Quotes by British Authors - Page 313

In the eyes of others, we're often not who we imagine ourselves to be.
Gilly Macmillan
If we could all hear one another's prayers God might be relieved of some of his burden.
Ashleigh Brilliant
So, Americans, then. Self-appointed vigilante defenders of the world, kind of like Superman, if Superman was retarded and only fought crime when he felt like it.
Yahtzee Croshaw
Oh, the others will talk and plan and make oaths and promises, but there are precious few fuckers who will do.
Ian McGuire
You put cow dung on my face?’ ‘Every day religiously until you were three. Why else do you think your skin is so clear?
Renita D'Silva
You may well warn me against such an evil. Human nature is so prone to fall into it!
Jane Austen
I've interrupted a party. Is it in celebration of the peace or in honor of the next war?
Winston Graham
A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
Jane Austen
Why, when you have a mental disease, is it always considered an act of imagination? Why is it that every organ in your body can get sick and you get sympathy except the brain?
Ruby Wax
As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War—they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.
G.K. Chesterton
The river of life, of mysterious laws and mysterious choice, flows past a deserted embankment; and along that other deserted embankment Charles now begins to pace, a man behind the invisible gun carriage on which rests his own corpse. He walks towards an imminent, self-given death? I think not; for he has at which to build; has already begun, though he would still bitterly deny it, thought there are tears in his eyes to support his denial, to realize that life, however advantageously Sarah may in some ways seem to fit the role of Sphinx, is not a symbol, is not one riddle and one failure to guess it, is not to inhabit one face alone or to be given up after one losing throw of the dice; but is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly into the city's iron heart, endured. And out again, upon the unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.
John Fowles
It’s never too early to begin pointing your little ones’ souls heavenward.
Elizabeth George
Red's world, you see, is a closed circle. Not that it matters. I know that I'm a closed circle, too, and it's all I can do to find some starting point from myself, while at the same time trying to find my own terminus. There's no way I'm ever going to find my beginning or end in somebody else's circle. Two people together never add up to anything more than one person added to another. That we continue to add ourselves up in this way is the reason human beings will always be lonely.
Xiaolu Guo
Not entirely fair?" His voice became that of the inferno: a rushing, booming howl of icy evil that flew around the great cavern, as swift and cold as the Wendigo on skates. "I am Satan, also called Lucifer the Light Bearer..."Cabal winced. What was it about devils that they always had to give you their whole family history?"I was cast down from the presence of God himself into this dark, sulfurous pit and condemned to spend eternity here-""Have you tried saying sorry?" interrupted Cabal."No, I haven't! I was sent down for a sin of pride. It rather undermines my position if I say 'sorry'!
Jonathan L. Howard
I am a Jewish mother. My dying words will be, “Put a jumper on
Amanda Craig
I am not ashamed that I was once a vacuum-cleaner salesman, only that I was a *good* vacuum-cleaner salesman.
Robert Morley
Believe that you can run farther or faster. Believe that you're young enough, old enough, strong enough, and so on to accomplish everything you want to do. Don't let worn-out beliefs stop you from moving beyond yourself.
John Bingham
When challenged by a zealous Popperian to say how evolution could ever be falsified, J. B. S. Haldane famously growled: 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.
Richard Dawkins
Jean and I had, as I think a great many best friends have, a secret make-believe world of our own. We had only to say, 'Let's be Lilian and Diana,' and, as though it was a magical formula, step straight into a world that was as real to us as the world of school and parents and cornflakes for breakfast. . . . In the summer after my father retired, Jean came to stay with me in North Devon. On the first morning, we retired to the rustic summerhouse. 'Let's be Lilian and Diana . . .'But the magic formula no longer worked. We tried and tried; but we could only _act_ Lilian and Diana; we could not _be_ them any more. I suppose the break had been too long, and we were just too old. We went on trying for days, searching for the way in. But it was like searching for the lost door to a lost country. Finally, without anything actually being said between us, we gave up and turned to other things. But with Lilian and Diana, something of Jean and Rosemary had gone too: left behind the lost door to the lost country. It was one of the saddest experiences of my young life.
Rosemary Sutcliff
We must wrestle earnestly in prayer like men contending with a deadly enemy for life.
J.C. Ryle
most men know what they hate few what they love
Charles Caleb Colton
They say that your powers of memory are at their peak when you're 26, and it's all downhill after that.
Lisa Jewell
In Dzokchen, compassion is much more than the virtue of loving kindness. Nor does the word compassion in the Dzokchen context denote its English etymological meaning, “suffering together” or “empathy,” although both these meanings may be inferred. Essentially, compassion indicates an open and receptive mind responding spontaneously to the exigencies of an ever-changing field of vibration to sustain the optimal awareness that serves self-and-others’ ultimate desire for liberation and well-being. The conventional meaning of compassion denotes the latter, active part of this definition, and, due to the accretions of Christian connotation, response is limited to specifically virtuous activity. “Responsiveness” defines the origin and cause of selfless activity that can encompass all manner of response. On this nondual Dzokchen path virtue is the effect, not the cause; the ultimate compassionate response is whatever action maximizes Knowledge—loving kindness is the automatic function of Awareness.
Keith Dowman
I was relying on youth be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness, which our hard-won marriage represents.
Alain de Botton
The Bloody-Nine opened his mouth, and shrieked out all of his bottomless love and his endless hate in one long wail.
Joe Abercrombie
The most dangerous thing in life is an incompetent that has been given a gun and a law enforcement badge.
Steven Magee
He that has learned to feel his sins, and to trust Christ as a Saviour, has learned the two hardest and greatest lessons in Christianity.
J.I. Packer
It is the custom on the stage: in all good, murderous melodramas: to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon. The hero sinks upon his straw bed, weighed down by fetters and misfortunes; and, in the next scene, his faithful but unconscious squire regales the audience with a comic song. We behold, with throbbing bosoms, the heroine in the grasp of a proud and ruthless baron: her virtue and her life alike in danger; drawing forth a dagger to preserve the one at the cost of the other; and, just as our expectations are wrought up to the highest pitch, a whistle is heard: and we are straightway transported to the great hall of the castle: where a grey-headed seneschal sings a funny chorus with a funnier body of vassals, who are free of all sorts of places from church vaults to palaces, and roam about in company, carolling perpetually.Such changes appear absurd; but they are not so unnatural as they would seem at first sight. The transitions in real life from well-spread boards to death-beds, and from mourning weeds to holiday garments, are not a whit less startling; only, there, we are busy actors, instead of passive lookers-on; which makes a vast difference. The actors in the mimic life of the theatre, are blind to violent transitions and abrupt impulses of passion or feeling, which, presented before the eyes of mere spectators, are at once condemned as outrageous and preposterous.
Charles Dickens
There will be a future. We believe in our unreality too strongly to give it up.
Jeanette Winterson
Because that's what unfaithfulness is, isn't it? A cancer that's always there in the back of your mind, eating away at the foundations of the relationship.
Matt Dunn
The scary thing about the protective properties of dietary intake regarding abnormal human radiation exposures is that NASA has understood this for decades!
Steven Magee
Warlock: Four thousand and fifty-three metric tons of inert rock, metal and organic matter, frozen solid.Quasar: Frozen in what?Drax: Time.Quasar: "Time", Drax?Drax: Uh-huh. Old, old frozen time.Quasar: Right. And that tastes like what?Drax: Regret.
Dan Abnett
Death was far more certain than God.
Graham Greene
For any scientist the real challenge is not to stay within the secure garden of the known but to venture out into the wilds of the unknown.
Marcus du Sautoy
Sometimes children do not realize by how fragile a thread their security hangs. Perhaps it is as well they do not - most of them grow up before the thread can be broken.
Mary Balogh
Animals will always have sad eyes because they can see into the soul of man.
Anthony T.Hincks
Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
Terry Eagleton
Change is the most beneficial power available to you, simply change the things you don't like, replacing them with your true desires.
Steven Redhead
This book will prove the following ten facts:1. A Goon is a being who melts into the foreground and sticks there.2. Pigs have wings, making them hard to catch.3. All power corrupts, but we need electricity.4. When an irresistible force meets an immovable object, the result is a family fight.5. Music does not always sooth the troubled beast.6. An Englishman's home is his castle.7. The female of the species is more deadly than the male.8. One black eye deserves another.9. Space is the final frontier, and so is the sewage farm.10. It pays to increase your word power.
Diana Wynne Jones
When distrust is so profound that it makes you wary of every word dripping from honeyed lips...It sharpens your instincts...Now for a woman, THAT is a powerful weapon...
Virginia Alison
but it was a religion which enabled him to despise himself and everyone else without despising the universe, thus allowing him at once in argument or conversation to the advantages of the pessimist and the optimist.
Charles Williams
You see, dear—I think there are two types of people in the world. Those who divide the world up into two kinds of people... and those who don't.
Tony Hendra
Apart from being dead its going to be necessary to die. And I'm dealing at the moment with the realization that at my age there is absoutely no way in which I can skirt the matter and come out on the other side.
Nathaniel Tarn
Perhaps trust had to be accompanied by a measure of common sense, and a hefty dose of realism about human nature. But that would need a lot of thinking about, and the tea break did not go on forever.
Alexander McCall Smith
The Ritz Hotel was grand, sophisticated, and established, unlike me. The only thing we had in common was façade. Mine may not have been as ornate but it was equally phony. I was presenting myself as an escort; I advertised as one, negotiated like one on the phone, and I identified as one to whoever was interested. I even simulated sex for escort rates.
Aiden Shaw
When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity – that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.
Graham Greene
The past had already been dealt with, to one end or another, it was certain, fixed, the horror of it was already over.For the living at least. They grieved, yes, but they were not trapped in the terror of the moment.Not so for my poor, elegant wraiths. They were like the old-fashioned zoetropes you find at the seaside: a tiny slice of a world in a box, brief yet somehow also eternal.
Hazel Butler
He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people’s jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; or gave all the jobs to his relatives; that he could be a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a footballer or a filmmaker; that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshiped elephants and wore turbans; that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been murdered.
Zadie Smith
Cheap booze is a false economy.
Christopher Hitchens
Look at the way people have swung through Communism, Toryism, Liberalism -- in vast blocks. In my father's boyhood you were either a Liberal or a Conservative in England, and there you stuck, and in America you were a sturdy individualist Democrat or Republican from the cradle to the grave. But now the Voice does it -- the pervading voice. And just nowit's come to a point when a Voice -- putting it straight and clear. Straight and clear...
H.G.Wells
The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses.
Thomas Henry Huxley
What is peculiar and novel to our age is that the principal goal of politics in every advanced society is not, strictly speaking, a political one, that is today, it is not concerned with human beings as persons and citizens, but with human bodies. ... In all technologically advanced countries today, whatever political label they give themselves, their policies have, essentially, the same goal: to guarantee to every member of society, as a psychophysical organism, the right to physical and mental health.
W.H. Auden
Truly there is a Living God, and He is the hearer and answerer of prayer.
Hudson Taylor
Books must be treated with respect, we feel that in our bones, because words have power. Bring enough words together they can bend space and time.
Terry Pratchett
The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's.
G.K. Chesterton
I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.
Douglas Adams
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenityAnd the wisdom of age? Had they deceived usOr deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secretsUseless in the darkness into which they peeredOr from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,At best, only a limited valueIn the knowledge derived from experience.The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,For the pattern is new in every momentAnd every moment is a new and shockingValuation of all we have been. We are only undeceivedOf that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
T.S Eliot
At night in the town's countryside, you could just about feel and hear everything, but without using lamps, it was impossible to see anything other than shadows
Peter Fryer
Like most artists, everything I produced was connected to who I was - and so I suffered according to how my work was received. The idea that anyone might be able to detach their personal value from their public output was revolutionary.
Jessie Burton
You are a human with one life and its up to you to make it the best life you can.
Dan Howell