Quotes by British Authors - Page 285

Your name?"The movements of the man's mouth didn't quite match what he was saying, so seeing him speak was a bit like watching a badly dubbed film."Alex Gardiner," Alex said. "Your real name?""I just told you.""You lied. Your real name is Alex Rider.""Why ask if you think you know?
Anthony Horowitz
She didn’t think that by hanging a chandelier from the ceiling you made a room with a chandelier. She felt you’d made another world, which you could slip in and out of by some vague process of application
Guy Mankowski
The pending brahpocalypse/ coup d'état - whatever it was - was much more important than whether a donut-eating Police Officer saw a flying saucer over a gay club or not." - Red Gods Sing.
Trevor Barton
The curious fact is that biology tells us nothing about desire. And, when you think about it, culture -- novels, movies, opera, and quite a lot of painting -- is about desire, how we manage desire, how we suffer from it, and how it brings us joy when we get things right. A story without desire -- and that means without the insistence of desire -- will be empty, dry, and more or less aimless. That is one reason we read novels, to see how people fall into awkward moral situations and then try to extricate themselves. This is why there is so much anguish in the world: frustrated desire is every bit as miserable as poverty, because desire is no respecter of one’s position in life: everyone goes through it.
Peter Watson
He sighed. It had come to this. He was a responsible authority, and people could use terms like "core values" at him with impunity.
Terry Pratchett
It is the function of vice to keep virtue within reasonable grounds.
Samuel Butler
Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that called Body is a portion of a Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
William Blake
Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two.
J.K. Rowling
Lady Constance's lips tightened, and a moment passed during which it seemed always a fifty-fifty chance that a handsome silver ink-pot would fly through the air in the direction of her brother's head.
P.G. Wodehouse
Adults are just making things up as they go along. And when they’re scared, adults have no more answers than us kids
Mike A. Lancaster
She really liked you, Noah,''Yeah, well, maybe I'm just an asshole.'I realize my hand is still in his hair and I retract it quickly. He grabs it, holds it against him. You're not an asshole I'm thinking, but for some reason I can't say it. It would be like admitting something else; like the fact that he's an asshole to every girl who likes him, but never to me. And then I'd have to really think about why that is and that's not something I'll ever be comfortable with at all, even though his eyes are like maps and his words are like anchors and his songs are like personal messages and I love all that.- Chloe
Becky Wicks
Great things are done when men and mountains meet; This is not done by jostling in the street. -William BlakeThis admirable couplet should be posted in conspicuous places all over England. The truth it embodies is threatened by two parties of opinion: on the one hand by those who hold it as a sin against nature to try and control the increase of population in any way and on the other by those who believe in 'growth', the pursuit at all costs of a standard of living which entails more and more industrialization and urbanization. If the believers in nature have their way, England will in the end be so full of people that they will be jostling each other even on mountains: if the believers in 'growth' have their way, the whole country will be covered with streets and we shall hardly be aware that mountains exist.
David Cecil
There is always that choice, the light or the dark
Julia Green
Now and again he spoke to those that served him and thanked them in their own language. They smiled at him and said laughing: 'Here is a jewel among hobbits!
J.R.R. Tolkien
No journey out of grief was straightforward. There would be good days and bad days.
Jojo Moyes
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
John Stuart Mill
Being laughed at is excellent preparation for marriage.
Timberlake Wertenbaker
This, explained the angel, is hell. The people do not love each other. They only want to feed themselves.
David Mitchell
The way to begin healing the wounds of the world is to treasure the Infant Christ in us; to be not the castle but the cradle of Christ; and, in rocking that cradle to the rhythm of love, to swing the whole world back into the beat of the Music of Eternal Life.
Caryll Houselander
It is true to say that the secret of a winning formula is the ability to accept that there is a vast area of unexploited potential beyond what you currently perceive to be your maximum.
Steve Backley
I don't advise a haircut, man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hairs are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos, and transmit them directly into the brain. This is the reason bald-headed men are uptight.
Bruce Robinson
Snow... blots and softens the top of every object like ice on a plum pudding. Hedges, telegraph wires, cars, postboxes, recycling bins. The world is losing its edges. Look upwards and it seems as if the stars themselves are being poured from the sky and turn out not to be vast and fiery globes after all but tiny, frozen things which melt in the palm of your hand.
Mark Haddon
It was not desirable for the paroles to have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.
George Orwell
In the irresistible logic of guilt, one evil leads to another, one sin is developed out of another. There is nothing abrupt, nothing casual in the process. The road to sin is smooth, because an army of transgressions has passed over it. When such a development takes place, the community is filled with consternation. Men meet each other and say, "Have you heard what has happened? Mr. A. has turned out a defaulter. Mr. B. has been robbing his bank. How could he have done it?" Alas! he did it long ago, when he took the first step, when he diverged a very little way from the path of right. After that, every other step was easy, natural, and logical.
James Clarke
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 they 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
The French girls would tell you, to believe that you were pretty would make you so.
Elizabeth Gaskell
Live a life never having any regrets.
Steven Redhead
It's not a sign of creativity to have sixty-five ideas for one problem. It's just a waste of energy.
Jan Kaplicky
She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.
Graham Greene
It's all very well going round with two fingers stuck up at the world, but what happens when the world turns round and sticks them back up at you?The world's a lot bigger than I am.
Liz Kessler
A doctor, a logician and a marine biologist had also just arrived, flown in at phenomenal expense from Maximegalon to try to reason with the lead singer who had locked himself in the bathroom with a bottle of pills and was refusing to come out till it could be proved conclusively to him that he wasn't a fish. The bass player was busy machine-gunning his bedroom and the drummer was nowhere on board.Frantic inquiries led to the discovery that he was standing on a beach on Santraginus V over a hundred light years away where, he claimed, he had been happy for over half an hour now and had found a small stone that would be his friend.
Douglas Adams
But its exclusive character and irreconcileable hostility to the religious cults and ceremonies with which the whole social life of the city-state and the empire were inseparably connected at every turn, brought the Christians into inevitable conflict with the government and with public opinion. To the man in the street, the Christian was an anti-social atheist who would take no part in the public feasts and the games, which played such a large part in city life. To the authorities he was a passive rebel, who would neither take his share of municipal offices nor pay loyal homage to the Emperor. Hence the rise of persecution, and the driving of the Christians into an underground existence, as a proscribed sect. The Church grew under the shadow of the executioner's rods and axes, and every Christian lived in the peril of physical torture and death. The thought of martyrdom coloured the whole outlook of early Christianity. But it was not only a fear, it was also an ideal and a hope. For the martyr was the complete Christian, he was the champion and hero of the new society and its conflict with the old, and even the Christians who failed in the moment of the trial - the lapsi - looked on the martyrs as their saviours and protectors
Christopher Henry Dawson
London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.
Nick Cohen
Having had this kind of binge reading relationship with online content for 15 years we're starting to think 'Hang on, we only have finite time and there is infinite content'.
Seb Emina
Adventures are never fun while you're having them.
C.S. Lewis
We must lay before him what is in us not what ought to be in us.
C.S. Lewis
The word 'listen' contains the same letters as the word 'silent'.
Alfred Brendel
I want a house that has gotten over all its troubles I don't want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.
Jerome K. Jerome
But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,' faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The deals of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!
Charles Dickens
[T]he more clamour we make about 'the women's point of view', the more we rub it into people that the women's point of view is different, and frankly I do not think it is -- at least in my job. The line I always want to take is, that there is the 'point of view' of the reasonably enlightened human brain, and that this is the aspect of the matter which I am best fitted to uphold.
Dorothy L. Sayers
I'd like to be born the son of a duke with 90,000 pounds a year, on an enormous estate.... And I'd like to have the most enormous library, and I'd like to think that I could read those books forever and forever, and die unlamented, unknown, unsung, unhonored - and packed with information.
Richard Francis Burton
I'm not afraid of death. Death's afraid of me.
Lee Child
Mostly, when Jess didn't want to talk about her ideas in class, Colleen thought that Jess was showing off, making sure that she would be coaxed and pleaded with, but how could Jess have explained in a coherent way that she was scared? Once you let people know anything about what you think, that's it, you're dead. Then they'll be jumping about in your mind, taking things out, holding them up to the light and killing them, yes, killing them, because thoughts are supposed to stay and grow in quiet, dark places, like butterflies in cocoons.
Helen Oyeyemi
I will be­lieve that the bat­tle of fem­i­nism is over, and that the fe­male has reached a po­si­tion of equal­ity with the male, when I hear that a coun­try has al­lowed it­self to be turned up­side-down and led to the brink of war by its pas­sion for a to­tally bald woman writer.
Rebecca West
A respectful woman is a righteous woman.
Habeeb Akande
Why should you go further in it? What have you to gain from it?''What, indeed? It is art for art's sake, Watson. I suppose when you doctored, you found yourself studying cases without thought of a fee?''For my education, Holmes.''Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last.
Arthur Conan Doyle
You can be rich or deliberately refuse to be rich. You can possess money, or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail to get it
George Orwell
I shouldn't wonder if you didn't wonder much too much!
P.L. Travers
Once I had a love affair with myself.I was left heart broken.
Anthony T.Hincks
I don't know whether to be proud or appalled that danger, blood and death inspire you so.
Samantha Young
The difficulty is that, so long as unreason prevails, a solution of our troubles can only be reached by chance; for while reason, being impersonal, makes universal co-operation possible, unreason, since it represents private passions, makes strife inevitable. It is for this reason that rationality, in the sense of an appeal to a universal and impersonal standard of truth, is of supreme importance to the well-being of the human species.
Bertrand Russell
•tThey’re like chickens who get out of the henhouse, and they’re so proud of themselves, and so puffed up from being able to eat all the worms and beetles and caterpillars they want, that they never think about foxes.
Neil Gaiman
The main task of a free society is to civilize the struggle for power. Slavery of the acquiescent majority to the ruthless few is the hereditary state of mankind freedom a rarely acquired characteristic.
R. H. S. Crossman
There are patterns in everything, in the whole of Nature, from the way the stars turn in the heavens to the whorl of a shell or the petals of a flower and the way leaves arrange themselves about a twig. There are forces, hidden forces. If I can discover what they are, how they operate, I will have my hands upon the levers of creation and can work them myself.
Celia Rees
Whoever said kindness should be earned is wrong. A kick in the shins is earned - kindness should be a given.
Jodi Ann Bickley
And yet, even while they baffled him, they aroused within his heart a feeling he had never known before. When- which was not often, but sometimes happened- they burst into tears of utter frustration or despair, their tiny disappointments seemed to him more tragic than Man’s long retreat after the loss of his Galactic Empire. That was something too huge and remote for comprehension, but the weeping of a child could pierce one to the heart.Alvin had met love in Diaspar, but now he was learning something equally precious, and without which love itself could never reach its highest fulfillment but must remain forever incomplete. He was learning tenderness.
Arthur C. Clarke
Meanwhile, the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain.She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly -the thought of the world's concern at her situation- was found on an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself.
Thomas Hardy
I'm a mother," said her mother, in her foodless flat where the dust did not dare to settle, "and I know what I know.
Neil Gaiman
You may fancy a glimpse of the abyss where I grovelled!
Emily Brontë
A union of literary and scientific cultures – there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was so soon to come ... Davy himself was writing (and sometimes publishing) a good deal of poetry at the time; his notebooks mix details of chemical experiments, poems, and philosophical reflections all together; and these did not seem to exist in separate compartments in his mind.
Oliver Sacks