Quotes by British Authors - Page 234

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,Falling, like dew, upon a thought producesThat which makes thousands, perhaps millions think.
George Gordon Byron
The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.
James Agate
If you say it very softly, with a smile, you can get away with saying almost anything, even the truth.
Neel Burton
There are three known planets in the PSR B1257 system, which have been named Draugr, Poltergeist and Phobetor. Poltergeist was the first to be discovered. I know, I was curious about their names as well. Poletrgeist means "pounding ghost". The draugr are the unded in Norse legends who live in their graves. And Phobetor is the personification of nightmares, and the son of Nyx, Greek goddess of the night.Astronomers are goths.
Brian Cox
Yo Mama’s so ugly, her dentist treats her by mail order.
Oliver Oliver Reed
Life is a wondrous journey that can be of your own making or a combination of fate and luck.
Steven Redhead
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
George Orwell
The most infectiously joyous men and women are those who forget themselves in thinking about others and serving others.
Robert J. McCracken
A frightened captain makes a frightened crew.
Lister Sinclair
Perception is never purely in the present - it has to draw on experience of the past.
Oliver Sacks
Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.
Bill Bryson
The course of true love rarely runs smooth.
Jasper Fforde
He wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican.
G.K. Chesterton
Be realistic with your expectations. I'd really like to cuddle a unicorn, but it aint going to happen.
India Knight
Sense howEven the smooth stones acheWith stories of their ownIn the shuddering light of day.
Scott Hastie
Even the names of the books gave me food for thought.
Virginia Woolf
You can be any sex you like provided you act male. There's no men and women in the Watch, just a bunch of lads.
Terry Pratchett
Go on, have a pasty," said Harry, who had never had anything to share before or, indeed, anyone to share it with. It was a nice feeling, sitting there with Ron, eating their way through all Harry's pasties, cakes, and candies (the sandwiches lay forgotten).
J.K. Rowling
You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn't force your way into someone else's, because then it wouldn't be a bubble any more.
Nick Hornby
In any age, there is no shortage of people willing to embark on a hazardous adventure. Columbus and Magellan filled eight ships between them for voyages into the void. One hundred and fifty years ago, the possibilities offered by missionary service were limitless and first-rate. Later, Scott and Shackleton turned away droves after filling their crews for their desperate Antarctic voyages. In 1959 ... sailor H.W. Tilman, looking for a crew for a voyage in an old wooden yacht to the Southern Ocean, ran this ad in the London Times: "Hand [man] wanted for long voyage in small boat. No pay, no prospects, not much pleasure." Tilman received more replies than he could investigate, one from as far away as Saigon.
Peter Nichols
Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
T.S Eliot
And when he kisses me it feels a bit like fear and tastes a bit like tears, but it’s as bright and sweet as sherbet, and I decide to call it joy.
Alexis Hall
The beauty of the animal form is in exact proportion to the amount of moral and intellectual virtue expressed by it.
John Ruskin
[T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
Bertrand Russell
Katy was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian's trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there's really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There's no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence.
Aldous Huxley
Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven't loved enough.
Elif Shafak
Dreams are what gives us insight into what may be if we have the get up and go to do it.
Anthony T.Hincks
It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain
George Orwell
If you are not appetisers, main course and dessert, you are dating the wrong diner...
Virginia Alison
LOGAN: I think you spend too much time believing what other people see, rather than what you think.
Sam Crescent
People are wrong when they say things like, “I didn’t have time to think.” If you’re really worried, or really miserable, those feelings come welling up around the edges of the other things you’re doing, so that you are in the feelings even when you’re working hard at something else.
Diana Wynne Jones
What's more important than recycling? Producing something to recycle.
Gordon Osmond
I would like you to teach [the orcs] civilised behaviour," said Ladyship coldly.He appeared to consider this. "Yes of course, I think that would be quite possible," he said. "And who would you send to teach the humans?
Terry Pratchett
Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy….The only purely popular government is local, and founded on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city because they know the city; but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizen who has or claims the right to rule over ten cities, and these remote and altogether alien cities…To make all politics cosmopolitan is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters. If your political outlook really takes in the Cannibal Islands, you depend of necessity upon a superior and picked minority of the people who have been to the Cannibal Islands; or rather of the still smaller and more select minority who have come back.
G.K. Chesterton
Empowerment is the intentional absence of negativity.
Stephanie Lennox
I just want to hear something I haven't heard before
John Peel
Her voice is filled with distant sonorities, like reverberations in a cave: now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation. And she is herself a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit.’ Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?’ She draws her long, sharp fingernail across the bars of the cage in which her pet lark sings, striking a plangent twang like that of the plucked heartstrings of a woman of metal. Her hair falls down like tears.
Angela Carter
Poor greedy one, wherever he runs He's after food, and death is after him.(Saadi)
Idries Shah
The Abbe Paul looked at Agnes rather as Alain had, with respect. 'How sensible. People are desperate to probe mysteries which for the most part are best left unprobed. It is the modern curse: this demented drive to explain every blessed thing. Not everything can be explained. Nor should be, I think.
Salley Vickers
... secrecy adds a charm to an amour ...
Frederick Marryat
Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person's childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It's their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can't understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That's the carrier of all the living qualities. It's the centre of all the possible magic and revelation.
Ted Hughes
London was so rich, and also so green, and somehow so detailed: full of stuff that had been made, and bought, and placed, and groomed, and shaped, and washed clean, and put on display as if the whole city was for sale.
John Lanchester
He was thirty-six years old, and six foot three. He spoke English to people and French to cats, and Latin to the birds. He had once nearly killed himself trying to read and ride a horse at the same time.
Katherine Rundell
Once, I believed that space couldhave no power over faith, just as I believed the heavens declared the glory of God’shandwork. Now I have seen that handwork, and my faith is sorely troubled.
Arthur C. Clarke
Mounting tensions in Eastern Europe send shivers down the spine. Barely a quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War we seem to be sliding inexorably towards another.
Alex Morritt
What could she do, bound as she was by the tyranny of silence? She dared not explain the girl to herself...that wilfully selfish tyranny of silence evolved by a crafty old ostrich of a world for its own well-being and comfort. The world hid its head in the sands of convention, so that seeing nothing it might avoid Truth...if silence is golden it is also in this case, very expedient.
Radclyffe Hall
A light like the glint of water on dewy grass flashed from under her feet as she danced.
J.R.R. Tolkien
There should be medals struck for men who produce tea at exactly the moment it's needed.
Jodi Taylor
I wish, he thinks, spoken words could be captured and kept in a locket.
David Mitchell
Of all the vices which degrade the human character, Selfishness is the most odious and contemptible. An undue love of Self leads to the most mon¬strous crimes and occasions the greatest misfortunes both in States and Families. As a selfish man will impoverish his family and often bring them to ruin, so a selfish king brings ruin on his people and often plunges them into war.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Rainbows make great pets,because they're already house trained.
Anthony T.Hincks
Freud was a genius; geniuses are bright but not necessarily right. What they do do, right or wrong, is to provide images that guide, or compel, the lives of the rest of us. If we are not careful we may accept the inevitability of these images. It seems that great men offer us a portion of reality and, because of their greatness, we take it for the whole.
Peter Redgrove
They sat a moment in embrace of silent mutual comfort, which was, she often thought, the reward of those long married.
Helen Simonson
Occasionally they would hear a harsh croak or a splash as some amphibian was disturbed, but the only creature they saw was a toad as big as Will's foot, which could only flop in a pain-filled sideways heave as if it were horribly injured. It lay across the path, trying to move out of the way and looking at them as if it knew they meant to hurt it.'It would be merciful to kill it,' said Tialys.'How do you know?' said Lyra. 'It might still like being alive, in spite of everything.''If we killed it, we'd be taking it with us,' said Will. 'It wants to stay here. I've killed enough living things. Even a filthy stagnant pool might be better than being dead.''But if it's in pain?' said Tialys.'If it could tell us, we'd know. But since it can't, I'm not going to kill it. That would be considering our feelings rather than the toad's.'They moved on.
Philip Pullman
Drink to me only with thine eyes And I will pledge with mine.
Ben Jonson
How much easier life was once you learned how to lie. I had gotten into trouble by speaking out of turn, arguing and answering back so many times. Not anymore. Now I would do what I wanted, and no one would stop me.
Zoë Marriott
It was nothing less than murder, in her eyes
Emily Brontë
Brag is a good dog, but Holdfast is a better.
Charles Dickens
There are no tragedies in life, only violent coup d’etats on the state of irrational optimism
Dean Cavanagh
He [Shakespeare] was a wordsmith who loved to act and to see things from many points of view.(...) His genius lay in being able to see all sides of an argument.
Tina Packer