Quotes by British Authors - Page 265

Being famous is wicked, but being normal is better.
Rupert Grint
Silence itself could be used as deftly and cruelly as a kire
Frances Hardinge
That of all people, it should be him; that took her aback. That the heart should settle on somebody like him; that surprised her. But she was so certain about it, so certain.
Alexander McCall Smith
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Susan Ertz
When human beings give their heartfelt allegiance to and worship that which is not God, they progressively cease to reflect the image of God. One of the primary laws of human life is that you become like what you worship; what’s more, you reflect what you worship not only to the object itself but also outward to the world around. Those who worship money increasingly define themselves in terms of it and increasingly treat other people as creditors, debtors, partners, or customers rather than as human beings. Those who worship sex define themselves in terms of it (their preferences, their practices, their past histories) and increasingly treat other people as actual or potential sex objects. Those who worship power define themselves in terms of it and treat other people as either collaborators, competitors, or pawns. These and many other forms of idolatry combine in a thousand ways, all of them damaging to the image-bearing quality of the people concerned and of those whose lives they touch.
N.T. Wright
The history of Kurdistan doesn’t just tell us why it hasn’t become independent so far. It also helps to make the case for Kurdistan’s independence. It is a desire founded, not just on some passing modern whim in that direction, or on spurious claims to natural and obvious borders, but on a sustained historical focus and desire by its people, on pre-existing promises, on the need for protection from the kind of atrocities that have historically been perpetrated against the Kurds, and on the rather artificial way in which Kurdistan has been denied its existence in the past.
Davan Yahya Khalil
She seemed to be occupied with of inner chamber of ideas and to have slight need for visible objects.
Thomas Hardy
You can put the human mind and body into strange states through the use of alien environments.
Steven Magee
A year ago I was being kept in this cell and I didn't want to kill anyone, not even the people who held me prisoner. I just wanted to escape, just wanted freedom. And now I have that; I have my freedom.
Sally Green
At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don't see how your gestures already mirror his; you don't see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don't hear his whisper in your blood.
Salman Rushdie
Mr. Cupples came out of his reverie. "I think," he said, "I will have milk and soda-water." "Speak lower!" urged Trent. "The head-waiter has a weak heart, and he might hear you.
E.C. Bentley
When the police willfully break the law on video and then deny the event in writing, you know that you are dealing with a blatantly corrupt group of people.
Steven Magee
London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!
E.M. Forster
I think: you deserve to be what you are if you could bare to get that way. You must have seen it coming. And now there's nothing for you here. No one will protect you, and people won't see any reason not to do you harm.
Martin Amis
I know that we have to live each moment because we won’t be here for ever, and that I wouldn’t want to be anyway, because knowing something’s going to end makes you appreciate it more, makes you want to savour every moment.And I know that I won’t sign the Declaration, even if it makes me different, even if it makes me suspicious. Because no one needs to live for ever.I think that sometimes you can outstay your welcome.
Gemma Malley
Edward Gibbon, in his classic work on the fall of the Roman Empire, describes the Roman era's declension as a place where "bizarreness masqueraded as creativity.
Edward Gibbon
No matter how many times people try to criticize you, the best revenge is to prove them wrong.
Zayn Malik
Look," Grace said. "How strange! In spite of the rain, you can still see the stars. How bright they are tonight." She pointed, but Lorcan didn't look. His eyes remained fixed intently on her."I can't think of a finer sight in the whole world than the one I'm looking at right now," he said.In spite of being drenched, Grace flushed at his words.Lorcan's eyes sparkled at her, brighter than ever before. It was as if the rare blue gems of his iriseshad been washed by the rain amd buffed by the moonlight to a new intensity. "Grace, there's been something I've wanted to do for a very long time now, but things have kept getting in the way." He reached forward, bringing a hand to the side of her face. Then he gently but firmly drew her wet face toward his. He gazed at her, as if seeing her for the first time. Then he brought his soft lips down to hers and kissed her.
Justin Somper
The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.
Julian Barnes
Our love grows soft if it is not strengthened by truth, and our truth grows hard if it is not softened by love.
John R.W. Stott
The brain is full of lonely ideas, begging you to make some sense of them, to recognize them as interesting. The lazy brain just files them away in old pigeonholes, like a bureaucrat who wants an easy life. The lively brain picks and chooses and creates new works of art out of ideas.
Theodore Zeldin
Our children belong to God. We're only given them on loan from heaven. Sometimes God calls them home sooner tan we expected.
Scarlet Wilson
For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my 'race,' unless I was permitted to put 'human.' The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put 'white,' which is not even a color let alone a 'race,' and I sternly declined to put 'Caucasian,' which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you 'black.
Christopher Hitchens
The heart knoweth its own sorrow and there are times when, like David, it is comforting to think that our tears are put in a bottle and not one of them forgotten by the one who leads us in paths of sorrow.
Hannah Hurnard
He came up straight to her father, whose hands he took and wrung without a word - holding them in his for a minute or two, during which time his face, his eyes, his look, told of more sympathy than could be put into words.
Elizabeth Gaskell
He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself.
H.G.Wells
It's funny to think that Christmas — a time known for its joyful togetherness — can be the loneliest time of the year for some.
Giovanna Fletcher
High FlightOh! I have slipped the surly bonds of EarthAnd danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirthof sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred thingsYou have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swungHigh in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flungMy eager craft through footless halls of air....Up, up the long, delirious, burning blueI’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.Where never lark, or even eagle flew —And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trodThe high untrespassed sanctity of space,- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
John Gillespie Magee Jr.
Roll on thou deep and dark blue ocean - roll! Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain Man marks the earth with ruin - his control Stops with the shore.
Lord Byron
An ‘usband should be plain enough to sit at his settle, and simple-minded enough to accept the stew on his plate, rather than looking round ev’ry corner for a more succulent chop,’ declares Elsie.
Emmanuelle de Maupassant
...You want a special truth. *You* want the truth to be a truth that *you* like. You want it to be a pretty little truth that fits what you already believe!
Terry Pratchett
My evanescent anarchistic tendencies are purely classical. I use the word anarchist in the sense in which it was understood by the ancient Greeks. They, of course, accepted the anarchist as a fairly respectable--if somewhat vehement--opponent of government encroachment on the individual's rights to think and act freely. It is in this sense that I glimpse myself as an anarchist--regretting the growth of government and the ever-increasing trend toward regulation and, worst of all, standardization of human activity.
J. Paul Getty
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
Doris Lessing
Pour Into My Spirit...spread your arms around meconsole me and keep me close -wield your mighty swordto vanquish all my foes...
Muse
Nature in everything demands respect, and those who violate her laws seldom violate them with impunity.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Promise me you’ll look after yourself … stay out of trouble …’‘I always do, Mrs Weasley,’ said Harry. ‘I like a quiet life, you know me.
J.K. Rowling
If asked, ‘Do you believe in ghosts or the supernatural?’, I can only answer somewhat as follows. I do believe in another world which penetrates this, and that, as Milton so aptly puts it, ‘Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth/Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep’, I deplore the false Cartesian split as a dreadful blow to the human mind. To me, the world of imagination, which works by means of analogy, is as real, in its own particular way, as the everyday external world. To me, the myths are vital truths, the gods and goddesses still live, on that mighty archetypal plane which lies beyond our little selves and yet within our being, too. Now this may appear illogical, a tangled web of contradictions. To believe in every spiritual truth, in all religions and all creeds, to revere a single God and the many? This may disturb the theologian, but not the Mystic. For, to the mystical turn of mind, the One may become the Many, the Many One. Spiritual and poetic truth—the transcendental vision, that is—encompasses both reason and ethics, yet soars above them.
Harvey Peter Sucksmith
Whence are thy beams O sun! thy everlasting light? Thou comest forth in thy awful beauty the stars hide themselves in the sky the moon cold and pale sinks in the western wave. But thou thyself movest alone.
James MacPherson
All this, and discontent too! Otherwise, why am I sitting here dreaming of England? Why am I gazing at this campfire like a lost should seeking a hope when all that I love is at my wingtips? Because I am curious. Because I am incorrigibly, now, a wanderer.
Beryl Markham
As I learnt very early in my life in Whitehall the acid test of any political question is: What is the alternative?
Lord Trent
It was all my fault. I'd let them in, I'd broken my rules, and I was back at square fucking one!"- Jocelyn Butler
Samantha Young
Such is the imperfect nature of man! such spots are there on the disc of the clearest planet; and eyes like Miss Scatcherd's can only see those minute defects, and are blind to the full brightness of the orb.
Charlotte Brontë
When you show yourself to the world and display your talents, you naturally stir all kinds of resentment, envy, and other manifestations of insecurity... you cannot spend your life worrying about the petty feelings of others
Robert Greene
It is widely believed that interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness. Yet the lives of creative individuals often seem to run counter to this assumption.
Anthony Storr
A person who has not done one half his day's work by ten o' clock runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.
Emily Brontë
I sat down and tried to rest. I could not; though I had been on foot all day, I could not now repose an instant; I was too much excited. A phase of my life was closing tonight, a new one opening tomorrow: impossible to slumber in the interval; I must watch feverishly while the change was being accomplished.
Charlotte Brontë
What can I say at seventy-five? "Thank God for my good life,and for all the love that has been given to me.
Agatha Christie
For the immense extension of the scale of education and its ramification into a hundred specialisms and technical disciplines has left the state as the only unifying element in the whole system. In the past the traditional system of classical education provided a commo intellectual background and a common scale of values which transcended national and political frontiers and formed the European or Western republic of letters of which every scholar was a citizen.
Christopher Henry Dawson
But this is africa, so hardly anything is normal.
Alexandra Fuller
Civilization is a race between disaster and education.
H.G.Wells
Everything man needs is in the world.
Idries Shah
I could run farther than a hare! I could fight the fiercest fox that ever lived...I could climb the highest mountain faster than an eagle could fly.
Erin Hunter
Life is a series of events and sensations. Everything else is interpretation. Much is lost in transition - and added in assumption / projection
Rasheed Ogunlaru
No matter how many times I've thought that the worst is behind us, something else always happens to remind me that the worst is yet to come.
Siobhan Davis
Because the bag is full of colours - starbursts and wheels and whorls of dazzling brightness that are as fine and complex in their structures as the branch is, only much more symmetrical. Flowers.
M.R. Carey
Never chase people. Be you and the right people who belong in your life and deserve a place in your heart will come, find and appreciate you!
Lily Amis
The free man does what he likes in his working time and in his spare time what is required of him. The slave does what he is obliged to do in his working time and what he likes only when he is not at work.
Eric Gill
There is no happily-ever-after to run to. We have to work for happiness.
Mary Balogh
Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression...
John Stuart Mill
The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness).
Christopher Hitchens