Quotes by British Authors - Page 281

We enact many laws that manufacture criminals and then a few that punish them.
Abraham Tucker
Use your profession to fund your passion.
Habeeb Akande
We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.
Anthony Burgess
..the senses do not give us a picture of the world directly; rather they provide evidence for checking hypotheses about what lies before us. Indeed we may say that a perceived object is a hypothesis, suggested and tested by sensory data.
Richard Langton Gregory
Working rightly, the brain is the highest form of "instinctual wisdom." Thus it should work like the homing instinct of pigeons and the formation of the foetus in the womb - without verbalizing the process of knowing "how" it does it. The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the acute feeling of separation between "I" and my experience.
Alan W. Watts
Will you not see?” she cried. “You are not as other men are. Why need you bow to a Fate? Can you not change it?
Jane Gaskell
Who shall tell the lady's griefWhen her Cat was past relief?Who shall number the hot tearsShed o'er her, beloved for years?Who shall say the dark dismayWhich her dying caused that day?
Christina Rossetti
Open wide the mind's cage-door,She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar.
John Keats
Love could end even though it was true love. Love could be false love, or the wrong kind of love, or love that came at the wrong time to the right people, or at the right time to the wrong people.
Leila Rasheed
The king's "only interest in government was a pious but simpleminded desire for reproachment
Dan Jones
You’re not going to fight me, Captain. This is the right call. You know it.”She marched me off the bridge and into the brilliant white passageway. “You think I’m just going to trust you’ll let me go?” I asked, getting a painful nudge in the back.“You don’t have a choice.” She was right about that. “Relax. I got your back, Cale.”“You’ve got a pistol in my back is what you’ve got.”“Just like old times.”Trust her? Well, shit.
Pippa DaCosta
The centre of me is always and eternally in terrible pain ... A searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfiguring and infinite.
Bertrand Russell
Writing "Snugs the Snow Bear" was an exhilerating walk on a beach - I stopped now and then to study the rock pools, put my hand to my forehead, to gaze over the vast ocean, and the tide danced; played music at my feet, turned over precious shells and stones, returned them to me, polished. I picked one, held it to my ear. The tide rushed in, ran over my naked feet, and I was home.
Suzy Davies
He that would govern others should first be the master of himself.
Philip Massinger
Don't gobblefunk around with words.
Roald Dahl
He was discovering that even hatred died a little at the end. But it still lasted longer than desire, longer even than love.
P.D. James
In the quantum multiverse, every choice, every decision you've ever and never made exists in an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes.
Nick Payne
Endless seas, mean endless adventures.
Anthony T.Hincks
The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.
John Fowles
So this talk, or touch if I were there,Should work its effortless gadgetry of love,Like Dante’s heaven, and melt into the air.If it doesn’t, of course, I’ve fallen. So much is chance,So much agility, desire, and feverish care,As bicyclists and harpsicordists proveWho only by moving can balance,Only by balancing move.
Michael Donaghy
Edilio is in hiding,” Astrid snapped. “Edilio has to worry about being kicked out of the country. Our Edilio.”“He’s got a volunteer lawyer—”But Astrid wasn’t done. “They should be putting up statues to Edilio. They should be naming schools after that boy—no, no, I’m not going to call him a boy. If he’s not a man, then I’ll never meet one.”Lana nodded approvingly, obviously enjoying and sharing in Astrid’s outrage.
Michael Grant
Passion is not such an emotion as a destiny.
Jeanette Winterson
Life is a brief shot at something incredible
Melanie Gow
But when reality was hopeless, fantasy became more and more necessary.
Michael Grant
A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool.
Nick Hornby
Nothing links man to man like the frequent passage from hand to hand of a good book.
Walter Sickert
Never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that it's enough.
Robert Heller
[But] you can't find love if you're not willing to lose it. You can't find happiness if you're not willing to risk being sad. And you can't find the love of your life without risking breaking your heart.....drive in.
Kunal Nayyar
While the Gods are powerful, we learn little about them. It is only in their day of decadence that a strong light beats into heaven.
E.M. Forster
Anyway, my writer gang: they kind of did their comedy apprenticeship with me and, during that period, when they were young and impressionable, I think I infected them with my pun virus. They grew to enjoy puns, think puns, just as much as me. The problem is people don't really like puns any more, so I worry I've rendered the poor fuckers virtually unemployable.
Frank Skinner
And anyway, life's too short....
J.K. Rowling
And, like the prodigal son, he had returned broken in body and also in mind to the house where he had been born, and he and his child had been welcomed with open arms.
Catherine Cookson
Study the assumptions behind your actions. Then study the assumptions behind your assumptions.
Idries Shah
It may be considered folly by common opinion but this refusal to destroy life unnecessarily, this reverence for it, must become a deeply implanted part of his ethical standard.
Paul Brunton
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
James Howell
Helping othersI order you to assist any oppressed person, whether he is a Moslem or not.
Idries Shah
That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity - the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don't attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself.
Nick Hornby
Police officers are well known for their aggressive behaviors, search "Police Officer Angry Aggression Theory". I can speak from personal experience that they do cover up for each other and target individuals that they have a vendetta on. Police Internal Affairs is just an extension of the cover up machine, they uphold very few complaints.
Steven Magee
Everything is balanced. Everything physical (matter/energy) goes back and forth in balanced circles, cycles, or the equivalent. Birth-death, old-young, big-small, strong-weak, start-stop, up-down, rich-poor, beginning-end, fast-slow, hot-cold, pain-pleasure, win-lose, day-night, full-empty, high-low, in-out, success-failure, united-divided, give-receive, creation-destruction, on-off, positive-negative, etc.Positive and negative forces moving in balance are the physical universe.
Michael Smith
Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the 'creative bug' is just a wee voice telling you, 'I'd like my crayons back, please.
Hugh MacLeod
Financial crashes happen precisely because the people who remember the last one have either died or retired and thus are no longer around, with memories and character formed by that previous experience, to warn people not to be irresponsible.
N.T. Wright
Why do we want to know history? Why does history form a recognized part of our liberal education? Simply because all of us, and every one of us, ought to know how we have come to be what we are, so that each generation need not start again from the same point, and toil over the same ground, but, profiting by the experience of those who came before, may advance towards higher points and nobler aims.
Friedrich Max Müller
Don’t.” His voice was harsh. “Don’t do that.” She exhaled.“You’re lovely. Lovelier than before.
Elizabeth Noble
As is perhaps obvious, Morris Zapp had no great esteem for his fellow-labourers in the vineyards of literature. They seemed to him vague, fickle, irresponsible creatures, who wallowed in relativism like hippopotami in mud, with their nostrils barely protruding into the air of common-sense. They happily tolerated the existence of opinions contrary to their own — they even, for God’s sake, sometimes changed their minds. Their pathetic attempts at profundity were qualified out of existence and largely interrogative in mode. They liked to begin a paper with some formula like, ‘I want to raise some questions about so-and-so’, and seemed to think they had done their intellectual duty by merely raising them. This manoeuvre drove Morris Zapp insane. Any damn fool, he maintained, could think of questions; it was answers that separated the men from the boys.
David Lodge
Is there any reward?I'm beginning to doubt it.I am broken and bored,Is there any rewardReassure me, Good Lord,And inform me about it.Is there any reward?I'm beginning to doubt it.
Hilarie Belloc
Short story collections are the literary equivalent of canapés, tapas and mezze in the world of gastronomy: Delightful assortments of tasty morsels to whet the reader's appetite.
Alex Morritt
Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.
China Miéville
I want my writing to bring people not just to think of "trees" as they mostly do now, but of each individual tree, and each kind of tree.
Roger Deakin
Every journey conceals another journey within its lines; the path not taken and the forgotten angle. These are the journeys I wish to record. Not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made, or perhaps did make in some other place or time.
Jeanette Winterson
Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.
George Orwell
Above all we have to go beyond words and images and concepts. No imaginative vision or conceptual framework is adequate to the great reality.
Bede Griffiths
Where doest Thou feed Thy flock? In Thy house? I will go, if I may find Thee there. In private prayer? Then I will pray without ceasing. In the Word? Then I will read it diligently. In Thine ordinances? Then I will walk in them with all my heart. Tell me where Thou feedest, for wherever Thou standest as the Shepherd, there will I lie down as a sheep.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I see nobody on the road,' said Alice'I only wish I had such eyes,' The King remarked in a fretful tone. 'To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!
Lewis Carroll
Vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we live, we find our escape from its sterile, annihilating reality in many dreams, in religion, passion, art.
Arthur Symons
Life, to me, is like fishing: you won’t catch anything until you start, and every year you get older is another year the fish might slip through the net.
Alex Staniforth
What are the four 'D' steps that ensure success?1) DREAM2) DESIRE3) DETERMINATION4) DESTINATIONFollow these four 'D' steps, never giving up or doubting yourself along the way, and you will become the person you were meant to be. And that's YOU!
Anthony T.Hincks
Let us make sure that the supreme fact of the 20th century is that they tread the same path.
Winston Churchill
The pain of hunger beneath everything. At the end of all love-making, the dreamless sleep after the orgasm, which is like death.
Christopher Isherwood
They looked at one another, and their hearts died within them.
Charles Dickens
All good is gained by those whose thought and life are kept pointed close to one main thing not scattered abroad upon a thousand.
Stephen McKenna