Quotes by British Authors - Page 227

Erik Satie died on July 1, 1925; his last words were 'Ah, the cows...
John Richardson
We are but as the instrument of Heaven. Our work is not design but destiny.
Owen Meredith
It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
George Eliot
Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife? And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad.
Hilary Mantel
Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.
Alain de Botton
Finding out how the rest of the world lives is a normal part of rumschpringe. I didn't think it was up to my father-or my bishop-to squash that kind of curiosity.
Mary Ellis
Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting.
Arthur Conan Doyle
A bunch of bad songs, make an awful whine.
Benny Bellamacina
For what is more lovable than failure?
Mervyn Peake
Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead
Alan Watts
The physical shock took away the pain of being.
Sebastian Faulks
From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions - fear, desire, anger - serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost . . . .
David Nicholls
If you do what is bad, Lay upon your knees and call upon HIM, and he will guide you in the right way.
Margaret Slade
How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is aquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.
Bertrand Russell
It struck Mort with sudden, terrible poignancy that Death must be the loneliest creature in the universe. In the great party of Creation, he was always in the kitchen.
Terry Pratchett
As soon as he had disappeared Deborah made for the trees fringing the lawn, and once in the shrouded wood felt herself safe.She walked softly along the alleyway to the pool. The late sun sent shafts of light between the trees and onto the alleyway, and a myriad insects webbed their way in the beams, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder. But were they insects, wondered Deborah, or particles of dust, or even split fragments of light itself, beaten out and scattered by the sun?It was very quiet. The woods were made for secrecy. They did not recognise her as the garden did. ("The Pool")
Daphne du Maurier
An inappropriate attraction to your friend’s fiancé was grounds for disbarment from the Woman Club. Neither did it make a lick of sense. He was uncouth, uneducated, uncivilized. All of their conversations back then had been unholy bicker fests where they charged from the opposite ends of the spectrum, determined not to meet in the middle but to rip pieces out of each other on the drive by.
Kate Meader
To me, it was clear proof of the existence of supersymmetry, the idea that every particle has a partner. She was mine.
Olivia Sudjic
When you reach the middle of your career ladder, turn it the other way around and slide down to the top
Benny Bellamacina
Lead kindly Light amid the encircling gloom Lead Thou me on! The night is dark and I am far from home - Lead Thou me on! Keep Thou my feet I do not ask to see The distant scene - one step enough for me.
John Henry Newman
If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.
Bill Bryson
Love is wanting to be with someone all the time.It is accepting the other person with all good qualities and bad and not wanting to change any of them. It is wanting to give affection and approval and comfort and everything that is oneself,demanding nothing in return. It is - love is very difficult, Julia. It is an ideal, rarely achieved in reality because we are all selfish and imperfect beings. It is a dream, a goal, something to be aimed for.
Mary Balogh
As I work in the afternoon on committing to paper some of my morning's thoughts, I find myself just about to close on the knotty question of whether or not I believe in God. In fact I am about to type, 'I do not believe in God', when the sky goes black as ink, there is a thunderclap and a huge crash of thunder and a downpour of epic proportions. I never do complete the sentence.
Michael Palin
Teachers should be made aware of visual stress symptoms and the potential difference coloured lights, overlays and lenses could make to a learners perception.
Adele Devine
I think there is a natural maternal instinct that comes out, which creates a much more nurturing environment. I've been accused of misogyny in the past, for relationship stuff that’s been twisted in the press and for bullshit that gets said, and that gets to me because I've always had a huge amount of respect for women, and I think that all the women who I've surrounded myself with in both a professional and personal capacity would agree with that.
Zayn Malik
Lenin and Stalin created the idiosyncratic Soviet system in the image of their ruthless little circle of conspirators before the Revolution. Indeed much of the tragedy of Leninism-Stalinism is comprehensible only if one realizes that the Bolsheviks continued to behave in the same clandestine style whether they formed the government of the world’s greatest empire in the Kremlin or an obscure little cabal in the backroom of a Tiflis tavern.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
It is good to be taught humility when we are young. If we do not exeperience pain as children, we will cause pain as adults.
Darren Shan
Envy suggests inferiority.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
[I]f a book is well written, I always find it too short.
Jane Austen
She once said her songs were "mostly about myths, spirits, that kind of thing. Not fairies, stronger than that." Not fairies. Stronger than that: there's a fine phrase to bear in mind. Her lyrics are about the things that drive, or repulse, or empower the human spirit. Not escapism, in fact, but its exact opposite.
Graeme Thomson
A human being can only endure depression up to a certain point; when this point of saturation is reached it becomes necessary for him to discover some element of pleasure, no matter how humble or on how low a level, in his environment if he is to go on living at all. In my case these insignificant birds with their subdued colourings have provided just sufficient distraction to keep me from total despair. Each day I find myself spending longer and longer at the window watching their flights, their quarrels, their mouse-quick flutterings, their miniature feuds and alliances. Curiously enough, it is only when I am standing in front of the window that I feel any sense of security. While I am watching the birds I believe that I am comparatively immune from the assaults of life. The very indifference to humanity of these wild creatures affords me a certain safeguard. Where all else is dangerous, hostile and liable to inflict pain, they alone can do me no injury because, probably, they are not even aware of my existence. The birds are at once my refuge and my relaxation.
Anna Kavan
Disco's are tricky. You look a total wally if you dance too early but after one crucial song tips the disco over, you look a sad saddo if you don't.
David Mitchell
If words are to enter men's hearts and bear fruit, they must be the right words shaped cunningly to pass men's defenses and explode silently and effectually within their minds.
J.B. Phillips
... suppose if something very terrible had happened, so terrible as to be almost unbearable, one might get like that. One might run away from reality into a half world of one's own and then, of course, after a time, one wouldn't be able to get back...
Agatha Christie
Not a good book. It attempts to take a complex subject and make it assessable to the layman with cartoons, and in this effort it fails. Moreover, the authors often take biased stances, and while I agree with them for the most part it nonetheless detracts from any scholarly offerings in which they wish to partake.
Richard Appignanesi
A ceremony of self-wastage - good talkers are miserable they know that they have betrayed themselves that they have taken material which should have a life of its own to disperse it in noises upon the air.
Cyril Connolly
You were my single greatest adventure.
Carrie Hope Fletcher
She could hear, some way off, her brothers calling to each other in the woods behind the house. She hoped desperately that their game wouldn't bring them any closer, that they wouldn't scare the birds away. Somehow she knew that you didn't get many moments like this in your life: moments when you knew, without any doubt, that you were alive, when you felt the air in your lungs and the wet grass beneath your feet and the cotton on your skin; moments when you were completely in the present, when neither the past nor the future mattered. She tried to slow her breathing, hoping somehow to make this moment last forever.
Neil Gaiman
Maybe in death you’ll understand that love, and all other needs take a backseat when the one thing you want, stands against all that you swear to protect.
Charles Lee
I hate myself on the screen. I want to die ... my voice is either too high or too gravelly. I want to dive under the carpet.... I'd love to be tall and willowy ... I'm short.
Elizabeth Taylor
He stared at his feet. “I’m still very ignorant,” he said, “but at least I’m ignorant about really important things.
Terry Pratchett
You sound like a college freshman taking his first philosophy class way too seriously, but that's good.
Michael Grant
If you don’t believe your whole life has been a path leading to this one point, you’re not focused enough.” Master Sergeant Gabriel Luther Wells.
Mark Henwick
In India, where there are no passports or identity discs, and where religions counts for so much- except among those few who have crossed the 'black water' - I believe that a man wearing a saffron robe, or carrying a beggar's bowl , or with silver crosses on his headgear and chest, could walk from Khyber Pass to Cape Comorin without once being questioned about his destination, or the object of his journey,
Jim Corbett
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
George Eliot
I am sure that if we can find reconciliation with our past – whether parents, partners or friends – we should try and do that. It won't be perfect, it will be a compromise . . . but it might mean acceptance and, the big word, forgiveness.
Jeanette Winterson
I think computer viruses should count as life ... I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Stephen Hawking
As it is?
Harold Pinter
Are you going? What shall you wear?""I shall go in what I am standing in," said Mak Genggang. "A witch is always appropriate whatever her attire.
Zen Cho
Discontented women are like pressure cookers. The steam rises and one day they just reach boiling point.
Bella Pollen
I sincerely hope that President Barack Obama’s government will be remembered as the peak of deregulated corporate corruption and not the ongoing rise of it.
Steven Magee
The height the dupe has fallen is measured by his anger.
John Fowles
Take in the ideas of the day drain off those of yesterday. As to the morrow time enough to consider it when it becomes today.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
You can do anything you want. You don't believe me. You think, she's out of her head. Yeah, I'm out of my head- on being me. What are you on? On being them. You don't even know. I bet you were never given a chance to know. ....Listen. You can be anything you want to be. Be careful. It's a spell. It's magic. Listen to the words.... You are anything...everyone, anyone. ...You listen to them, teachers, parents, politicians. They're always saying, if you steal you're a thief, if you sleep aroung you're a slut, if you take drugs you're a junkie. They want to get inside your head and control you with their fear. ...Don't play their game. Nothing can touch you; you stay beautiful.
Melvin Burgess
The more you give the less your poor
Benny Bellamacina
The crying wailed, somewhere beneath the planks. Several sweeps of the light showed that the cellar was otherwise deserted. Though the face mouthed behind him, he ventured down. For God’s sake, get it over with; he knew he would never dare return.
Ramsey Campbell
In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughter-houses. And, in a population that is all educated, and at about the same level of physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. We never settled the hygienic question of meat-eating at all. This other aspect decided us. I can still remember, as a boy, the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughter-house.
H.G.Wells
Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy.
Bertrand Russell
He lived then before me, he lived as much as he had ever lived---a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities, a shadow darker than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence. The vision seemed to enter the house with me---the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshipers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum regular and muffled like the beating of a heart, the heart of a conquering darkness.
Joseph Conrad
There must be room in our world for eccentricity, even if it offends the prudes, and room for the vague other-worldliness that often goes with genius.
Boris Johnson