Quotes by British Authors - Page 29

The ancient wisdom of the masters says that even a mighty oak was once a nut like you.
Mark Brown
Stability,” insisted the Controller, “stability. The primal and the ultimate need. Stability. Hence all this.
Aldous Huxley
It is no coincidence that, on all four sides, in all four corners, the borders of the Roman Empire stopped where wine could no longer be made.
Neel Burton
Grief isn't always a knife-sharp twist in your heart or a dull bludgeon in your stomach, sometimes it's a net, cast suddenly and silently over your soul so that you feel trapped and suffocated by its grasp. I feel the loss in the deepest recesses of myself, hidden parts of my mind and my matter, united in missing someone I will never see again.
Non Pratt
It is an anxious, sometimes a dangerous thing to be a doll. Dolls cannot choose; they can only be chosen; they cannot 'do'; they can only be done by.
Rumer Godden
I had failed him; I knew it. But I could do no more. It was beyond my strength.That night, I think, he explored the uttermost depths of his loneliness.
Christopher Isherwood
I gaped at what I saw next. She yanked his arm off and ate it. Gross! I knew she was hungry, but that was just...well, against the school rules for one thing.
Imogen Rose
The more I see, the less I know for sure.
John Lennon
But sometimes there's a difference between being needed and being taken advantage of.
Lindsey Kelk
We throw stones though we live in glass houses,We talk shit like its a cross to bare.You're only relevant 'til you get older.Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer
Alex Gaskarth
You weremoon's eye to mepull and grained and mantling' - Praise Song For My Mother by Charlotte Mew
Charlotte Mew
In truth, Kipling's politics are not mine. But then, it would be a poor sort of world if one were only able to read authors who expressed points of view that one agreed with entirely. It would be a bland sort of world if we could not spend time with people who thought differently, and who saw the world from a different place.
Neil Gaiman
An idiot child screaming in a hospital." (on George Bernard Shaw)
H.G.Wells
A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don't find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.
J.M. Barrie
The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.
Peter Shaffer
There is always more goodness in the world than there appears to be, because goodness is of its very nature modest and retiring.
Evelyn Beatrice Hall
O that our dreamings all, of sleep or wake, Would all their colours from the sunset take.
John Keats
If you have ever come up against Nothing you have no idea how it can scare you out of your wits. When I was a child I used to be afraid of Something in the dark. I know now that the most fearful thing about the dark is that we may find Nothing in it.
Howard Spring
I have not broken your heart - you have broken it - and in breaking it, you have broken mine ... I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer - but yours! How can I?
Emily Brontë
She couldn’t tell how long she’d been searching for her daughter. It was dusk, but it had seemed darker as she ran through the wood, tripping on hooked tree roots, her feet crunching through crisp, curled ash leaves.
Sanjida Kay
It isn't that they can't see the solution it's that they can't see the problem.
G.K. Chesterton
I seriously have the best friends in the world.
Evelyn Smith
I have little use for religion as it is practiced, or for astrology, or for belief in witchcraft or omens of good or ill-luck. I think they all stem from some insufficiency in men’s minds, perhaps from a lack of a willingness to feel themselves utterly alone. But now and then I feel that there is something beyond the material world, somethings we all feel intimations of but cannot explain. Underneath the religious vision there is the harsh fundamental reality of all our lives, because we know we must live and die as the animals we are. But sometimes I suspect that under that harsh reality there is a further vision, still deeper based, that comes nearer to true reality than the reality we know.
Winston Graham
Having faith in God did not mean sitting back and doing nothing. It meant believing you would find success if you did your best honestly and energetically.
Ken Follett
It is the character of lived experience I want to explore, not the nature of man.
Michael James Jackson
The overriding reason why we should take other people's cultures seriously is because God has taken ours seriously.
John R.W. Stott
The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.
Terry Pratchett
To Tiffany's surprise, Nanny Ogg was weeping gently. Nanny took another swig from her flagon and wiped her eyes. 'Cryin' helps sometimes,' she said. 'No shame in tears for them as you've loved. Sometimes I remember one of my husbands and shed a tear or two. The memories're there to be treasured, and it's no good to get morbid-like about it.
Terry Pratchett
A half-dead thing in a stark dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold.
Robert W. Service
Writing should beguile us, not just take us from A to B to Zzzzz
Kevin Ansbro
I guess the truth is nobody told this smart kid that communication between such divergent life forms was impossible, so he just went ahead and did it anyhow.
Terry Pratchett
I won't regret, because you can grow flowers where dirt used to be.
Kate Nash
When the stars threw down their spears, and watered heaven with their tears, did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
William Blake
1) Leopardskin is always a neutral.2) You can get away with nearly anything if you wear the thing with black opaque tights and boots.3) Contrary to popular opinion, a belt is often not a good friend to a lady. Indeed, in many circumstances, it acts merely as a visual aid to help the onlooker settle the question: "Which half is fatter - the bottom or the top?"4) Bright red is a neutral.5) Sellotape is NOT strong enough to mend a hole in the crotch of a pair of tights.6) You should NOT buy an outfit if you have to strike a sexy pose in the changing-room mirror to make it look good. On the other hand, if you immediately start dancing the minute you put it on, buy it, however much it costs: unless it's lots, in which case, you can't, so don't. Fashion magazines will NEVER say, "Actually, don't buy it if you can't afford it." Neither will your friends. I am probably the only person who will EVER say it to you. You're welcome.
Caitlin Moran
The Purpose of Philosophy is to fall in Love. To strip the world of all its clothes, and fall in Love with it as it stand before you completely naked.
Ilyas Kassam
(...) “to have a hairy heart” has passed into everyday wizarding language to describe a cold or unfeeling witch or wizard.
J.K. Rowling
Give if thou can an alms if not a sweet and gentle word.
Robert Herrick
Romance blossomed over a carrier bag full of mackerel. It wasn't exactly how I imagined it would happen; there were no sunsets, or butterflies, or birdsong, just some smelly dead fish and a slimy carrier bag.
Victoria Twead
And who isn’t less innocent than they lead us to believe? That’s one of the fundamental truths about human nature.
Glenn Haybittle
The water beneath the Temple was both actual and metaphorical, existing as springs and streams, as spiritual energy, and as a symbol of the receptive or lunar aspect of nature. The meaning of that principle is too wide and elusive for it to be given any one name, so in the terminology of ancient science it was given a number, 1,080. Its polar opposite, the positive, solar force in the universe, was also referred to as a number 666. These two numbers, which have an approximate golden-section relationship of 1:1.62, were at the root of the alchemical formula that expressed the supreme purpose of the Temple. Its polar opposite, the positive, solar force in the universe, was also referred to as a number 666. Not merely was it used to generate energy from fusion of atmospheric and terrestrial currents, but it also served to combine in harmony all the correspondences of those forces on every level of creation.
John Michell
Japanese goldfish,With your gossamer tail,You are the loveliest creatureI have ever seen.""Japanese kitten,Put your tongue back in where it belongsAnd go away.I know exactly what you are thinking.
Paul Gallico
While they were dancing, the buoyancy that the champagne had given her left her all at once, and she slumped and felt suddenly tired and miserable about all the things that Denys should have said and done and hadn't. At the end of the dance there was one awful moment when she was bored. She didn't want to go and be kissed in the garden, she didn't want to drink any more, and Denys was in no mood for conversation; what was there to do? She was bored. It was a terrible, treacherous thought to feel like that when you were with someone you loved.
Monica Dickens
The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing.
Alexander McCall Smith
Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!
Joseph Conrad
One final time I told myself I wasn't abducting my little brother.
Marcus Sedgwick
Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those that do.
Cyril Connolly
We want to create an atmosphere in which creation is possible.
Marie Rambert
You invaded Narnia. You have no more right leading than Miraz does. Peter Pevensie: You, him, your father! Narnia's better off without the lot of you!
C.S. Lewis
...I take as a point of departure the possibility and desirability of a fundamentally different form of society--call it communism, if you will--in which men and women, freed from the pressures of scarcity and from the insecurity of everyday existence under capitalism, shape their own lives. Collectively they decide who, how, when, and what shall be produced.
Michael Burawoy
Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
C.S. Lewis
The United States of America was a pirate nation for the first one hundred years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from by blood. By keeping their GDP at home, the U.S. revolutionaries were able to bootstrap their nation into an industrial powerhouse. Now, it seems, their descendants are bent on ensuring that no other country can pull the same trick off.
Cory Doctorow
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
C.S. Lewis
As seasons change, life changes!
Lily Amis
As Romeo and Juliet found to their cost, marriage is never just about two people falling in love, it is about families.
Marina Lewycka
Massive changes may have occurred in libraries in recent years, with new digital resources and services supplementing the old traditional resources and services, the dog-eared card catalogues ripped up and destroyed, workstations suddenly everywhere, but one essential aspect of “libraryness” has not changed: libraries remain places dedicated to storage. Books continue to be published in greater and greater numbers – so great in fact that there are no accurate figures as to exactly how many are published: some say one every thirty seconds, others four thousand per day, others a million per year – and somehow, whether through the off-site storage of the physical books themselves, or microfilm copying, or digital scanning, we remain obliged to keep up with or afloat in this vast deluge of paper. Even the new, high-tech rebranded libraries opened to great fanfare in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in the 1990s could not get away from this essential fact of paper hoarding: they were called “Idea Stores.” - p.56
Ian Sansom
Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without the distant shadow of doubt, the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. No angels handed him his lines, no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learnt techniques, he learnt tricks, and he learnt them well.
Mark Forsyth
Let us learn to adapt our ways to the generosity of Nature. Let us learn to care, yet without letting care itself bring us down. Let us learn to think, yet without letting thought be our only master. Let us learn to die, yet without believing in death.
Patrick Woodroffe
And at the closing of the dayShe loosed the chain, and down she lay;The broad stream bore her far away,The Lady of Shallot.
Alfred Tennyson
The Hall Of Fame Is Built On Quicksand
Dean Cavanagh
We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with. A world without values quickly becomes a world without value.
Jonathan Sacks