Quotes by British Authors - Page 257

Any activity where you let go of fears and doubts and inertia, and move toward a goal you desire brings, if not the goal itself (which may or may not be available to you) but brings you a life full of adventure, dedication, excitement and fulfillment – in other words – satisfaction and happiness.
Martin Gover
Once a partner has begun to lose interest, there is apparently little the other can do to arrest the process. Like seduction, withdrawal suffers under a blanket of reticence. The very breakdown of communication is hard to discuss, unless both parties have a desire to see it restored. This leaves the lover in a desperate situation. Honest dialogue seems to produce only irritation and smothers love in the attempt to revive it. Desperate to woo the partner back at any cost, the lover might at this point be tempted to turn to romantic terrorism, the product of irredeemable situations, a gamut of tricks (sulking, jealousy, guilt) that attempt to force the partner to return love, by blowing up (in fits of tears, rage or otherwise) in front of the loved one. The terroristic partner knows he cannot realistically hope to see his love reciprocated, but the futility of something is not always (in love or in politics) a sufficient argument against it. Certain things are said not because they will be heard, but because it is important to speak.
Alain de Botton
She dabbed at the surface of the water with one paw, and the moon fluttered like silver wings before settling again as the water stilled. Letting out a faint mrrow of wonder, Half Moon dabbed again and again. However often she disturbed the surface, the moon was still there.“It doesn’t give up, does it?” Half Moon blinked at Jayfeather. “It’s always there, constant like the stones in this cave. Maybe we should be like the moon’s reflection, holding fast whatever happens?
Erin Hunter
The beauty of today may not be realised until it becomes tomorrow’s memory
Steven Aitchison
Three passions simple but overwhelmingly strong have governed my life: the longing for love the search for knowledge and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
Bertrand Russell
Men. Young men. Legal age, mind you. But young nonetheless. And it’s not what you think. When we meet, we make … magic.
Clive Barker
I believe ghost story writing is a dying art.
H. Russell Wakefield
The stark nakedness and simplicity of the conflict with which humanity is oppressed - that of getting angry with and wishing to hurt the very person who is most loved.
John Bowlby
I wanted to become an atheist but I gave it up. They have no holidays.
Henny Youngman
Another source of fallacy is the vicious circle of illusions which consists on the one hand of believing what we see, and on the other in seeing what we believe.
Thomas Clifford Allbutt
Faith is the angelic messenger between the soul and the Lord Jesus in glory.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
What is a Communist? One who hath yearnings For equal division of unequal earnings Idler or bungler or both he is willing To fork out his copper and pocket your shilling.
Ebenezer Elliott
Parvati positively beamed. Harry could tell that she was feeling guilty for having laughed at Hermione in Transfiguration. He looked around and saw that Hermione was beaming back, if possible even more brightly. Girls were very strange sometimes.
J.K. Rowling
Class is entirely intangible, and the way it affects things isn't subject to scientific analysis, and it's not supposed to be real but it's pervasive and powerful. See; just like magic.
Jo Walton
Yes! all is past—swift time has fled away,Yet its swell pauses on my sickening mind;How long will horror nerve this frame of clay?I'm dead, and lingers yet my soul behind.Oh! powerful Fate, revoke thy deadly spell,And yet that may not ever, ever be,Heaven will not smile upon the work of Hell;Ah! no, for Heaven cannot smile on me;Fate, envious Fate, has sealed my wayward destiny.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The thoughts of othersWere light and fleeting,Of lovers' meetingOr luck or fame.Mine were of trouble,And mine were steady;So I was readyWhen trouble came.
A.E. Housman
The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he’s been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?
Julian Barnes
It matters not what goal you seek Its secret here reposesYou've got to dig from week to week To get Results or Roses.
Edgar A. Guest
A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.
G.K. Chesterton
We must be trying to learn who we really are rather than trying to tell ourselves who we should be.
John Powell
The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate and is sometimes equally convenient.
Charles Darwin
I can ask for cigarettes in every language
David Bowie
Why?' is always the most difficult question to answer. You know where you are when someone asks you 'What's the time?' or 'When was the battle of 1066?' or 'How do these seatbelts work that go tight when you slam the brakes on, Daddy?' The answers are easy and are, respectively, 'Seven-thirty in the evening,' 'Ten-fifteen in the morning,' and 'Don't ask stupid questions.
Douglas Adams
Being terrified but going ahead and doing what must be done—that's courage. The one who feels no fear is a fool, and the one who lets fear rule him is a coward.
Piers Anthony
Depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and it is not cured by medication. Depression may not even be an illness at all. Often, it can be a normal reaction to abnormal situations. Poverty, unemployment, and the loss of loved ones can make people depressed, and these social and situational causes of depression cannot be changed by drugs.
Irving Kirsch
The Past is Experience, Thats All You Got to Learn From.
Mary Norton
Pale winter sun Is beatin' the ground Why'm I throwin' away The best thing that I've found My young heart's in tatters and I'm sureThat it will be a long time healing It's so hard to see what I'm doing this forWhen loneliness is all that I'm feeling
David Gray
She liked this. Liked the closeness. With lover’s she’d taken in the past, things had been short and sweet. She certainly hadn’t stuck about to snuggle in case they started to get ideas, not after the first time. Killing a guy you’d fucked was one thing, but to kill one you’d snuggled with damn near broke a girl’s heart
Mina Carter
Kindness: It's ours to share.
Anthony T.Hincks
If someone even mentions his name it is like a little present to me - and I long to mention it myself. I start subjects leading up to it, and then I feel myself going red. I keep swearing to myself not to speak to him again - and then an opportunity occurs and I jump at it!
Dodie Smith
With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.
Doris Lessing
The world is full of injustice, and those who profit by injustice are in a position to administer rewards and punishments. The rewards go to those who invent ingenious justifications for inequality, the punishments to those who try to remedy it.
Bertrand Russell
If you assume that it is there, you will generally not be far off the truth…
Idries Shah
And He watched over me before I knew Him and before I learned sense or even distinguished between good and evil.
St. Patrick
It's all to do with the training: you can do a lot if you're properly trained.
Queen Elizabeth II
I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
C.S. Lewis
Warning:This data storage unit, or "book," has been designed to reprogram the human brain, allowing it to replicate the lost art that was once called reading. It is a simple adjustment and there will be no negative or harmful effects from this process.What you are doing: "Reading" ExplainedEach sheet is indelibly printed with information and the sheets are visually scanned from left to right, and from top to bottom.This scanned information is passed through the visual cortex directly into the brain, where it can then be accessed just like any other data.
Mike A. Lancaster
If history is written by the victors, conspiracy theory is typically written by the losers, and there were few greater losers in the revolution than the French church and especially the Jesuits.
Mike Jay
I will place no value on anything I have or may possess except in relation to the kingdom of Christ.
David Livingstone
Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart into you? Invention, energy, wit, style, charm--they've all got to be paid for in hard cash.
George Orwell
I was going to dine at the television company’s expense with one of the most beautiful women in show business and some television producer with an inferiority complex. In my experience, there’s always a price.
V.T. Davy
I'm sorry to disturb you, madam,' said Nurse, 'but I thought I'd better speak to you. It's about Miss Delia's knickers' she continued, after a glance at the Vicar and a rapid decision that his cloth protected him. 'She really hasn't a pair fit to wear...
Angela Thirkell
:Paintings are easy to see," he said after a moment. "Open, presented flat to the eye. Words are not easy. Words have to be discovered, deep in their pages, deciphered, translated, read. Words are symbols to be encoded, their letters trees in a forest, enmeshed, their tangled meanings never finally picked apart.
Catherine Fisher
Just a month after the completion of the Declaration of Independence, at a time when he delegates might have been expected to occupy themselves with more pressing concerns -like how they were going to win the war and escape hanging- Congress quite extraordinarily found time to debate business for a motto for the new nation. (Their choice, E Pluribus Unum, "One from Many", was taken from, of all places, a recipe for salad in an early poem by Virgil.)
Bill Bryson
Saying of the ProphetAngerYou ask for a piece of advice. I tell you : 'Do not get angry.' He is strong who can withhold anger.
Idries Shah
Books’ll be back,” Esther-in-Unalaq predicts. “Wait till the power grids start failing in the 2030s and the datavats get erased. It’s not far away. The future looks a lot like the past.
David Mitchell
There is a kind of gospel being proclaimed today which conveniently accommodates itself to the spirit of the age, and makes no demand for godliness.
Duncan Campbell
My mind to me a kingdom is,Such present joys therein I find,That it excels all other blissThat world affords or grows by kind.Though much I want which most would have,Yet still my mind forbids to crave.
Edward Dyer
The lawbreaking itch is not always an anarchic one. In the first place, the human personality has (or ought to have) a natural resistance to coercion. We don't like to be pushed and shoved, even if it's in a direction we might choose to go. In the second place, the human personality has (or ought to have) a natural sense of the preposterous. Thus, just behind my apartment building in Washington there is an official sign saying, Drug-Free Zone. I think this comic inscription may be done because it's close to a schoolyard. And a few years back, one of our suburbs announced by a municipal ordinance that it was a "nuclear-free zone." I don't wish to break the first law, though if I did wish to do so it would take me, or any other local resident, no more than one phone call and a ten-minute wait. I did, at least for a while, pine to break the "nuclear-free" regulation, on grounds of absurdity alone, but eventually decided that it would be too much trouble.
Christopher Hitchens
Would to God we were all Christians who profess to be Christians, and that we lived up to what we profess. Then would the Christian shine forth “clear as the sun, fair as the moon,” and what besides—why, “amazing as an army withbanners”! A consistent Church is an amazing Church—an honest, upright Church would shake the world! The tramp ofgodly men is the tramp of heroes; these are the thundering legions that sweep everything before them. The men that arewhat they profess to be, hate the semblance of a lie—whatever shape it wears—and would sooner die than do that which is dishonest, or that which would be degrading to the glory of a Heaven-born race, and to the honor of Him by whose name they have been called! O Christians! You will be the world’s contempt; you will be their despising, and hissing unless you live for one objective!
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Some of us have hearts, you know. Some of us don't give up on true love.
Sophie Kinsella
I'm sorry to disappoint you, but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.
Ian McEwan
Proof is boring. Proof is tiresome. Proof is an irrelevance. People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.
Joe Abercrombie
As de Saussure said, risk-taking brings with it its own reward: it keeps a "continual agitation alive" in the heart. Hope, fear. Hope, fear - this is the fundamental rhythm of mountaineering. Life, it frequently seems in the mountains, is more intensely lived the closer one gets to its extinction: we never feel so alive as when we have nearly died.
Robert Macfarlane
She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in his dull brain two matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days of mankind had been quite distinct.
Thomas Hardy
The two of them together in a place like Retribution Falls would result in alcoholic carnage, sure as bird shit on statues.
Chris Wooding
If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people.
Tony Benn
there was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heart
Iris Murdoch
[R]eligion was the race's first (and worst) attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best the species could do at a time when we had no concept of physics, chemistry, biology or medicine. We did not know that we lived on a round planet, let alone that the said planet was in orbit in a minor and obscure solar system, which was also on the edge of an unimaginably vast cosmos that was exploding away from its original source of energy. We did not know that micro-organisms were so powerful and lived in our digestive systems in order to enable us to live, as well as mounting lethal attacks on us as parasites. We did not know of our close kinship with other animals. We believed that sprites, imps, demons, and djinns were hovering in the air about us. We imagined that thunder and lightning were portentous. It has taken us a long time to shrug off this heavy coat of ignorance and fear, and every time we do there are self-interested forces who want to compel us to put it back on again.
Christopher Hitchens
But whence came this curious difference between them? He found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. One could try - Ransom has tried a hundred times - to put it into words. He has said that Malacandra was like rhythm and Perelandra like melody. He has said that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre. He thinks that the first held in his hand something like a spear, but the hands of the other were open, with the palms towards him. But I don't know that any of these attempts has helped me much. At all events what Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender.
C.S. Lewis