Quotes by British Authors - Page 240

Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.
Julian Barnes
An Arabian proverb says there are four sorts of men: He who knows not and knows not he knows not: he is a fool-shun him. He who knows not and knows he knows not: he is simple-teach him. He who knows and knows not he knows: he is asleep-wake him. He who knows and knows he knows: he is wise-follow him.
Lady Isabel Burton
Sure I’m alone but I don’t feel lonely. Some people regard loneliness as a disease and to be honest, this is the first time in years I have been totally alone. No girl around to put my hand under her chin in the dead of night or feel her warm breath against my cheek in the morning when I awake. But this is just a temporary loneliness, a mild winter cold. The disease only becomes terminal when you no longer realise you’re alone, when you’ve become used to the silence and look forward to it when you get home at night. When you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be loved and in love and when you've given up on trying, that's when you’re in trouble.
Garry Crystal
Slowly, very slowly, he sat up, and as he did so he felt more alive, and more aware of his own living body than ever before. Why had he never appreciated what a miracle he was, brain and nerve and bounding heart? It would all be gone...or at least, he would be gone from it. His breath came slow and deep, and his mouth and throat were completely dry, but so were his eyes.
J.K. Rowling
Modesty, not temper.
George Eliot
We are all fit for better things than we ever do
Ethel Lilian Voynich
It's time to have and enjoy magical moments in life, reposition yourself so magic happens.
Kayisha Thomas
The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
Alain de Botton
Both precious and absurd, this tightrope of existence we walk in both directions; strung only on a rhythm of heartbeats across a void
Dean Cavanagh
Have you suffered, starved and triumphed, grovelled down, yet grasped at glory,Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole? 'Done things' just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story,Seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul? Have you seen God in His splendours, heard the text that nature renders?(You'll never hear it in the family pew.) The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things–Then listen to the wild–it's calling you.
Robert W. Service
Silence is where my demons lurk, taunting me endlessly day after day until the end of time...yet still I wait, revelling in their company...
Virginia Alison
If the nineteenth century was a time of education for women, it was no less a time of education for men.
Millicent Garrett Fawcett
Ask yourself, if they getting married, would you be upset if you weren't invited? If the answer is no, then that's an easy name to cross off your list.
Anna Bell
Never underestimate the capacity for romance, no matter what the circumstances.
Jasper Fforde
Man is more miserable, more restless and unsatisfied than ever before, simply because half his nature--the spiritual--is starving for true food, and the other half--the material--is fed with bad food.
Paul Brunton
The Air Loom, if Matthews revealed its existence under questioning, would now be recognised immediately as a classic paranoid delusion. But in 1797 it was something that had never been encountered before, and would emerge as the baffling leitmotif of a case that was unprecedented in almost every imaginable way.
Mike Jay
Every American should own a Koran. There are no excuses. Every day you can switch on the television or the radio or open a newspaper and hear or read pronouncements about what Islam is and“what the Koran says. Most of it is wrong—very wrong. You owe it to yourself, your family, and all the Americans killed on 9/11 and since to know the truth. Do not take anyone’s word for it. Find out for yourself by reading the actual Koran. One of the most reliable and recognized versions is the The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation and Commentary translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali. Once you have a Koran and start to read it, take care to note the enormous differences between the half reportedly communicated to Mohammed in the beginning in Mecca, when he was weak and without followers, and the latter half, allegedly written after he returned from Medina with thousands of followers, the leader of a mighty military force. It is the post-Medina chapters of the Koran that are naturally favored by groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. They are not in fact perverting religious texts but skillfully applying those alleged revelations that best support their cause.
Sebastian Gorka
For a few minutes the anxiety that tormented him had vanished, leaving his mind as serene as the beauty he looked at. Very lovely, he thought, are the sudden moments of relief that come in the midst of strain, those moments of forgetfulness when we are "teased out of thought" by a bird or a flower or the sight of old roofs in the sun; lovely though so transient, the reversal of those brief moments of misery that visit us even in the midst of joy.
Elizabeth Goudge
She was weak and helpless, shaken in mind and nerve. It was to take her at a disadvantage to obtrude love upon her at such a time.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.
Bertrand Russell
Ishmael was looking at him through narrowed eyes. “This is very important to you, this box.”“It’s important to the world.”Ishmael said: “The sun rises, and the sun sets. Sometimes it rains. We live, then we die.” He shrugged.He would never understand, Wolff thought; but others would.
Ken Follett
Surely she had endured enough for one evening without having to listen to intelligent conversation?
Stella Gibbons
I always thought the joy of reading a book is not knowing what happens next. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)
Christopher Nolan
Who are you after?”“The snarky asshole one.”“Could you be a little more specific.”“The one who has a staff and throws their toys out of the pram that one.”“Ooh.”“Yeah.
Charon Lloyd-Roberts
A schoolboy's tale the wonder of an hour!
Lord Byron
In truth, people can generally make time for what they choose to do; it is not really the time but the will that is wanting.
John Lubbock
Lucas heard a strange sound, something he hadn’t heard in months. At first it didn’t seem real, it was something distant from the past. It was the first time in nearly a year he had heard himself laugh, and it momentarily stunned him
Mark A. Cooper
You think horror enters spectacularly. It doesn't. It just prosaically turns up. Even in the first seconds you know you'll find it a room.
Glen Duncan
There's a lot of sex. But it isn't about sex.
Peter Milligan
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house.
C.S. Lewis
I have lived recklessly, gambled my income away at the horse races, gone whoring, have been more drunk than sober, beaten men to a pulp with my hands, have had a man’s nose cut off for insulting my father and have been indebted to villains more times than I care to say. But, I do not want to live like this anymore. I want a quiet life with a good woman who will care and love me – not for being the Duke of Monmouth, but for me, Jemmy.
Andrea Zuvich
Out of the ugliness of the ironworks lepers will eat, children will be born, their parents will grow old.
Helen McCarthy
Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw.It was its tendency to bend at the knees.
Terry Pratchett
I know enough of the world now to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything
Charles Dickens
The thing about Ayers Rock is that by the time you finally get there you are already a little sick of it.
Bill Bryson
If he could sleep, she thought, sleep through the unhappy months, the heart's hunger, the months of death and cold and not having what you most want, and wake with time gone past and blurred and a new year coming. But perhaps it is too early in the year, she thought after that, and besides, he is not a bear.
Naomi Mitchison
The pity is not that there is a myth of Sylvia Plath but that the myth is not simply that of an enormously gifted poet whose death came carelessly, by mistake, and too soon.
Al Álvarez
Then I say, "Let's go and brush our teeth." So Lola says, "But Charlie, I can't brush my teeth because somebody is using my tooth." "But who would use your toothbrush?" I ask. Lola says "I think that lion. I saw a lion with my toothbrush and now he's brushing his teeth with it." "But it isn't this your toothbrush Lola?" "Oh," says Lola, "he must be using yours.
Lauren Child
Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.
Virginia Woolf
... a man needs no camel to ride to hell, yea, nor horse, nor mule; a man may ride into hell on his tongue...
Terry Pratchett
Right and wrong stood for him as immutable as the two poles. He had never wandered in that twilight country where the nuances of evil and good cast their perplexing shadows.
P.D. James
Then a person has only one tale?”No, some have two or three separate ones or more,” Fleet said. “Some people have many tales. Sometimes they are linked into one big tale, sometimes they are utterly distinct. Most people do not have one at all.
Chris Wooding
That's the trouble with having the whole world love you. One day, you wake up and it's flirting with your best friend instead. And you don't know what to do. You're thrown.
Sophie Kinsella
O I will accompany the windUntil the chainOf my white bonesDrifts like fine sandAnd I become compassing.I become the
John Fairfax
Hasan Pasha also gave the green light for Turks and Greeks to take whatever action they pleased against any Albanians they found: killing them was not a crime. Continuing his march, he executed all the Albanians he encountered, setting fire to a monastery where other were hiding and offering five sequins for every Albanian head brought him.
Mark Mazower
I wisely started with a map.
J.R.R. Tolkien
If we can predict, then we have observed enough to know that what we are observing does not just happen randomly; we have noted a pattern of regularities.
Hugh Coolican
The British Army has a fine tradition of being so distracted by what it is currently up to it stubbornly refuses to look round the corner, let alone into the future.
Patrick Hennessey
It's wrong to anticipate evil.
Emily Brontë
We are not like you. We do not glory in having power over our own kind." Haghuf turned to walk away. Then as an afterthought added over his shoulder, "Or imagining that we do.
Jaq D. Hawkins
In the first place it's not true that people improve as you know them better: they don't. That's why one should only have acquaintances and never make friends. An acquaintance shows you only the best of himself, he's considerate and polite, he conceals his defects behind a mask of social convention; but we grow so intimate with him that he throws the mask aside, get to know him so well that he doesn't trouble any longer to pretend; then you'll discover a being of such meanness, of such trivial nature, of such weakness, of such corruption, that you'd be aghast if you didn't realize that that was his nature and it was just as stupid to condemn him as to condemn the wolf because he ravens or the cobra because he strikes.
W Somerset Maugham
A windmill is eternally at work to accomplish one end although it shifts with every variation of the weather cock and assumes 10 different positions in a day.
Charles Caleb Colton
In a very real way, then, materials are a reflection of who we are, a multi-scale expression of our human need and desires.
Mark Miodownik
it is the people who control the Government, not the Government the people.
Winston S. Churchill
I have not known him long indeed, but I am much better acquainted with him than I am with any other creature in the world.
Jane Austen
Being brave doesn't mean you're not scared.
Neil Gaiman
Dost thou want another eye beside that of Him who sees every secret thing?
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name.
Jeanette Winterson
To wear your heart on your sleeve isn't a very good plan you should wear it inside where it functions best.
Margaret Thatcher
There are some young almond tress, which ordinarily look as if drawn by a childish hand. Now, as the wind sets their weak branches gibbering, they seem like shamanistic scratches on the white bone of the brittle bright night.
John Collier