher
True friendhip is like sound health: the value of it is seldom know until it is lost.
Charles Caleb Colton
I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.
Julian Barnes
Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.
G.K. Chesterton
For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories.
Tahir Shah
Fred, you next," the plump woman said. "I'm not Fred, I'm George," said the boy. "Honestly, woman, you call yourself our mother? Can't you tell I'm George?" "Sorry, George, dear." "Only joking, I am Fred," said the boy and off he went.
J.K. Rowling
Christianity does NOT replace the technical. When he tells you to feed the hungry and doesn't give you lessons in cookery. If you want to learn THAT, you must go to a cook rather than a Christian.
C.S. Lewis
If I have one piece of advice to give you all about what to search for in your quest for What Next, it's to find where the line blurs between hard work and happiness for you. To find that thing where working hard at it makes you happy, and where you're happy to work hard at it.
Tom Fletcher
He had them as spellbound as a room full of Ewoks listening to C-3PO.
Cory Doctorow
They get quieter over the years. They still whisper to you sometimes, but the world gets louder. You can see it and hear it again. There's a gap in it, where they used to be. But you get used to the gap; so used to it that you can hardly see it. And then some days, out of nowhere, you're making the tea or banging out the washing or sitting on the bus and it's there again: that aching, empty space that will never be filled.
Clare Furniss
It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.
Bill Bryson
You say you're 'depressed' - all i see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn't mean you're defective - it just means you're human.
David Mitchell
O it's Tommy this, and Tommy that, and Tommy 'ow's your soul/But it's thin red line of heroes when the drums begin to roll.
Rudyard Kipling
Writers don’t get time off. Every moment - waking or sleeping - a writer is working, observing, thinking and creating.
Graeme Roberts
Mad Eye' Moody on the Avada Kedavra curse: "Not nice," he said calmly. "Not pleasant. And there's no counter curse. There's no blocking it. Only one known person has ever survived it, and he's sitting right in front of me.
J.K. Rowling
A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one's age group. It comes from reading books above one.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The undisciplined mind confuses misfortune with mistakes.
Mark Caney
When I married Mr. Right I didn't know his first name was Always.
Anne Gilchrist
Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is so hard to establish. Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Remaining aware of awareness, witnessing it thru every experience within without one, is the way and the goal both...Be Happy and keep smiling...
Satish Kumar
Old times, sad times. I feel better about them now than I did then.
Anita Brookner
Very often a change of self is needed more than a change of scene.
Arthur Christopher Benson
. . . Mrs. Arcanum considered foreign parts only marginally less unspeakable than private parts. . .
Terry Pratchett
You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.
Alexandra Fuller