Quotes by British Authors - Page 312

Telling me I’m pretty is nice and all, but if you really want to make my day, tell me I inspired you to read a book. Say you picked up a novel I’ve raved about and that you fell in love with it, too. Or tell me the time we spent reading aloud together was one of your favorite moments. Ask me to read to you, and beg for another chapter. This will fill me with indescribable joy and purpose.And if you really want to make me speechless with wonder, tell me it was MY words and MY story you enjoyed. Tell me you shed tears over the things my characters went through, and that you’re just a little bit in love with them, too. I might never recover. I will carry those words around in my heart for the rest of my life, like a talisman against all past and future criticisms.That’s how important stories are to me.
J.M. Richards
Sometimes you gotta take a break from all the noise to appreciate the beauty of silence.
Robert Tew
What seems wrong to you is right for himWhat is poison to one is honey to someone else.Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,These mean nothing to Me.I am apart from all that.Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as betteror worse than one another.Hindus do Hindu things.The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do.It's all praise, and it's all right.It's not I that's glorified in acts of worship.It's the worshippers! I don't hearthe words they say. I look inside at the humility.That broken-open lowliness is the Reality,not the language! Forget phraseology.I want burning, burning.Be Friendswith your burning. Burn up your thinkingand your forms of expression!
Karen Armstrong
The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale.
Stanley Kubrick
Bette Davis lived long enough to hear the Kim Carnes song, 'Bette Davis Eyes'. The lyrics to that song were not very interesting. But the fact of the song was the proof of an acknowledgement that in the twentieth century we lived through an age of immense romantic personalities larger than life, yet models for it, too - for good or ill. Like twin moons, promising a struggle and an embrace, the Davis eyes would survive her - and us. Kim Carnes has hardly had a consistent career, but that one song - sluggish yet surging, druggy and dreamy - became an instant classic. It's like the sigh of the islanders when they behold their Kong. And I suspect it made the real eyes smile, whatever else was on their mind.
David Thomson
Ignorance is more than bliss, it is a recipe for potential disaster.
Steven Redhead
Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.
Jeanette Winterson
Darling, whose book is this to be?""Ostensibly yours, my sweet""I see -- rather like my life since I met you?""Yes darling
John Wyndham
Just because something is told as a story and that story is part legend or myth, or feat of imagination, does not mean there is no truth in it.
Chris Priestley
Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
Alain de Botton
we do not write as we want but as we can
W Somerset Maugham
Christ's vast benevolence must, from the very nature of things, have afforded Him the deepest possible delight, for benevolence is joy.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Some things are hard to imagine. Can you conceive of excessive contentment, for example? Or an over pleasant evening? Too much happiness?
Alan Moore
There was never a great genius without a touch of madness.
Ben Jonson
We are medium-sized mammals who only prosper because we've developed a half-arsed ability to terraform the less suitable bits of the planet we evolved on, and we're conscious of our inevitable decay and death, and we can't live anywhere else. There is no invisible sky daddy to give us immortal life and a harp and wings when we die.
Charles Stross
Why is it that all individuals today, at least all who are socially conscious, are in one way or another tortured by social guilt? Because whatever they do is fatally false, falsified by the pressure of an utterly false society. If you live solely for individual contacts and personal service, then you betray your obligation to the suffering millions with whom you have no contact. If you live for economic or social and political action to cure the sick world, then, either you will be entirely ineffective, or else you will gain power, and so be corrupted by power; and then you will contribute to the burden of the institutionalism and mechanized tyranny that is turning all men into robots. If you withdraw from the world to purge your soul of the world’s poison, seeking a lone salvation in religious discipline and contemplation, then again you betray your immediate obligation to your fellows, even if you innocently suppose you will discover truth invaluable to a future generation. No! As I see it, do what you will, you are damned, just because you are all of a piece with a damned world, a damned species.
Olaf Stapledon
Remember, if Christmas isn't found in your heart, you won't find it under a tree.
Charlotte Carpenter
If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.
Rachel Cusk
I would prefer to have one comfortable room well stocked with books to all you could give me in the way of decoration which the highest art could supply.
John Bright
I may not believe in myself, but I believe in what I'm doing.
Jimmy Page
Your reward will be the widening of the horizon as you climb. And if you achieve that reward, you will ask no other.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
Charity groped for the phone, coming up with it at last and croaking "hello" in a voice that sounded exactly like a bullfrog's mating call. Which made a kind of twisted sense -- last night she'd been hunting for a mate as well.
Elizabeth Jane Howard
I am he As you are me And we are all together.
John Lennon
No wonder that the ghost and goblin stories had a new zest. No wonder that the blood of the more timid grew chill and curdled, that their flesh crept, and their hearts beat irregularly, and the girls peeped fearfully over their shoulders, and huddled close together like frightened sheep, and half-fancied they beheld some impish and malignant face gibbering at them from the darkling corners of the old room. By degrees my high spirits died out, and I felt the childish tremors, long latent, long forgotten, coming over me. I followed each story with painful interest; I did not ask myself if I believed the dismal tales. I listened and fear grew upon me - the blind, irrational fear of our nursery days. ("Horror: A True Tale")
John Berwick Harwood
It’s frustration which makes creativity possible.
Hanif Kureishi
Has something happened to upset you today?”“Yeah, I had an argument with a vacuum cleaner hose, it wanted me to it a blowjob, but I refused so it took offence. It claimed I blew everyone else's attachment and it wasn't fair.
Gillibran Brown
Do You BelieveDo you believethat I have loved yousince the dawn of time?Do you believethat we were destinedto be intertwined?...
Muse
Education with inert ideas is not only useless it is above all things harmful.
Alfred North Whitehead
People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of 'race' or 'gender' alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.
Christopher Hitchens
Were you terrified, Murgatroyd?" Murgatroyd nodded eagerly. "There you go, girl: You're a terrorist. You make me twitchy, and under Article Forty-One of the 2000 Terrorism Bill, that's all I need. Time for some reasonable force, I think.
China Miéville
He said he preferred to feel the earth sing through his feet, and that shoes stopped you from hearing the song of the earth.
Graham Joyce
It unscrews the other way.
J.K. Rowling
There is something about yourself that you don't know. Something that you will deny even exists until it's too late to do anything about it. It's the only reason you get up in the morning, the only reason you suffer the shitty boss, the blood, the sweat and the tears. This is because you want people to know how good, attractive, generous, funny, wild and clever you really are. "Fear or revere me, but please think I'm special." We share an addiction. We're approval junkies. We're all in it for the slap on the back and the gold watch. The "hip, hip, hoo-fucking-rah." Look at the clever boy with the badge, polishing his trophy. Shine on, you crazy diamond. Cos we're just monkeys wrapped in suits, begging for the approval of others.
Guy Ritchie
I had imagined myself into existence. I wrote because of an inner need,and that need was to create a clearer vision of myself, and in writing I became what I wrote.
Christopher Priest
Margaret liked this smile; it was the first thing she had admired in this new friend of her father's; and the opposition of character, shown in all these details of appearance she had just been noticing, seemed to explain the attraction they evidently felt towards each other.
Elizabeth Gaskell
Things don't so much end as disappear. They don't so much begin as turn up. You think there will be a time to say goodbye, but people have often gone before you know about it. And I don't just mean the dying.
Rachel Joyce
She never opened her mail in the middle of the day. Sometimes she forgot about it for a week or more until people rang to complain. Nor did she check her answering machine messages. In fact, it had only been in the last year that she had finally bought an answering machine, and she steadfastly refused to have a mobile, to the incredulity of all those around her, who didn’t believe that people could actually function without one. But Frieda wanted to be able to escape from incessant communications and demands. She didn’t want to be at anyone’s beck and call, and she liked cutting herself off from the urgent inanities of the world. When she was on her own, she liked to be truly alone. Out of contact and adrift.
Nicci French
The Scotchman seemed hardly the same Farfrae who had danced with her, and walked with her, in a delicate poise between love and friendship - that period in the history of a love when alone it can be said to be unalloyed with pain.
Thomas Hardy
I grew up in an era that was a golden age of the blockbuster, when something we might call a family film could have universal appeal. That's something I want to see again. In terms of the tone of the film, it looks at where we are as a people and has a universality about human experience.
Christopher J. Nolan
Onward and Upward! To Narnia and the North!
C.S. Lewis
You stick a bunch of drunken murderers together, ain't long before some turn to thieving, then to lying, then to bad language, and pretty soon to sobriety, raising families and making an honest living.
Joe Abercrombie
It was then I truly realised the whale is no more a fish than I am. So much blood. This was not like the fish on the quay, fresh caught, lying flipping and flopping, death on a simmer. This was a fierce, boiling death. She died thrashing blindly in a slick of gore, full of pain and fury, gnashing her jaws, beating her tail, spewing lumps of slime and half-digested fish that fell stinking about us. It was vile. So much strength dies slowly.
Carol Birch
Of course it's the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.
Margaret Thatcher
Albatrosses and penguins are the last birds I'd want to murder.
Bruce Chatwin
... ancient days of sorrowancient days of pain-heartaches of the pastslowly began to wane ...(from gleaning granules)
Muse
There is some prophecy, however, that is unconditional. It depends solely on God himself for fulfillment. Normally it relates to the overview of his plans and purposes for mankind as a whole.
Graham Cooke
The Lord's mercy often rides to the door of our hearts on the black horse of affliction. Jesus uses the whole range of our experiences to wean us from earth and woo us to Heaven.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Some say that you should turn your face from the light of the moon. They say it makes you mad.I turn my face towards it and I laugh.Make me mad, I whisper. Go on, make Mina mad.I laugh again.Some people think that she's already mad, I think.
David Almond
There is another version of the tale. That is the tale the women tell each other, in their private language that the men-children are not taught, and that the old men are too wise to learn. And in that version of the tale perhaps things happened differently. But then, that is a women's tale, and it is never told to men.
Neil Gaiman
Job tries to comfort himself with philosophical pessimism like the intellectuals of the nineteenth century. But God comforts Job with indecipherable mystery, and for the first time Job is comforted. . . . Job flings at God one riddle, God flings back at Job a hundred riddles, and Job is at peace. He is comforted with conundrums.
G.K. Chesterton
When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.
Winston S. Churchill
Learn about the true powers of your heart, it’s not just pulsing blood throughout your entire body, but also communicating with every cell including those of your mind.
Steven Redhead
My dear Watson, you as a medical man are continually gaining light as to the tendencies of a child by the study of the parents. Don't you see that the converse is equally valid. I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.”—Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
Arthur Conan Doyle
Let us humour if we can The vertical man Though we value none But the horizontal one.
W.H. Auden
Such is the state of life that none are happy but by the anticipation of change. The change itself is nothing. When we have made it the next wish is to change again.
Samuel Johnson
As it happened I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even of self-definition — I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another; in fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.
Rachel Cusk
Every physical response, every psychological change and every mental transformation starts with the mind.
David Amerland
They said I was a valued customer, now they send me hate mail.
Sophie Kinsella
Sometimes war is necessary to teach us the value of peace. Sometimes you need to learn the real value of diplomacy in avoiding war. And I'd rather my students learned those lessons on the playground than on the battlefield.
Neil Gaiman
Avoid the mindless chaos that pervades vast swathes of society.
Steven Redhead