Quotes by British Authors - Page 305

Of an artistic temperament, I deny that I am; yet I must possess something of the artist's faculty of making the most of present pleasure.
Charlotte Brontë
When people are free to choose, they choose freedom
Margaret Thatcher
It's wrong for libraries to have limited budgets.
Jo Walton
…It was embarrassing now to recall with what little regret he had let slip his pleasures and preoccupations, the imminence of loss revealing them for what they were, at best only a solace, at worst a trivial squandering of time and energy. Now he had to lay hold of them again and believe that they were important, at least to himself. He doubted whether he would ever again believe them important to other people.
P.D. James
He answered the phone to his daughter with a broken but joyous heart, ready to speak with her of astonishment and wonder.
Patrick Ness
When the love of your life dies, the problem is not that some part of you dies too, which it does, but that some part of you is still alive.
Jackie Kay
The misconception of something being a certainty sometimes gets to me until I remember we can change most things consciously.
Jay Woodman
With a burning ambition, sustained focus, and daily action - there simply are no limits to what you will achieve.
Curtis Rivers
But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead.
Scarlett Thomas
They keep you doped with religion, and sex, and T.V.And you think you're so clever and classless and freeBut you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see
John Lennon
There are times in one's life when a good book—the right book—feels like a voice speaking in the darkness,reaching out from the past;providing solace when all else seems lost.
Justine Picardie
Maybe in the case of true human, their mind, their soul, their consciousness flows through their bodies like blood, inhabiting every cell of their physical being, and so Aristotle was right, in humans the mind and body are one and cannot be separated, the self is both with the body and perishes with it too. She imagined that union with a thrill. How lucky human beings were if that was the case, she wanted to tell Geronimo who was and was not Ibn Rushd: lucky and doomed. When their hearts pounded with excitement their souls pounded too, when their pulses raced their spirits were aroused, hen their eyes moistened with tears of happiness it was their minds that felt the joy. Their minds touched the people their fingers touched, and when they in turn were touched by others it was as if two consciousnesses were briefly joined. The mind gave the body sensuality, it allowed the body to taste delight and to smell love in their lover's sweet perfume; not only their bodies but their minds, too, made love. And at the end the soul, as mortal as the body, learned the last great lesson of life, which was the body's death.
Salman Rushdie
When you can begin to see the similarities between you and your work colleagues in respect of ‘being human’ and the collective challenges we all face, it makes life much easier to deal with, especially when met with overbearing behaviour.
Christopher Dines
Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns--nicht wahr?. . . No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. So if you ask me--how to be?
Joseph Conrad
A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.
Anthony Trollope
Disconnect from society’s pressure to conform. Do things your own way.
Fennel Hudson
The next morning, when Thomasin withdrew the curtains of her bedroom window, there stood the Maypole in the middle of the greek, its top cutting into the sky. It had sprung up in the night. or rather early morning, like Jack's bean-stalk. She opened the casement to get a better view of the garlands and posies that adored it. The sweet perfume of the flowers had already spread into the surrounding air, which being free from every taint, conducted to her lips a full measure of the fragrance received from the spire of blossom in its midst. At the top of the pole were crossed hoops decked with small flowers; beneath these came a milk-white zone of Maybloom;then a zone of bluebells, then of cowslips, then of lilacs, then of ragged-rosins, daffodils and so on, till the lowest stage was reached.Thomasin noticed all these, and was delighted that the May revel was to be so near.
Thomas Hardy
It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule. You are puzzled because you cannot get over the idea that pleasures are only of the sense; but, child, a man who dies for his country dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage because he likes it.
W Somerset Maugham
If any young man reads this Book aright, he becomes large-hearted. He cannot hold his soul within the narrow bound of his ribs, but his great heart looks out to see where it can scatter benefits.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Gods should be iridescent, like the rainbow in the storm. Man creates a God in his own image, and the gods grow old along with the men that made them... But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard.
D.H. Lawrence
Having it all is just too much hassle. I'm not every-woman. I'm a working woman. And I'm not entirely sure I see the oint of being as dexterous in the kitchen as I am at my desk. If Mr. Y is perfectly satisfied with pre-packaged sushi every night, then far be it from me to raise his hopes with all sorts of homey behavior. The secret, I have discovered, is to manage expectations. If he doesn't expect it, then he's hardly going to be disappointed to discover he may never again eat a home-cooked meal. Or indeed, ever eat again.
Amy Mowafi
That he will haunt the footsteps of his enemy after death is the one revenge which a dying man can promise himself; and if men had power thus to avenge themselves the earth would be peopled with phantoms. ("Eveline's Visitant")
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.
Hilary Mantel
History repeats itself but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.
Joseph Conrad
Life is made of connections. Who knows why fate throws things in our direction, but one thing's for sure, new things are there to offer value to our lives and teach us something new about ourselves. It's what makes life exciting.
Serina Hartwell
Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.
Tom Hodgkinson
Cross-legged on the floor, you drink, hoping each mouthful will hurt; occasional flurries of spastic movement as you try to work out what to do with your hands. When everyone else is gone, your world is just a tiny box with the walls pressing in. Messages on the phone you can't bear to play, much less listen to, and nothing in the apartment that you can recognize as meaningfully yours.
Michael Marshall Smith
If I were you, Mr Lascelles," said Childermass, softly, "I would speak more guardedly. You are in the north now. In John Uskglass's own country. Our towns and cities and abbeys were built by him. Our laws were made by him. He is in our minds and hearts andspeech. Were it summer you would see a carpet of tiny flowers beneath every hedgerow, of a bluish-white colour. We call them John's Farthings. When the weather is contrary and we have warm weather in winter or it rains in summer the country people say that JohnUskglass is in love again and neglects his business. And when we are sure of something we say it is as safe as a pebble in John Uskglass's pocket.
Susanna Clarke
The human situation, in general or in particular, is slightly worse (ignoring an occasional hiccup in the graph) at any given moment than at any preceding moment.
FARRELL J.G.
Lust, I suspect, wears repatent stilettos, that feather boa and not much else. Maybe glossy red lipstick.
Claire Cross
When God gives you a mission, He also gives you everything you need to fulfill that mission.
Elizabeth George
In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.
Samuel Johnson
Why, in a world where there is love, would you ever choose hate?
Siobhan Curham
Indeed. I have often thought that when a man selects one word over another he often reveals far more of himself than he intended.
Mark Hodder
Your life - and all lives - will be richer if lived with a open, loving heart rather than a closed, fearful mind
Rasheed Ogunlaru
It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.
Charles Darwin
Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
Terry Eagleton
...if we were to associate the genius of a place with one particular thing – the Russians with literature, say, or the Germans with music, the Dutch and Spanish with painting – we would have to say that the true genius of Ancient India was language.
Aatish Taseer
Prayer is a shield to the soul a sacrifice to God and a scourge for Satan.
John Bunyan
Powerful to alleviate, to delay, to camouflage, though money is, in the end it lets us down.
Caryll Houselander
I have no objection to instruments of music in our worship, provided they are neither seen nor heard.
John Wesley
I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.
George Orwell
Comedians can turn laughter into tears and back again.
Anthony T.Hincks
Life has many insignificant pursuits that add little or no value to your reality.
Steven Redhead
He went to work in this preparatory lesson, not unlike Morgiana in the Forty Thieves: looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after another, to see what they contained. Say, good M’Choakumchild. When from thy boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within—or sometimes only maim him and distort him!
Charles Dickens
Every story of conversion is a story of blessed defeat.
C.S. Lewis
Cats are a mysterious kind of folk.
Walter Scott
Ty swung around. He was obviously fed up with Ben's negative attitude.
Lauren Brooke
I have a hundred times heard him say, that all ages and nations have represented their gods as wicked, in a constantly increasing progression; that mankind have gone on adding trait after trait till they reached the most perfect conception of wickedness which the human mind could devise, and have called this God, and prostrated themselves before it.
John Stuart Mill
I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed like sugar and butter
Virginia Woolf
I believe, Messieurs, in loyalty---to one's friends and one's family and one's caste.
Agatha Christie
Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds even if it is the salt of the earth.
Rebecca West
It was the forty-fathom slumber that clears the soul and eye and heart, and sends you to breakfast ravening. They emptied a big tin dish of juicy fragments of fish- the blood-ends the cook had collected overnight. They cleaned up the plates and pans of the elder mess, who were out fishing, sliced pork for the midday meal, swabbed down the foc'sle, filled the lamps, drew coal and water for the cook, an investigated the fore-hold, where the boat's stores were stacked. It was another perfect day - soft, mild and clear; and Harvey breathed to the very bottom of his lungs.
Rudyard Kipling
Things that are truly innocent don’t need to be labelled as such.
Zoë Heller
Really, I protest--what is left for the satirical mind to invent when reality so surpasses it?
Jude Morgan
Dad?" Jesus asked."Yes, son?" God replied."What came before colors?" Jesus asked."What do you mean?" God asked."Well, before we had colors. What was there?" Jesus asked."We've always had colors," God said."What about the darkness then?" Jesus asked."That's black," God said."So colors come from black," Jesus said."Yes, if you want to keep your colors vibrant, you need to keep them in something black and then when they come out, they're beautiful and full of life," God said."Now that I know darkness is full of colors, I won't be afraid of it anymore," Jesus said.God smiled, "You should never be scared of darkness. It's just a box with colors in. That's all." Jesus laughed and smiled. He wasn't afraid anymore.
Anthony T.Hincks
Lockhart'll sign anything if it stands still long enough.
J.K. Rowling
Although we should affirm the wonder and mystery of sexual intimacy and romantic attraction as God's good creations, we need to set these aesthetic enjoyments within the context of the Christian virtues of fidelity, self-sacrifice, and patience in suffering.Bringing this together, our pastoral approach should be double-edged, seeking to challenge our culture's worship of sexual desire and personal fulfillment while offering a different vision of human flourishing. Christian formative involves both RESISTANCE and REDIRECTION. But is is the redirection of our desires that enables our resistance of cultural idolatries. Failure to attend to the dynamics of our desires leads to inevitable self-deception regarding the 'freedom' of our actions. Especially within our sexual lives, our hearts must be truly captivated by the goodness of the Christian vision of life, so that our whole self is drawn toward it, or our commitment to live in tune with it will be brittle.
Jonathan Grant
Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers.
Philip Kerr
Luck is what a capricious man believes in.
Benjamin Disraeli