Quotes by British Authors - Page 300

It was only when I started to be myself that the music started to flow and people started to listen.
Sam Smith
The bee that hath honey in her mouth hath a sting in her tail.
John Lyly
There wasn't even enough meat to make proper fun of [....] I keep waiting for somebody else to come on TV, maybe a cabinet member, to read the real speech, the one that tells us ... I dunno ... stuff. Seriously, sorority girls have done the Walk of Shame home from frat parties feeling more satisfied.
Stephen Green
The picture of helpless indolence she calls herselfsublimely helpless and impotentI had done living I thoughtWas ever life so like death before? My face was so close against the tombstones, that there seemed no room for tears.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
As far as I'm concerned, you can't beat a good whodunnit: the twists and turns, the clues and the red herrings and then, finally, the satisfaction of having everything explained to you in a way that makes you kick yourself because you hadn't seen it from the start.
Anthony Horowitz
To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul.
George Eliot
Haven’t you got any romance in your soul?’ said Magrat plaintively. ‘No,’ said Granny. 'I ain’t. And stars don’t care what you wish, and magic don’t make things better, and no one doesn’t get burned who sticks their hand in a fire. If you want to amount to anything as a witch, Magrat Garlick, you got to learn three things. What’s real, what’s not real, and what’s the difference.
Terry Pratchett
The bigger the front, the bigger the back.
Stephen Grosz
Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.
G.K. Chesterton
She smiled as though someone had just offered her, the oldest virgin in town, a fully functioning Kingsize Vibro vibrator and a deluxe inhibition bypass.
Andrew Barrett
The world seemed to go red. He wanted to scream his outrage, to charge at Skarn and tear the murdering bastard's face off with his bare teeth. But he knew that meant certain death. No, he had to be ice. Not fire, but ice.
Luke Scull
Science is not, as so many seem to think, something apart, which has to do with telescopes, retorts, and test-tubes, and especially with nasty smells, but it is a way of searching out by observation, trial and classification; whether the phenomena investigated be the outcome of human activities, or of the more direct workings of nature's laws. Its methods admit of nothing untidy or slip-shod; its keynote is accuracy and its goal is truth.
Archibald E. Garrod
You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.
Jessica Mitford
Music is like poetry, It can stop you thinking. But it can also open you up.
Deborah Meyler
When she was living one of her fantasies she felt like a bird, the freedom of its wings letting her soar without earthly boundaries, enabling her to look on to her vividly imagined scenes from a great height.
Wendy Anne Gibbins-Lekkou
In any case the friendships of later life, in contrast wih those negotiated before thirty, are apt to be burdened with reservations, constraints, inhibitions.
Anthony Powell
With experience comes improvement.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Be not afraid of life believe that life is worth living and your belief will create the fact.
Henry James
The reasons for Emma's illness and for her decision to allow life in, rather than die, are intertwined and involve the beginnings of her feelings of belonging, of safety and of competence to be in the world.
Carol Lee
History is about longing and belonging. It is about the need for permanence and the perception of continuity. It concerns the atavistic desire to find deep sources of identity. We live again in the twelfth or in the fifteenth century, finding echoes and resonances of our own time; we may recognise that some things, such as piety and passion, are never lost; we may also conclude that the great general drama of the human spirit is ever fresh and ever renewed. That is why some of the greatest writers have preferred to see English history as dramatic or epic poetry, which is just as capable of expressing the power and movement of history as any prose narrative; it is a form of singing around a fire.
Peter Ackroyd
...kissing me with a violence that was terrifying and yet, somehow, the summit of all my tenderest dreams.
Mary Stewart
As a sea level adapted human, I am more fearful about the radiation levels on top of high altitude mountains, mile high modern cities and inside jet aircraft than from nuclear reactors and bombs, as that is where I get the most radiation exposures in the modern world.
Steven Magee
Faith in Jesus is the most important event in the history of a child’s life.
Elizabeth George
Claret is the liquor for boys port for men but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.
Samuel Johnson
Perhaps it is true that all that happens is in accordance with Your will, and thus it is good. But sometimes You leave blood on Your instruments.
Neil Gaiman
Everything, all those great things, had happened so far away--or so it seemed to [Mma Ramotswe] at the time. The world was made to sound as if it belonged to other people--to those who lived in distant countries that were so different from Botswana; that was before people had learned to assert that the world was theirs too, that what happened in Botswana was every bit as important, and valuable, as what happened anywhere else.
Alexander McCall Smith
It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.
Alain de Botton
In truth, she disliked books. She felt a peculiar disquiet when opening the pages. She had felt it since childhood. She did not know why. Something in the act itself, the immersion, the seclusion, was disturbing. Reading was an affirmation of being alone, of being separate, trapped. Books were like oubliettes. Her preference was for company, the tactile world, atoms.
Sarah Hall
Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.
W.H. Auden
Comfort me by a solemn Assurance, that when the little Parlour in which I sit at this Instant, shall be reduced to a worse furnished Box, I shall be read, with Honour, by those who never knew nor saw me, and whom I shall neither know nor see.
Henry Fielding
The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has shown that the same neural mechanisms mediate the fear response in all sorts of animals, from pigeons and rats to cats and humans. The idea that other animals experience similar emotions to us is not anthropomorphism: it is based on sound scientific evidence.
Dylan Evans
[On David Hume]Although he never admitted to being an atheist as such, he was clearly and unquestionably the most vividly elegant skeptic of them all.
Jonathan Miller
Pain is strong, aye - but friends' eyes, more strong." I told him that he knows next to nothing about me & I know nothing about him. He jabbed at his eyes & jabbed at mine, as if that single gesture were ample explanation.
David Mitchell
it’s like the British in Ireland in 1916’ , says Oisir O’Dowd. ‘The repeated the ageless macho mantra, “Force is the only thing these natives understand,” so often that they ended up believing it . From that point they were doomed.
David Mitchell
Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel.
Samuel Johnson
It's never too early to give your best friend some moral support
Zoe Sugg
I love cats, they're great; intelligent, affectionate, lovable, and this one was particularly nice, so picking it up and giving it a few slaps and a bit of a rough time was galling, even though it was unfortunately necessary. See, if you're hiding in someone's spare bedroom waiting for them to turn in for the night, the last thing you need is a cat meowing at the door trying to get in to see you because you've been stroking it all day. A bit of a shake and a growl in the cat's face and that's all that's usually needed for it to give the spare room and the horrible bastard inside a wide berth for the rest of the night.
Danny King
There is always a need to understand that others don't think the way that you do.
Steven Redhead
What the soul hardly realizes is that, unbeliever or not, his loneliness is really a homesickness for God.
Dom Hubert Van Zeller
This place is packed with beautiful hipsters. While the Coney Island bombast radiated sincerity, everything here seems more ironic. When someone in the crowd ironically chants, 'USA!' someone else ironically chants back, 'Mother Russia.
Jon Ronson
I can’t imagine that I’m supposed to get over it , like hopping a low stone wall; if Thursday was a barrier of some kind, it was made of razor wire, which I did not bound over but thrash through, leaving me in flayed pieces and on the other side of something only in a temporal sense.
Lionel Shriver
The richness of the whole world reduced to a choice that was not a choice at all, but a sentence.
Rosie Thomas
There's so much destruction all over the world - and all you can do is complain about ME!
Morrissey
Music without the ebb and flow would be like "watching a film with only good guys in it." -attrib Frank Zappa
John Powell
People say nothing can solve the Middle East problem. Not mediation, not arms, not financial aid. I say there is Something. Atheism. Suddenly everyone would be looking at each other thinking, ‘What the fuck were we doing? That was insane! Why are we all wearing these ridiculous hats? Were we drunk?
Frankie Boyle
It’s a father’s place to hate the son-in-law. It’s our place to put them through h*ll just to make sure they know what they’re doing.
Sam Crescent
And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue and purity--that I want, not alone with your brittle frame.
Charlotte Brontë
A closed heart is the most self limiting factor in life. Start to listen to your heartfelt desires.
Steven Redhead
You do not have to be alone. The world never inflicts loneliness upon us. That is something we choose or reject by ourselves.
Darren Shan
...love must feel the ego of the beloved person as important as one's own ego, and must realize the other's feelings and wishes as though they were one's own.
Bertrand Russell
One day, Lorna, I will dance this waltz with you again.
Caroline Leech
But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.''In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.' 'All right then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.''Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.' There was a long silence. 'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last.Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. 'You're welcome," he said.
Aldous Huxley
You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?
Jeanette Winterson
Well, everything's a lesson, isn't it? Learning all the time, as you could say.
Anthony Burgess
Terry Gilliam has spoken scathingly about my preference for physical comfort. I have come to the conclusion that this is very much his problem.
John Cleese
People think that I'm a nice guy.The truth is that I'm so nasty that I don't allow anyone else to hate me, except myself.
Anthony T.Hincks
Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.
Cory Doctorow
Every sacred mission, every hunt for hidden relics, every pilgrimage from one end of the earth to the other … I was looking for you.
Dianna Hardy
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Isaac Newton
Friendship," said Christopher Robin, "is a very comforting thing to have.
A.A. Milne