Quotes by British Authors - Page 254

What we call progress is the exchange of one Nuisance for another Nuisance.
Havelock Ellis
The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.
Malcolm Muggeridge
It's shame that gets us killed. Shame is the anchor, the heaviest burden to carry from the battlefield. Fortunately shame was an affliction I'd never suffered from.
Mark Lawrence
Actor-manager - one to whom the part is greater than the whole.
Ronald Jeans
Pink colors my world with love.
Anthony T.Hincks
It was an article of faith with NCOs [noncommissioned officers] that they were better than their officers. And they were usually right. Certainly I had been happy with mine. They had done plenty of good work for me.
Lee Child
[She was] a creature full of eager, passionate longings for all that was beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining after dreamy music that died away and would not come near to her; with a blind unconscious yearning for something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul a sense of home in it.
George Eliot
Leo, I have another secret. I've fallen in love with you.” "I've always loved you.
Tom Rob Smith
Makana stared up at the stars and marvelled at how clear they were out here, so far from human habitation. It was remarkable, just how many there were. They felt comforting, despite his situation. They took him back to his life with Muna, the happiest time he could remember, when the world had been simple. Sitting out in the yard in the evenings, watching the sky revolve slowly around them. It seemed like another world.
Parker Bilal
One thing I will say, they often take it better than a man. Pain, that is. Probably the residue of tolerance from when they were all bloody witches and got stoned or burned or drowned for it, eh lad? Never tell your mother I said that, by the way.
Sarah Hall
This pain is comfort. It is the solace of physicality, like a touch.
Johnny Rich
so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again...
Virginia Woolf
You cannot dream yourself into a character you must hammer and forge one for yourself.
James A. Froude
Always ensure that the roads you must take are filled with love not hate.
Steven Redhead
I laughed at him as he said this. “I am not an angel,” I asserted; “and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me—for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.
Charlotte Brontë
We can learn a lot from animals, if we're prepared to accept that they may just know more about life than what we do.
Anthony T.Hincks
I grab at Smitty and he at me, and, for one horrible, deperately embarrassing second we fly into each others arms like Shaggy and Scooby Don't.
Kirsty McKay
Even hell will give you an incentive not to reach for heaven.
Garry Crystal
Jane, my little darling (so I will call you, for so you are), you don't know what you are talking about; you misjudge me again: it is not because she is mad I hate her. If you were mad, do you think I should hate you?""I do indeed, sir.""Then you are mistaken, and you know nothing about me, and nothing about the sort of love of which I am capable. Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still: if you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat--your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me: if you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace, at least as fond as it would be restrictive. I should not shrink from you with disgust as I did from her: in your quiet moments you should have no watcher and no nurse but me; and I could hang over you with untiring tenderness, though you gave me no smile in return; and never weary of gazing into your eyes, though they had no longer a ray of recognition for me.
Charlotte Brontë
I'm just not going to do it so that we can say that we've done it. And I'm not going to do it if the first thing you say afterwards is 'please don't tell anyone' or 'let's forget it ever happened'. If you have to keep something secret it's because you shouldn't be doing it in the first place!
David Nicholls
Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.
G.K. Chesterton
Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.
Alain de Botton
You speak from your heart, young Firepaw. This will make you a stronger warrior one day." said LionheartTigerclaw growled. "Or it might make him give in to kittypet weakness right at the moment of attack
Erin Hunter
Provided with a case of pencils, and some sheets of paper, I used to take a seat apart from them, near the window, and busy myself in sketching fancy vignettes representing any scene that happened momentarily to shape itself in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of imagination: a glimpse of sea between two rock; the rising moon, and a ship crossing its disc; a group of reeds and water-flags, and a naiad's head, crowned with lotus-flowers, rising out of them; an elf sitting in a hedge-sparrow's nest, under a wreath of hawthorn bloom.
Charlotte Brontë
You see every day of life as a bonus once you have inner peace.
Steven Magee
Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?
Alain de Botton
The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.
Celia Green
We shape our buildings thereafter they shape us.
Winston Churchill
A third...candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn't too dead to work.
Bill Bryson
As your lover describes you, so you are.
Jeanette Winterson
Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women do when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
Thomas Hardy
The Party's Object...' The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interests of the whole community'......was precise and legalistic. Correctness of definition and theory was all-important: in the minds of the men of new party, the failures of the existing organisations were simply the fruits of false theories. For the same reason, the Object did not mention the means of exchange. It was held that socialism, with free access to everything, there would be no exchange of goods; hence, to talk of the common ownership of the means of exchange was to show misunderstanding from the start.
Robert Barltrop
Whether I resolve to fire, earth, water, air, Or all the elements by scruples, I know not, Nor greatly care. - Shoot. Shoot!Of all deaths, the violent death is best;For from ourselves it steals ourselves so fast,The pain, once apprehended, is quite past.
John Webster
The USA is a beautiful country...when you take the corrupt corporations and their government minions out of the equation.
Steven Magee
I want to save the world but I haven't worked out a way to save myself yet.
Rae Earl
His attention. Sweet and intense at the same time. Like a barley sugar I could untwist from its plastic and hold in my mouth. A flood of secret pleasure.
Alexis Hall
Your home is within you, you carry your place in the world.
Kate Lord Brown
I went to a foot specialist recently and she said:"You've broken a bone, it's healed funny.""What can you do?""Not much."She strapped me up though and that's the reason my foot is hurting, because the strapping gave me cramp.When I'm about to die I'm going to head ti a swamp so I topple in when the time comes. In 50,000 years when they dig me up, pretty well preserved, the scientists will have to work out what sort of life I led from my bone structure, teeth and whatnot. Maybe I'll be clutching a Felt record or something to give them a clue. They'll look at my foot and say: "This man broke a bone and it's healed funny." And they'll look at the Felt record, analysing the grooves with a Groove Analyser and they'll say: "He was obviously in an indie band and one day the pressure got too much, and he booted a wall." And they wouldn't be far from the truth, those crazy scientists.
Stuart Murdoch
I learned what research was all about as a research student [with] Stoppani ... Max Perutz, and ... Fred Sanger... From them, I always received an unspoken message which in my imagination I translated as 'Do good experiments, and don’t worry about the rest.
César Milstein
We are all a great deal luckier that we realize, we usually get what we want - or near enough.
Roald Dahl
We feel that, for the honour of God (and also, though we do not say this, for the sake of our own reputation as spiritual Christians), it is necessary for us to claim that we are, so to speak, already in the signal-box, here and now enjoying the inside information as to the why and wherefore of God’s doings. This comforting pretence becomes part of us: we feel sure that God has enabled us to understand all His ways with us and our circle thus far, and we take if for granted that we shall be able to see at once the reason for anything that may happen to us in the future. And then something very painful and quite inexplicable comes along, and our cheerful illusion of being in God’s secret councils is shattered. Our pride is wounded; we feel that God has slighted us; and unless at this point we repent, and humble ourselves very thoroughly for our former presumption, our whole subsequent spriritual life may be blighted.
J.I. Packer
Charity is the power of defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and eclipse. It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.
G.K. Chesterton
No gods or demons would stop him in his quest of being reunited with her.
Alan Kinross
If you’re creative, if you can think independently, if you can articulate passion, if you can override the fear of being wrong, then your company needs you more than it ever did. And now your company can no longer afford to pretend that isn’t the case. So dust off your horn and start tooting.
Hugh MacLeod
People grieve in different ways, some silently, some in anger, some in spite. Rarely does grief bring out the best in people, despite what local historians like to tell you.
Joanne Harris
I'd love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I'd love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I'd be one day to look inside it.
David Mitchell
For it is just this question of pain that partsus. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your ownpains drive you; so long as pain underlies your propositions aboutsin,—so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurelywhat an animal feels.
H.G.Wells
I feel younger than eighteen but burdened as a eighty-year-old.
Jessie Burton
It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
Bill Bryson
And sometimes I misbehave on purpose.""Seriously?!""It's called being a brat. Ben will sometimes indulge me [and punish me], but occasionally I have to listen to a lecture about asking for what I want. And those times, I get sent to bed without an orgasm.
Sierra Cartwright
It's important to learn to laugh at ourselves, don't take life too seriously.
Geri Halliwell
I don't know why they call it life, it's just a moment with memories.
Tibor Fischer
I don’t think I’d feel any more violated if he’d stripped me bare. I might as well have lain down before him openly exposing all my flaws and my fears, inviting him to psychoanalyze me.
Siobhan Davis
When a theological world view dominated, deviance was sin; when the nation-states emerged from the decay of feudalism, most deviance became designated as crime; and in our own scientifically oriented world, various forms of deviance are designated increasingly as medical problems. Thus we view the medical paradigm as the ascending paradigm for deviance designations in our postindustrial society.
Peter Conrad
Alongside the practical thought something else struggled and, like an escaped butterfly, took wing: the assurance of something wonderful awaiting her. Just around the corner......
Norah Lofts
But the more I think it, the more I want her, the more my desire rises and swells.
Sarah Waters
Sometimes a high moon, liquid-brilliant, scudded across a hollow space and took cover under electric, brown-iridescent cloud-edges.
D.H. Lawrence
You do know you’re one of the hot ones, right? You could have any dom in this room if you looked marginally more approachable than an underfed piranha having a bad day.
Alexis Hall
They were like waking up to what was being done to their malenky persons and saying that they wanted to go home and like I was a wild beast. They looked like they had been in some big bitva, as indeed they had, and were all bruised and pouty. Well, if they would not go to school they must have there education. And education they had had.
Anthony Burgess
There's a nobility in his eye, a regal serenity about him. Does he not personify all that men try to be and never can be?
Michael Morpurgo