Quotes by British Authors - Page 259

[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.
Dorothy L. Sayers
It is not great faith, but true faith, that saves; and the salvation lies not in the faith, but in the Christ in whom faith trusts...It is not the measure of faith, but the sincerity of faith, which is the point to be considered.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
My mother could see that as far as my father's relationship with the Party was concerned, she was an outsider. One day, when she ventured some critical comments about the situation and got no response from him, she said bitterly, "You are a good Communist, but a rotten husband!" My father nodded. He said he knew.
Jung Chang
Look, my son, she is so beautiful, she has fair skin and green eyes and brown hair.''She's English?' I asked cheekily, holding the cheap photo print with trepidation. Which unfortunate victim had they found for me to marry in what backwater, unbeknownst that my heart was not for trading? Honour would quote Shakespeare to make a point; for me, it was always Rumi.'La hawla wala kuwwat... May God protect us from such misfortune... you think I have lost my senses that I would marry you to a white girl?' My mum used the word gori as an insult and yet when she talked about Billo she said 'Look how gori she is.'Oh, Mum, the irony.'Well, you seem pretty obsessed with green eyes and skin colour,' I mumbled.'She is gorgeous.' Mum went on ignoring me. 'Think how beautiful your children, my grandchildren, will be? They will have cats' eyes, just like Billo.'Honour has fair skin and green eyes too, and just think how beautiful your grandchildren will be if they're mixed race, I thought.I didn't say that to my mum, obviously.
Ruth Ahmed
We are always in these days endeavoring to separate intellect and manual labor; we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen in the best sense.
John Ruskin
Athletes who are able to stay completely focused in pursuit of their dreams are the ones that are most likely to become champions.
Steve Backley
Sweetheart the doctor gave you the okay, and your friends will be there. It's okay to live your life. You can't be afraid at every turn.
Evelyn Smith
When he's hot, he's hot; when he's not, he's not. But at least there is always food
Helen Fielding
I suppose you’re young,’ she conceded, managing once again to make youth sound like impetigo
Tyne O'Connell
President Trump is doing a great job of demonstrating how mean the rich can be to the poor, sick and elderly.
Steven Magee
I reckon responsible behavior is something to get when you grow older. Like varicose veins.
Terry Pratchett
Look for solutions, instead of being difficult; be more thoughtful, instead of allowing anger to burn you out. Look at things from a different perspective, embrace change, look out for opportunities and you will feel much more in control.
Steve Backley
The miracle isn't that I finished. The miracle is that I had the courage to start.
John Bingham
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything. - Hitchens 3:16
Christopher Hitchens
Since I am I, I must make an act of self-surrender, however small or however easy, in living to God rather than to my self.
C.S. Lewis
The true philosopher is a man who says "All right," and goes to sleep in his armchair.
P.G. Wodehouse
There's a thing that happens in Hollywood, when you hand in a script with magic in it, and the people at the studio who read it say "We don't quite understand... can you explain the rules? What are the rules here? The magic must have rules" and sometimes when they say that to me I explain that I am sure it does, just as life has rules, but they didn't give me a rule book to life when I was born, and I've been trying to figure it out as I go along, and I am sure it is the same thing for magic; and sometimes I explain that, yes, the magic has rules, and if they read again carefully they can figure out what they are; and sometimes I sigh and put in a line here and a line there that spells things out, says, YES THESE ARE THE RULES YOU DON'T ACTUALLY HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION and then everyone is very happy.
Neil Gaiman
I've been in love and you'll never know
Sam Smith
When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its cornerstone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward – in a word, a man. And upon this rock He has built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.
G.K. Chesterton
I don’t know what to do,” he said. “No harm in that. I’ve never known what to do,” said Rincewind with hollow cheerfulness. “Been completely at a loss my whole life.” He hesitated. “I think it’s called being human, or something.
Terry Pratchett
Miss Parkinson lived alone in a big bay-windowed house of Edwardian brick with a vast garden of decaying fruit trees and untidy hedges of gigantic size. She was great at making elderberry wine and bottling fruit and preserves and lemon curd and drying flowers for winter. She felt, like Halibut, that things were not as they used to be. The synthetic curse of modern times lay thick on everything. There was everywhere a sad drift from Nature.
H.E. Bates
It was Nathaniel's boundless capacity for stating the obvious that made him so charmingly human.
Jonathan Stroud
Music is very personal. It means different things to different people. To you it means belonging. To me it means knowing I exist.
Simon Cheshire
I can see clearly now, my brain is gone.Lucy
Cathy Hopkins
Among the privileges of being a superpower, the right and the ability to make a local quarrel into a global one ranks very high.
Christopher Hitchens
You move on. You move back. On because you're always getting older, back because there's always a set of habits and routines to catch you and suck you back in when your guard is down.
Mike Carey
We are not alone!Everything has been orchestrated.If you think that the meteor that killed of the dinosaurs was natural. Think again!What use would a world of greed be if we had to worry about getting eaten by dinosaurs every minute of the day?It wouldn't be good for the economy, now would it?Think about it!
Anthony T.Hincks
Your tears come easy, when you're young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you're old, and leaving it. I burst out crying.
Wilkie Collins
I sew his ears on from time to time, sure.
Patrick O'Brian
At school, the news that Pia Kolvenbach was moving to England and that her parents were divorcing had circulated with lightening speed. Suddenly I was no longer ostracized for being the Potentially Exploding Girl, but the new attention was worse. I could tell that the girls who sidled up to me and asked with faux-sympathetic smiles whether it was true were doing it on the basis of discussions they had heard between their own parents, to who they would report back like scouts. Soon there would be nothing left of me at all, nothing real: I would be a walking piece of gossip, alternatively tragic and appalling and, worse of all, a poor thing.
Helen Grant
Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-coloured chalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green, like the first fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness.
G.K. Chesterton
Wherever a choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to passion and the instincts; the philosophers to what is superficial and supererogatory - reason.
Aldous Huxley
A marriage filled with unconditional love experiences the depth of grace and mercy.
Elizabeth George
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.
Charles Dickens
Perhaps twenty minutes later he realized she had gone to sleep. He quietly removed his now stiff arm, then turned away. It must have woken her a little After a moment he felt her turn as well and lay a hand, instinctively, like a sleeping wife, across his hips; as if, in some dream, he was the one who escaped.
John Fowles
Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
Aldous Huxley
The machinery of propaganda may pack their minds with falsehood and deny them truth for many generations of time. But the soul of man thus held in trance, or frozen in a long night, can be awakened by a spark coming from God knows where, and in a moment the whole structure of lies and oppression is on trial for its life.
Winston S. Churchill
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Arthur C. Clarke
The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe—I have thought since—I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. But in spite of the brilliant sunlight and the green fans of the trees waving in the soothing sea-breeze, the world was a confusion, blurred with drifting black and red phantasms, until I was out of earshot of the house in the stone wall.
H.G.Wells
There are already plenty of people who will take a firm stand on the need to be competely impartial between right and wrong.
Martin Cohen
Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language itself for the post-structuralists, it is composed less of signs — stable meanings — than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse, it is not immediately obvious what this signifies: it may have many contradictory meanings, may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. The image of the horse, that is to say, is not a sign in Saussure’s sense - it does not have one determined signified tied neatly to its tail - but is a signifier which may be attached to many different signifieds, and which may itself bear the traces of the other signifiers which surround it. (I was not aware, when I wrote the above sentence, of the word-play involved in ‘horse’ and ‘tail’: one signifier interacted with another against my conscious intention.) The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier’, as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre ‘modernist’ text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation.
Terry Eagleton
My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantle piece, in order to prove it could be done.This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees. However, this is not relevant to what is currently on my mind because it concerns sloths, whereas the Branwell Brontë piece of information concerns writers and feeling like death and doing things to prove they can be done, all of which are pertinent to my current situation to a degree that is, frankly, spooky.
Douglas Adams
You know you’re dealing with a numpty when her saving grace is that she didn’t help to cover up a murder.
Rosen Trevithick
It's quite sad that so many children go through life unsure whether their parents love them or not.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
All stories are ultimately about the fall.
J.R.R. Tolkien
It may be that you will be happiest in the rat race; perhaps, like me, you are basically a rat.
Richard Koch
Will Cato's alien buddies come en masse and invade Earth? He's not sure but he'll try to keep humanity in the loop.
John Hopkins
My mind does not easily accept stately historical processions.
Zadie Smith
It could have been a thief or a murderer. I considered crying out. A thief would run away, but a murderer would murder me. On the other hand, the murderer would probably murder me if I didn't too. That was his whole thing.
Yahtzee Croshaw
You and your husband have, I think, been very fortunate to know so little, by experience, in your own case or in that of your friends, of the wicked recklessness with which people repeat things to the disadvantage of others, without a thought as to whether they have grounds for asserting what they say. I have met with a good deal of utter misrepresentation of that kind. And another result of my experience is the conviction that the opinion of "people" in general is absolutely worthless as a test of right and wrong. The only two tests I now apply to such a question as the having some particular girl-friend as a guest are, first, my own conscience, to settle whether I feel it to be entirely innocent and right, in the sight of God; secondly, the parents of my friend, to settle whether I have their full approval for what I do. You need not be shocked at my being spoken against. Anybody, who is spoken about at all, is sure to be spoken against by somebody: and any action, however innocent in itself, is liable, and not at all unlikely, to be blamed by somebody. If you limit your actions in life to things that nobody can possibly find fault with, you will not do much
Lewis Carroll
Do you remember a time when men were men? When they would do anything for love, for their friends or for their country?'No, I don't, but at least I would love to read about those men!
David Cook
There's a name for people with an interest in the moon," Alex said. "They're called lunatics.
Anthony Horowitz
Children need time to become themselves--through play and social interaction. If you overwhelm a child with stuff--with choices and pseudochoices--before they are ready, they will only know one emotional gesture: More!
Kim John Payne
Power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will.
Alexander Hamilton
Sufi Teachers are not, as you might hope, people who make you feel peace and harmony.
Idries Shah
We don't have a soul. We are a soul. We happen to have a body.
C.S. Lewis
. . .a scientific theory is just a mathematical model we make to describe our observations: it exists only in our minds. So it is meaningless to ask: which is real, "real" or "imaginary" time? It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description.
Stephen Hawking
Big flashy things have my name written all over them. Well... not yet, give me time and a crayon.
Matt Smith
She wasn't to know there was no room for Soren - or any other boy - in my heart. There was only one boy taking up that place.Luca.
Lee Monroe
You made me feel less alone;you made me feel not quite sodeformed, uninformed and hunchbacked.
Morrissey