Quotes by British Authors - Page 320

There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.
H. Havelock Ellis
And tell them all about the books you've read. Better still, buy some more books and read them. That's an order. You can never read too many books.
P.B. Kerr
The Pekes and the Pollicles, everyone knows, Are proud and implacable, passionate foes;It is always the same, wherever one goes.And the Pugs and the Poms, although most people saythat they do not like fighting, will often displayEvery symptom of wanting to join in the fray.And theyBark bark bark bark bark barkUntil you can hear them all over the park.
T.S Eliot
I'm a sailor, Lettie, I go where the wind takes me. And it led me to you, didn't it? I was born ten thousand miles away, but the wind brought me to Barter, and now we're friends. We're on this boat for a reason.
Sam Gayton
There are three conditions which often look alikeYet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachmentFrom self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference, ... .
T.S Eliot
If there is a God he's a great loathsome spider in the darkness.
John Fowles
The great business of life is to be to do to do without and to depart.
John Morley
Have intercourse with females, acquire wealth.
John Stuart Mill
Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.
J.G. Ballard
Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone has said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shift of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.
Jeanette Winterson
You’ll slip up, just like everyone else who tries to mess with the British Empire. They all get it wrong somehow – forget some detail, make some tiny error, invade Russia – and then it’s all downhill from there.
Toby Frost
Partnerships are increasingly seen through the prism of promises and expectations, and as a kind of product for consumers: satisfaction on the spot, and if not fully satisfied, return the product to the shop or replace it with a new and improved one! You don't, after all, stick to your car, or computer, or iPod, when better ones appear.
Zygmunt Bauman
Just as one can arrange bits of iron, etc, into a hermetically sealed box which imprison other pieces of matter, so one can arrange thoughts into a box too, which effectively imprisons other thoughts.
Nanamoli Thera
It [discovering Finnish] was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The main problem is that most commentators are accustomed to thinking of spiritual schools as 'systems', which are more or less alike, and which depend upon dogma and ritual: and especially upon repetition and the application of continual and standardised pressures upon their followers.The Sufi way, except in degenerate forms which are not to be classified as Sufic, is entirely different from this.
Idries Shah
It always rains on the unloved-wet dreams-a fishing expedition-she kisses wyverns (the disneyland analogy)-dinner etiquette and chocolate lovers-desire swears by the first circle-"things are changing"-what can possibly go wrong?
Neil Gaiman
The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was interested.
E.M. Forster
As for the fear, you'll have to put up with that like the rest of us.
William Golding
But one may say something and yet not be able to do it. Try, for instance, lifting yourself up by the bootstraps.
Idries Shah
Amantium irae amoris integratio estA Latin saying that means Lovers’ quarrels are the renewal of love
Janet Aylmer
A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written.
Robert Harris
Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.
Virginia Woolf
Did nothing in particular and did it very well.
W.S. Gilbert
People can change anything they want to, and that means everything in the world.
Joe Strummer
I am a believer in free will. If my dog chooses to hate the whole human race except myself, it must be free to do so.
Diana Wynne Jones
People are not two-thirds one thing and the remainder something else. Temperament, personality, or outlook don’t divide quite like that. The bits don’t separate clearly. You end up a funny homogeneous mixture. This is something that will become more common in the latter part of the century—people with mixed cultural backgrounds, and mixed racial backgrounds. That’s the way the world is going.
Kazuo Ishiguro
She raised herself up on an elbow, stroked my forehead & said in a hushed half-whisper, 'You will be famous.' "The seed was planted. Ambition fed on the compost of my vanity.
F.R. Tallis
A novel must show how the world truly is, how characters genuinely think, how events actually occur. A novel should somehow reveal the true source of our actions.
Kevin Hood
What I tell you three times is true.
Lewis Carroll
Foreign policy often involved nothing more than the decision whom to make war upon.
Peter Heather
Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional -- to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death.
Kate Summerscale
Know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one's lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.
Neil Gaiman
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
Aldous Huxley
Inner Knowledge -- You want to become wise in one lesson: First become a real human being.
Idries Shah
Keep still!” Tria was parsistantly kicking back and it seemed to be working “Ow!” “You three are a resistant bunch aren't you...” The man said angrily “No really how long did it take you to work that out.” Agres replied sarcastically
Charon Lloyd-Roberts
... it is to your credit that you recognize that if he was a monster then it was other monstrous things which made him so. The iron forged on the anvil cannot be blamed for the hammer...
Terry Pratchett
I love the relationship that anyone has with music ... because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. ... It's the best part of us probably ...
Nick Hornby
It's a weird thing, writing.Sometimes you can look out across what you're writing, and it's like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer's day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you'll be going on your walk. And that's wonderful.Sometimes it's like driving through fog. You can't really see where you're going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you're probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you'll still get where you were going.And that's hard while you're doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn't exist in that order down on paper, half of what you'd get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you're doing and where you're going, and you couldn't see or know any of that five minutes before.And that's magic.
Neil Gaiman
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Douglas Adams
A single person is a manageable entity, whom you can either make friends with or leave alone. But half of a married couple is not exactly a whole human being: if the marriage is successful it is something a little more than that; if unsuccessful, a little less. In either case, a fresh complication is added to the already intricate business of friendship: as Clem had once remarked, you might as well try to dance a tarantella with a Siamese twin.
Jan Struther
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
Graham Greene
It's naive to assume that another person can fulfill you, or save you, if the two things are, in fact, different, and I have never felt that way with Colin. I simply believe that he fulfills an important part of me, and that Robert fulfilled another equally important part of me. The part of me Robert fulfilled is a part which I imagine Colin, even now, doesn't know exists. It is the part of me that can destroy as easily as it loves. It is the part of me that feels safest and most at home behind closed doors, in a dark bedroom, that believes that the only truth lies in the secrets we keep from each other.
Andrew Porter
I want to lay my kill at your feet.
Annette Curtis Klause
I don’t want my pain blanked out, he thought to himself; I need to keep my pain. It is a part of who I am, every bit as integral as the joy I’ve felt.
Mark Samuels
I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.
George Orwell
Go lovingly into each moment and experience your infinite being as you truly are. Feel, learn, play!
Jay Woodman
If your dreams seem to be drifting away, wake up!
Benny Bellamacina
The bonds of friendship dwindle with age, Oliver. But a little blackmail lasts forever.
Stephen Hunt
The ocean is six miles deep.
Joe Dunthorne
What people don't understand when you've already been a suicide and pulled through is that after the sadness comes fear: Where is my mind going with this? I don't want to die. I do not want to die. When you don't have so much control over your own thoughts, over the myriad voices in your head, you don't know where they could go.
Emma Forrest
Without a word he started stalking down the street in the opposite direction my grandparents had taken. I started after him, my steps slower.And then quite abruptly Caine whipped around and marched back toward me. Features etched with determination, he yanked me roughly to him and crushed his mouth down over mine. I made a noise of surprise in the back of my throat before my instincts took over. I couldn’t help sinking into his kiss.When he finally let me go we were both breathing hard. Caine smoothed his thumb over my cheek, his eyes still dark with passion and anger. “I could give a fuck who saw that.
Samantha Young
In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill and he creates very ‘gifted’ improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.
Malcolm Gladwell
Memory haunts me from age to age, and passion leads me by the hand--evil have I done, and with sorrow have I made acquaintance from age to age, and from age to age evil shall I do, and sorrow shall I know till my redemption comes.
H. Rider Haggard
Believe it or not the war on Iraq is based on a sound scientific principle, The bee hive principle. Which clearly states that if you are stung by a bee, you should follow it back to its nest and then proceed to beat nest to a pulp with a baseball bat until the stripey little turd has learned its lesson.
John Oliver
Dynasties rise and fall according to what the Chinese used to call ‘the mandate of heaven’, but life for the peasant changes little.
Kenneth Minogue
God comes at last when we think he is farthest off.
James Howell
We took such care of tomorrow, but died on the way there.
Warsan Shire
If you cannot read all your books...fondle them---peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances.
Winston S. Churchill
The human body may need to receive sunlight through the tree canopy in order to be in a healthy state. I call this light “Interference Green Light” and it may be the top thing that you need to be receiving in order to be in good health and free of pain.
Steven Magee
One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
Harold Pinter