Quotes by British Authors - Page 261

There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.
Thomas Hardy
She felt the urge to tell him more, to explain about the abortions she had done after the war, and that she hadn’t realised until later, much later, that she had racked up a debt she was still struggling to repay. How could he know – he was just a soldier, he had killed as a matter of principle, but the war babies, the children of rape, had been left to junior doctors, the volunteers in ragged tents on the outskirts of town.
Tahmima Anam
It was amusing to me to see how the detective's overbearing manner had changed suddenly to that of a child asking questions of its teacher.
Arthur Conan Doyle
How you see the world may not be how others view it.
Steven Redhead
Every increase in objectivity takes us further from reality.
Nanavira Thera
Do you love me?” Diana asked.Caine’s eyes widened. She could actually see him twitch. Like a startled animal. Like a rabbit who had just heard a fox.“It’s a yes or no question,” Diana said acidly. “But I’ll accept a nod or a shake of the head or an incoherent grunt.”“I . . . I don’t know what you mean by that,” Caine said lamely.“When I jumped off the cliff, you saved me even though it meant letting Sanjit and the others escape.”“You didn’t give me much choice,” Caine said peevishly. “You had a choice. You wanted to destroy them.”“Okay.”“Why did you make that choice?”Caine swallowed and seemed to find his palms sweaty since he rubbed them on his sides.Diana walked to the door. She unlocked it and held it open. “Go away,” she said. “Come back when you figure out your answer.
Michael Grant
Of course he'll bring no money. Nor never will. He's not the type to--accumulate. But it's a good name to have. And he's becoming a personality in the county. One never knows quite why this happens, eh? Not so much what a man does. More a matter of character.
Winston Graham
What is called economic power, while it can be an instrument of coercion, is in the hands of private individuals never exclusive or complete power, never power over the whole life of a person. But centralised as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery.
Friedrich A. Hayek
It was the merit of Gestalt psychology to make us aware of the remarkable performance involved in perceiving shapes. Take, for example, a ball or an egg: we can see their shapes at a glance. Yet suppose that instead of the impression made on our eye by an aggregate of white points forming the surface of an egg, we were presented with another, logically equivalent, presentation of these points as given by a list of their spatial co-ordinate values. It would take years of labour to discover the shape inherent in this aggregate of figures - provided it could be guessed at all. The perception of the egg from the list of co-ordinate values would, in fact, be a feat rather similar in nature and measure of intellectual achievement to the discovery of the Copernican system.
Michael Polanyi
There is no such thing as an 'unemployed writer', only an unemployed mind
Kevin Cowdall
I grew up once, I decided never to do it again
Benny Bellamacina
Brilliant strategy is the best route to desirable ends with available means.
Max McKeown
Hardly anyone understands the principles behind magic,"scoffed Betony. "It's too difficult.
Elizabeth Kay
You see, until then I'd been driven. I'd had a true quest, a purpose beyond my function - and then suddenly, the quest was over. I felt... drained. Disappointed. Let down.Does that make sense? I had been sure that as soon as I had everything back I'd feel good. But inside I felt worse than when I stared.
Neil Gaiman
I don't understand, Jem. I don't understand why you'd leave me. Why would you that?
Rachel Ward
To be sure, there's a warm passion behind what you say. But if you give in to that passion, friends, you're doing what I always warned you agin: you're a placing the satisfaction of your own feelings above the work you have to do... Don't you worry that John Faa's heart is too soft to strike a blow when the time comes. And the time will come under judgement. Not under passion.
Philip Pullman
William James used to preach the 'will to believe.' For my part, I should wish to preach the 'will to doubt' ... what is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite.
Bertrand Russell
There is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset.
G.K. Chesterton
We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust only the reported back, the publicly framed, the edited, the thing set in the clearly artistic or the clearly scientific angle of perspective. One of the deepest lessons we have to learn is that nature, of its nature, resists this. It waits to be seen otherwise, in its individual presentness and from our individual presentness.
John Fowles
One day, this Establishment will fall. It will not do so on its own terms or of its own accord, but because it has been removed by a movement with a credible alternative that inspires. For those of us who want a different sort of society, it is surely time to get our act together.
Owen Jones
A great artist is conscious of the talent and the power he possesses, otherwise he would not see his faults, and so would not be able to improve.
H.S. Ede
I feel like we should stop calling feminists 'feminists' and just start calling people who aren't feminist 'sexist' – and then everyone else is just human.
Maisie Williams
Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do.
Hilary Mantel
To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.
Charles Caleb Colton
Unseen University was much bigger on the inside. Thousands of years as the leading establishment of practical magic in a world where dimensions were largely a matter of chance in any case had left it bulging in places where it shouldn't have places. There were rooms containing rooms which, if you entered them, turned out to contain the room you'd started with, which can be a problem if you are in a conga line.
Terry Pratchett
A true thing, poorly expressed, is a lie.
Stephen Fry
Why would you want to stand there waving a stick when you could be playing an instrument?
Nigel Kennedy
The two of us lurching on an unlikely journey up a lonely road in the dark, thick beginning of a Mozambique night. As our pickup churned over rocks and through thick sand, the engine drowned out the night cries of the cicadas, the crickets, and the nightjars. Behind us, a plume of dust burned pink in our rear lights.
Alexandra Fuller
It is curious what patches of hardness and tenderness lie side by side in men’s dispositions. I suppose he has some test by which he finds out whom Heaven cares for.
George Eliot
You didn’t warn us about this, Readier,’ said Stowley resentfully.Gilt waved his hands. ‘We must speculate to accumulate!’ he said. ‘The Post Office? Trickery and sleight of hand. Oh, von Lipwig is an ideas man, but that’s all he is. He’s made a splash, but he’s not got the stamina for the long haul. Yet as it turns out he will do us a favour. Perhaps we have been . . . a little smug, a little lax, but we have learned our lesson! Spurred by the competition we are investing several hundred thousand dollars—’‘Several hundred?’ said Greenyham.Gilt waved him into silence, and continued: ‘—several hundred thousand dollars in a challenging, relevant and exciting systemic overhaul of our entire organization, focusing on our core competencies while maintaining full and listening co-operation with the communities we are proud to serve. We fully realize that our energetic attempts to mobilize the flawed infrastructure we inherited have been less than totally satisfactory, and hope and trust that our valued and loyal customers will bear with us in the coming months as we interact synergistically with change management in our striving for excellence. That is our mission.’An awed silence followed.
Terry Pratchett
It is time to climb the mountains of our mind
Tim Macartney-Snape
He feels excited. He feels ashamed. He wants to talk to her, but he is afraid. Maybe he imagined it all. Maybe she will call him a bad name if he asks her what happened.
Naomi Alderman
I have learned that the libido, like Elvis and jealousy, never dies. I know copulators of eighty-five. Who said you need an erection, a body or an orgasm for sex?
Hanif Kureishi
Love is the great conqueror of lust.
C.S. Lewis
,m./But it is precisely at those moments when the glass seems to be ‘set fair’ that Fate invariably decides to take a hand.
John Bude
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
W.H. Auden
When I was done raking and bagging, I banged on the door and demanded entry /...let me in by the hair on your chinny, chin-chin/ (a fairytale moment there) Dick opened it and in his posthest voice, said that before he could possibly consider letting me re-cross the threshold he needed to ask me whether I was a good f*cking fairy or a bad f*cking fairy? Grinning, I told him that I was very wicked fairy and if he had a wand about his person that I could have lend of, I would prove it. He said that was the right answer and promptly yanked me inside where he located and presented me with his wand, breathily ordering the sorcerer's apprentice to perform magic with it. Judging by the look on his face afterwards, I knew I'd impressed him with my oral sorcery and I was more than happy with the short-lifting sorcery Shane performed on me as the same time.
Gillibran Brown
These are the two basic controls at the photographer's command--position and timing--all others are extensions, peripheral ones, compared to them
David Hurn
They had a saying: An Arab loves in the order of: his son, his camel, and his wife - but there were times when one was allowed to take precedence over the other!
Margaret Rome
Just for a moment, amid all the bad stuff, this was a happy place again.
Caroline Green
My life and most people's lives are a series of little miracles -- strange coincidences which spring from uncontrollable impulses and give rise to incomprehensible dreams. We spend a lot of time pretending that we are normal, but underneath the surface each one of us knows that he or she is unique.
Colin Clark
Secrets are lies by another name.
Michael Morpurgo
In life your expectations and disappointments are directly linked. So too is your heartfulness and your contentedness
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Sam and Caine were left standing side by side, bruised and battered, to stare over Penny's sickening corpse, at the face of their mother.
Michael Grant
Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.
Julian Barnes
From the beginning, she had sat looking at him fixedly. As he now leaned back in his chair, and bent his deep-set eyes upon her in his turn, perhaps he might have seen one wavering moment in her, when she was impelled to throw herself upon his breast, and give him the pent-up confidences of her heart. But, to see it, he must have overleaped at a bound the artificial barriers he had for many years been erecting, between himself and all those subtle essences of humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck. The barriers were too many and too high for such a leap. With his unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face, he hardened her again; and the moment shot away into the plumbless depths of the past, to mingle with all the lost opportunities that are drowned there.
Charles Dickens
No relationship is without its difficulties and this is certainly true when one or both of the persons involved has an autistic spectrum disorder. Even so, I believe what is truly essential to the success of any relationship is not so much compatibility, but love. When you love someone, virtually anything is possible.
Daniel Tammet
I drive a motorbike, so there is the whiff of the grim reaper round every corner, especially in London.
Benedict Cumberbatch
If all the evidence in the universe turned in favour of creationism, I would be the first to admit it, and I would immediately change my mind. As things stand, however, all available evidence (and there is a vast amount of it) favours evolution.
Richard Dawkins
Temujin watched Borte's ballet, her elegance on the fulcrum of her hips.
Bryn Hammond
Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony but organically I am incapable of a tune.
Charles Lamb
Chaos is complexity viewed through a reductionist filter.
Silvia Hartmann
Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die
Alfred Tennyson
Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life—the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it—can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.
George Eliot
[Art] acts as 'an instrument allowing us to see through the gaps of dominant ideologies, and the source from which new methods could be drawn in the struggle against the system(s)'.
Nicholas Gane
She knew, now, why her father had not spoken of the last war, nor Alistair of his. It was hardly fair on the living.
Chris Cleave
We didn’t see anyone that day. We had no expectations. Everything was spontaneous. There wasn’t a single moment of stress. We laughed like crazy all afternoon – though I couldn’t tell you what about. And there was definitely something in the air – call it magic if you like – because that was the happiest Christmas any of us could remember, which makes me think that perhaps, like luck, magic is something we can make for ourselves. It isn’t something you can buy. It doesn’t come as standard. And you don’t need to plan, or to overspend, or to wrack your brains trying to come up with some extraordinary way to celebrate. Because sometimes it’s the little things that bring us the greatest pleasure.
Joanne Harris
That's right," said Door. Her cheek lightly grazed and her dirty reddish hair was tangled; tangled but not matted. And her eyes...Richard realized that he could not tell what color her eyes were. They were not blue, or green, or brown, or gray; they reminded him of fire opals: there were burning greens and blues, and even reds and yellows that vanished and glinted as she moved.
Neil Gaiman
God's codpiece, you're very kind
Laurie Lee
Alone among unsympathetic companions, I hold certain views and standards timidly, half ashamed to avow them and half doubtful if they can after all be right. Put me back among my Friends and in half an hour - in ten minutes - these same views and standards become once more indisputable. The opinion of this little circle, while I am in it, outweighs that of a thousand outsiders: as Friendship strengthens, it will do this even when my Friends are far away. For we all wish to be judged by our peers, by the men "after our own heart." Only they really know our mind and only they judge it by standards we fully acknowledge. Theirs is the praise we really covet and the blame we really dread.
C.S. Lewis