Quotes by British Authors - Page 298

It's nice when you can ride the inspirational wave, but as a writer, you'll also find how fast you can lose that wave. You must persevere.
Charles Lee
She breathed an enormous sigh, looked at Poirot, Looked away, and suddenly blurted out, "You're too old. Nobody told me you were so old. I really don't want to be rude but - there it is. You're too old. I'm really sorry." She turned abruptly and blundered out of the room, rather like a desperate moth in lamplight. Poirot, his mouth open, heard the bang of the front door. He ejaculated: "Non d'un nom d'un nom...
Agatha Christie
... in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights", the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.
David Mitchell
If we are to talk in the language of social constructions, then the construction of the very concepts of the social and the biological must also be elucidated.
Denise Riley
He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser. (Nietz
W.H. Auden
And this fine young prince had fallen in love with a Nobody from Nowhere -- as princes sometimes do, though not as often as romantic tradition would have you believe.
Kate Saunders
SONG OF DAWNI saw the sun rise by accident.It was a horrible sight.Annoyed by its splendor, I sought refugein a moist pillow, and lay there, alone,at the dawn of another day,that brought me closer to another death,pondering the vanity of my solitude,the vanity of procrastination,and the tiresome inevitability of waking upagain the same person.It might still be possible to change,but obstinately I remain the same,hoping that others might take solacein my consistency.But perhaps they take no solace in it,perhaps they too find it tedious.
John Tottenham
Yeah. A feeling. Like the whole point of my life from the alleys in Bangkok to the yachts and private island to coming here like a crazy person trying to fly a helicopter like all of it from birth to here point A to point Z was all some big cosmic trick to get me to meet you. - Sanjit to Lana
Michael Grant
I look upon every day to be lost in which I do not make a new acquaintance.
Samuel Johnson
No egoism is so insufferable as the Christian with regard to his soul.
W Somerset Maugham
She believed in getting as much use as possible from everything, and thought that as long as machinery, or anything else, could be cajoled into operation, it should be kept; to do otherwise, she thought, was wasteful.
Alexander McCall Smith
The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas. It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
Edward de Bono
What am I searching for? Maybe its the beliefs I had as a child, that the world is a nice place, that people are genuinely who they say they are, that life is not simply what it is, where the sun shines and the stars glitter for me. Where am I going? I do not know but maybe I am just searching for those beliefs that lead to a happy ending...
Virginia Alison
Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you.
Matt Haig
Till it does come, you know, we women never mean to have anybody. It is a thing of course among us, that every man is refused, till he offers.
Jane Austen
For all the excitement and adventure and really wild things going on, the danger was always very real. Ferdy was real. He really died. There's a cost, when you wish for things there's always a cost. You have to make sure it's a price you're willing to pay. And life is the highest price of all.
Justin Richards
It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what.", The Guardian, 5 June 2005]
Stephen Fry
Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment!
Ellis Peters
Eating, drinking, dying - three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference.
Aldous Huxley
My 11 #books come without pomp n frills, for all seeking #true #meaning & unafraid of overcoming past conditioning. #Rewards are infinite
Michael Levy
Writer's block is just a symptom of feeling like you have nothing to say, combined with the rather weird idea that you should feel the need to say something. Why? If you have something to say, then say it. If not, enjoy the silence while it lasts. The noise will return soon enough.
Hugh MacLeod
It shows a mediocre architect at the top of his game [on the Beetham Tower in Manchester]
Owen Hatherley
Always speak the truth - think before you speak - and write it down afterwards.
Lewis Carroll
I love that you're worried,' she says, 'but you're worried about all the wrong things.
Patrick Ness
How can a man’s candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind—impetuous, arm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian.
George Eliot
So-called Islamic 'fundamentalism' does not spring, in Pakistan, from the people. It is imposed on them from above. Autocratic regimes find it useful to espouse the rhetoric of faith, because people respect that language, are reluctant to oppose it. This how religions shore up dictators; by encircling them with words of power, words which the people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked.But the ramming-down-the-throat point stands. In the end you get sick of it, you lose faith in the faith, if not qua faith then certainly as basis for a state. And then the dictator falls, and it is discovered that he had brought God down with him, that the justifying myth of the nation has been unmade. This leaves only two options: disintegration, or a new dictatorship ... no, there is a third, and I shall not be o pessimistic as to deny its possibility. The third option is the substitution of a new myth for the old one. Here are three such myths, all available from stock at short notice: liberty; equality; fraternity. I recommend them highly.
Salman Rushdie
Those who believe that liberal democracy and the free market can be defended by the force of law and regulation alone, without an internalised sense of duty and morality, are tragically mistaken.
Jonathan Sacks
He who grows not in the knowledge of Jesus, refuses to be blessed.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant—so that he constantly called different things by that name—but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of ‘pain’—in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Their love was thus seeded in the rich soil of mutual understanding.
Jacqueline Winspear
A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with 'Got To Get You Off My Mind', but then realised that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straight away, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs, and ... oh there are loads of rules.
Nick Hornby
I had a feeling once about Mathematics - that I saw it all. Depth beyond depth was revealed to me - the Byss and Abyss. I saw - as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor's Show - a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly why it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable but it was after dinner and I let it go.
Winston S. Churchill
Know yourself and go in swinging, if it hurts when you hit, it might be real, too.
Patrick Ness
The voice of a donkey braying in the neighbouring meadow seemed like the mocking laughter of demons.
P.G. Wodehouse
He has never told anyone this story. He doesn't mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past--within reason--but he doesn't mean to give away pieces of himself.
Hilary Mantel
In [David] Douglas's success in life ... his great activity, undaunted courage, singular abstemiousness, and energetic zeal, at once pointed him out as an individual eminently calculated to do himself credit as a scientific traveler.
Joseph Dalton Hooker
Hesitation creates gaps. Boldness obliterates them.
Robert Greene
Selfishness is not a virtue. Altruism is not a moral weakness. Taxation is the price we pay for civilization.
Darryl Cunningham
Only I don't close my eyes these days, because it hurts too much when I open them.
David Mitchell
This was the first of the sorrows of Turin.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I truly believed that the creation of hope was the greatest of all the arts, the noblest of all the lies.
Karen Maitland
England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
George Orwell
Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.
Ted Hughes
The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.
John Lanchester
We have to report this." Kai sighed deeply in relief. "I was afraid you were going to say that we had to investigate it ourselves.""Don't be ridiculous," Irene said briskly. "We may collect fiction, but we are not required to imitate the stupider parts of it.
Genevieve Cogman
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.Comforter, where, where is your comforting?Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief-woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing —Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'.O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fallFrightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheapMay who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our smallDurance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: allLife death does end and each day dies with sleep.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Ghosts were created when the first man woke in the night
J.M. Barrie
Creativity is as important now in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.
Ken Robinson
It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake.
C.S. Lewis
Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
A.S. Byatt
If grief could burn outLike a sunken coal,The heart would rest quiet, The unrent soulBe still as a veil; But I have watched all nightThe fire grow silent, The grey ash soft:And I stir the stubborn flintThe flames have left, And grief stirs, and the deftHeart lies impotent.
Philip Larkin
I do not mind lying but I hate inaccuracy.
Samuel Butler
At any given moment life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time having a purpose tending in a certain direction.
Aldous Huxley
The beauty of God, is God himself.
Anthony T.Hincks
There is unmistakable proof that abusers do get together in order to share children, abuse more children, and even learn from each other. As more cases have come into the public eye in recent years, this has become increasingly obvious. More and more of this type of abuse is coming to light.I definitely think it is the word ritual which causes people to question, to feel uncomfortable, or even just disbelieve. It seems almost incredible that such things would happen, but too many of us know exactly how bad the lives of many children are. A great deal of child pornography shows children being abused in a ritualised setting, and many have now come forward to share their experiences, but there is a still tendency to say it just couldn't happen.Why not?Why, given what we now know about paedophiles and about what they do to children? Would they have limits? It was all done to me and I have enough experiences to write many more books than this one, but this will have to do for now. I've tried to make sense of it and I've tried to tell you my story in a way that will, hopefully, let you understand how it was done, and how they managed to get away with it, but I haven't told you a big part of it yet. I haven't told you what happened that finally ended it all for me.There was something else.When I was eight, someone else came into my life and made a huge difference to what was happening and how things would turn out. I didn't know it then, but I see the whole picture now.Something I have often wondered is whether Andrew was there while I was being abused. Lots of people hide their faces, and there were often masks worn, so he certainly could have been. I have no evidence one way or another though, so I will leave it to the reader to decide whether it would seem in a paedophile's character to watch abuse continue when it has been masterminded by him. But I do know that it wasn't just me who he abused - I know that because I saw it.Andrew was away a lot with the Army until I was at high school, then he left that position. He was instrumental both in my abuse and in setting the scene, but when I was eight, something happened which would distract him and which would, at times, take his attention from me. My mother very kindly provided him with a new victim - my little sister.
Laurie Matthew
In the end, the cats were rounded up and put into a room. My father went into the room with his First World War revolver, more reliable, he said, than a shotgun. The gun sounded again, again, again, again. The cats that were still uncaught had sensed their fate and were raging and screaming all over the bush, with people after them. My father came out of the room at one point, very white, with tight angry lips and wet eyes. He was sick. Then he swore a good deal, then he went back into the room and the shooting continued. At last he came out. The servants went in and carried off the corpses to the disused well. Some of the cats had escaped – three never came back at all to the murderous household, so they must have gone wild and taken their chances. When my mother returned from her trip, and the neighbour who had brought her had gone, she walked quiet and uncommenting through the house where there was now one cat, her old favourite, asleep on her bed. My mother had not asked for this cat to be spared, because it was old, and not very well. But she was looking for it; and she sat a long time stroking and talking to it. Then she came out to the verandah. There sat my father and there I sat, murderers, and feeling it. She sat down. He was rolling a cigarette. His hands were still shaking. He looked up at her and said: ‘That must never happen again.’ And I suppose it never did.
Doris Lessing
For pilgrims walking...every footfall is doubled, landing at once on the actual road and also on the path of faith.
Robert Macfarlane
Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches civilisation.
Ian McEwan
On the doorstep Adele met Tony Limpsfield. She hurried him into her motor, and told the chauffeur not to drive on."News!" she said. "Lucia's going to have a lover.""No!" said Tony in the Riseholme manner"But I tell you she is. He's with her now.""They won't want me then," said Tony. "And yet she asked me to come at half-past five.""Nonsense, my dear. They will want you, both of them. . . . Oh Tony, don't you see? It's a stunt."Tony assumed the rapt expression of Luciaphils receiving intelligence."Tell me all about it," he said."I'm sure I'm right," said she. "Her poppet came in just now, and she held his hand as women do, and made him draw his chair up to her, and said he scolded her. I'm not sure that he knows yet. But I saw that he guessed something was up. I wonder if he's clever enough to do it properly. . . . I wish she had chosen you, Tony, you'd have done it perfectly. They have got--don't you understand?--to have the appearance of being lovers, everyone must think they are lovers, while all the time there's nothing at all of any sort in it. It's a stunt: it's a play: it's a glory.""But perhaps there is something in it," said Tony. "I really think I had better not go in.""Tony, trust me. Lucia has no more idea of keeping a real lover than of keeping a chimpanzee. She's as chaste as snow, a kiss would scorch her. Besides, she hasn't time. She asked Stephen there in order to show him to me, and to show him to you. It's the most wonderful plan; and it's wonderful of me to have understood it so quickly. You must go in: there's nothing private of any kind: indeed, she thirsts for publicity."Her confidence inspired confidence, and Tony was naturally consumed with curiosity. He got out, told Adele's chauffeur to drive on, and went upstairs. Stephen was no longer sitting in the chair next to Lucia, but on the sofa at the other side of the tea-table. This rather looked as if Adele was right: it was consistent anyhow with their being lovers in public, but certainly not lovers in private."Dear Lord Tony," said Lucia--this appellation was a halfway house between Lord Limpsfield and Tony, and she left out the "Lord" except to him--"how nice of you to drop in. You have just missed Adele. Stephen, you know Lord Limpsfield?"Lucia gave him his tea, and presently getting up, reseated herself negligently on the sofa beside Stephen. She was a shade too close at first, and edged slightly away."Wonderful play of Tchekov's the other day," she said. "Such a strange, unhappy atmosphere. We came out, didn't we, Stephen, feeling as if we had been in some remote dream. I saw you there, Lord Tony, with Adele who had been lunching with me."Tony knew that: was not that the birthday of the Luciaphils?
E.F. Benson