Quotes by British Authors - Page 246

It is impossible to be truly artistic without the risk of offending someone somewhere.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
They (...) call what I have an invisible illness, but I often wonder if they're really looking. Beyond the science stuff. It doesn't bleed or swell, itch or crack, but I see it, right there on my face. It's like decay, this icky green colour, as if my life were being filmed through a grey filter. I lack light, am an entire surface area that the sun can't touch.
Louise Gornall
To die hating them, that was freedom
George Orwell
It is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Why was I chosen?''Such questions cannot be answered,' said Gandalf. 'You may be sure that it was not for any merit that others do not possess. But you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.
J.R.R. Tolkien
By attempting to kill you, Voldemort himself singled out the remarkable person who sits here in front of me, and gave him the tools for the job! It is Voldemort's fault that you were able to see into his thoughts, his ambitions, that you even understand the snakelike language in which he gives orders, and yet, Harry, despite your privileged insight into Voldemort's world (which, incidentally, is a gift any Death Eater would kill to have), you have never been seduced by the Dark Arts, never, even for a second, shown the slightest desire to become one of Voldemort's followers!""Of course I haven't!" said Harry indignantly. "He killed my mum and dad!""You are protected, in short, by your ability to love!" said Dumbledore loudly. "The only protection that can possibly work against the lure of power like Voldemort's! In spite of all the temptation you have endured, all the suffering, you remain pure of heart, just as pure as you were at the age of eleven, when you stared into a mirror that reflected your heart's desire, and it showed you only the way to thwart Lord Voldemort, and not immortality or riches. Harry, have you any idea how few wizards could have seen what you saw in that mirror? Voldemort should have known then what he was dealing with, but he did not!
J.K. Rowling
The night has a thousand eyes,And the day but one; Yet the light of the bright world dies With the dying sun. The mind has a thousand eyes, And the heart but one: Yet the light of a whole life dies When love is done.
Francis William Bourdillon
If truth is not to be spoken, Sir, in a government, calling itself free, least it should be understood by the people, who are governed; and prevent their freely supplying the oil, that facilitates the movement of the cumbrous machine—If facts, which cannot be denied, be repressed; and reason, which cannot be controverted, be stifled; the time is not far distant, when such a country may say, adieu liberty!
Charlotte Turner Smith
Woman cannot be content with health and agility: she must make exorbitant efforts to appea something that never could exist without a diligent perversion of nature. Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate? Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men; following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves.
Germaine Greer
Environmental radiation research is the rent I pay for living on this planet.
Steven Magee
Well, people are like that too. THey create a false door - to deceive. If they are conscious of weakness, of inefficiency, they make an imposing door of self-assertion, of bluster, of overwhelming authority - and, after a time, they get to believe in it themselves. They think, and everybody thinks, that they are like that. But behind that door, Renisenb, is bare rock... And so when reality comes and touches them with the feather of truth - their true self reasserts itself.
Agatha Christie
That boy may have been born on third base but he sure as shit ain’t scored a triple.
Sarah Hall
In the next world I could not be worse than I am in this.
Patrick Branwell Brontë
You can't be like pop stars, but you can be part of their story. You can be their fan.
Simon Cheshire
There is something revolting about the way girls' minds so often jump to marriage long before they jump to love.
Dodie Smith
Even demons can fall in love.
Anthony T.Hincks
The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
Virginia Woolf
Human history has become too much a matter of dogma taught by 'professionals' in ivory towers as though it's all fact. Actually, much of human history is up for grabs. The further back you go, the more that the history that's taught in the schools and universities begins to look like some kind of faerie story.
Graham Hancock
Being a woman, in this world, ultimately makes you crazy.
Holly Bourne
Friendship is a strong and habitual inclination in two persons to promote the good and happiness of one another.
Eustace Budgell
Every man who is acutely alive is acutely wrestling his own soul.
D.H. Lawrence
Everybody thinks some people are born with the "gift of gab" and some people aren't. But the truth is there is no "gift of gab." People who are good at conversation just know a few simple skills that anyone can learn.
Alan Garner
Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.
Richard Dawkins
I've just been to a debutant ball where all the girls were wearing low-cut gowns. It's clear why they're called coming out parties.
Martin Fenton
It was inevitable under a monarchy, however benevolent the monarch. The old virtues disappear. Independence and frankness are at a discount. Complacent anticipation of the monarch's wishes is then the greatest of all virtues. One must either be a good monarch like yourself, or a good courtier like myself—either an Emperor or an idiot.
Robert Graves
Almost astride the Equator, night fell like a portcullis. The sun dropped below the horizon and suddenly all was dark.
Tim Butcher
What George was thinking was that the late king Herod had been unjustly blamed for a policy which had been both statesmanlike and in the interests of the public. He was blaming the mawkish sentimentality of the modern legal system which ranks the evisceration and secret burial of small boys as a crime.
P.G. Wodehouse
So, my sweet, did it put the fun into funeral?
Johnny Rich
She is a wiry blanched creature with no beauty. Her expression reminds him of a crumpled letter – there is both sadness and anger in it.
Glenn Haybittle
So it was perfectly possible that there were men who liked shopping, men who understood exactly what it was all about, but Mma Ramotwe had yet to meet such a man. Maybe they existed elsewhere - in France, perhaps - but they did not seem to be much in evidence in Botswana.
Alexander McCall Smith
The cross is a crisis point for all societies which seek to produce me in and women of quiescence, men and women who are trained to give unquestioning, uncritical obedience to worldly powers and not to Christ.
Megan McKenna
What day is it?” It’s today, squeaked Piglet. My favorite day, said Pooh.
A.A. Milne
It's our goddamed city! It's our goddamed country. No terrorist can take it from us for so long as we're free. Once we're not free, the terrorists win! Take it back! You're young enough and stupid enough not to know that you can't possibly win, so you're the only ones who can lead us to victory! Take it back!
Cory Doctorow
The only test is what you see when you look in a mirror.
Steve Backley
I do think the barsThat kept my spirit in are burst - that IAm sailing with thee through the dizzy sky!How beautiful thou art!
John Keats
We know amazingly little about what happens beneath our feet. It is fairly remarkable to think that Ford has been building cars and baseball has been playing World Series for longer than we have known that the Earth has a core. And of course the idea that the continents move about on the surface like lily pads has been common wisdom for much less than a generation. “Strange as it may seem,” wrote Richard Feynman, “"we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth.
Bill Bryson
It is a curious thought that the earliest description of the steam-engine in antiquity describes its use for the magic opening of the temple doors, when the priests lit the fires on the altars, to deceive the populace into ascribing to a deity what was the work of the engineer. In much the same way today, the almost boundless fecundity of the creative scientific discoveries and inventions of the age are being appropriated for the purpose of the mysterious opening of doors into the holy of holies of the temples of mammon by a hierarchy of imposters and humbugs, whom it is the first task of a sane civilization to expose and clear out.
Frederick Soddy
No wife wants to hear that her husband is less than perfect.
Sophie Kinsella
We fail so easily to see the difference between fear of the unknown and respect for the unknown, thinking that those who do not hasten in with bright lights and knives are deterred by a holy and superstitious fear. Respect for the unknown is the attitude of those who, instead of raping nature, woo her until she gives herself. But what she gives, even then, is not the cold clarity of the surface but the warm inwardness of the body - a mysteriousness which is not merely a negation, a blank absence of knowledge, but that positive substance which we call wonderfull.
Alan W. Watts
We found a smooth inviting boulder under a vast banyan tree, and sat in companionable silence. There unexpectedly, on that rock, I saw the secret of contentment. True happiness is only ever possible if you have been unhappy. And there, at that moment, I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt so peaceful. It wouldn’t have been possible for me to take in any more happiness. Moti turned to me and smiled as if she knew. I realised then that this moment and this wonderful feeling would sustain me for a long, long time.
Jane Wilson-Howarth
Is there any stab as deep as wondering where and how much you failed those you loved?
Florida Scott-Maxwell
Dumbledore will only leave from Hogwarts when there are none loyal to him!
J.K. Rowling
God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face. A gauntlet with a gift in't.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
The three most powerful seasonings are hunger, variety, and gratitude.
Neel Burton
Sometimes our worst fears aren't realized - though in my experience it's only to make room for the fears our imagination was insufficient to house.
Mark Lawrence
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
E.M. Forster
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
G.K. Chesterton
Emotional position is part of it, but as an individual you are not your emotions, neither are you your intellect. These are things that you have . They're not things that you are . Therefore you have to start to become aware of the different requirements that human beings have, the different areas that they like to be satisfied in. Which means becoming aware of yourself. I mean, as a writer you're gonna have to understand pretty much the whole universe. But the best place to start is by understanding the inner universe. The entire universe – for one thing – only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality. So. To understand the universe there's worse advice than that which was carved above the shrine of the Delphi oracle. Where it just said: “Know thyself”. Understand yourself. Know thyself is a magical goal, but like I say to me there is very little difference between magic and creative art in any sense – the laws of one apply perfectly well to the other.
Alan Moore
Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them.
John Berger
In our towns and cities they will continue to be born, in our communities they will go on to be nurtured & radicalised & from within our neighbourhoods they will terrorise & murder our citizens including women & children in their attempt to destroy the very fabric & order of our civilised society. They are influenced by our ignorance, our lack of knowledge is their power, martyrdom in the name of their God and prophet is their aspiration & so it is critical that we waste no time & learn more about them & this ideology they follow before we can even begin to eradicate this chilling & growing endemic Islamic faith based terrorism’.
Cal Sarwar
Henri held herself as if only her arms could keep her pieced together, and I saw that behind all her fake control—throwing herself at a teacher, carving our dad out of her heart—was something fragile. I wish we’d seen it sooner—my dad and Mr. Flynn, they had a responsibility to see it, to do better. Those moments were my sister spinning out.
Jessica Taylor
Most of didn’t know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out.
Rachel Cusk
If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills - than my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory.
Virginia Woolf
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
George Orwell
Literature is the question without the answer. Philosophy is the answer without the question.
Chloe Thurlow
Above all shadows rides the Sunand Stars for ever dwell:I will not say the Day is done,nor bid the Stars farewell.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Tiffany got up early and lit the fires. When her mother came down, she was scrubbing the kitchen floor, very hard.“Er…aren’t you supposed to do that sort of thing by magic, dear?” said her mother, who’d never really got the hang of what witchcraft was all about.“No, Mum, I’m supposed not to,” said Tiffany, still scrubbing.“But can’t you just wave your hand and make all the dirt fly away, then?”“The trouble is getting the magic to understand what dirt is,” said Tiffany, scrubbing hard at a stain. “I heard of a witch over in Escrow who got it wrong and ended up losing the entire floor and her sandals and nearly a toe.”Mrs. Aching backed away. “I thought you just had to wave your hands about,” she mumbled nervously.“That works,” said Tiffany, “but only if you wave them about on the floor with a scrubbing brush.
Terry Pratchett
I give you full credit for the discovery, I crawl, I grovel, my name is Watson, and you need not say what you were just going to say, because I admit it all.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Now I recall my emotions at that moment, children seem to me a remarkable race. They want so much to murder so many people, and they so rarely murder anybody at all.
Rebecca West
People are like a pack of dogs sometimes. All right one by one, but together... together they do awful things they don't mean to do.
Monica Furlong