Quotes by British Authors - Page 230

It's funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they're related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there's a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again.
Alan Moore
Her suspense was terrible.
Thomas Hardy
It is a West zone planet which by an inexplicable and somewhat suspicious freak of topography consists almost entirely of subtropical coastline. By an equally suspicious freak of temporal relastatics, it is nearly always Saturday afternoon just before the beach bars close. No adequate explanation for this has been forthcoming from the dominant life forms on Ursa Minor Beta, who spend most of their time attempting to achieve spiritual enlightenment by running round swimming pools, and inviting Investigation Officials from the Galactic Geo-Temporal Control Board to 'have a nice diurnal anomaly.
Douglas Adams
Hazrat Ali, in a saying attributed to him, says: ‘Man is in disguise, covered by his tongue’.
Idries Shah
The best steel doesn't always shine the brightest.
Joe Abercrombie
There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won't remember and that she can't even let herself think about because that's when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow and endless drizzle.You will hear that she has left the country, that there was a gift she wanted you to have, but it is lost before it reaches you. Late one night the telephone will sign, and a voice that might be hers will say something that you cannot interpret before the connection crackles and is broken.Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her again. Whenever it rains you will think of her.
Neil Gaiman
The more time you spend with God, the more you will resemble Him.
Elizabeth George
We are therefore blessed with powerful minds yet at the same time cursed, not only to die, but to know that we must.
Stephen Cave
Rincewind sighed, and padded around the base of the tower toward the Library.Towards where the Library had been. There was the arch of the doorway, and most of the walls were still standing, but a lot of the roof had fallen in and everything was blackened by soot.Rincewind stood and stared for a long time. Then he dropped the carpet and ran, stumbling and sliding through the rubble that half-blocked the doorway. The stones were still warm underfoot. Here and there the wreckage of bookcase still smouldered. Anyone watching would have seen Rincewind dart backward and forward across the shimmering heaps, scrabbling desperately among them, throwing aside charred furniture, pulling aside lumps of fallen roof with less than superhuman strength. They would have seen him pause once or twice to get his breath back, then dive in again, cutting his hands on shards of half molten glass from the dome of the roof. They would have noticed that he seemed to be sobbing.Eventually his questing fingers touched something warm and soft. The frantic wizard heaved a charred roof beam aside, scrabbled through a drift of fallen tiles and peered down. There, half squashed by the beam and baked brown by the fire, was a large bunch of overripe, squashy bananas. He picked one up, very carefully, and sat and watched it for some time until the end fell off.Then he ate it.
Terry Pratchett
The nice sense of measure is certainly not one of Nature's gifts to her English children ... we have all of us yielded to infatuation at some moment of our lives.
Matthew Arnold
Edward, Edward," he said with a patronising smile, "there are no unanswered questions of any relevance. Every question that we need to ask has been answered fully. If you can't find the correct answer then you are obviously asking the wrong question.
Jasper Fforde
You're my closest friend and you're thousands of miles away.
Anthony Horowitz
For real men serve their country with random acts of kindness, not vicious acts of violence. And real soldiers have one duty, and one duty only; they have a duty to mutiny!
Joss Sheldon
Man is not the creature of circumstances Circumstances are the creatures of men.
Benjamin Disraeli
But you shouldn't have let her. That's the only way with these fanciful women that chaw high--innocent or guilty. She'd have come round in time. We all do! Custom does it! It's all the same in the end! However, I think she's fond of her man still--whatever he med be of her. You were too quick about her. I shouldn't have let her go! I should have kept her chained on-- her spirit for kicking would have been broke soon enough! There's nothing like bondage and a stone-deaf taskmaster for taming us women. Besides, you've got the laws on your side. Moses knew.
Thomas Hardy
What we often feel in ecstatic moments in this world - 'I don't ever want this to stop' - will be the constant thought of our hearts in that world. We shall think it, knowing that in fact it never WILL stop.
J.I. Packer
I’ve never been this happy,” I whispered, a little scared by it.Caine must have heard the fear, because he kissed my neck, tightened his hold on me, and said, “Me neither. But we’ll get used to it.”“Promise?”He lifted his head to meet my gaze. “No, because on second thought I don’t want to get used to it. If you get used to it—”“You forget to be thankful for it,” I finished.He nodded slowly. “Yeah.
Samantha Young
Don't argue about the difficulties. The difficulties will argue for themselves.
Winston Churchill
This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in--an interesting hole I find myself in--fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch-out for. We all know that at some point in the future the universe will come to an end, and at some other point, considerably in advance from that but still not immediately pressing, the sun will explode. We feel there's plenty of time to worry about that, but on the other hand that's a very dangerous thing to say... I think that we need to take a larger perspective on who we are and what we are doing here if we are going to survive in the long term.
Douglas Adams
It’s dangerous to be grateful for the cage that traps you.
Beth Kempton
I might be asked, ‘Do you equally reject the approach which begins with the question “What do modern children need?” — in other words, with the moral or didactic approach?’ I think the answer is Yes. Not because I don’t like stories to have a moral: certainly not because I think children dislike a moral. Rather because I feel sure that the question ‘What do modern children need?’ will not lead you to a good moral. If we ask that question we are assuming too superior an attitude. It would be better to ask ‘What moral do I need?’ for I think we can be sure that what does not concern us deeply will not deeply interest our readers, whatever their age. But it is better not to ask the question at all. Let the pictures tell you their own moral. For the moral inherent in them will rise from whatever spiritual roots you have succeeded in striking during the whole course of your life. But if they don’t show you any moral, don’t put one in.
C.S. Lewis
There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.
P.G. Wodehouse
Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.
Robert Harris
It is the most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home.
Charles Dickens
I’ll tell you a piece of news--I hope you have not heard it before: for good, bad, or indifferent, one always likes to be the first to tell.
Anne Brontë
What an absurdity to go and bury oneself in South America, where they are always having revolutions.
Agatha Christie
The twelve jurors were all writing very busily on the slates. "What are they doing?" Alice whispered to the Gryphon. "They can't have anything to put down yet, before the trial's begun.""They're putting down their names," the Gryphon whispered in reply, "for fear they should forget them before the end of the trial.
Lewis Carroll
Those are my bougainvillea—I got Victoria to plant them today, but I don;t know if they will survive. But Right now they have the appearance of survival, which is almost the same thing.
Zadie Smith
I have seen the tourism market shift over the last ten years with greater value attached to the culture of places, seen people growing sick of plastic phoniness and genuinely wanting to experience places and people that do different things. I see how bored we have grown of ourselves in the modern Western world and how people can fight back and shape their futures using their history as an advantage not an obligation.
James Rebanks
It's easy to forget that anything is possible with these guys. That there really are no limits.
Kevin Dutton
Oh Lion in a peculiar guise,Sharp Roman road to Paradise,Come eat me up, I'll pay thy tollWith all my flesh, and keep my soul.
Stevie Smith
Have you noticed how vocabularies fluctuate in order to cope with our need to justify ourselves?
J.G. Ballard
Sirs, so much as your hearts as is empty of Christ and heaven, let it be filled with shame and sorrow, and not with ease (483).
Richard Baxter
Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.
Graham Greene
The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.
Arthur Koestler
Sitting on the train I watch the scenery speeding by, notice a cobweb in the top corner of the window, undulating with a gentle breeze I can’t feel. I lean back in my seat and take my book out of the carrier bag. Turning it over in my hand, it feels warm. It feels how I want to feel; full of knowledge, full of the future.The time I’ve spent staying in bed smoking dope I’ve been hibernating, recuperating and gaining strength. I’m weak socially, but being away from other drug users has made me resilient. It’s allowed my mind and body to heal and mend. As if the winter is over, I’ve come out stronger now. I’m on my own. I have the choice of what to do with my life.I’m going to stay clean. I’m going to be the woman I can be.
Christine Lewry
You will need to create a discipline where head and heart can bothbe involved in the decisions that you make. Taking the emotion out of something you feel very passionate about is far from easy. But easy don’t build great.
David Hieatt
And right action is freedom from past and future also.For most of us, this is the aim never to be realized. Who are only undefeated because we have gone on trying. "The Dry Salvages
T.S Eliot
Although he didn't care much about any subject for its own sake, he cared a great deal about marks (grades or comparisons).
C.S. Lewis
I do not know where the error lies. I do not pretend to set people right, but I do see they are often wrong.
Jane Austen
Competition means decentralized planning by many separate persons.
Friedrich Hayek
The trick and the beauty of language is that it seems to order the whole universe, misleading us into believing that we live in sight of a rational space, a possible harmony.
John Burnside
What is the scent of water?""Renewal. The goodness of God coming down like dew.
Elizabeth Goudge
It's different when the person you love dies. There's an awful finality to death. But it is final. The end. And there's the funeral, family gatherings, grieving, all of those necessary rituals. And they help, believe me. When the object of your love just disappears, there's no way to deal with the grief and pain.
Barbara Taylor Bradford
Depression is a serious problem, but drugs are not the answer. In the long run, psychotherapy is both cheaper and more effective, even for very serious levels of depression. Physical exercise and self-help books based on CBT can also be useful, either alone or in combination with therapy. Reducing social and economic inequality would also reduce the incidence of depression.
Irving Kirsch
Time travel was only a kind of magic, after all. That's why it always went wrong.
Terry Pratchett
The local liberal press, much molested by the censorship, had its courageous and skilful writers such as VM Doroshevich, the master of that semi-literary and semi-journalistic essay at which Bronstein himself was one day to excel.
Isaac Deutscher
The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
Lionel Shriver
At the age of 45, most days in Tucson were spent feeling like I was on the summit of Mauna Kea, as I was exhibiting debilitating health symptoms that corresponded to what I saw at very high altitude. I was later to find that I had erratic low blood oxygen levels after almost a decade of high altitude work.
Steven Magee
There's three different kinds of Christian," said Cash. "There's preaching Christians, church-playing Christians, and then there's practicing Christian. I'm trying very hard to be a practicing Christian.
Steve Turner
When a boy's first romantic interlude is with Pheobe the Dog-Faced Girl, he feels a need to get out into the world and find a new life.
Annette Curtis Klause
The AristocratThe Devil is a gentleman, and asks you down to stayAt his little place at What'sitsname (it isn't far away).They say the sport is splendid; there is always something new,And fairy scenes, and fearful feats that none but he can do;He can shoot the feathered cherubs if they fly on the estate,Or fish for Father Neptune with the mermaids for a bait;He scaled amid the staggering stars that precipice, the sky,And blew his trumpet above heaven, and got by masteryThe starry crown of God Himself, and shoved it on the shelf;But the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn't brag himself.O blind your eyes and break your heart and hack your hand away,And lose your love and shave your head; but do not go to stayAt the little place in What'sitsname where folks are rich and clever;The golden and the goodly house, where things grow worse for ever;There are things you need not know of, though you live and die in vain,There are souls more sick of pleasure than you are sick of pain;There is a game of April Fool that's played behind its door,Where the fool remains for ever and the April comes no more,Where the splendour of the daylight grows drearier than the dark,And life droops like a vulture that once was such a lark:And that is the Blue Devil that once was the Blue Bird;For the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn't keep his word.
G.K. Chesterton
Teasing is very often a sign of inner misery.
Christopher Hitchens
The most blessed result of prayer would be to rise thinking "But I never knew before. I never dreamed...." I suppose it was at such a moment that Thomas Aquinas said of all his own theology, "It reminds me of straw.
C.S. Lewis
Life is all about selling. Being able to exchange knowledge and move people to co-operate.
Colin Myles
You don't go to school to learn about others.You go to school to learn about yourself.
Anthony T.Hincks
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
Samuel Johnson
The back of my hand to guilt.
Patrick O'Brian
One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
Alain de Botton
Such is the influence which the condition of our own thoughts, exercises, even over the appearance of external objects. Men who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from their own jaundiced eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate, and need a clearer vision.
Charles Dickens