Quotes by British Authors - Page 316

Wisdom is not increased by acquiring more information, but by increasing the capacity of seeing.
Belsebuub
There's no way out," he announced with satisfaction, "and no amount of wishful dreaming will produce one. The demon won't go back in its bottle, the face-off is for ever, the embrace gets tighter and the toys cleverer with every generation, and there's no such thing for either side as enough security. Not for the main players, not for the nasty little newcomers who each year run themselves up a suitcase bomb and join the club. We get tired of believing that, because we're human. We may even con ourselves into believing the threat has gone away. It never will. Never, never, never.""So, who'll save us then, Walt?" Barley asked. "You and Nedsky?""Vanity, if anything will, which I doubt," Walter retorted. "No leader wants to go down in history as the ass who destroyed his country in an afternoon. And funk, I suppose. Most of our gallant politicians do have a narcissistic objection to suicide, thank God.
John le Carré
It is action that creates motivation.
Steve Backley
...Human beings, little bags of thinking water held up briefly by fragile accumulations of calcium...
Terry Pratchett
Sometimes I don't feel as if I'm a person at all. I'm just a collection of other people's ideas.
David Bowie
Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.
Doris Lessing
Parliament is the longest running farce in the West End.
Cyril Smith
Her voice had suddenly jumped a couple of social classes to underline her ownership status.
Joe Cawley
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
Agatha Christie
These days, loneliness is the new cancer - a shameful, embarrassing thing, brought upon yourself in some obscure way. A fearful, incurable thing thing, so horrifying that you dare not mention it; other people don't want to hear the word spoken aloud for fear that they might too be afflicted, or that it might tempt fate into visiting a similar horror upon them.
Gail Honeyman
It's only human nature for dogs to chase motrobikes
Peter Tinniswood
Cardinal Campeggio has implored Katherine to bow to the king's will, accept that her marriage is invalid and retire to a convent. Certainly, she says sweetly, she will become a nun: if the king will become a monk.
Hilary Mantel
The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b. who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.
John Derbyshire
if people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and injust, the wicked people would have it all their own way: they will never be afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should- so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again
Charlotte Brontë
He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the even more refined accomplishments of skipping and skimming.
Arthur Balfour
God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.
William Nicholson
It has always seemed to me that if one falls in love with any gentleman one becomes instantly blind to his faults.But I am not blind to your faults, and I do not think that everything you do or say is right! Only—Is it being—not very comfortable—and cross—and not quite happy, when you aren’t there?” “That, my darling,” said his lordship,taking her ruthlessly into his arms,“is exactly what it s!” “Oh—!” Frederica gasped, as she emerged from an embrace which threatened to suffocate her. “Now I know! I am in love!
Georgette Heyer
It's time to stop following your dreams and time to start chasing them!
Habeeb Akande
War does not answer war, war does not finish war. The only ending is peace.
Philippa Gregory
We walk the paths we choose.
Barbara Wood
I like stories where women save themselves.
Neil Gaiman
I favour humans over ideology, but right now the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas, where everyone is either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. We can lead good, ethical lives, but some bad phraseology in a Tweet can overwhelm it all - even though we know that's not how we should define our fellow humans. What's true about our fellow humans is that we are clever and stupid. We are grey areas.And so ... when you see an unfair or an ambiguous shaming unfold, speak up on behalf of the shamed person. A babble of opposing voices - that's democracy.The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people. Let's not turn it into a world where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.
Jon Ronson
It's impossible to lose that which does not belong to you.
Michael de Larrabeiti
When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.
Hilary Mantel
She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!
Virginia Woolf
For the sake of all the others who are like you, but less strong and less gifted perhaps, many of them, it's up to you to have the courage to make good.
Radclyffe Hall
The altar must be built in one place so that the fire may come down in another place.
Charles Williams
Reacher prowled the hallway, his gun stiff-armed way out in front of him, his torso jerking violently left and right from the hips, like a crazy disco dance. The house-storming shuffle.
Lee Child
Let's say you're walking around and you find a watch on the ground. As you examine it, you marvel at the intricately complex interweaving of its parts, a means to an end. Surely you wouldn't think this marvel would have come about by itself. The watch must have a maker. Just as the watch has such complex means to an end, so does nature to a much greater extent. Just look at the complexity of the human eye. Thus we must conclude that nature has a maker too.
William Paley
All my life I have been the sort of person in whom people confide. And all my life I have been flattered by this role - grateful for the frisson of importance that comes with receiving important information. In recent years, however, I have noticed that my gratification is becoming diluted by a certain weary indignation. They tell me because they regard me as safe. All of them, they make their disclosures to me in the same spirit that they might tell a castrato or a priest - with a sense that I am so outside the loop, so remote from the doings of the great world, as to be defused of any possible threat. The number of secrets I receive is in inverse proportion to the number of secrets anyone expects me to have of my own. And this is the real source of my dismay. Being told secrets is not - never has been - a sign that I belong or that I matter. It is quite the opposite: confirmation of my irrelevance.
Zoë Heller
We all have the same pallet of emotional paints. It is how we pigment them on the canvas of life that dictates our artistry.
Ged Thompson Liverpool Poet
True freedom is the choice to create the desires one believes in.
Steven Redhead
Jacob studied the iron graveyard, where every vehicle was its own gravestone. He drove slowly through, as if he was afraid to wake the dead. That was not it though. The general made it clear that they should fear the living.
Dean F. Wilson
There is a face beneath this mask, but it isn't me. I'm no more that face than I am the muscles beneath it, or the bones beneath that.
Steve Moore
It comforted her, in the confused unhappy welter of her emotions, to see the mountains always tranquil, remote, in their lonely splendour; untouchable, serenely inviolate. It was an obscure comfort to her to know that man's hectic world wasn't the only one — that there were others, where agitation and passion and bewilderment had no place. When her love turned into a chaotic fever-dream, in which she was tossing, hallucinated, frightened and miserable, she had longed to escape to the cold, austere, changeless beauty and peace of the snow.
Anna Kavan
If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were educated. But a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.
C.S. Lewis
Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I understand the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate.
John Henry Newman
And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.
George Orwell
One of the main purposes of university education is to escape from the Zeitgeist, from the mean, narrow, provincial spirit which is constantly assuring us that we are at the peak of human achievement, that we stand on the edge of unprecedented prosperity or an unparalleled catastrophe; that the next summit conference is going to be the most fateful in history or that the leader of the day is either the greatest, or the most disastrous, of all time. It is a liberation of the spirit to acquire perspective, to recognize that every generation is confronted by problems of the utmost subjective urgency, but that an objective grading is probably impossible; to learn that the same moral predicaments and the same ideas have been explored before. One need read very little in political theory to become aware of recurrences and repetitions.
Martin Wight
But Ana, how could I have been such a lousy judge of character?" I groaned."Because you don't much care to judge people's characters," she answered after a moment's thought. "It's a strength, you know, as well as weakness."It was small consolation.
Chris Stewart
We laughed over our difference then spent years bonding over things that made us the same.
Nikesh Shukla
Work, the gospel of work, the sanctity of work, laborare est orare - all that tripe and nonsense. 'Work!' he once broke out contemptuously against the reasonable expostulations of Philip Quarles, 'work is no more respectable than alcohol, and it serves exactly the same purpose: it just distracts the mind, makes a man forget himself. Work's simply a drug, that's all. It's humiliating that men shouldn't be able to live without drugs, soberly; it's humiliating that they shouldn't have the courage to see the world and themselves as they really are. They must intoxicate themselves with work. It's stupid. The gospel of work's just a gospel of stupidity and funk. Work may be prayer; but it's also hiding one's head in the sand, it's also making such a din and a dust that a man can't hear himself speak or see his own hand before his face. It's hiding yourself from yourself. No wonder the Samuel Smileses and the big business men are such enthusiasts for work. Work gives them the comforting illusion of existing, even of being important. If they stopped working, they'd realize that they simply weren't there at all, most of them. Just holes in the air, that's all. Holes with perhaps a rather nasty smell in them. Most Smilesian souls must smell rather nasty, I should think. No wonder they daren't stop working. They might find out what they really are, or rather aren't. It's a risk they haven't the courage to take.
Aldous Huxley
It is good for children to find themselves facing the elements of a fairy tale - they are well-equipped to deal with these
Neil Gaiman
We are not always shaped by our parents, Cas. We're shaped by our choices.
Sarah Dalton
Don't be led away to think this part of the world important and that unimportant. Every corner of the world is important. No man knows whether this part or that is most so, but every man may do some honest work in his own corner.
Thomas Hughes
We were left with nothing because of a love like acid that ate its way through our entire family.
R.D. Ronald
I remember the stink of corruption. It had a kind of sweetness to it, a sweetness that'd make you want to hurl.
Mark Lawrence
Preaching a man a sermon with a broken head and telling him to be right with God is equal to telling a man with a broken leg to get up and run a race.
Richard Baxter
Everyone's always scared for someone else's generation
Holly Bourne
Follow, poet, follow rightTo the bottom of the night,With your unconstraining voiceStill persuade us to rejoice;With the farming of a verseMake a vineyard of the curse,Sing of human unsuccessIn a rapture of distress;In the deserts of the heartLet the healing fountain start,In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise.
W.H. Auden
There were a lot of things he could say. "Son of a bitch!" would have been a good one. Or he could say, "Welcome to civilization!" He could have said, "Laugh this one off!" He might have said, "Fetch!" But he didn’t, because if he had said any of those things then he’d have known that what he had just done was murder.
Terry Pratchett
Never pause unless you have a reason for it, but when you pause, pause as long as you can.
W Somerset Maugham
When the world is worth nothing, then heaven is worth something. I leave every Christian to judge by his own experience, whether we do not overlove the world more in prosperity than in adversity (374) [.]
Richard Baxter
Very astute, Harry, but the mouth organ was only ever a mouth organ." - Albus Dumbledore
J.K. Rowling
Not all developing countries are the same.
Paul Collier
Tony smothered the life that me and Ma had built, a furry mould growing over a sweating slab of cheese.
Kerry Hudson
It was like this blackness that crept into the corners of my life until everything was grey and dirty. My insides felt burnt out, like if you cut me open, all you would find would be smoke. No heart. No bones. There was nothing left, just the anger. It followed me everywhere. It sat on my bed and watched me sleep and when I had to eat, it looked at me across the table.
Tanya Byrne
Find your truth and make your existence real as you choose it. Your creation is your own greatest gift. (Neings of Light via Joules)
Jay Woodman
In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.
Scarlett Thomas
I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then.
H.G.Wells