Quotes by British Authors - Page 315

I don't have a hot date. I don't even have a lukewarm date.
Sarah Morgan
There are people.There are stories.The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse if often closer to the truth.Stories shape the world. They exist independently of people, and in places quite devoid of man, there may yet be mythologies.
Alan Moore
Overheard on a Saltmarsh"Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?Give them me.No.Give them me. Give them me.No.Then I will howl all night in the reeds,Lie in the mud and howl for them.Goblin, why do you love them so?They are better than stars or water,Better than voices of winds that sing,Better than any man's fair daughter,Your green glass beads on a silver ring.Hush, I stole them out of the moon.Give me your beads, I want them.No.I will howl in the deep lagoonFor your green glass beads, I love them so.Give them me. Give them.No.
Harold Monro
There’s merit in being different, inspiration in being individual, courage in being unique, and freedom in being yourself.
Fennel Hudson
... When you're living like that, I think time can seem to stretch out for ever. Matters only change when you start fretting about all the things you need to get done. The more stuff you try to force into it, the less accommodating time becomes.
Gavin Extence
He lay back for a little in his bed thinking about the smells of food… of the intoxicating breath of bakeries and dullness of buns… He planned dinners, of enchanting aromatic foods… endless dinners, in which one could alternate flavor with flavor from sunset to dawn without satiety, while one breathed great draughts of the bouquet of brandy.
Evelyn Waugh
Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their vo
Helen Dunmore
Trusting fate is like gambling on an unknown outcome with unknown consequences.
Steven Redhead
If character is destiny, I was fated to be carried off into the desert. From the deck of the ship I had imagined my own ghost and seen my unvanishing footsteps. When you don't belong anywhere it doesn't matter where you are or where you go, if you stay or move on. You arrive at a place where the view forwards and backwards is the same, where the sun rises in the east one day and the west the next, where you stop planning and live like the birds and beasts by intuition and instinct.
Chloe Thurlow
How do you get all those coins?" asked Mort.IN PAIRS.
Terry Pratchett
He walked into the bathroom, wincing at himself in the mirror, that always more tired older brother.
J.G. Ballard
We may differ on many things, but what we respect is freeinquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement betweenProfessor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins,concerning “punctuated evolution” and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shallresolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication.
Christopher Hitchens
Don't even try making out I’m making this up. I’ve got proof. Evidence.
Diane Samuels
May be you find out I could be useful getting people out of camps and prisons in Germany - just before they got shot. I should love to do it and I like to jump out of a plane even every day.
Christine Granville
Anyone who has lived here for long enough has seen it all before: opposing sides of the political spectrum ferociously criticising each other, getting hot under the collar about this and that, bringing up all sorts of allegations and innuendos. Then just as it looks as if the argument is about to get physical, harmony breaks out. A dialogue is opened, an accord or a compromise is found. And suddenly, just as quickly as it came, all that fiery rhetoric subsides and everyone realizes it was all synthetic, put on for show when all along some deal was imminent anyway. It's as if every politician is merely an actor in a little theatre, and as soon as the curtain falls and the public can't see them any more they all slap each other on the back, tot up the takings and go out for an expensive meal.
Tobias Jones
There will be times in your life when you want to pray but feel so far from God that prayer seems impossible. The flesh will tell you that God is against you, that you have gone too far and that He is no longer interested in you. But faith defies the flesh. It contradicts Satan’s lies. It rises up against defeat, gloom, and despair and finds hope in God.
Colin S. Smith
In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his hip, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a railroad. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford.
Elizabeth Gaskell
If some great power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right on condition of being some sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed I should close instantly with the offer.
Thomas Huxley
Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.
Neil Gaiman
A series of failures may culminate in the best possible result.
Gisela Richter
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.
D.H. Lawrence
...to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice...Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath - who were they? Only be reading could she find out.
Alan Bennett
I'm sure we all have dreams of leaving at some time in our lives, but when we reach the bottom, most of us go running home.
Deborah Curtis
What comes about by design or chance determine how life plays out.
Steven Redhead
The heart's the trouble. It knows the monster but remembers the love.
Gemma Farrow
the whole Bible is itself a missional phenomenon. The writings that now comprise our Bible are themselves the product of and witness to the ultimate mission of God. The Bible renders to us the story of God's mission through God's people in their engagement with God's world for the sake of the whole of God's creation. The Bible is the drama of this God of purpose engaged in the mission of achieving that purpose universally, embracing past, present and future, Israel and the nations, "life, the universe and everything," and with its centre, focus, climax, and completion in Jesus Christ. Mission is not just one of a list of things that the Bible happens to talk about, only a bit more urgently than some. Mission is, in that much-abused phrase, "what it's all about.
Christopher J.H. Wright
Sufism is the doing in this lifetime what any fool will be doing in then thousand years’ time.
Idries Shah
People are always changing themselves and their world, dear. Very few of the changes are new. We rather confuse change and newness, I think. What is truly new never changes.""You speak in riddles, aged progenitor.""The world worships a certain kind of newness. People are always talking about a new car, or a new drink or p-p-play or house, but these things are not truly new, are they? They begin to get old the minute you acquire them. New is not in things. New is within us. The truly new is something that is new forever: you. Every morning of your life and every evening, every moment is new. You have never lived this moment before and you never will again. In this sense the new is also the eternal.
Tony Hendra
Sometimes, Anselm – and especially with the most important parts of our lives – we cannot share who we are. We can give the facts, as information, to a stranger; but with a friend we want to give that little bit more, something that changes the facts into flesh and spirit . . . and at certain times we can’t do it. Because ultimately we can’t give away our depths: they lie beyond our grasp. It is when we most want to do so that we realize how immense we are . . . more vast and mysterious than the night sky; and alone.
William Brodrick
Don't spend your life believing a story about yourself that you didn't write that's been fed to you - that simply you've accepted, embedded and added to. Let the story go and there beneath is the real you...and your unique gifts, heart and path that await you.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth of falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?
C.S. Lewis
These things are going to look primitive to you, but you have to remember that we’re not stupid. We have the same intelligence as you. We simply don’t have the same cumulative knowledge you do. So we apply our intelligence to what we have.
Warren Ellis
A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
John Maynard Keynes
The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.
Wyndham Lewis
The Specters feast as vampires feast on blood, but the Specters’ food is attention. A conscious and informed interest in the world. The immaturity of children is less attractive to them.
Philip Pullman
Challenge who you can be, don't let fate control your future. Fate can come to rule your life if you don't decide for yourselves exactly what you want. It fills in the bits like a mischievous mistress.
Steven Redhead
Even coal shimmers in the light
Jocelyn Murray
Writing is the voice of the heart' Julia Suzuki
Julia Suzuki
In the 21st century, it can't be about who we might make, and what they might do, anymore. It has to be about who we are and what we're going to do.
Caitlin Moran
The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.
C.S. Lewis
But Jeanie had just gone through the motions. No one would have realized, except perhaps her too-perceptive son-in-law, but that was one of the few perks of maturity: you knew how to dissemble.
Hilary Boyd
I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.
Nancy Mitford
What when drunk one sees in other women one sees in Garbo sober.
Kenneth Tynan
You seek havoc, but all you’ll end up finding is despair.
Jaimie Roberts
To surround anything, however monstrous or ridiculous, with an air of mystery, is to invest it with a secret charm, and power of attraction which to the crowd is irresistible.
Charles Dickens
There's nothing wrong with giving up all your principles for a suitable financial reward. It is indeed the basis of our society.
Manny Rayner
It is a true saying, that what you fear you find.
Jeanette Winterson
The happiest people on Earth are the ones who know love.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
I was in my element, excuse the pun.
Adele Rose
I suddenly knew that religion, God - something beyond everyday life - was there to be found, provided one is really willing. And I saw that though what I felt in the church was only imagination, it was a step on the way; because imagination itself can be a kind of willingness - a pretense that things are real, due to one's longing for them. It struck me that this was somehow tied up with what the Vicar said about religion being an extension of art - and then I had a glimpse of how religion can really cure you of sorrow; somehow make use of it, turn it to beauty, just as art can make sad things beautiful.tI found myself saying: 'Sacrifice is the secret - you have to sacrifice things for art and it's the same with religion; and then the sacrifice turns out to be a gain.' Then I got confused and I couldn't hold on to what I meant - until Miss Blossom remarked: 'Nonsense, duckie - it's prefectly simple. You lose yourself in something beyond yourself and it's a lovely rest.'I saw that, all right. Then I thought: 'But that's how Miss Marcy cured her sorrow, too - only she lost herself in other people instead of in religion.' Which way of life was best - hers or the Vicar's? I decided that he loves God and merely likes the villagers, whereas she loves the villagers and merely likes God - and then I suddenly wondered if I could combine both ways, love God and my neighbor equally. Was I really willing to?
Dodie Smith
Happiness and beauty are the worst things you can have in a life, because you never forget them. They go on and on ambushing you, presumably until you die.
M. John Harrison
All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.
Richard Hughes
It is an extraordinary thing to meet your heroes and find them to be everything you hoped they would be.
Simon Pegg
When I am abroad I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.
Winston Churchill
The striking thing about Ericsson’s study is that he and his colleagues couldn’t find any ‘naturals,’ musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any ‘grinds,’ people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn’t have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder. The idea that excellence at a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of excellence. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.
Malcolm Gladwell
She's had a long life of experience in noticing evil, fancying evil, suspecting evil and going forth to do battle with evil.
Agatha Christie
Time alone helps us to remember who we are.
Fennel Hudson
What in cat hell just happened?
Sarah Jane Avory
Familiarity, globalisation, cheap travel, mere weariness had diluted our sense of foreign-ness.
David Nicholls
Cometh the hour, cometh the man.
Cliff Gladwin