Quotes by British Authors - Page 314

Love, love, love, love is all you can do, even in the face of bitterness, pain, anger, confusion, it's the only thing to keep you steady and stop you biting back.
Jay Woodman
In relation to law I am doubtful whether, even at the present time, science has fairly begun.
H.G.Wells
For a tiny instant Faith wondered whether it would benefit the doctor's investigation if he experienced a cliff fall first-hand.
Frances Hardinge
Show me a person who has never made a mistake and I'll show you someone who has never achieved much.
Joan Collins
America Is A GunEngland is a cup of tea. France, a wheel of ripened brie.Greece, a short, squat olive tree.America is a gun.Brazil is football on the sand.Argentina, Maradona's hand.Germany, an oompah band.America is a gun.Holland is a wooden shoe.Hungary, a goulash stew.Australia, a kangaroo.America is a gun.Japan is a thermal spring.Scotland is a highland fling.Oh, better to be anythingthan America as a gun.
Brian Bilston
You can't just sit in a corner weeping or you'll die.
Elizabeth Wein
That's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster.
Ted Hughes
Most marriages don't add two people together. They subtract one from the other.
Ian Fleming
But you still need the two: the dark and the light. You can't see one without the other.
Julia Green
The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.
H.G.Wells
All ministries, therefore, must be subjected to this test—if they do not glorify Christ, they are not of the Holy Spirit.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Maybe this journey is a way for you to get your redemption..." he said softly, "Maybe, if Elder Man Belduran is right, it is the start of a journey, that leads to redemption for all of us...""Not all of us... There's no redemption for Elder Man Vaymaz..." Melchor replied softly, before turning and continuing to walk.
Nathalie M.L. Römer
He had gone again and, emboldened by his first successful trip, had chosen a different sort of world to enter, that of THE MONK. He had studied the book with great care and finally selected a passage that was purely descriptive.The result was the same. The instant he closed the top of the showcase, he was transported to the world described in the open pages. He found himself standing - and shivering - in a dank corridor that, he knew, was far underground. Feeble candlelight flickered in the distance, off to his left. Water dripped down the gleaming walls and startled rats scurried past his feet. The air was stale and unpleasant. Down the corridor to his left, he could hear singing but could not make out the words. Then suddenly, from his right, he heard a woman's high-pitched scream, its sound caroming off the wet, stone walls of the passageway. He jumped, his skin crawling at the back of his neck.And found himself back in his warm and familiar room.("I Shall Not Leave England Now")
Alan Ryan
Men will allow God to be everywhere but on his throne. They will allow him to be in his workshop to fashion worlds and make stars. They will allow Him to be in His almonry to dispense His alms and bestow his bounties. they will allow Him to sustain the earth and bear up the pillars thereof, or light the lamps of heaven, or rule the waves of the ever-moving ocean; but when God ascends Hes throne, His creatures then gnash their teeth. And we proclaim an enthroned God, and His right to do as He wills with His own, to dispose of His creatures as He thinks well, without consulting them in the matter; then it is that we are hissed and execrated, and then it is that men turn a deaf ear to us, for God on His throne is not the God they love. But it is God upon the throne that we love to preach. It is God upon His throne whom we trust.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.
Alexander McCall Smith
We have all lived through that shriveling moment when a parent walks into a room and repeats, with sardonic disbelief, a couplet picked up from the stereo or the TV. 'What does that mean, then?' my mother asked me during Top of the Pops. "Get it on / Bang a gong"? How long did it take him to think of that, do you reckon?' And the correct answer - 'Two seconds, and it doesn't matter' - is always beyond you, so you just tell her to shut up, while inside you're hating Marc Bolan for making you like him even though he sings about getting it on and banging gongs.
Nick Hornby
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?
C.S. Lewis
Memory is an artist, an impressionist. She adds colour, sound, smell and emotion to events at her whim. She adds, subtracts and embellishes until the event she started documenting is quite unrecognisable to the others who also experienced it, but at the same time, is more truthful to the owner of the memory. There is no reality. There are only impres- sions of past events, made by a million selves, all interacting with each other, vying for superiority. Reality doesn’t exist, perhaps in the end, that’s my only truth.
Nigel Jay Cooper
We are all artists painting our desires on the canvas of life and time.
Steven Redhead
..what moved me was that I had found something I didn't think could exist. And that thing - the thing that I found - was very simple. Most people know all about it and have never really doubted it because their lives have been such as to give them a glimpse of the thing that they were not sure about, which is love, of course: the sheer fact of feeling of love for another, of finding the one person - the only person, it seems - who makes the world make sense. It's like discovering the map that you've been looking for all your life and have never been able to find - the map that makes sense of the journey.
Alexander McCall Smith
What you have made me see,' answered the Lady, 'is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet is has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one’s mind. Then, may it be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before–that the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished–if it were possible to wish–you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.
C.S. Lewis
People write for ego gratification, not money.
Deborah Meyler
I wanted stories, and I wanted them always, and I wanted the experience that only fiction could give me: I wanted to be inside them.
Neil Gaiman
I did what I had to do. Now he's motivated.""Yeah, sure, motivated to s**t his pants maybe," Luke point out.
Amanda Steel
Could some of the challenging behaviours that often partner autism begin as experiements on measuring human reactions? Are these children exploring boundaries - seeing what makes the toy squeak or the adult shriek?
Adele Devine
The thing about lying is it’s like creating your own world, controlling your own little world. A tiny innocent, or as some people call them white lie, can lead eventually to the break-up of a relationship. If the other person in the relationship knows the person has lied, no matter if it was with good intentions, then it’s the beginning of the breakdown of trust. A profile or a picture is being continually formed of the two people in a relationship, and the lies, big and small, add to that profile.
Garry Crystal
People who prefer to believe the worst of others will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts.
Dorothy L. Sayers
This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.
Jacob Bronowski
I have a feeling that we've seen the dismantling of civilisation, brick by brick, and now we're looking into the void. We thought that we were liberating people from oppressive cultural circumstances, but we were, in fact, taking something away from them. We were killing off civility and concern. We were undermining all those little ties of loyalty and consideration and affection that are necessary for human flourishing. We thought that tradition was bad, that it created hidebound societies, that it held people down. But, in fact, what tradition was doing all along was affirming community and the sense that we are members of one another. Do we really love and respect one another more in the absence of tradition and manners and all the rest? Or have we merely converted one another into moral strangers - making our countries nothing more than hotels for the convenience of guests who are required only to avoid stepping on the toes of other guests?
Alexander McCall Smith
Human history is in essence a history of ideas.
H.G.Wells
Why'd you want to sing about sad things?" Candy had asked him."Because any fool can be happy," he'd said to her."It takes a man with real heart"—he'd made a fist and laid it against his chest—"to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.
Clive Barker
The laboring man and the artificer knows what every hour of his time is worth and parts not with it but for the full value.
Lord Clarendon
I do not preach doubtingly, for I do not live doubtingly.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I don’t know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, ‘Why don’t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?’ And I always say, well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate…
David Attenborough
When shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes, nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.
Jon Ronson
Make life a wonder to behold.
Steven Redhead
There is no water, so things are bad. If there were water, it would be better. But there is no water.
T.S Eliot
Injustice is a rule of the service, as you know very well; and since you have to have a good deal of undeserved abuse, you might just as well have it from your friends.
Patrick O'Brian
But in case signals can neither be seen or perfectly understood no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside the enemy.
Horatio Nelson
I could just as easily have taken the train.”He shut his eyes, just long enough for a movie of a Tess-induced train riot to screen on the backs of his eyelids. Fists flying, teeth broken, friendships destroyed as men vied to get closer to her lush body barely covered in that incendiary French maid outfit. And now he was turning hard again.
Kate Meader
Everything that matters hurts, until it doesn't matter anymore.
Dianna Hardy
When a baronet is discovered behind a bush in the park with a guardsman, or a minister of the crown is caught creeping out of a country with his socks stuffed full of bank notes and a woman not his wife ten paces behind, or a public person is revealed disporting himself with a couple of tarts and a teddy bear in West Paddington, they complain to the press that the outcry is hypocritical and that everyone would like to do what they were doing if only they had the chance. They regard the law as an instrument of envy, like nationalization and death duties.
Alice Thomas Ellis
Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are callingFrom glen to glen, and down the mountain sideThe summer's gone, and all the flowers are dying'Tis you, 'tis you must go and I must bide.But come ye back when summer's in the meadowOr when the valley's hushed and white with snow'Tis I'll be here in sunshine or in shadowOh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so.And if you come, when all the flowers are dyingAnd I am dead, as dead I well may beYou'll come and find the place where I am lyingAnd kneel and say an "Ave" there for me.And I shall hear, tho' soft you tread above meAnd all my dreams will warm and sweeter beIf you'll not fail to tell me that you love meI'll simply sleep in peace until you come to me.I'll simply sleep in peace until you come to me.
Fred E. Weatherly
Jesus enters the garden, in preparation, intending to face his fears by facing his God, his Father, His greatest fear is to offend his Father, to disobey his own calling, its integrity, and the word of God on his life.
Megan McKenna
We are all different. God made us that way. Drawing a line in the sand due to that is indeed unfortunate.
Jill Telford
The artist says to the cosmos: All I ask is infinite love-is that so very wrong? And the cosmos doesn't even bother to respond.
John Lanchester
Perhaps this is what Henry James meant when he talked about the “irresponsibility” of characters. Characters are irresponsible, art is irresponsible when compared to life, because it is first and foremost important that a character be real, and as readers or watchers we tend to applaud any effort made towards the construction of that reality. We do not, of course, indulge actual people in the world this way at all. In real life, the fact that something seems real to someone is not enough to interest us, or to convince us that that reality is interesting. But the self-reality of fictional characters is deeply engrossing, which is why villains are lovable in literature in ways that they are not in life.
James Wood
What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.
George Eliot
Life is a gift. We don't earn it. We don't own it. Learn to be thankful for the time that you have.
Joshua David Swift
There’s a lot of degradation in sex, isn’t there?”“When it’s done right.
Hanif Kureishi
I meant skies all empty aching blue. I meant years. I meant all of them with you.
Kate Clanchy
The four stages of acceptance:1. This is worthless nonsense.2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.3. This is true, but quite unimportant.4. I always sai
J.B.S. Haldane
How can we turn our knowledge about God into knowledge of God? The rule for doing this is simple but demanding. It is that we turn each Truth that we learn about God into matter for meditation before God, leading to prayer and praise to God.
J.I. Packer
An' I learned about women from 'er.
Rudyard Kipling
Why it's simply impassible!Alice: Why, don't you mean impos
Lewis Carroll
If you care for money too much, it is only the money you see, everything else is in shadow.
Agatha Christie
A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them.
G.K. Chesterton
That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes -- the legal subordination of one sex to the other -- is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.
John Stuart Mill
The pageant of the river bank had marched steadily along, unfolding itself in scene-pictures that succeeded itself in stately procession. Purple loosestrife arrived early, shaking luxuriant locks along the edge of the mirror whence its own face laughed back at it. Willow-herb, tender and wistful, like a pink sunset-cloud was not slow to follow. Comfrey, the purple hand-in-hand with the white, crept forth to take its place in the line; and at last one morning the diffident and delaying dog-rose stepped delicately on the stage, and one knew, as if string music has announced it in stately chords that strayed into a gavotte, that June at last was here. One member of the company was still awaited; the shepherd-boy for the nymphs to woo, the knight for whom the ladies waited at the window, the prince that was to kiss the sleeping summer back to life and love. But when meadow-sweet, debonair and odorous in amber jerkin, moved graciously to his place in the group, then the play was ready to begin.
Kenneth Grahame
The Christian knows no change with regard to God. He may be rich to-day and poor to-morrow; he may be sickly to-day and well to-morrow; he may be in happiness to-day, to-morrow he may be distressed-but there is no change with regard to his relationship to God. If He loved me yesterday, He loves me to-day.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon