Quotes by British Authors - Page 297

Humble yourself, and you will find that Love is spreading a carpet of flowers beneath your feet.
Hannah Hurnard
Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?""Yes.""All like ours?""I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted.""Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?""A blighted one.
Thomas Hardy
Swiftly the brain becomes an enchanted loom, where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern-always a meaningful pattern-though never an abiding one.
Charles Sherrington
So much of a novelist’s writing … takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.
Graham Greene
The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it.
Terry Pratchett
Shelves full of books are all around me. Opening the different volumes I take a look, and find the pages covered with writings in unknown scripts — tadpole traces, bird feet markings, twisted branches. And in my dream I am able to read them all, to make sense of everything despite its difficulty.
Jonathan D. Spence
Sometimes the little opportunities that fly at us each day can have the biggest impact.
Danny Wallace
Because the world all twisted up and wrong, like distorted glass, only came back into focus if you looked at it through the bottom of a bottle.
Terry Pratchett
We live in a society where interacting with government agents is apotentially hazardous activity
Steven Magee
Like I said earlier, it sounds like I’ll need a plan B, said Porter. Because I can’t see them going for any of that bollocks. They’ve had more peace plans than I’ve had bottles of vodka, and if they wanted money, they would have asked for it by now.
Chris Ryan
If you’re given a dirty look, wash it and give it back.
Benny Bellamacina
Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.
Neil Gaiman
Only me, eh? Is that how you see yourself? Only you is worth a good deal more than you think.
Gabriel King
Mr Rycroft said nothing. It was so difficult not to say the wrong thing to Captain Wyatt that it was usually safer not to reply at all.
Agatha Christie
Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism.
G.K. Chesterton
Feeling important is a vice, not a virtue, however concealed as participation in something noble.
Idries Shah
Time is not ours and we would not own it. It does not wound us to say so.from the prose poem INNOCENCE
Jay Woodman
There is nothing more to be said or to be done tonight, so hand me over my violin and let us try to forget for half an hour the miserable weather and the still more miserable ways of our fellowmen.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Ah ha!" the Doc screeched suddenly, wheeling around. "The salicylic acid! Maybe it SHOULD have been heated first!
Clare Havens
Writing is for stories to be read, books to be published, poems to be recited, plays to be acted, songs to be sung, newspapers to be shared, letters to be mailed, jokes to be told, notes to be passed, recipes to be cooked, messages to be exchanged, memos to be circulated, announcements to be posted, bills to be collected, posters to be displayed and diaries to be concealed. Writing is for ideas, action, reflection, and experience. It is not for having your ignorance exposed, your sensitivity destroyed, or your ability assessed.
Frank Smith
Sooner
 or 
later 
it 
would 
happen: 
strength 
would 
change
 into 
consciousness.
George Orwell
What a sad thing men are. Can't do nothing good without being so weak we have to mess it up. Can't build something up without tearing it down.
Patrick Ness
In the course of crime ... the descent is rapid.
Frederick Marryat
Where Do You Show Up to Share What You Have to Offer?When You Love What You Do-You Share It Daily
Ninon de Vere De Rosa
Like Pascal, Nietzsche, and Simone Weil, Kierkegaard is one of those writers whom it is very difficult to estimate justly. When one reads them for the first time, one is bowled over by their originality . . . and by the sharpness of their insights. . . . But with successive readings one’s doubts grow, one begins to react against their overemphasis on one aspect of the truth at the expense of all the others, and one’s first enthusiasm may all too easily turn to an equally exaggerated aversion. Of all such writers, one might say that one cannot imagine them as children. The more we read them, the more we become aware that something has gone badly wrong with their affective life; . . . it is not only impossible to imagine one of them as a happy husband or wife, it is impossible to imagine their having a single intimate friend to whom they could open their hearts.
W.H. Auden
Children are the closest we have to wisdom, and they become adults the moment that final drop of everything mysterious is strained from them.
Simon Van Booy
Eat what you desire, but dress like other people.
Idries Shah
The blood of too many, dissolving the very stain.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Excellence in any pursuit is the late ripe fruit of toil.
W. M. L. Jay
To often we speak just to hear the sound of our own voice, when we should speak only when the words are sweeter than silence.
Steven Aitchison
Don’t be afraid of making mistakes or failing. You never really fail anyway unless you actually give up and quit!
John Newman
To listen to criticism and act on it if it is valid and ignore it if it is not is a sign of intelligence.
Chloe Thurlow
Christmas is a day of meaning and traditions, a special day spent in the warm circle of family and friends.
Margaret Thatcher
[My father] loved me tenderly and shyly from a distance, and later on took a naive pride in seeing my name in print.
Arthur Koestler
So what's the problem?’‘No problem. There's no problem. Don't ever say what's the problem, nthat's the negative way of looking at things, you know like is the bottle half empty or half full, know what I mean, every problem is also an opportunity, the question here is what opportunity does this present us with?’‘It seems to me’, said Ernest stubbornly, ‘that this opportunity presents us with a problem. Is there a director that Virginia would like?
Jonathan Lynn
One day you're something, so promising and full o' dares, so big the world's too small a place to hold you. Then, 'fore you know it, you're old, and you realise all them things you had in mind you'll never get to. All them doors you felt too big to fit through have already shut. Only one left open and it leads to nothing but nothing.
Joe Abercrombie
The intoxication with the theatre, with its limelight, costumes, and masks, and with its passions and conflicts, accords well with the adolescence of a man who was to act his role with an intense sense of the dramatic, and of whose life it might indeed be said that its very shape had the power and pattern of classical tragedy.
Isaac Deutscher
Some things have to be believed to be seen
Ralph Hodgson
we must love those with whom we live and work, and love them for all their failings, manifest and manifold though they be.
Alexander McCall Smith
Sometimes, language is the sound of longing
Simon Van Booy
Luck enters into every contingency. You are a fool if you forget it-and a greater fool if you count upon it.
Phyllis Bottome
God’s ways and His will come in His own perfect time.
Elizabeth George
Libraries are about Freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.
Neil Gaiman
In dreams, we enter a world that’s entirely our own.
J.K. Rowling
There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
Philip Larkin
The more important one feels the greater the illusion is.
Steven Redhead
All decisions are taken two levels above the highest level of understanding
David K. Brown
To be angry about trifles is mean and childish to rage and be furious is brutish and to maintain perpetual wrath is akin to the practice and temper of devils but to prevent and suppress rising resentment is wise and glorious is manly and divine.
Isaac Watts
When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!
E.M. Forster
The future is purchased by the present.
Samuel Johnson
The term bohemian has a bad reputation because it's allied to myriad clichés, but Parisians originally adopted the term, associated with nomadic Gypsies, to describe artists and writers who stayed up all night and ignored the pressures of the industrial world.
Sarah Thornton
Cole, for Christ's sake, will you stop staring at me like I'm beefcake of the month?
Simon Holt
Life is indeed a gamble, the ultimate game of chance, based purely upon having the ability to make the right choices at the right time. You never win or lose in life if you realise it is all just for the experience. Learn to create your own destiny, don't wait to see what fate throws your way.
Steven Redhead
A dead man is the worst enemy alive, I thought. You can't alter his power over you. You can't alter what you love or owe. And it's too late to ask him for his absolution. He has beaten you all ways.
John le Carré
Ignorance, when voluntary, is criminal, and a man may be properly charged with that evil which he neglected or refused to learn how to prevent.
Samuel Johnson
The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be a myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.
C.S. Lewis
Nobody scarce doth any good, yet they all agree in praising those who do. Indeed, it is strange that all men should consent in commending goodness, and no man endeavour to deserve that commendation; whilst, on the contrary, all rail at wickedness, and all are as eager to be what they abuse.
Henry Fielding
What a night it was! The jagged masses of heavy dark cloud were rolling at intervals from horizon to horizon, and thin white wreaths covered the stars. Through all the rush of the cloud river the moon swam, breasting the waves and disappearing again in the darkness.I walked up and down, drinking in the beauty of the quiet earth and the changing sky. The night was absolutely silent. Nothing seemed to be abroad. There was no scurrying of rabbits, or twitter of the half-asleep birds. And though the clouds went sailing across the sky, the wind that drove them never came low enough to rustle the dead leaves in the woodland paths. Across the meadows I could see the church tower standing out black and grey against the sky. ("Man Size In Marble")
E Nesbit
Oh! you are a great deal too apt, you know, to like people in general. You never see fault in any body. All the world are good and agreeable in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of a human being in my life.""I would wish not to be hasty in censuring any one; but I always speak what I think.
Jane Austen
Never underestimate the ridiculous things that have been done in the name of religious-semantic obscurity.
Kate Griffin