Quotes by British Authors - Page 304

Faith to my mind is a stiffening process a sort of mental starch.
E.M. Forster
I see you in the grass,Running through the snow,But where you have gone,I cannot go.
Helen Pearson
That is my rule of life. If fate means you to lose, give him a good fight anyhow. Do you remember Henley's magnificent lines? 'Under the bludgeonings of chanceMy head is bloody, but unbowed.' ? That is my gospel. What do you think of it?
William McFee
One can always satisfy oneself, I suppose; it's other people one can't satisfy. One thinks one's way of life is sound and then comes an external vision to say: you are a fake, you are nothing, you're animal and must die, and no one will know you were ever here. It's an intimation of the whole absurdity of what you are and do. It's the worst kind of despair.
Malcolm Bradbury
Don't wait for your ship to come in, swim out to it.
Cathy Hopkins
For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure.
Tahir Shah
Never seen the sea! How could anyone not have seen the sea? Surely the sea must somehow belong to the happiness of every child.
Iris Murdoch
When there is a true or useful thing, there is sure to be a counterfeit.
Idries Shah
This Captain had been brought up in Istanbul. His mind was made of minarets and domes. He capped himself with spacious ease. He was his own call to prayer.
Jeanette Winterson
Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,
C.S. Lewis
The sun set, which is everyday magic...
Terry Pratchett
Pick a flower on Earth and you move the farthest star.
Paul A.M. Dirac
O thou by whom we come to God The Life the Truth the Way The path of prayer Thyself hast trod- Lord teach us how to pray.
James Montgomery
A child must have care and attention, but that care and attention need not emanate from a single, permanently present individual. Children are more disturbed by changes of place than by changes in personnel around them, and more distressed by friction and ill-feeling between the adults in their environment than by unfamiliarity.
Germaine Greer
They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love
Virginia Woolf
He can be made to take a positive pleasure in the perception that the two sides of his life are inconsistent... by exploiting his vanity. He can... enjoy kneeling beside the grocer on Sunday just because he remembers that the grocer could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world which he inhabited on Saturday evening; and contrariwise, to enjoy the bawdy and blasphemy over the coffee with these admirable friends all the more because he is aware of a "deeper," "spiritual" world within him which they can not understand. You see the idea - the worldly friends touch him on one side and the grocer on the other, and he is the complete, balanced, complex man who sees round them all. Thus, while being permanently treacherous to at least two sets of people, he will feel, instead of same, a continual under-current of self-satisfaction... and that to cease to do so would be "priggish," "intolerant," and... "Puritanical.
C.S. Lewis
That is a terrible plan.""Hiccup's plans are always t-terrible.""Hey! You're still here, aren't you?
Cressida Cowell
My last words to him were to assure him that we would bring Sally to join him later. And you know what your dad said? He said that he would wait for as long as it took."Grace bit her lip. "But she never came, did she? And he never stopped waiting.
Justin Somper
It's when we're inches apart and not speaking or touching each other that I feel that we are miles apart.
Anthony T.Hincks
Jaws 4 is so bad it makes Jaws 3 look like Jaws 2.
Neil Perryman
EPITAPH OF JALALUDIN RUMIWhen we are dead, seek not our tomb in the earth, but find it in the hearts of men.
Idries Shah
Man has less than he suspects of: Time, Friends, Hopes, Qualities.Proverb
Idries Shah
There is no equality while privileges enjoyed by the many are denied to the few.
Robert Cubitt
A monster lies in wait in me,A stew of wounds and misery,But fiercer still in life and limb,The me that lies in wait in him.
Clive Barker
I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the “best” people, the “right” food, the “important” books.
C.S. Lewis
The objects of the present life fill the human eye with a false magnification because of their immediacy.
William Wilberforce
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.
Robert Browning
With simplification we can bring an infusion of inspiration to our daily lives; set a tone that honors our families' needs before the world's demands. Allow our hopes for our children to outweigh our fears. Realign our lives with our dreams for our family, and our hopes for what childhood could and should be.
Kim John Payne
The old days are dead and gone days. For what I did in the past I have been punished. I have been cured.
Anthony Burgess
Nothing ruins a good thing quite like knowing you share your opinions with mindless little tits.
Yahtzee Croshaw
The sun was shining, but Christ had hidden Himself, and all the world was black to you; or it was night, and since the bright and morning star was gone, no other star could yield you so much as a ray of light. What a howling wilderness is this world without our Lord! If once He hideth Himself from us, withered are the flowers of our garden; our pleasant fruits decay; the birds suspend their songs, and a tempest overturns our hopes.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
A garden isn't meant to be useful. It's for joy.
Rumer Godden
The old man in the beard he felt convinced was wrong. He was too busy saving his own soul. Wasn't it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, and if that were the end of everything suffer damnation with them rather than be saved alone?
Graham Greene
You should read it though there is much that is skip-worthy.
Herbert Asquith
So it is with grief where, if all goes well, can come a strengthening of the inner world, of memory and definition.
Jeremy Holmes
Speeches are like steer horns - a point here a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Evelyn Anderson
the true knowledge is disciplined and tested knowledge,—not the first thought that comes, so the true passion is disciplined and tested passion,—not the first passion that comes. The first that come are the vain, the false, the treacherous; if you yield to them they will lead you wildly and far, in vain pursuit, in hollow enthusiasm, till you have no true purpose and no true passion left. Not that any feeling possible to humanity is in itself wrong, but only wrong when undisciplined.
John Ruskin
Actually, years mean nothing. It's what's inside them.
Simon Van Booy
For the rest, they shall represent the other Free Peoples of the World: Elves, Dwarves, and Men, Legolas shall be for the Elves; and Gimli son of Gloin for the Dwarves. They are willing to go at least to the passes of the Mountains, and maybe beyond. For Men you shall have Aragorn son of Arathorn, for the Ring of Isildur concerns him closely
J.R.R. Tolkien
Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre; remorse is the poison of life.
Charlotte Brontë
One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.
Virginia Woolf
Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's.
Christopher Hitchens
I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only recognized much later, when the story and the characters have faded into darkness.
Philip Sington
There's a large strain of irony in our human affairs... Interwoven with our affairs is this wonderful spirit of irony which prevents us from ever being utterly and irretrievably serious, from being unaware of the mysterious nature of our existence.
Malcolm Muggeridge
On the day the Gjallerhorn is blown, it will wake the gods, no matter where they are, no matter how deeply they sleep.Heimdall will blow Gjallerhorn only once, at the end of all things, Ragnarok.
Neil Gaiman
Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.
Alfred Hitchcock
Magic obeys only the heart of the one who uses it. Your magic would always be a kind magic, because you are kind, I can tell. Please stay and help us.
Michael Morpurgo
If I were omnipotent and omnibenevolent I wouldn't be so damn ineffable.
Jo Walton
You fear tomorrow: yet yesterday is just as dangerous.
Idries Shah
Journey to the end of day, Come the fire-fly, Come the moon; Say a prayer for God's good grace And sleep with lore upon your face.
Clive Barker
You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all.
Thomas Hardy
Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.
C.S. Lewis
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
Richard Dawkins
I despise women who rely on men entirely for their own existence.
Lindsey Davis
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.
Charlotte Brontë
Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography. You could wear, once more, your own life in all its stages, from whatever they wrapped you in when you emerged from the dark red naked warmth of the womb to your deathbed.
Linda Grant
People care more about being thought to have good taste than about being thought either good clever or amiable.
Samuel Butler
There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the same thing whether the lights belonged to a caravel battling the swell on a stormy horizon or a diamond-hulled starship which had just sliced its way through interstellar space.
Alastair Reynolds
As the many male victims of rape in the regime's disgusting jails can testify, this state-run pathology of sexual repression and sexual sadism is not content to degrade women only.
Christopher Hitchens
There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.
Jane Austen