Quotes by British Authors - Page 296

To cleave wood is a common every-day business, and yet it has its dangers; so then, reader, there are dangers connected with your calling and daily life which it will be well for you to be aware of. Your occupation may be as humble as log splitting, and yet the devil can tempt you in it. Nowhere is he safe who thinks himself so.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Look. Survey. Inspect. My hair is ruined! I look like a pan of bacon and eggs!
Diana Wynne Jones
Evey Hammond: Who are you? V: Who? Who is but the form following the function of what and what I am is a man in a mask. Evey Hammond: Well I can see that. V: Of course you can. I'm not questioning your powers of observation I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is
Alan Moore
Haftor was the Easer to the Easers. This was the most powerful man in Creation. Peder knew trouble was coming, but knew not what it was or how to deal with it.
Paul W.S. Bowler
To be as vehement as he is is to be almost non-committal.
John Osborne
If per capita was a problem, decapita could be arranged
Terry Pratchett
I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!
Thomas Hardy
Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore.
Neil Gaiman
We all feel inadequate very often. It’s only when it gets chronic that it is disturbing to one’s emotions and can get out of hand and make you pretty damn miserable.
Taylor Caldwell
She'd been cross so much of the time and often about small things. Looking back at herself, she thought that her crossness was like a shapeless overcoat, covering loneliness, and it wasn't the old loneliness she'd felt after her mother died, or even an adult version of it, but something different and more punishing.
Rosamund Lupton
Now I think that a true liberal will always prioritize individuals over the group, will always prioritize heresy over orthodoxy, will always prioritize the dissenting voice over the status quo.
Maajid Nawaz
We must have within ourselves some consciousness of this impelling power that may lead us to travel deliberately through our ages, realizing that the most wonderful adventures are not those which we go forth to seek.
Frances Chesterton
Learning how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them. Harder, maybe. There'd be a sight more frogs in this world if I didn't know how not to turn people into them. And big pink balloons, too.
Terry Pratchett
We profit little by books we do not enjoy.
John Lubbock
You’ve always got me”“Always?”“Didn’t I just say so?”“Yes”“Am I liar? ““No.” I lied.
Clive Barker
It’s a small painful sort of courage which is at the root of every life, because injustice and cruelty is at the root of life. And the reason why I have only given my attention to the heroic or the beautiful or the intelligent is because I won’t accept that injustice and the cruelty, and so won’t accept the small endurance that is bigger than anything.
Doris Lessing
Oh, sometimes I like to put the sand of doubt into the oyster of my faith." (Br. Cadfael)
Ellis Peters
The combination of power, optimism and abstract thinking makes powerful people more certain. The more cut-off they are from others, the more confident they are that they are right.
Margaret Heffernan
I was made to learn Latin and Greek, but I resented it, being of opinion that it was silly to learn a language that was no longer spoken. I believe that all the little good I got from years of classical studies I could have got in adult life in a month.
Bertrand Russell
You can't comfort the afflicted without afflicting the comfortable.
Lady Diana
Because there is a word for perfection, people will always imagine that they know it.
Idries Shah
Color shows us love.AndLove gives us color.
Anthony T.Hincks
Pride has often been his best friend. It has connected him nearer with virtue than any other feeling.
Jane Austen
The hardest thing in the world is to be original. It seems like our heads are filled with banalities and clichés. You have to keep digging deeper and deeper to try and find a fresh new seam that hasn't been explored.
Chloe Thurlow
We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.
Penelope Lively
Simplicity is a kind of transparency in which subtle nuances can have outsize effects.
David Byrne
If you would convince others seem open to conviction yourself.
Lord Chesterfield
Five words that were the hardest words I would ever have to say,Five pillars of my faith that couldn't save him that day.Five rivers, the Panj Aab, that didn't flow through his veins.Five minutes that changed our world forever.
Ruth Ahmed
Choice of attention-to pay attention to this and ignore that-is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences.
W.H. Auden
It made me wonder if there is much difference in our hearts between love and grief. they both have a yearning that seems unable to be satisfied.
Suzanne Kelman
Come with me to howling tree?""What?""Howling tree. It's a place a found. Come on
Debbie Moon
I always see the crack in the glass before I see the window.
Richard Wentworth
Simply put, this is one insight we heard echoed by tens of thousands of great managers: People don't change that much.Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out.Try to draw out what was left in.That is hard enough.
Marcus Buckingham
I’m using Mao as my inspiration. “Cast away illusions. Prepare for struggle.” I’m back in business, baby. You don’t know you’re stuck until you get moving.
Hanif Kureishi
My level of excitement is above cricket proportions
C.S. Woolley
The essence of true friendship is to make allowance for another's little lapses.
David Storey
Something was nagging at me that I was trying to resist. Was it then or was it later that the thought came to me: if God really does exist, and is not just a myth, it must have a consequence for the whole of life. It was not a comfortable thought.
Jennifer Worth
No one is ever holy without suffering.
Evelyn Waugh
Media has the ability to make good seem evil and evil seem good.
Duncan William Gibbons
Have a little sociological beano. As you said - in sociology one can do anything and call it work.
Malcolm Bradbury
I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.
John Fowles
We all travelled light, taking with us only what we considered to be the bare essentials of life. When we opened our luggage for Customs inspection, the contents of our bags were a fair indication of character and interests. Thus Margo’s luggage contained a multitude of diaphanous garments, three books on slimming, and a regiment of small bottles each containing some elixir guaranteed to cure acne. Leslie’s case held a couple of roll-top pullovers and a pair of trousers which were wrapped round two revolvers, an air-pistol, a book called Be Your Own Gunsmith, and a large bottle of oil that leaked. Larry was accompanied by two trunks of books and a brief-case containing his clothes. Mother’s luggage was sensibly divided between clothes and various volumes on cooking and gardening. I travelled with only those items that I thought necessary to relieve the tedium of a long journey: four books on natural history, a butterfly net, a dog, and a jam-jar full of caterpillars all in imminent danger of turning into chrysalids. Thus, by our standards fully equipped, we left the clammy shores of England.
Gerald Durrell
If the Lord Jehovah makes us wait, let us do so with our whole hearts; for blessed are all they that wait for Him. He is worth waiting for. The waiting itself is beneficial to us: it tries faith, exercises patience, trains submission, and endears the blessing when it comes. The Lord’s people have always been a waiting people.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set on its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog's bollocks. Nothing else comes close.
Stephen Fry
This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.
George Orwell
I wander through each chartered street,Near where the chartered Thames does flow;A mark in every face I meet,Marks of weakness, marks of woe.In every cry of every man,In every infant’s cry of fear,In every voice, in every ban,The mind-forged manacles I hear:How the chimney-sweeper’s cryEvery blackening church appals,And the hapless soldier’s sighRuns in blood down palace-walls.But most, through midnight streets I hearHow the youthful harlot’s curseBlasts the new-born infant’s tear,And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.
William Blake
A shapeless figure bent over him, he smelt the fresh leather of the revolver belt; but what insignia did the figure wear on the sleeves and shoulder straps of its uniform—and in whose name did it raise the dark pistol barrel?A second, smashing blow hit him on the ear. Then all became quiet. There was the sea again with its sounds. A wave slowly lifted him up. It came from afar and travelled sedately on, a shrug of eternity.
Arthur Koestler
People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.
George Eliot
I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.
Neil Gaiman
I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.
Neil Gaiman
After ten pages I felt that Nietzsche was reading me, not I him.
David Mitchell
Life is like a cup of coffee: The more avidly you drink of it, the sooner you reach the dregs.
J.M. Barrie
All Chelsea's internet dates were gorgeous. Until she met them.
Jojo Moyes
Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dess? I though that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. "We must see all scars as beauty. OKay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on dying. A scar means, I survivied.
Chris Cleave
There is a room in the Department of Mysteries, that is kept locked at all times. It contains a force that is at once more wonderful and more terrible than death, than human intelligence, than forces of nature. It is also, perhaps, the most mysterious of the many subjects for study that reside there. It is the power held within that room that you possess in such quantities and which Voldemort has not at all. That power took you to save Sirius tonight. That power also saved you from possession by Voldemort, because he could not bear to reside in a body so full of the force he detests. In the end, it mattered not that you could not close your mind. It was your heart that saved you.
J.K. Rowling
Where error is irreparable, repentance is useless.
Edward Gibbon
Lindsay [Doran] goes round the table and introduces everyone -- making it clear that I am present in the capacity of writer rather than actress, therefore no one has to be too nice to me.
Emma Thompson
If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?
George Eliot
Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.
G.K. Chesterton
Australia is so kind that just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest.
Douglas Jerrold