Quotes by British Authors - Page 256

A simple act of kindness and compassion towards a single animal may not mean anything to all creatures, but will mean everything to one.
Paul Oxton
The modern tendency towards increasing specialization in all branches of research and scholarship has discouraged comparative studies of the arts; and what we seldom do we generally distrust. But our distrust of analogies was not shared by the sixteenth century, which inherited from antiquity a habit of drawing parallels as a matter of course.
John Shearman
I think it was then that it dawned on me that Mum wasn't going to notice Chris was missing. She has been made so that she thinks Chris is just round the corner all the time. She doesn't realise that she never sees him. I don't know why I didn't understand earlier. If Aunt Maria can turn Chris into a wolf, she's surely strong enough to do this to Mum- except that it seems a different kind of thing, much more natural and ordinary, and I didn't really think she could do both kinds.
Diana Wynne Jones
Theory is a six-letter dirty word to most musicians, but hey, musicians love dirty words, right? And just like all the other dirty words, theory is easy to learn and fun to use!
Ray Harmony
Rapport is the link between meeting and communicating.
Nicholas Boothman
One hand has surely worked throughout the universe.
Charles Darwin
His Christianity was muscular.
Benjamin Disraeli
It seemed to me,' said Wonko the Sane, 'that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.
Douglas Adams
Two men look out through the same bars: One sees the mud and one the stars.
Frederick Langbridge
Anyone who is desperate or alone will agree there is comfort in routine.
Simon Van Booy
I am tired and drunk and still hungry. He is full of steak and Coca-Cola and, presumably, energy: enough energy to cross the road and walk up the steps inside the tower of the cathedral, which I have never entered.
Joanna Walsh
The father of his country.
Francis Bailey
The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility...According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
C.S. Lewis
God had mercy, he knew. The Mongols had none.
Conn Iggulden
So what was it then exactly, this truth-telling? ... It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive. It was about finding a language. And it was about being true to the fact, the one thing only followed from the other, that many things in life —of so many more than we think—can never be explained at all.
Graham Swift
Friendship is the wine of life.
Edward Young
Pennies do not come from heaven- they have to be earned here on earth.
Margaret Thatcher
And I'd started thinking about my mother's last weeks--the way she'd drifted listlessly about the house in her dressing gown, cigarettes in one hand, glass of something strong-smelling in the other.
Anna Davis
And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before--and thus was the Empire forged.
Douglas Adams
The sooner you finish procrastinating, the sooner you can get back to your art.
Stephanie Lennox
At the heart of the pain created by sexual rejection is our habit of interpreting it as a moral judgement, when it might more accurately be categorized as a mere accident.
Alain de Botton
The Resurrection is not a single event, but a loosening of God's power and light into the earth and history that continues to alter all things, infusing them with the grace and power of God's own holiness. It is as though a door was opened, and what poured out will never be stopped, and that door cannot be closed.
Megan McKenna
There ain't half been some clever bastards
Ian Dury
The creeping sense that he might have seen him reading the book came up from the ground, but that was more anxiety than evidence.
Natasha Pulley
Anyone who truly wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places. Instead of fleeing to desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will d better to seek out the company of other animals. A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery.
John N Gray
The miserable man was a man of that confined stolidity of mind that he could not discuss my prospects without having me before him.
Charles Dickens
The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.
Jeanette Winterson
Lovely phrases had lit candles in her mind, one after the other, till she felt intoxicated with the brightness.
Elizabeth Goudge
The eye of youth is very observant. Youth has its moments of keen intuition, even normal youth -- but the intuition of those who stand mi-way between the sexes is so ruthless, so poignant, so deadly, as to be in the nature of an added scourge...
Radclyffe Hall
Everyone feels depressed, angry or frustrated at times; it’s a crossroads not a dead end.
Sam Owen
I’ve always felt that your belongings have never been on a level with you.
George Eliot
Two years hence you will be as calm as I am now, - and far, far happier, I trust, for you are a man and free to act as you please
Anne Brontë
But then, she wonders,just what kind of man would ever give her the courage to marry at all- to overcome that dreadful fear of death that seemed always to accompany the very thought of love? It was illogical, idiotic and childish. And yet the child was with her always; and always she would be afraid unless someone could place a light down there inside that dark and chilly heart of hers and chase all the ghosts away - the ghosts of Katherine Howard, of Jane Seymour and, not least, that of her own poor mother. They accompanied her always, those spirits - especially at this kind of time, a time of being alone, of being feminine and reflective. They would all gather round to whisper in her ear and warn her - so that even as she looks up once more into her mirror she almost expects to see them there, ranged behind her shoulders, their faces full of concern and anxiety. Never trust them - never trust the men, for they will betray you always the moment you surrender to them!
Robert Stephen Parry
The "fashion-beauty complex'," representing the corporate interests involved in the fashion and beauty industries, has, Bartky argues, taken over from the family and church as "central producers and regulators of 'femininity'" (1990, p. 39). The fashion-beauty complex promotes itself to women as seeking to, "glorify the female body and to provide opportunities for narcissistic indulgence'' but in fact its aim is to "depreciate woman's body and deal a blow to her narcissism'' so that she will buy more products. The result is that a woman feels constantly deficient and that her body requires "either alteration or else heroic measures merely to conserve it'' (p. 39).
Sheila Jeffreys
All we can do is to prepare for a universal language that will go on changing for ever. We don’t know everything. We aren’t final. I wish we could make that statement a part of the Fundamental Law.
H.G.Wells
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?And is there honey still for tea?
Rupert Brooke
Much of modern life is based upon a false logic, a logic that assumes that happiness and well-being come from financial prosperity.
Nic Marks
...[A] certain degree of un-understanding (not mis-, but un-) is the only possible sanctuary which one human being can offer to another in the midst of the devastating intimacy of a happy marriage.
Jan Struther
I stood lonely enough, but to that feeling of isolation I was accustomed: it did not oppress me much.
Charlotte Brontë
I believe,” he said gently, “we all have a perfect right to make ourselves unhappy if that is what we freely choose. But I am not sure we have the right to allow our own unhappiness to cause someone else’s. The trouble with life sometimes is that we are all in it together.
Mary Balogh
So much of war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn't seem worth even starting a train of thought.
Graham Greene
It is the absence of hope, which equals the despair that is the punishment.
James Fox
A person who can write a long letter with ease cannot write ill.
Jane Austen
Can I have a look at Uranus too, Lavender?
J.K. Rowling
The prefect evening...lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself sleepy...Jim lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other's presence.
Christopher Isherwood
Readers who have owned animals will appreciate how difficult it would be to train a dog to play exclusively in his own yard, to fetch his sweater whenever he sees it is raining outside, or to be generous in sharing his dog biscuits with other dogs. Yet these same people would not even question the feasibility of trying to use reward and punishment to teach their children the same behaviors.
Thomas Gordon
There are few overnight successes and many up-all-night successes.
Kevin Ashton
Excellence encourages one about life generally it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.
George Eliot
Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don't. I don't.
Neil Gaiman
The Heart of what you are is not your body or your thoughts but pure Consciousness itself.
J.M. Harrison
Though his death would not fill me with any sense of sadness, I would probably feel the loss. Even enemies are part of one.
Jasper Fforde
The seed of a blue lupin will usually produce a blue lupin. But the seed of a blue-eyed man may produce a brown-eyed bore...especially if his wife has a taste for gigolos.
Beverley Nichols
This reminds Faron of those stupid dogs that people put in their cars, that when the car moves, the dogs frantically nod their heads, like some demented, freshly graduated psychologist, with their first patients.
Gary Edward Gedall
Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.
G.K. Chesterton
The mixtapes we made for ourselves were musical mirrors. The sadness, anger, or frustration you might be feeling at a given time could be encapsulated in the song selection. You made mixtapes that corresponded to emotional states, and they'd be avaliable to pop into the deck when each feeling needed reinforcing or soothing. The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace.
David Byrne
You can greet even the dullest acquaintance with pleasure, if you have forgotten their dreary story.
Jude Morgan
This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this Island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this war, but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a War of the Unknown Warriors
Winston S. Churchill
Dexter, I love you so much. So, so much, and I probably always will.' Her lips touched his cheek. 'I just don't like you anymore. I'm sorry.
David Nicholls
But there are roughly two sorts of informed people, aren't there? People who start off right by observing the pitfalls and mistakes and going round them, and the people who fall into them and get out and know they're there because of that. They both come to the same conclusions but they don't have quite the same point of view.
Margery Allingham
He made a pit and digged it. He was cunning in his plans and industrious in his labors. He stooped to the dirty work of digging. He did not fear to soil his own hands. He was willing to work in a ditch if others might fall therein. What mean things men will do to wreak revenge on the godly. They hunt for good men as if they were brute beasts - they that will not give them the fair chase afforded to the hare or the fox, but must secretly entrap them because they can neither run them down nor shoot them down. Our enemies will not meet us to the face for they fear us as much as they pretend to despise us. But let us look on to the end of the scene. The verse says he has fallen into the ditch that he has made. Ah, there he is. Let us laugh at his disappointment. Lo, he is himself the beast. He has hunted his own soul. The chase has brought him a goodly victim. So should it ever be.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon