Quotes by British Authors - Page 277

Your life is what happens when you're busy trying to become unbusy.
Max McKeown
In business, three things are necessary: knowledge, temper, and time.
Owen Felltham
Honest people don't hide their deeds.
Emily Brontë
It is a very dangerous thing to have an idea that you will not practice.
Phyllis Bottome
Unfortunately, we-especially in the United States-have become increasingly mechanized, so that today we feel very strongly that if we can take anything out of human hands and especially out of the human heart and put it through a machine, we have made progress. Indeed, we flatter ourselves that we can make machines that think like human beings, while not always pausing to reflect that in the process we have also succeeded in making millions of human beings who can feel and think like machines. It is a sorry reflection.
Ashley Montagu
Sometimes it's very difficult to keep momentum when it's you that you are following. - Andrew Lloyd Webber
Andrew Lloyd Webber
I had no knowledge of divine help, and all the world lost faith in gradual progress.
Joy Davidman
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
George Orwell
I have called this principle by which each slight variation if useful is preserved by the term natural selection.
Charles Darwin
God’s Word changes the way you think, feel, and live.
Elizabeth George
Possibly, there was something to be said for the intellectual discipline of second-guessing what you thought was true.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
...I tell myself it does not matter what one reads--favorite authors, particular themes--as long as we read something. It is not even important to own the books.
Helen Simonson
There are certain shocks which, if sufficiently strong, seem to have power to destroy the balance of life. Such a shock would seem to overthrow all the intricate, vital, slowly developed mechanism of mind, to plunge the victim into a chaotic half-world of confusion and loss. This is what had happened to Anna.
Anna Kavan
I am not so sure I should like the facts of life, but I have got over the bitter disappointment I felt when I first heard about them,...
Dodie Smith
But, here was a curious thing. The more I tried to give up thinking of her, the more I said to myself, 'She's nothing to you', the harder I tried to pluck the idea of her out of my heart, the more she stayed there.
Sarah Waters
The rise of Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) in the USA population can be traced back to President Bill Clinton. While memorable for sexual foreplay with Monica Lewinsky, EHS people associate him with the 1996 Telecommunications Act that prohibits the protection of human health and safety from the known biologically toxic effects of wireless radio frequency (RF) radiation.
Steven Magee
But you can't just leave it at that!" said Anathema, pushing forward. "Think of all things you could do! Good things.""Like what?" said Adam suspiciously."Well... you could bring all the whales back, to start with."He put his head on one side. "An' that'd stop people killing them?"She hesitated. It would have been nice to say yes."An' if people do start killing 'em, what would you ask me to do about 'em?" said Adam. "No. I reckon I'm getting the hang of this now. Once I start messing around like that, there'd be no stoppin' it. Seems to me, the only sensible thing is for people to know if they kill a whale, they've got a dead whale.
Terry Pratchett
Action is always superior to speech in the Gospels, which is why the Word became flesh and not newsprint.
Colin M. Morris
Tria finally slumped to the ground “I swear I'm sick of falling into pits and swamps...” “Hey, upside is you're not dead yet so win win.” Ingra said cheerfully.
Charon Lloyd-Roberts
Where the writing takes place doesn’t matter to a publisher, but it matters a great deal to the author.
Fennel Hudson
If we are ever in doubt what to do, it is a good rule to ask ourselves what we shall wish on the morrow that we had done.
John Lubbock
After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper.
Michael Cox
This is the world, he thought. And I am in it.
Nick Harkaway
Is a figment of our imagination actually reality coming to life?
Anthony T.Hincks
There are some great roles - mostly in Shakespeare's tragedies which no one can play at full strength from beginning to end. One simply hopes that one can hit the peaks as often as one has the strength.
Peggy Ashcroft
The Captain of the Watch says if you're still in the City by sunrise he will personally have you buried alive.
Terry Pratchett
Turn to page three hundred and ninety-four.
J.K. Rowling
Besides, they cast an eye to the past, they didn't disgrace the ground they trod and they believed in the future again. That's what a victory does for you.
Bryn Hammond
Oliver Cromwell banned kissing on Sundays---even for married couples---on pain of a prison sentence.
Mitchell Symons
Besides a burial service is rather lovely. Makes you feel uplifted, the grief is real. It makes you feel awful but it does something to you. I mean, it works it out like perspiration.
Agatha Christie
There's no greater show on earth than observing human nature
Benny Bellamacina
There we were, filled with pure animal need, as he pinned me to the wooden table, and cruelly whipped my naked bottom; the two of us sweaty and panting, me screaming, him grunting, our primal sexual natures overprinting the tea room’s pretence at gentility, and refinement.
Fiona Thrust
Who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him the gift of reason?In this style, argue tyrants of every denomination, from the weak king to the weak father of a family; they are all eager to crush reason; yet always assert that they usurp its throne only to be useful.
Mary Wollstonecraft
A hermit never lives alone when he has God as a house guest.
Anthony T.Hincks
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot.
Alexander Pope
What is magic?There is the wizard's explanation... wizards talk about candles, circles, planets, stars, bananas, chants, runes and the importance of having at least four good meals every day.
Terry Pratchett
Man is now a new animal, a new and different animal; he can jump a hundred miles, see through brick walls, bombard atoms, analyse the stars, set about his business with the strength of a million horses. And so forth and so on. Yes. Yes. But all the same he goes on behaving like the weak little needy ape he used to be. He grabs, snarls, quarrels, fears, stampedes, and plays in his immense powder magazine until he seems likely to blow up the whole damned show.
H.G.Wells
Take the time to make some sense for what you wanna say,And cast your words away upon the waves.Sail them home with acquiesce on a ship of hope today,And as they land upon the shore,Tell them not to fear no more.I'm not saying right is wrong,It's up to us to make the best of all the things that come our way.Cos' everything that's been has past,The answers in the looking glass.There's four and twenty million doorsOn life's endless corridor,So say it loud and sing it proud today.
Noel Gallagher
You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope...I have loved none but you.
Jane Austen
Although I don't know much about anything, I know that I have a story. I know that it is not over. There are shades and shadows of adventures and people and wild new places. Whatever Paris might turn out to be, and whatever Dr. Epstein is able to do, I want to be there to find out.
Emily Barr
Does this story have a happy ending?" Bobby asked."There is no such thing as an ending," she said. "Good things come out of bad things and bad things come out of good things, but it always continues. It's as in life. Books are life. There is just the part you read. They start before that. They finish after it. Everything carries on forever. You are only in it for those pages, for a tiny window of time.
David Whitehouse
Don't be surprised when Death comes knocking. Be surprised when he goes away empty handed.
Anthony T.Hincks
Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing aside the thick leather curtain of a church in Rome. This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it. They could not stop it, she thought, exulting. There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability.
Virginia Woolf
So now I lye by Day and toss or rave by Night, since the ratling and perpetual Hum of the Town deny me rest: just as Madness and Phrensy are the vapours which rise from the lower Faculties, so the Chaos of the Streets reaches up even to the very Closet here and I am whirl'd about by cries of Knives to Grind and Here are your Mouse-Traps. I was last night about to enter the Shaddowe of Rest when a Watch-man, half-drunken, thumps at the Door with his Past Three-a-clock and his Rainy Wet Morning. And when at length I slipp'd into Sleep I had no sooner forgot my present Distemper than I was plunged into a worse: I dreamd my self to be lying in a small place under ground, like unto a Grave, and my Body was all broken while others sung. And there was a Face that did so terrifie me that I had like to have expired in my Dream. Well, I will say no more.
Peter Ackroyd
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.
Charlotte Brontë
There is a dangerous willful ignorance in governments to the adverse health effects of the various forms of electromagnetic radiation.
Steven Magee
There was an inevitability about the road towards each other which encouraged meandering along the route.
Zadie Smith
When men decided women could be educated - this is what I think - they educated them on the male plan; they put them into schools with mottoes and school songs and muddy team games, they made them were collars and ties. It was a way to concede the right to learning, yet remain safe; the products of the system would always be inferior to the original model. Women were forced to imitate men, and bound not to succeed at it.
Hilary Mantel
Let us begin with the fine-structure constant. ... The fine-structure constant is really the ratio of two natural units or atoms of action. ... We obtain action when we multiply energy by time. ... We are challenged to find a unified theory of electric particles and radiation in which the electrostatic type of action and the quantum type of action are traced to their source.
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.
W Somerset Maugham
It was love, she thought, love that never clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of human gain. The world by all means should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem.
Virginia Woolf
Prayer is the forerunner of mercy.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
The moment that you give gratitude is the moment that you find happiness. The moment that you lose gratitude your happiness will vanish and slip through your fingers
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Those who want power do not deserve it.And those who deserve power do not want it.
J.K. Rowling
There's her silence, loud as a roar, pulling at me like the greatest sadness ever, like I want to take it and press myself into it and just disappear forever down into nothing.What a relief that would feel like right now. What a blessed relief.
Patrick Ness
Human kind cannot bear very much reality.
T.S Eliot
I love the fact that Perrault's princess goes on living and struggling after she finds her prince, and that Perrault doesn't shrink from the weirdness of Sleeping Beauty being over a hundred years old but having the body of a lithe young thing. When the prince wakes her, he considers telling her she's wearing the kind of clothes his grandmother used to wear, but decides it's best not to mention it just yet.
Samantha Ellis
Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body.
Cyril Connolly
You can't Google life
Colin Tegerdine
As long as we encourage a culture of victim hood, said Monty, with the rhythmic smoothness of self-quotation, we will continue to raise victims. And so the cycle of underachievement continues.
Zadie Smith