Quotes by British Authors - Page 309

Why can't we have those curves and arches that express feeling in design? What is wrong with them? Why has everything got to be vertical straight unbending only at right angles - and functional?
Charles
I was up really early. It was the day of my selection tests and interviews to become a Prison Officer. The recruitment process was an absolute joke ... Everyone could have travelled round the world seven fucking times before they hear[d] back from the Service's recruitment cowboys.
Ronnie Thompson
He who having lost one ideal refuses to give his heart and soul to another and nobler is like a man who declines to build a house on rock because the wind and rain ruined his house on the sand.
Constance Naden
Ruby clapped her hands in glee and gave a comedic wiggle of her head, Bollywood style.I know the song now, can even sing it, but back then all I heard was the verdant Punjabi, the striking primary colours of the five rivers, the intricate history of a complex land.
Ruth Ahmed
My laboratory is interested in the related challenges of understanding the origin of life on the early earth, and constructing synthetic cellular life in the laboratory. Focusing on artificial life frees us to explore novel chemical systems, but what we learn from these systems helps us to understand possible pathways leading to the origin of life. Our basic design for a synthetic cell involves the encapsulation of a spontaneously replicating nucleic acid, which acts as the genetic material, within a spontaneously replicating membrane vesicle, which provides spatial localization. We are using chemical synthesis to make nucleic acids with modified nucleobases and sugar-phosphate backbones.
Jack W. Szostak
Imagine there's no countriesIt isn't hard to doNothing to kill or die forAnd no religion tooImagine all the peopleLiving life in peaceYou may say that I'm a dreamerBut I'm not the only oneI hope someday you'll join usAnd the world will be as one
John Lennon
I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. I do not believe that, on the balance, religious belief has been a force for good. Although I am prepared to admit that in certain times and places it has had some good effects, I regard it as belonging to the infancy of human reason, and to a stage of development which we are now outgrowing.
Bertrand Russell
The beauty in the genome is of course that it's so small. The human genome is only on the order of a gigabyte of data...which is a tiny little database. If you take the entire living biosphere, that's the assemblage of 20 million species or so that constitute all the living creatures on the planet, and you have a genome for every species the total is still about one petabyte, that's a million gigabytes - that's still very small compared with Google or the Wikipedia and it's a database that you can easily put in a small room, easily transmit from one place to another. And somehow mother nature manages to create this incredible biosphere, to create this incredibly rich environment of animals and plants with this amazingly small amount of data.
Freeman Dyson
My vibration is always in the sublime sunshine of life!
Debbie A. Anderson
And then the second thing you have to do is go and see your son. That is a duty of love, Andrew. It's as simple as that. A duty of love. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?
Alexander McCall Smith
what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'"- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, Ch. 1
Lewis Carroll
The feeling of freedom is as precious as a fortune waiting to be told.
Beth Kempton
There are no boundaries among the geese. How can you have boundaries if you fly?
T.H. White
Fancifully, I had thought I would feel the exact moment if anything ever happened to Scarlett, even if she wasn't nearby. Some kind of immense magnetic disturbance as our two hemispheres divided and went their separate ways.
Keith Houghton
What's a philosopher?' said Brutha.Someone who's bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting,' said a voice in his head.
Terry Pratchett
I'm afraid to go out at night because it's too dark.I'm afraid to try different food because I may not like it.I'm afraid to do something different because what if I fail.I'm afraid to smile at someone because it may lead to a conversation.I'm afraid to make friends because they may end up leaving me one day.I'm afraid to commit to any relationship because what if they're not as committed as I am.I'm afraid to go out because someone may break in while I'm not home.I'm afraid to think differently than everyone else because they may think that I'm crazy.I'm afraid of shadows because what would happen if one of them isn't my own.I'm afraid of being afraid because I'm too scared of everything.I'm afraid...Each of us is afraid of something, but if we let our fears dominate our lives, then we don't have any kind of life at all I'm afraid.
Anthony T.Hincks
Love is a noun as well as a verb, a treacherous construct.
Chloe Thurlow
And from the midst of cheerless gloomI passed to bright unclouded day.
Emily Brontë
Tomorrow's leaders will not lead dictating from the front, nor pushing from the back. They will lead from the centre - from the heart
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Here, at the edges,Whispering to you,And we’re not alone; not aloneHere, in the dark.We are behind the door, in the corners,In the room where you’ve just extinguished the light.We flicker in the shadow you cast on the wall.We are the prickle on the back of your neck.Curled, in words unspoken,We are the shiver on your uneasy flesh,The creep of the unknown on your skin.Can you feel us?Here, at the edges.From the Foreword of Cautionary Tales - by Emmanuelle de Maupassant
Emmanuelle de Maupassant
They here shall be redeemed from sin,Shall here put on their glorious dress,Fine linen, pure, and white, and cleanThe saints' inherent righteousness.Love, perfect love, expels all doubt,Love makes them to the end endure;Their names thou never wilt blot out;Their life is hid, their heart is pure.Their names thou wilt vouchsafe to ownBefore thy Father's majesty,Pronounce them good, and say, 'Well done,Enter, and ever reign with me!
Charles Wesley
Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.
Clive Barker
Watson. Come at once if convenient. If inconvenient, come all the same.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Some people live a nothing life: the most important thing they ever do is die. Thank God for eccentrics! Take Gunner Octavian Neat. He would suddenly appear naked in a barrack room and say, “Does anybody know a good tailor?”, or “Gentlemen – I think there’s a thief in the battery.” He was the bane of the Regiment.
Spike Milligan
Reading an author's Biography contributes to an understanding and enjoyment of their work, and gives a richness to the reading experience.
Suzy Davies
Eleanor went to her room "where she was free to think and be wretched.
Jane Austen
The dominating idea of English society was not cultivate virtue but to avoid scandal.
Edward Short
Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. I can't see how to avoid it, without being very rich or very unpopular, & it does worry me, for time is slipping by , and nothing is done. It isn't as if anything was gained by this social frivolity, It isn't: it's just a waste.
Philip Larkin
But still try for who knows what is possible!
Michael Faraday
Still men be clever and in an hundred centuries or more, perchance will have found a way to journey thither; when that they have discovered and understood all things on the earth. What will a man be like in the xxvii century, or even the xx? Very like unto us, I do expect; I do not think that man’s nature shall change; nor do I anticipate that he will be the wiser than we, for all his learning, for ‘tis a part of that nature which is ours that we do not heed the lessons of history: neither our own, nor the world’s.
Chico Kidd
I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn't present the picture they would like.
George MacDonald Fraser
I never knew how soothing trees are - many trees and patches of open sunlight and tree presences it is almost like having another being.
D.H. Lawrence
Many atheists might proudly proclaim that our lives have no ultimate meaning, yet the business of finding significance in one's life is perhaps the most important part of being human. When we drift into a life without meaning, we soon become a pack of symptoms and pathologies; and without any feeling of significance, many choose to end their lives altogether.
Derren Brown
If you want to routinely break the law and get away with it, then a police officer would be a great career choice for you.
Steven Magee
I couldn't make any sense of this logic, that the better off got more and those had little got less. The world ran on this law and only on this.
Neel Mukherjee
The American Club was for those who preferred to have dinner at six and brunch on a Sunday and avoid the stress of dealing with Greeks and their language.
John Mole
It is not for nothing that you are named Ransom,” said the Voice...The whole distinction between things accidental and things designed, like the distinction between fact and myth, was purely terrestrial. The pattern is so large that within the little frame of earthly experience there appear pieces of it between which we can see no connection, and other pieces between which we can. Hence we rightly, for our sue, distinguish the accidental from the essential. But step outside that frame and the distinction drops down into the void, fluttering useless wings. He had been forced out of the frame, caught up into the larger pattern… “My name also is Ransom,” said the Voice.
C.S. Lewis
She gave me another of those long keen looks, and I could see that she was again asking herself if her favourite nephew wasn't steeped to the tonsils in the juice of the grape.
P.G. Wodehouse
But sometimes, by the deserving and the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And when it is accomplished— behold!— all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile— and the return to an eternal rest.
Joseph Conrad
If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years as I could in a day.
Emily Brontë
Someone told me once, ‘It’s time to get you a pair of overalls, boy.’ But I don’t believe in summing up nothin’ – I let my experiences speak for themselves – and even if I did, a synopsis should be singular. That’s why every time I go out to work in the fields, I work naked. It lets my neighbors speak of my experiences for me.
M.C. Humphreys
It’s the strangest thing about this church - it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now, they will say we, with our permissive society and rude jokes, are obsessed. No. We have a healthy attitude. We like it, it’s fun, it’s jolly; because it’s a primary impulse it can be dangerous and dark and difficult. It’s a bit like food in that respect, only even more exciting. The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese, and that in erotic terms is the Catholic Church in a nutshell.
Stephen Fry
As we delight in the strange and exotic beauty of orchid flowers, it is salutary to reflect that we are, in essence, looking at their genitalia.
Unknown British Biologist
Larry has been absorbed, as he wished, into that tumultuous conglomeration of humanity, distracted by so many conflicting interests, so lost in the world's confusion, so wistful of good, so cocksure on the outside, so diffident within, so kind, so hard, so trustful and so cagey, so mean and so generous, which is the people of the United States.
W Somerset Maugham
It is much easier to do and die than it is to reason why.
G. A. Studdert-Kennedy
It is the favourite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own.
George Eliot
I feel a very unusual sensation - if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude.
Benjamin Disraeli
I see you are —”“Dumbledore’s man through and through,” said Harry. “That’s right.
J.K. Rowling
There can be no spirituality, according to the Sufi masters, without psychology, psychological insight and sociological balance.
Idries Shah
The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything is...42!
Douglas Adams
for fear is all the blind future harrying us and when the scales drop away the fear goes too
Adam Roberts
A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.
Leopold Stokowski
Woe to the soul which God rejoiceth to punish! . . . . Is it not a terrible thing to a wretched soul, when it shal lie roaring perpetually in the flames of hell, and the God of mercy himself shall laugh at them; when they shall cry out for mercy, yea, for one drop of water, and God shall mock them instead of relieving them; when non in heaven or earth can help them but God, and hell shall rejoice over them in their calamity(244)?
Richard Baxter
Aim to live the life that gives you the most of what you want.
Steven Redhead
I was with book, as a woman is with child.
C.S. Lewis
It is mere nonsense to put pain among the discoveries of science. Lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practiced, in a world without chloroform.
C.S. Lewis
I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to beige. But when I look again, cream is next to green is next to black. A tall book shelters a small book, a huge Folio bullies a cowering line of Quartos. A child's nursery rhyme book does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless.
Susan Hill
Lilith came to Longinus in the night, as she often did, and the darkness of the cave was filled with the lustful sounds of their passionate couplings. Afterwards, as he lay back with his eyes closed, she ran her cool fingers playfully across his chest and whispered honeyed words in his ear.
Alan Kinross
It was never built for the comfort and happiness of its citizens, but to astonish the world.
Susan Ertz
A veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line, 'Good mor
Christopher Isherwood