Quotes by British Authors - Page 249

Fiordland, a vast tract of mountainous terrain that occupies the south-west corner of South Island, New Zealand, is one of the most astounding pieces of land anywhere on God's earth, and one's first impulse, standing on a cliff top surveying it all, is simply to burst into spontaneous applause.
Douglas Adams
The aunts’ conception of the right to privacy went far enough to allow you to close the toilet door when you were peeing, but no further.
Zen Cho
What would normal people think if they knew what went on in a writer's mind below the surface? They'd think him even more around the bend than they had previously supposed if they could see the witches' cauldron of images and memories boiling up from the subconscious, impressions whirling in from without, ideas and insights bursting up like bubbles and gone again before they can be seized. And the hopelessness of the business, the whole infuriating, exhausting, fascinating business of grabbing something out of the turmoil and imposing upon it some faint shadow or rumor of the order, pattern and rhythm of the world.
Elizabeth Goudge
We're going' Anne said firmly. So soon?' Percy pleaded. 'But stars come out at night.'Then they fade at dawn', Anne replied. 'This star needs to veil herself in darkness.
Philippa Gregory
I think you can tell when you meet someone whether they read novels. There's some hollowness if they don't.
Philip Hensher
Every person is an island in the sea of humanity.
Anthony T.Hincks
If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going.
Jeanette Winterson
Family. Friendship. Loyalty. These things have been my guiding stars, my light in these dark times.
John Gwynne
Angling is just a way of relaxing and escaping in the countryside.
Fennel Hudson
Conjugation of the irregular verb “to design”:I create, You interfere, He gets in the way.We cooperate, You obstruct, They conspire.
David K. Brown
If my phrases shock the reader, that only shows it is high time he or she was shocked.
H.G.Wells
Origin of man now proved.—Metaphysics must flourish.—He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.
Charles Darwin
All questions of right to one side, I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that Israel just did not look, or feel, either permanent or sustainable. I felt this when sitting in the old Ottoman courtyards of Jerusalem, and I felt it even more when I saw the hideous 'Fort Condo' settlements that had been thrown up around the city in order to give the opposite impression. If the statelet was only based on a narrow strip of the Mediterranean littoral (god having apparently ordered Moses to lead the Jews to one of the very few parts of the region with absolutely no oil at all), that would be bad enough. But in addition, it involved roosting on top of an ever-growing population that did not welcome the newcomers.
Christopher Hitchens
History is the long struggle of man, by exercise of his reason, to understand his environment and to act upon it. But the modern period has broadened the struggle in a revolutionary way. Man now seeks to understand, and act on, not only his environment, but himself; and this has added, so to speak, a new dimension to reason and a new dimension to history.
Edward Hallett Carr
For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols
Aldous Huxley
Power needs plots because plots are secret until they unfold and the most gratifying kind of power is holding onto an explosive secret.
Glenn Haybittle
You know I love you,' said the other mother flatly.'You have a very funny way of showing it,' said Coraline.
Neil Gaiman
Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—'a land without a people for a people without a land'—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?
Christopher Hitchens
We're merely one tree with various types, shapes and sizes of leaves that all wave differently in the breeze
Rasheed Ogunlaru
loveis giving everything too easilythen staying to try and claw it back
Andrew McMillan
I had never before been a special fan of that great comedian Phyllis Diller, but she utterly won my heart this week by sending me an envelope that, when opened, contained a torn-off square of brown-bag paper of the kind suitable for latrine duty in an ill-run correctional facility. Duly unfurled, it carried a handwritten salutation reading as follows:Money's scarceTimes are hardHere's your f******I could not possibly improve on the sentiment, but I don't think it ought to depend on the current austerities. Isn't Christmas a moral and aesthetic nightmare whether or not the days are prosperous?
Christopher Hitchens
The public do not know enough to be experts yet know enough to decide between them.
Samuel Butler
Sometimes I think it is my fate to live in the wreckage and confusion of crumbling houses.
Abdulrazak Gurnah
It's fun being a girl.
Chloe Thurlow
I've started to hate this city, this country, all these STUPID FUCKING PEOPLE.
Nick Bantock
I know there’s something troubling you. I’m not going to ask what it is, if you don’t want to tell me. But remember that I’m your mother. Nothing you say could ever shock me or make me love you less.
Erin Hunter
Understanding is a creative act in a dimension we do not see.
Elizabeth Goudge
I don't give a damn for anybody's opinion, I only care about the facts. So I'm not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where factual matters are concerned.
Richard Dawkins
His eyes are as green as a fresh pickled toad,His hair is as dark as a blackboard.I wish he was mine, he's really divine,The hero who conquered the Dark Lord.
J.K. Rowling
Michael Palin : "I am sorry to interrupt you there Dennis, but he's crossed it out. Thomas Hardy here on the first day of his new novel has crossed out the only word he has written so far and he is gazing off into space. Ohh! Oh dear he's signed his name again."Graham Chapman: "It looks like Tess of the D'Urbervilles all over again."- Matching Tie and Handkerchief, "Novel Writing
Graham Chapman
I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.
Roald Dahl
It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your own beliefs really are.
George Orwell
Acting is happy agony.
Alec Guinness
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
C.S. Lewis
What she did learn from all the books was something else, something she hadn't really been expecting, which was that the story of loneliness is much longer than the story of life. In the sense of what most people mean by living, she said. Without children or partner, without meaningful family or a home, a day can last an eternity: a life without those things is a life without a story, a life in which there is nothing - no narrative dramas - to alleviate the cruelly meticulous passing of time.
Rachel Cusk
Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid person's notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so with those whose opinions and feelings are an emanation from their own nature and faculties.
John Stuart Mill
It is an axiom of modern social psychology that the stories that tend to get repeated are the ones that somehow have the potential to strengthen the communities in which they are told, or to enhance the relationship between the teller and the hearer. This principle seems to be reflected in the stories that were handed down from the community around Jesus. Again and again, early Christian stories suggest that virtue is not enough. The lives of families and communities can only really flourish where virtue takes second place to love.
Kate Cooper
The nearest thing we have to a defence against [the gods] (but there is no real defence) is to be very wide awake and sober and hard at work, to hear no music, never to look at earth or sky, and (above all) to love no one.
C.S. Lewis
Raise from your bed of languorRaise from your bed of dismayYour friends will not come tomorrowAs they did not come todayYou must rely on yourself, they said,You must rely on yourself,Oh but I find this pill so bitter said the poor manAs he took it from the shelfCrying, O sweet Death come to meCome to me for company,Sweet Death it is only you I canConstrain for company.
Stevie Smith
I don't ever dream about you and meI don't ever make up stuff about usThat would be considered insanityI don't ever drive by your houseTo see if you're inI don't even have an opinionOn that tramp that you are still seeingI don't know your timetableI don't know your face off by heartBut I must admit that there's still a part of meThat thinks we might get on
Kate Nash
You cannot control life, but you can change the way you see life.Animals other than man are more fulfilled, because they have less mind blocking life, but they are stuck with the perspective and perception they are born with. We (human beings) can greatly improve our perception by learning the ultimate truth.All the problems we have stem from people not knowing the truth of life.
Michael Smith
Prayer's a very tricky business.
Dodie Smith
It could be said that the lectures changed the way many people thought about myth, fairy story, and poetry, and even about the relationship of imagination to thought and to language. One of the brilliant but cryptic insights he expressed was: ‘To ask what is the origins of stories … is to ask what is the origin of language and of the mind.
Colin Duriez
I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc, is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them.
C.S. Lewis
There is no wealth but life.
John Ruskin
Can angels lie spine to spine?If not, how they must envy us humans
Kamila Shamsie
It was the most natural thing in the world because from out of his mouth were coming most of the things I felt. In another person, one i did not have this attachment to, it would have been gushing, clingy and embarrassing, from him it was like having a mirror held up to my soul.
Dorothy Koomson
The real distinction between being great and being less great seems to be the extent to which we are willing to be pushed along by our own desires.
Melanie Brown
I know where I come from, but what I want to know is, where am I going?
Anthony T.Hincks
Then it doesn't matter which way you walk...-so long as I get somewhere.
Lewis Carroll
What is now proved was once only imagined.
William Blake
Maggie wasn't without her concerns, though. "What if he's crazy?""Yeah, that's a definite possibility," he agreed."What if he's not your type?""Then we'll only hook up in dark places.
Con Riley
Then, as now, I believe that the English use language to hide what they mean.
Zia Haider Rahman
To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity.
Michael Denton
It’s always hard to lose somebody. It leaves a hole in you heart that never grows back.
Kevin Brooks
As well as a shared mentality, the Establishment is cemented by financial links and a 'revolving door' culture: that is, powerful individuals gliding between the political, corporate and media worlds - or who manage to inhabit these various worlds at the same time. The terms of political debate are in large part dictated by a media controlled by a small number of exceptionally rich owners, while think tanks and political parties are funded by wealthy individuals and corporate interests.
Owen Jones
Even jellyfish have a life. So, what's your excuse?
Anthony T.Hincks
If anyone else asked that question, O He Who Is Terrible and Great, I would have said they were an ignorant fool; in you it is a sign of the disarming simplicity which is the fount of all virtue.
Jonathan Stroud
...317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is, because mathematical reality is built that way.
G H Hardy
Though it had no wide reputation, all manner of people frequented 'The Midnight Bell.' This was in its nature, of course, since it is notorious that all manner of people frequent all manner of public-houses - which in this respect resemble railway stations and mad-houses.
Patrick Hamilton