Quotes by British Authors - Page 262

Food is, for me, for everybody, a very sexual thing and I think I realised that quite early on. I still cannot exaggerate how just putting a meal in front of somebody is really more of a buzz for me than anything. And I mean anything. Maybe that goes back to trying to please my dad, I don't know. It's like parenting in a way I suppose.
Nigel Slater
No man is a caricature, no individual can alone bear responibilty for a nation's collapse. The disaster Zaire became, the dull acquiescence of its people, had its roots in a history of extraordinary outside interference, as basic in motivation as it was elevated in rhetoric. The momentum behind Zaire's free-fall was generated not by one man but thousands of compliant collaborators, at home and abroad.
Michala Wrong
The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
Alan Bennett
I began to enjoy my own generosity; I felt the pleasure of pleasing others, especially as this was accompanied by money-power. I was paying for them; they were grateful, they had to be; and they could no longer see me as a failure.
Hanif Kureishi
No one vinces me, baby
Michael Grant
Dictators ride to and fro on tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.
Winston Churchill
Our talents come so easily to use that we acquire a false sense of security: Doesn't everyone see the world as I do? Doesn't everyone feel a sense of impatience to get this project started? Doesn't everyone want to avoid conflict and find the common ground? Can't everyone see the obstacles lying in wait if we proceed down this path? Our talents feel so natural to us that they seem to be common sense.
Marcus Buckingham
We have been God-like in our planned breeding of our domestic plants and animals but rabbit-like in our unplanned breeding of ourselves.
Arnold Toynbee
Yesterday has gone, never to return. It is the past and over; learn from its mistakes and look to the future with optimism.
Marilyn L Rice
The young man turned to him with a disarming candour which instantly put him on his guard.
Saki
The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.
Alain de Botton
When the power falls on me, it buzzes in the warm, dark spaces of my skull. It stings like nettles at the tips of my fingers. The power is a fever I have felt since early childhood, a heat in the blood that leaves me flushed and unsteady, dreaming in daylight.
Victoria Lamb
When the sun shines you cannot see the moon," he said. "But when the sun is gone ah,when the sun is gone.
Agatha Christie
It is not about "life after death" as such. Rather, it's a way of talking about being bodily alive again after a period of being bodily dead. Resurrection is a second-stage postmortem life: "life after 'life after death.
N.T. Wright
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
George Orwell
The porter spends his days in the Library keeping strict vigil over this catacomb of books, passing along between the shelves and yet never paying heed to the almost audible susurrus of desire- the desire every book has to be taken down and read, to live, to come into being in somebody's mind. He even hands the volumes over the counter, seeks them out in their proper places or returns them there without once realising that a Book is a Person and not a Thing.
W.N.P. Barbellion
Finish is a laundry powder. I feel guilty when I finish a book.
Jeremy Lee
,"I am not crazy, my reality is just different from yours."-Cheshire Cat
Lewis Carroll
To err is human, to forgive, divine.
Alexander Pope
The older Puritans had trampled down all fleshly impulses; these newer Puritans trampled no less self-righteously upon the spiritual cravings. But in the increasingly spiritistic inclination of physics itself, Behaviorism and Fundamentalism had found a meeting place. Since the ultimate stuff of the physical universe was now said to be multitudinous and arbitrary “quanta” of the activity “spirits”, how easy was it for the materialistic and the spiritistic to agree? At heart, indeed, they were never very far apart in mood, though opposed in doctrine. The real cleavage was between the truly spiritual view on the one hand, and the spiritistic and materialistic on the other. Thus the most materialistic of Christian sects and the most doctrinaire of scientific sects were not long in finding a formula to express their unity, their denial of all those finer capacities which had emerged to be the spirit of man.
Olaf Stapledon
We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.
G.K. Chesterton
Nothing snubs quite like a cat. What evolutionary purpose did it serve, this inherent disdain, this artful blanking?
Will Wiles
Darker and darker, he said; farther and farther yet. Death takes the good, the beautiful, and the young - and spares me. The Pestilence that wastes, the Arrow that strikes, the Sea that drowns, the Grave the closes over Love and Hope, are steps of my journey, and take me nearer and nearer to the End.
Wilkie Collins
Why are our people going out there,” said Mr. Boggis of the Thieves’ Guild.Because they are showing a brisk pioneering spirit and seeking wealth and … additional wealth I na new land,” said Lord Vetinari.“What’s in it for the Klatchians?” said Lord Downey.“Oh, they’ve gone out there because they are a bunch of unprincipled opportunists always ready to grab something for northern,” said Lord Vetinari.“A mastery summation, if I may say so, my lord,” said Mr. Burleigh. The Patrician looked down again at his notes. “Oh, I do beg your pardon, I seem to have read those last to sentences in the wrong order…
Terry Pratchett
Suddenly watching her feet, so light and precise and mistress of his shuffle, I was in love again.
Graham Greene
Life is like a one rung ladder, some days you can be on the top and bottom of the world at the same time
Benny Bellamacina
Waiting never makes things easier or less troublesome.
Steven Redhead
As time passed, I began to get depressed and cried a lot. It was not because of my pregnancy. Praise the Lord, I wasn't having any more morning sickness, and I remained in good health, but my emotions were taking a nosedive. In my present situation, I was so isolated, and so lonely, and when a woman is pregnant, she doesn't feel pretty any more. In fact, she often feels ugly and awkward.
Helen Goldie
Jack laughed behind him, a mirthless sound from a man who had been on the wrong end of life's ironies too many times.
R.D. Ronald
Words are cheap. The biggest thing you can say is 'elephant'.
Charlie Chaplin
Society prepares the crime the criminal commits it.
Henry Thomas Buckle
It was one of those pictures that children are supposed to like but don't. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know?
Douglas Adams
Ymir was a frost giant; he was evil from the first. While he slept, he began to sweat. A man and woman grew out of the ooze under his left armpit, and one of his legs fathered a son on the other leg.
Kevin Crossley-Holland
He who profits by villainy, has perpetrated it.
Iain Pears
A question I have often asked is, ‘What would an inoffensive political cartoon look like?’ What would a respectful cartoon look like? The form requires disrespect and so if we are going to have in the world things like cartoons and satire, we just have to accept it as part of the price of fre
Salman Rushdie
She was a gardener of the ruthless type, and went for any small green thing that incautiously showed a timid spike above the earth, suspecting it of being a weed. She had had a slight difference with the professional gardener who had hitherto worked for her on three afternoons during the week, and had told him that his services were no longer required. She meant to do her gardening herself this year, and was confident that a profusion of beautiful flowers and a plethora of delicious vegetables would be the result. At the end of her garden path was a barrow of rich manure, which she proposed, when she had finished the slaughter of the innocents, to dig into the depopulated beds. On the other side of her paling her neighbour Georgie Pillson was rolling his strip of lawn, on which during the summer he often played croquet on a small scale. Occasionally they shouted remarks to each other, but as they got more and more out of breath with their exertions the remarks got fewer. Mrs. Quantock's last question had been "What do you do with slugs, Georgie?" and Georgie had panted out, "Pretend you don't see them.
E.F. Benson
Pam wasn't what Gloria would have called a friend, just someone she had known for so long that she had given up trying to get rid of her.
Kate Atkinson
If we open a quarrel between the past and the present we shall find we have lost the future.
Winston Churchill
The psychology of individual creativity is about at least three different things. First, creativity is about thinking differently. Second, creativity is about feeling differently. Third, creativity is about focusing, or committing, differently.
Max McKeown
Fine, I'll teach you,''Besides, there's only so many times a girl wants to fall on her butt in front of the boy she's out to impress.
Joss Stirling
Justice and judgment lie often a world apart.
Emmeline Pankhurst
The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.
Julian Barnes
I have been wandering to find him and my happiness is so great that it even weakens me like a wound. And this is the marvel of marvels, that he called me Beloved, me who am but as a dog.
C.S. Lewis
...my object is to show that the chief function of the child--his business in the world during the first six or seven years of his life--is to find out all he can, about whatever comes under his notice, by means of his five senses...
Charlotte M. Mason
He lived on, miserable and misunderstood, as before, and increasingly lonely. One cannot write those words too often: Maurice’s loneliness: it increased.
E.M. Forster
Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.
Jane Austen
Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.
Cory Doctorow
It's harder to pick and choose when you're dead. It's like a photograph, you know. It doesn't matter as much.
Neil Gaiman
The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes.
Agatha Christie
One could call a master a good master because he did not whip his slaves, but ultimately he was still and owner of men, and men were not made to be owned.
Nick Lake
We were girls, you see, not even women, just girls, most of us when we started. And the boys were just boys, not men, most of them. We’d only begun to live life, we knew little and understood less. We were unformed, incomplete. It’s funny how easy it is to see that now. If you’d called me a child three years ago when this started I’d have been furious. But looking back? We were children just getting ready to figure out what adulthood was all about.
Michael Grant
To be content in utter darkness and ignorance is indeed unmanly, and therefore we think that to love light and find knowledge must always be right. Yet wherever pride has any share in the work, even knowledge and light may be ill pursued. Knowledge is good, and light is good: yet man perished in seeking knowledge, and moths perish in seeking light; and if we, who are crushed before the moth, will not accept such mystery as is needful to us, we shall perish in like manner.
John Ruskin
To think, to think, even with a split second left - to think was the only hope.
George Orwell
Bob, I am grateful for yourThree letter name.It's another reminder of homeOf a world predictableOf a life I had.
Wilfred Waters
No weakness of the human mind has more frequently incurred animadversion, than the negligence with which men overlook their own faults, however flagrant, and the easiness with which they pardon them, however frequently repeated.
Samuel Johnson
Learn to Open Your Heart and mind to the infinite wonder that exists for you in life
Steven Redhead
Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.
Mark Haddon
From my earliest years I had always wanted to be a writer. It was not that I had any particular message for humanity. I am still plugging away and not the ghost of one so far, so it begins to look as though, unless I suddenly hit mid-season form in my eighties, humanity will remain a message short.
P.G. Wodehouse
When you make mistakes-not IF, Fireheart, WHEN- I'll tell you all about them.
Cinderpelt
Jess couldn't stop spitting out words, because they were words like blades to hurt, and if she swallowed them, she'd be scraped hollow.
Helen Oyeyemi