Quotes by British Authors - Page 318

I see you and St. John have been quarrelling, Jane,' said Diana, 'during your walk on the moor. But go after him; he is now lingering in the passage expecting you - he will make it up.'I have not much pride under such circumstances: I would always rather be happy than dignified; and I ran after him - he stood at the foot of the stairs.
Charlotte Brontë
Firmness of purpose is one of the most necessary sinews of character and one of the best instruments of success. Without it genius wastes its efforts in a maze of inconsistencies.
Lord Chesterfield
There are so few people left alive from back then, you may as well be talking to them about the Black Death. Nobody recalls the shite in the 30s and that were fucking horrible. For Christ's sake, nobody wants to remember the shite in the 80s. It's all forgotten and swept under the rug by the newspapers and the BBC. They get nostalgic about the music, but they never want to mention the misery. It's all shite. As for the bloody Second World War, the politicians only talk about it when they need an excuse to go pissing about in one of those fucking Muslim countries.
Harry Leslie Smith
Knowing that others want to read my writing is the greatest inspiration to write.
David Rose
There's no friend like someone who has known you since you were five.
Anne Stevenson
It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.
Doris Lessing
The things that make me different are the things that make me.
A.A. Milne
It was only when I started to reconnect with my inner child four years into recovery (I was over four years clean and sober off drugs and alcohol) and started to attend a love addiction support group that I was able to trust again and have faith that there are just as many honest and trustworthy women as there are women who are not interested in monogamy. However, it was after ten years of continuous recovery that I started to really dig deep into my childhood grief work and was finally able to reclaim my inner child. I started to take risks again. On a practical level, you can’t get very far in this world if you resent and distrust the opposite sex and, sadly, many men and women suffer in this area. Rather than celebrating the opposite sex, they fear them. Empathy and self-compassion has helped me in this area too.
Christopher Dines
Kindness is not entered onto the great ledger of civilisation.
Matthew De Abaitua
He that is down need fear no fall.
John Bunyan
Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die?
Hilary Mantel
You're not me. You can't feel like I feel.""I can feel.""No you can't. You just choose not to feel or something and everything's fine.""It's not fine. It's just not so bad.
John Fowles
What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. Proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another.
George Orwell
When you battle with your conscience and lose, you win. -Henny Youngman, comedian and violinist (1906-1998)
Henny Youngman
F.O.I. protects the guilty, but not the innocent!
Anthony T.Hincks
And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.
Joseph Conrad
After the sorts of winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen. Every February since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time winter is going to be permanent. But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same moment. Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle happens and the decaying slum in which I live is transfigured.
George Orwell
We die, you die. You die, we survive. I think there’s a pecking order in that, don’t you?
Lindsay J. Pryor
Why do they call them daytime dramas, anyway? Shouldn't they be bedtime dramas? All anyone ever talks about is getting someone into bed! Plus if you're at home watching, you're probably watching in bed. And if you're like me, after an hour or two of watching all those sexy goings-on you forget the silly story entirely and fall asleep. Just like it's bedtime!
Elizabeth Jane Howard
Build a little fence of trust Around today Fill the space with loving work And therein stay.
Mary Frances Butts
Nothing is permanently perfect. But there are perfect moments and the will to choose what will bring about more perfect moments.
Mary Balogh
At the moment, it's simply a difference of opinon between the Doctor and you.. You both want the best. You've only tried to kill him a couple of times... I mean, don't worry about that. I've seen people do much worse to him and at the end of the day he'll take them out for pizza. He's very forgiving. The Doctor is brilliant,' [said Rory]
James Goss
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
Douglas Adams
People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.
Lawrence Durrell
No statement about God is simply literally true. God is far more than can be measured described defined in ordinary language or pinned down to any particular happening.
David Jenkins
Until we realize that things might not be, we cannot realize that things are. Until we see the background of darkness, we cannot admire the light as a single and created thing. As soon as we have seen that darkness, all light is lightening, sudden, blinding, and divine. Until we picture nonentity we underrate the victory of God, and can realize none of the trophies of His ancient war. It is one of the million wild jests of truth that we know nothing until we know nothing.
G.K. Chesterton
Fire will save the Clan," she murmured, and Fireheart remembered the mysterious prophecy that he had heard from his earliest days in ThunderClan. "You never understood, did you?" Bluestar went on. "Not even when I gave you your apprentice name, Firepaw. And I doubted it myself, when fire raged through our camp. Yet I see the truth now. Fireheart, you are the fire who will save ThunderClan.
Erin Hunter
Now as before, women must refuse to be meek and guileful, for truth cannot be served by dissimulation. Women who fancy that they manipulate the world by pussy power and gentle cajolery are fools. It is slavery to have to adopt such tactics.
Germaine Greer
The hare-brained chatter of irresponsible frivolity.
Benjamin Disraeli
While there may be many things in life you wish to harvest not every seed you plant will grow.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
When you don't fit in anymore, eat less.
Benny Bellamacina
Tai tapped his left nostril. 'You know what this is, Nakkoo? It's the place where the outside world meets the world inside you.
Salman Rushdie
Our income are like our shoes; if too small, they gall and pinch us; but if too large, they cause us to stumble and trip.
Charles Caleb Colton
Government agencies are trying to get doctors to cut back on prescribing opioids. I understand that they need to do something about the epidemic of overdoses. However, labeling everyone as addicts, including those who responsibly take opioids for chronic pain, is not the answer. If the proposed changes take effect, they would force physicians to neglect their patients. Moreover, legitimate pain patients, like myself, would be left in agony on a daily basis.
Alison Moore
A man who offers to cook after he's seen you trying to freeze a dead dog has to be at least a little bit keen.
Rosen Trevithick
... And now we shan't be parted no more, and that's finished.
E.M. Forster
I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.
C.S. Lewis
Sometimes even the imagination lets one down.
Mary Balogh
There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence—or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly's wings. The insect would fly just as well without them.
Arthur C. Clarke
And it was sad music fit to make you cut your throat.
Angela Carter
If you would not have affliction visit you twice listen at once to what it teaches.
James Burgh
Literature offers the thrill of minds of great clarity wrestling with the endless problems and delights of being human. To engage with them is to engage with oneself, and the lasting rewards are not confined to specific career paths.
Jonathan Stroud
If you want to live a godly life, then choose to put the things into your mind that lead to living a godly life.
Elizabeth George
Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the ‘unnamable Thing’, the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance’. When it actually arrives, capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis.
Mark Fisher
Be brave enough to never yearnFor that you cannot hold closeIn your heart forever.Tread lightly, cherish compassionAnd live in the moment without fear.
Scott Hastie
The greatest gift you can give (yourself or anyone else) is just being present
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Doubt not your purpose nor your strength.
Joe Dever
God finds a way to weave even your mistakes into the fabric of a brighter future if you let Him.
Elizabeth George
I'd spent so long trying to fit in,trying to be someone i wasn't,that i had no idea who i was any more.
Dorothy Koomson
You ask my love completest,As strong next year as now,The devil take you, sweetest,Ere I make aught such vow.Life is a masque that changes,A fig for constancy!No love at all were better,Than love which is not free.
Ernest Dowson
For some people,being mean to others is the point of their lives.
Jacqueline Rayner
Preindustrial living standards are predictable based on knowledge of disease and environment. Differences in social energy across societies were muted by the Malthusian constraints. They had minimal impacts on living conditions. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, we have entered a strange new world in which economic theory is of little use in understanding differences in income across societies, or the future income in any specific society. Wealth and poverty are a matter of differences in local social interactions that are magnified, not dampened, by the economic system, to produce feast or famine.
Gregory Clark
There were relatives of their victims among the Hogwarts students, who now found themselves the unwilling objects of a gruesome sort of reflected fame as they walked the corridors: Susan Bones, whose uncle, aunt, and cousins had all died at the hands of one of the ten, said miserably during Herbology that she now had a good idea what it felt like to be Harry."And I don't know how you stand it- it's horrible" she said bluntly.
J.K. Rowling
Self-expression has to come out pure. It has to have an environment waiting for it. It has to have a garden it can plant itself in.
Melinda Gebbie
Gos was still out there in the forest, the dark forest to which all things lost must go. I'd wanted to slip across the borders of this world into that wood and bring back the hawk White lost. Some part of me that was very small and old had known this, some part of me that didn't work according to the everyday rules of the world but with the logic of myths and dreams. And that part of me had hoped, too, that somewhere in that other world was my father. His death had been so sudden. there had been no time to prepare for it, no sense in it happening at all. He could only be lost. He was out there, still, somewhere out there in that tangled wood with all the rest of the lost and dead. I know now what those dreams in spring had meant, the ones of a hawk slipping through a rent in the air into another world. I'd wanted to fly with the hawk to find my father; find him and bring him home.
Helen Macdonald
Ah me!" said he, "what might have been is not what is!
Charles Dickens
Pluto was a well-known fixture in Bad Münstereifel, at least among those who lived in the old part of town. A large, foul-tempered, and unsterilized inky-black tomcat, he had once made it onto the front page of the local free paper (admittedly during a quiet week as regards other news) after a resident of the town accused him of making an unprovoked attack on her pet dachshund.
Helen Grant
In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.
Geoff Ryman
she was wishing that whatever stage of her life she was in now could be got through quickly, for it was seeing to her interminable. If life had to be looked at in terms of high moments. or peaks, then nothing had "happened" to her for a long time; snd she could look forward to nothing much but a dwindling away from full household activity into getting old
Doris Lessing
If people who are in a difficulty will only do the first little reasonable thing which they can clearly recognize as reasonable, they will always find the next step more easy both to see and take.
Samuel Butler