Quotes by British Authors - Page 276

Knowledge is something which you can use.Belief is something which uses you.
Idries Shah
The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable. It is true that some people may find they have to wait in the hall for a considerable time, while others feel certain almost at once which door they must knock at. I do not know why there is this difference, but I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do get into your room you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for light; and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling. In plain language, the question should never be: 'Do I like that kind of service?' but 'Are these doctrines true: is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike of this particular door-keeper?'When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if there are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.
C.S. Lewis
Be patient with everyone you meet, for you may never know whether your words were the last they ever heard.
L.J. Kane
An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pierglass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, the candle is the egoism of any party now absent.
George Eliot
I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for - and whose noble gesture re-emphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. 'Most lives': my life.
Julian Barnes
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:The sun-comprehending glass,And beyond it, the deep blue air, that showsNothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Philip Larkin
People, and boys the worst, are so much more intelligent than what comes out of their mouths.
Bryn Hammond
You want something enough that you’re going to hurt, then you stay, and keep it.
Sam Crescent
We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.
C.S. Lewis
You always use that word "remember",' said Milena. 'You say, "remember, team". You never tell us to think.
Geoff Ryman
On revient toujours a son premier amour." It sounds like a cynicism to-day. As if we really meant: "On ne revient jamais a son premier amour." But as a matter of fact, a man never leaves his first love, once the love is established. He may leave his first attempt at love. Once a man establishes a full dynamic communication at the deeper and higher centers, with a woman, this can never be broken. But sex in the head breaks down, and half circuits break down. Once the full circuit is established, however, this can never break.
D.H. Lawrence
If you were to tell the thing down at the bottom of that pit it had napped through forty-two presidential inaugurations, eight British coronations, sixteen popes and three number ones by the Danish pop group, Aqua, it would have told you to stop talking nonsense and shut the fuck up. It had slept, somewhat peacefully, through Emmet’s Insurrection, World War I and II, Vietnam, and even the Great War of Blur Vs. Oasis.
Adam Millard
Every ceiling when reached becomes a floor upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right.
Aldous Huxley
I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.
Ben Goldacre
Doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune.
William McFee
Nature intended you to be the fountain-spring of cheerfulness and social life and not the mountain of despair and melancholy.
Sir Arthur Helps
Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.
C.S. Lewis
It's true about the running water. You can hear anything you want to in it.
Gwendoline Riley
But nothing in my previous work had prepared me for the experience of reinvestigating Cleveland. It is worth — given the passage of time — recalling the basic architecture of the Crisis: 121 children from many different and largely unrelated families had been taken into the care of Cleveland County Council in the three short months of the summer of 1987. (p18)The key to resolving the puzzle of Cleveland was the children. What had actually happened to them? Had they been abused - or had the paediatricians and social workers (as public opinion held) been over-zealous and plain wrong? Curiously — particularly given its high profile, year-long sittings and £5 million cost — this was the one central issue never addressed by the Butler-Sloss judicial testimony and sifting of internal evidence, the inquiry's remit did not require it to answer the main question. Ten years after the crisis, my colleagues and I set about reconstructing the records of the 121 children at its heart to determine exactly what had happened to them... (p19)Eventually, though, we did assemble the data given to the Butler-Sloss Inquiry. This divided into two categories: the confidential material, presented in camera, and the transcripts of public sessions of the hearings. Putting the two together we assembled our own database on the children each identified only by the code-letters assigned to them by Butler-Sloss. When it was finished, this database told a startlingly different story from the public myth. In every case there was some prima fade evidence to suggest the possibility of abuse. Far from the media fiction of parents taking their children to Middlesbrough General Hospital for a tummy ache or a sore thumb and suddenly being presented with a diagnosis of child sexual abuse, the true story was of families known to social services for months or years, histories of physical and sexual abuse of siblings and of prior discussions with parents about these concerns. In several of the cases the children themselves had made detailed disclosures of abuse; many of the pre-verbal children displayed severe emotional or behavioural symptoms consistent with sexual abuse. There were even some families in which a convicted sex offender had moved in with mother and children. (p20)
Sue Richardson
It's at moments like these in a game that the essentials of his character are exposed: narrow, ineffectual, stupid—and morally so. The game becomes an extended metaphor of character defect. Every error he makes is so profoundly, so irritatingly typical of himself, instantly familiar, like a signature, like a tissue scar or some deformation in a private place.
Ian McEwan
There's no magic more powerful than the human spirit.
Vic James
Without triers there would never be any successors
Thomas Wright
She gave up trying to understand herself, and the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters — the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go.
E.M. Forster
If we stay with animal analogies for a moment, owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are god. (Cats may sometimes share the cold entrails of a kill with you, but this is just what a god might do if he was in a good mood.)
Christopher Hitchens
You wanted hearts and flowers. You have my heart - & here are the flowers.
Christian Grey
As a devil's advocate Mr Neville was faultless. And yet, she knew, there was a flaw in his reasoning, just as there was a flaw in his ability to feel.
Anita Brookner
A species that survives by creating must not limit who can create. More creators means more creations. Equality brings justice to some and wealth to all.
Kevin Ashton
At these moments I took refuge in the most perfect solitude. I passed whole days on the lake alone in a little boat, watching the clouds, and listening to the rippling of the waves, silent and listless.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us.
Winston S. Churchill
It's only hard until it becomes easy.
David A. Smith
When Bishop Berkeley said "there was no matter " And proved it - 'twas no matter what he said.
Lord Byron
Hope itself is like a star- not to be seen in the sunshine of prosperity, and only to be discovered in the night of adversity.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Grief came in waves, sometimes big, sometimes small, but even on the calmest days, the grief remained. The tide still came ashore.
Dianna Hardy
To ugly ducklings everywhere,Don't worry about those fluffy yellow morons:They'll never get to be swans
Zoë Marriott
How quick come the reasons for approving what we like.
Jane Austen
Drug and alcohol addiction almost killed me. I was a grave substance misuser in my teens. I started drinking at ten, smoking at eleven and by the time I attended high school aged twelve, I was regularly smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol on weekends. I was a full-blown alcoholic at thirteen. Tragically, I had my stomach pumped at fourteen and although I promised my family I would never drink again, I started less than two weeks later. I was completely hooked on alcohol.
Christopher Dines
No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. but they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.
C.S. Lewis
The addition of certain chemicals to the atmosphere will destroy wavelengths of light and it may only be a matter of time before one of these wavelengths of light that is critical for human survival is eliminated. This is called: The Extinction Wavelength
Steven Magee
I will keep no further journal of that same hesternal torch‐light ; and, to prevent me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory, I tear out the remaining leaves of this volume...
George Gordon Byron
I love her beyond reason.
Janet Mullany
There was less of him now. There was less of them all. Officers and men dragged themselves around in uniforms three sizes too big, new holes punched into every belt, every collar hanging loose. They were a garrison of skinny boys performing a play about soldiers.
Chris Cleave
Friendship is like a glass ornament, once it is broken it can rarely be put back together exactly the same way.
Charles Kingsley
Don't you be thinking,' she says, 'on things that are done and can't be changed. All right, dear girl? You think of the time to come.
Sarah Waters
Because stories start in minds-- they aren't artifacts or natural phenomena.
Neil Gaiman
Tucker, please put him down," said Annie. "You're frightening Jackson.""He's not," said Jackson. "It's cool. I don't like that guy anyway. Punch him, Dad.
Nick Hornby
Land of hope and glory Mother of the Free How shall we extol thee who are borne of thee? Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set God who made thee mighty make thee mightier yet.
A.C. Benson
When they reached the table, Hannah started to introduce them. “Layla, this is Joe. Joe, this is—”“We’ve already met,” said Joseph, extending his hand and smiling.“Have we?” asked Layla, baffled.“Have you?” said Hannah. This was news to her.“Yeah, we have,” continued Joseph. “A couple of hours ago. On the road into the village. You tried to kill me, remember?”“Kill you?” gasped Layla. “You’re the biker? The one I knocked over?”“You knocked him over?” repeated Hannah in horror.“I didn’t mean to,” explained Layla quickly. “It was an accident. I was going to tell you about it. I just haven’t had the chance yet.”Turning to Joseph, Hannah asked, “Are you okay? Are you hurt at all?”“Well,” he replied somberly, “apart from my right arm, which I’m not sure is going to be of much use to me ever again, I’m fine.”As Layla’s jaw dropped open, he added quickly, “I’m joking. Really, it’s just a joke. I’m fine.”“Right, well, in that case,” Hannah continued, “as I was saying, Layla, this is Joseph Scott. Joe, this is Layla Lewis, your would-be killer, next door neighbor, and my best friend. She’s house-sitting whilst Lenny’s in Scotland.”“Next door neighbor, huh?” replied Joseph, taking a swig from his pint glass. “That could prove interesting.
Shani Struthers
Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.
Bertrand Russell
A while back, when Dick & Barry & I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you *are* like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for potential partners, a 2 or 3 page multiple-choice document that covered all the music/film/TV/book bases. It was intended: a) to dispense with awkward conversation, and b) to prevent a chap from leaping into bed with someone who might, at a later date, turn out to have every Julio Iglesias record ever made. It amused us at the time... But there was an important & essential truth contained in the idea, and the truth was that these things matter, and it's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.
Nick Hornby
In the grounds of the château was a church said to date from the year 1000, and he went to look at it, but he had never really understood what people saw in old churches.
Ken Follett
If you had to lose everything, what would you miss most? It wouldn't be anything gross, like the big house, or the fancy car, assuming you had such things. It wouldn't be your impeccable reputation, or fame, or the regard of others. No; if you had to lose everything – I mean EVERYTHING – it would be the things you most take for granted now that you would miss. It would be different for each person, and it would probably surprise you to know what it was: a lilac tree in flower, the sound of a train in the distance, the smell of marmalade or hot buttered toast. Rain on a windowpane. A fruit thingummy.
John Burnside
St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night in a second-class hotel.
Malcolm Muggeridge
Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body.
Jeanette Winterson
She seemed a compound of the autumn leaves and the winter sunshine ...
Virginia Woolf
A continued atmosphere of hectic passion is very trying if you haven't got any of your own.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Julia's unhappy relationship with the Inland Revenue was due to her omission, during four years of modestly successful practice at the Bar, to pay any income tax. The truth is, I think, that she did not, in her heart of hearts, really believe in income tax. It was a subject which she had studied for examinations and on which she had thereafter advised a number of clients: she naturally did not suppose, in these circumstances, that it had anything to do with real life.
Sarah Caudwell
Knowledge was the great thing--not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed, passionate, trivial human knowledge.
Graham Greene
One single sentence, one frame of film, and abracadabra! the story’s wings would take her to another lost world, another magic realm that was ready to be explored.
Neale Osborne
Thrift of time will repay you in afterlife with a usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams waste of it will make you dwindle alike in intellectual and moral stature beyond your darkest reckoning.
William Gladstone