Quotes by British Authors - Page 260

The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
George Eliot
The messages must be stuck somewhere in the tube of light underneath the ocean that connects London and New York.
Olivia Sudjic
Aren't I enough for you?' she asked.'No,' he said. 'You are enough for me, as far as a woman is concerned. You are all women to me. But I wanted a man friend, as eternal as you and I are eternal.'(Women in Love)
D.H. Lawrence
You know what it's like when a cart overturns in the street? Everybody you meet has witnessed it. They saw a man's leg sliced clean off. They saw a woman gasp her last. They saw the goods looted, thieves stealing from the back-end while the carter was crushed at the front. They heard a man roar out his last confession, while another whispered his last will and testament. And if all the people who say they were there had really been there, then the dregs of London would have drained to the one spot, the gaols emptied of thieves, the beds empty of whores, and all the lawyers standing on the shoulders of the butchers to get a better look.
Hilary Mantel
A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!
Richard Dawkins
A good problem statement often includes: (a) what is known (b) what is unknown and (c) what is sought.
Edward Hodnett
[his healing skills] ..lay in the ability to comfort, to comfort in the proper sense, to make strong, to fortify
Stephen Fry
At the end of time when God judges us humans, I just hope He remembers to judge Himself as well.
Indra Sinha
What runs through a person like water through a sieve.
Samuel Butler
We do know that no person can be saved except through Christ. We do not know that only those who know Him can be saved by Him.
C.S. Lewis
I have terrible periods of lack of confidence. I just don't believe I can do it and no evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view.
Douglas Adams
Tolerance was like one of those soothing creams—it drew out inflammation, it did away with the pain.
Alexander McCall Smith
They were a remarkable company, each one of them a unique person, yet characterized to some extent by his particular national type. And all were distinctively “scientists” of the period. Formerly this would have implied a rather uncritical leaning towards materialism, and an affectation of cynicism; but by now it was fashionable to profess an equally uncritical belief that all natural phenomena were manifestations of the cosmic mind. In both periods, when a man passed beyond the sphere of his own serious scientific work he chose his beliefs irresponsibly, according to his taste, much as he chose his recreation or his food.
Olaf Stapledon
Confident people generally handle people with respect, compassion and integrity.
Sam Owen
You see, Marcus, some things have value yet have no price, and a wise man learns them and their worth. So do not let the standard of the marketplace be your guide. A man goes there for flour and greens, but not for virtue.
Paul Waters
A man treats his own faults as original sin and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realize that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided his vices as well as his virtues.
G.K. Chesterton
If this is dying I don't think much of it.
Lytton Strachey
I cared not a whit whether Time were “a form of thought,” or an aspect of reality, or (this was later) compoundable with Space. What I wanted to know was: How it got mixed?
J.W. Dunne
I’m sorry I changed… life forced me to grow.
Robert Tew
The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That's how most people thought.
Alexander McCall Smith
It is to the middle class we must look for the safety of England.
William Thackeray
Intelligence is overrated. Wisdom is under applied.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Learning without action is like wax without honey.(Anwar-i-Suhaili)
Idries Shah
There is no god but Road Runner and Chuck Jones is his prophet.
John Steiner
It is the best of all trades to make songs and the second best to sing them.
Hilaire Belloc
Boys, men," she said. "They're all the same. They think that this [their manhood] is something special and they're all so proud of it. They do not know how ridiculous it is.
Alexander McCall Smith
I don't think writers need to be insane. Just crazy.
Rayne Hall
But this was not quite the right kraken apocalypse.
China Miéville
Do what we will, we are alone. The sooner we learn that, the better; and the more we are fit to be alone with ourselves, the more we are respectful to the individuality of others, and therefore the more we are fit to associate with our kind. This was a paradox she would have to learn for ourselves.
Howard Spring
What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out.
Alfred Hitchcock
I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...
Aldous Huxley
101 Reasons Why its great to be a woman : We have three times the amount of potential sick leave. Take into account all those days you are unable to work owing to pre, during and post menstrual tension.
Summersdale Publishers
You do what you are
Glynn Burridge
The truth is that everyday and everyone is different. We just like to think that they aren't.
Anthony T.Hincks
The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller. The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller. The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger. Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a large world. It is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car round the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash of rice-fields. But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a flash of rice-fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them it must not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets. To conquer these places is to lose them.
G.K. Chesterton
Life should always be concerned with balance.
Steven Redhead
Risks? I have lived with the prospect of assassination for years. What risks? All men die, rich and poor alike. But if I am to die, then let it be while I fight, not like some bullock in a pen waiting for the ax to fall.
David Gemmell
I care not what black spiritual crisis we may come through or what delightful spiritual Canaan we may enter no blessing of the Christian life becomes continually possessed unless we are men and women of regular daily unhurried secret lingerings in prayer.
J. Sidlow Baxter
Tale-bearing emits a threefold poison; for it injures the teller, the hearer, and the person concerning whom the tale is told.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Chance works for us when we are good captains.
George Meredith
A world that won't forget is a world drowned in its not forgetting. Do we want a world full of unedited memory? To be human is to be finite.
Tacita Dean
Victor patted my hand. 'I like you, Sky. You're a fighter.''I am, aren't I? Hear that, Zed? No more bambi comparisons. I'm a Rottweiler -with a temper.''A very small Rottweiler,' said Zed, still not convinced.
Joss Stirling
You pays your money and you takes your choice.
Aldous Huxley
In Britain, a cup of tea is the answer to every problem.Fallen off your bicycle? Nice cup of tea.Your house has been destroyed by a meteorite? Nice cup of tea and a biscuit.Your entire family has been eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex that has travelled through a space/time portal? Nice cup of tea and a piece of cake. Possibly a savoury option would be welcome here too, for example a Scotch egg or a sausage roll.
David Walliams
...red sings like summer in the shadows, hot on my tongue...
Nell Grey
Anonymity crowned him as if t'were the halo of romantic glory.
Emmuska Orczy
Because we cannot scrub our inner body we need to learn a few skills to help cleanse our tissues, organs, and mind. This is the art of Ayurveda.
Sebastian Pole
He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.
George Orwell
Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the only thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationships between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships.
John Fowles
I find that...The bigger the ego.The bigger the mouth.The deeper the shallowness of a person.
Anthony T.Hincks
I once met a woman who'd been in therapy... and it seemed like the big thing she'd learned was to ignore everything she thought in the first hour of the day. That's when the negative stuff will try to bring you down, she said, and she was right about that but not much else. You come back from the night with your head and your soul empty, and bad things try to fill you up. There's a lot to get exercised about, if you let it. But if you've got a task, something to fill your head and move your limbs, by the time you've finished it the day has begun ands you're onto the next thing. You're over the hump, like I said.
Michael Marshall Smith
The notion that I had walked twelve hundred miles since Rotterdam filled me with a legitimate feeling of something achieved. But why should the thought that nobody knew where I was, as though I were in flight from bloodhounds or from worshipping corybants bent on dismemberment, generate such a feeling of triumph? It always did.
Patrick Leigh Fermor
Don't forget to give Neville our love!' Ginny told James as she hugged him.!' Neville-'James rolled his eyes.....
J.K. Rowling
What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities.
Arthur C. Clarke
We live in an age of miracles so commonplace that it can be difficult to see them as anything other than part of the daily texture of living
Tom Chatfield
A familiar name on its own, however, does not carry its bearer far unless the talent is there, and the will to work.
Daphne du Maurier
A woman who focuses on worshiping God will consider carefully how she is dressed, because her heart will dictate her wardrobe and appearance.
Elizabeth George
An intelligent enemy,' he would say, stroking his beard as if it were a bristly pet, 'rather than a foolish friend.' Or, 'He learnt the language of pigeons, and forgot his own.' Or, the favourite of Jan Fishan Khan: 'Nothing is what it seems.
Tahir Shah
the euro, it seems, is stuck in a political no man's land – trapped between two opposing world views. And the battleground is not economics, but ethics.
Martin Cohen
The mistake ninety-nine percent of humanity made, as far as Fats could see, was being ashamed of what they were; lying about it, trying to be somebody else.
J.K. Rowling