Quotes by British Authors - Page 250

Blood is thicker than water, I know, but it's unnatural stuff to drink so much of. (“The Wife Of Ted Wickham”)
A.E. Coppard
I don't think it really matters whether parents are strict or lenient, as long as they're consistent. Kids can live with more or less any set of rules so long as they know what they are. It's arbitrary tyranny that gets them mixed up.
Ken Follett
This is what I feared would come; this is what I have dreaded. It is not very bright and honorable as you have always thought it; it is not like a ballad. It is a muddle and a mess, and a sinful waste, and good men have died and more will follow.
Philippa Gregory
Answers are almost always insufficient. They are almost always misleading.
Robert Aickman
Every moment is a fresh new beginning, a wonderful inauguration of the great cosmic journey through the universe. We can do whatever we want. We can change reality at any moment.
Russell Brand
Come! our world is done:For all the witchery of the world is fled,And lost all wanton wisdom long since won.
Lionel Pigot Johnson
Black was the without eyeBlack the within tongueBlack was the heartBlack the liver, black the lungsUnable to suck in lightBlack the blood in its loud tunnelBlack the bowels packed in furnaceBlack too the musclesStriving to pull out into the lightBlack the nerves, black the brainWith its tombed visionsBlack also the soul, the huge stammerOf the cry that, swelling, could notPronounce its sun.
Ted Hughes
I suppose it had something to do with it being a secret, just how much it had meant to me. Maybe all of us at Hailsham had little secrets like that--little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone with our fears and longings. But the very fact that we had such needs would have felt wrong to us at the time--like somehow we were letting the side down.
Kazuo Ishiguro
I don't fly on account of my religion. I'm a devout coward.
Henny Youngman
…a waitress came out and plonked in front of each of us a small standard terra-cotta flowerpot in which had been baked a little loaf of bread."What's this?" I asked."It's bread," she replied."But it's in a flowerpot?" She gave me a look that I was beginning to think of as the Darwin stare. It was a look that said, "Yeah? So?""Well, isn't that kind of unusual?"She considered for a moment. "Is a bit, I suppose." "And will we be following a horticultural theme throughout the meal?" Her expression contorted in a deeply pained look, as if she were trying to suck her face into the back of her head. "What?""Will the main course arrive in a wheelbarrow?" I elaborated helpfully. "Will you be serving the salad with a pitchfork?""Oh, no. It's just the bread that's special.""I'm so pleased to hear it.
Bill Bryson
It is unreasonable for the common people to expect a known corrupt legal system to protect them.
Steven Magee
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
Salman Rushdie
On the face of it, no one could have been less equipped for the job than these gently nurtured girls who walked straight out of Edwardian drawingrooms into the manifold horrors of the First World War.
Lyn Macdonald
Funny that. We live in islands of Hours and we never seem to have time enough for anything...
Clive Barker
YOU'RE ONLY PUTTING OFF THE INEVITABLE, he said.That's what being alive is all about.
Terry Pratchett
To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.
Winston S. Churchill
There's so much proscription in the lives of young people, and it's so vital to have a place that says, look, here are the doors onto the world and amazingly, you're free to choose any one you like. - Patrick Ness on Libraries
Patrick Ness
Even now - in the final hour of my life -I'm falling in love again.
Morrissey
We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
Alain de Botton
By night an atheist half believes in God.
Edward Young
I suppose what I really am is restless. I want to go everywhere, see everything, do everything. I want to find something. Yes, that's it, I want to find something.
Agatha Christie
I wasn't getting better. I was getting worse.I did not go to the doctor because I didn't want pills. If this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. If this was the rest of my life I could not live.
Jeanette Winterson
I will find you another long-forgotten Queen Mab poem in no time. Depend on it. I refuse to let Cody or anyone else know more about English Literature than me. So calm yourself, Elfish, and let an expert take over.
Martin Millar
God's Final Message to His Creation:'We apologize for the inconvenience.
Douglas Adams
And again Harry understood without having to think. It did not matter about bringing them back, for he was about to join them. He was not really fetching them: They were fetching him.
J.K. Rowling
the English explorer Richard Burton told the story of an Englishman finding his new wife unconscious on the marital bed, having chloroformed herself. She had pinned a note to her nightdress which read: 'Mama says you're to do what you like.
Sam Miller
We shall change all that...because it is possible to change the world, if one is determined enough, and if one sees with sufficient clarity just what has to be changed.
Alexander McCall Smith
[Kandinsky] arrived, as they say, 'with snow on his boots', and it never really melted.
Neville Weston
... Of his sins [Heavenly Father] does not want [man] to think [on them] too much: once they are repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better [Heavenly Father] is pleased.
C.S. Lewis
It is a sad state of affairs in the USA that for the sick and the poor that jail offers better benefits than the freedom of no healthcare, bills that cannot be paid and starvation.
Steven Magee
I have given you your liberty, Lucius, is that not enough for you? But I have noticed that you and your family seem less than happy of late. . . . What is it about my presence in your home that displeases you, Lucius?”“Nothing — nothing, my Lo
J.K. Rowling
Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.
Thomas Henry Huxley
It's always the mind that needs quietening and the heart that needs listening to.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
[T]o believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing.
Christopher Hitchens
It is better to live rich than to die rich.
Samuel Johnson
The energy industry is filled with toxic people that are following a corporate government subsidized known biologically toxic agenda.
Steven Magee
When you get a principle on which everyone is agreed, you get the beginning of complacency and deterioration.
Idries Shah
Life is sustained within the confines of personal reality bubbles.
Steven Redhead
Their love was so forbidden that their very touch could wrap a hangman's noose around them.
Victoria Sue
Spermicide' sort of rhymes with 'pesticide', yet you wouldn't put a load of DDT in you know where to kill you know what, now would you?
Anthony T.Hincks
Good general differ from bad generals only in the degree to which they resist the psychopathology of the very organization they serve. Norman Dixon
Patrick Hennessey
Why is erasing desire seen as so important? If the subjugation of the self is the point of the self what's the point in having a self? It's like someone handing you a leaflet which says throw this leaflet away.
Tibor Fischer
To be successful you must recognise your weaknesses and employ people with complementary skills.
Duncan Bannatyne
A novel is a static thing that one moves through a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.
Kenneth Tynan
Badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.
Anthony Burgess
Find the environment that best suits what lifestyle is required.
Steven Redhead
No one can usurp the heights...But those to whom the miseries of the worldAre misery, and will not let them rest.
John Keats
Eighteen pockets in one suit? I haven't the time.
A.A. Milne
In following your inclinations and moving toward mastery, you make a great contribution to society, enriching it with discoveries and insights, and making the most of the diversity in nature and among human society.
Robert Greene
Walk boldly and wisely. ... There is a hand above that will help you on.
Philip James Bailey
Of course the cat will growl and spit at the operator and bite him if she can. But the real question is whether he is a vet or a vivisector.
C.S. Lewis
Lord, grant us rest tonight, and if we must be wakeful, cheerful.
Robert Bolt
You know the only rule you need to know to get on in this country? ‘Never complain, never explain.
Amanda Craig
I will be brave, thought Coraline. No, I am brave.
Neil Gaiman
Funny how money speaks even more loudly than morals in this beautiful, superficial material world.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
If no one seems to understandStart your own revolution and cut out the mid
Billy Bragg
A blow job. Why did people do these things to each other? Artemis felt faintly sick.
Marie Phillips
Liberty is about being free and is granted by laws and conventions and government permissions. Freedom is about feeling free, and the only permission you need for that is your own.
Beth Kempton
Playing in an orchestra is completely different to playing on my own.Sometimes I played, sometimes listened; instead of waiting my turn, I sometimes interrupted another player, sometimes I argued, sometimes agreed.My flute is my mouthpiece and I felt as if I was actually joining in a conversation.
Kevin Crossley-Holland
People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.
Neil Gaiman