Quotes by British Authors - Page 327

Badger hates Society, and invitations, and dinner, and all that sort of thing.
Kenneth Grahame
Fame, infamy, they're of the same family.
Gemma Malley
Power was my weakness and my temptation.
J.K. Rowling
Beauty is truth truth beauty.
John Keats
Part of the problem was that I couldn't seem to get past the fact that I hadn't tried to escape from Kas. Even in France, when he'd left me on my own for several days, I'd carried on working [as a prostitute] and doing all the things he'd told me to d. And although I knew that it was because of the fear he'd so carefully and deliberately instilled in me, I still felt as though I'd somehow colluded in what had happened to me - despite knowing, deep down, that nothing could have been further from the truth.
Sophie Hayes
Everything is about to go seriously tits up. - Clipper
Jamie Scallion
The church exists primarily for two closely correlated purposes: to worship God and to work for his kingdom in the world ... The church also exists for a third purpose, which serves the other two: to encourage one another, to build one another up in faith, to pray with and for one another, to learn from one another and teach one another, and to set one another examples to follow, challenges to take up, and urgent tasks to perform. This is all part of what is known loosely as fellowship.
N.T. Wright
...because the great beauty of embryo development, the bit that human beings find so hard to grasp, is that it is a totally decentralised process...no cell need wait for instructions from authority; every cell can act on its own information and the signals it receives from its neighbours. We do not organise societies that way...Perhaps we should try.
Matt Ridley
She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.
John Fowles
Reason must know the heart's reasons and every other reason
Leonora Carrington
Integrity is a life where your beliefs and intentions are aligned with your words and actions.
Stephen Lovegrove
Angel I've loved you since the first time I laid my eyes on you. It's only ever been you. It will always be you, marry me?
Kirsty Moseley
In 1867, George Campbell, Duke of Argyll, had published The Reign of Law, a book that Darwin found deeply annoying. A supporter of Richard Owen, Campbell argued that while evolution (or "Development") might be observable in the fossil record, it was merely evidence of God's purpose. God, for example, would cause horses and oxen to evolve in time to meet human needs. The brightly colored plumage of birds, Campbell went on, were simply God's decorations of nature for humanity's enjoyment.
Jonathan Clements
Putting down the power right from the whistle would be ugly and brutal, but it would get the job done. He wanted to tell her that, but this was the thing with coaching: you had to step back at exactly the moment you ached to step forward.
Chris Cleave
When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him.
C.S. Lewis
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.
Clive James
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
C.P. Snow
Part of being of a true existentialist is wanting to be what we make ourselves be by the way we choose to act, as opposed to making excuses for the way we act and regretting it.
Gary Cox
Not, how much of my money will I give to God, but, how much of God’s money will I keep for myself?
John Wesley
There are potential opportunities for everyone to expand consciousness.
Steven Redhead
I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure as a test of value.
Rebecca West
Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love--it's being unhappy together.
Graham Greene
Would it hurt to die?
J.K. Rowling
But we live in a karaoke society... Many people feel they have to dance to someone else's tune, to sing someone else's song.
Francis Dewar
There are things that will not have themselves buried and put out of sight, as though they had never been.
Anthony Trollope
Is there any pleasure on earth as great as the circle of Christian friends by a good fire?
J.R.R. Tolkien
You must confront your past. At some time or other you must confront your past. It doesn't flash before your eyes, I knew that, but it's always there. We are our past. There is nothing else, and none of it can be undone.
The Fall
My mother was the perfect Spartan mother. I have always been able to imagine her telling her sons to return from battle 'with their shields, or on them'. She did actually try it on my father at the start of the Second World War. He didn't take it kindly, and confided to me ruefully that he thought she rather fancied herself a Hero's Widow.
Rosemary Sutcliff
Your mind will never be dull, if you remember there is never enough to learn for it to be to full.
Benny Bellamacina
I didn't want to take it. I knew it was a powerful drug, but I also knew it was a catabolic drug that consumed the body.
David Millar
Happiness is not to be found at the bottom of a bottle or from the tip of a needle; it is not to be found amidst a cloud of smoke or within a sugar-coated pill. If you look for it in these places, you will find naught but despair.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Illusions connected with religion are generally most difficult to remove.
John Meade Falkner
Every year hundreds of books, many of considerable merit, pass unnoticed. Each one has taken the author months to write, he may have had it in his mind for years; he has put into it something of himself which is lost forever, it is heart-rending to think how great are the chances that it will be disregarded.
W Somerset Maugham
Obstinacy and vehemency in opinion are the surest proofs of stupidity.
Bernard Barton
I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it is the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills.
Audrey Hepburn
A delusion a mockery and a snare.
Lord Denman
Patience can be bitter but her fruit is always sweet.
Habeeb Akande
The English murder their meat twice: once when they shoot it, again when they cook it. 'Drôle, n'est-ce pas'?
Peter Mayle
But joy is individual, and can only be experienced alone. Hell is communal, but Heaven is personal.
Simon Kurt Unsworth
It was so easy to be wise in the explanation of an experience one has not personally witnessed.("The Wendigo")
Algernon Blackwood
Ay call it holy ground The soil where first they trod. They have left unstained what there they found - Freedom to worship God.
Felicia D. Hemans
Preparation for the future was necessary, and he was willing to admit that the great change would perhaps come in the upheaval of a revolution. But he argued that revolutionary propaganda was a delicate work of high conscience. It was the education of the masters of the world. It should be as careful as the education given to kings.
Joseph Conrad
For years I’d been awaiting that overriding urge I’d always heard about, the narcotic pining that draws childless women ineluctably to strangers’ strollers in parks. I wanted to be drowned by the hormonal imperative, to wake one day and throw my arms around your neck, reach down for you, and pray that while that black flower bloomed behind my eyes you had just left me with child. (With child: There’s a lovely warm sound to that expression, an archaic but tender acknowledgement that for nine months you have company wherever you go. Pregnant, by contrast, is heavy and bulging and always sounds to my ear like bad news: “I’m pregnant.” I instinctively picture a sixteen-year-old at the dinner table- pale, unwell, with a scoundrel of a boyfriend- forcing herself to blurt out her mother’s deepest fear.) (27)
Lionel Shriver
To move into what God has in mind for you, it is necessary to discover your purpose, to know where you are going, and to understand the reason for your existence.
Pedro Okoro
People who believe that justice is a pendulum are willing to swing it wildly.
George Hammond
Compassion is a fundamental principle of meditation. Meditation is not a narcissistic, self-interested path. It provides the foundation for love, integrity, compassion, respect and sensitivity (Feldman, 1998, p.2).
Christina Feldman
The depth of my feelings is proportional to the depth of the color.
Anthony T.Hincks
If the colour of life turns grey turn the palette the other way
Benny Bellamacina
When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening.
George Orwell
The three witches and the knight set off down the hill together, arm in arm, and all four led long and happy lives, and none of them ever knew or suspected that the Fountain's waters carried no enchantment at all.
J.K. Rowling
Be led by your talent, not by your self-loathing; those other things you just have to manage.
Russell Brand
I also wish I'd been born with a clearly defined talent for something, or else stupid.
James Hamilton-Paterson
Leave any problem alone for long enough and it will solve itself.
Nell Dixon
The world won't get more or less terrible if we're indoors somewhere with a mug of hot chocolate.
Kamila Shamsie
It may...be judged indecent in me to come forward on this occasion; but when I see a fellow-creature about to perish through the cowardice of her pretended friends, I wish to be allowed to speak, that I may say what I know of her character.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
You can see the same immorality or amorality in the Christian view of guilt and punishment. There are only two texts, both of them extreme and mutually contradictory. The Old Testament injunction is the one to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (it occurs in a passage of perfectly demented detail about the exact rules governing mutual ox-goring; you should look it up in its context (Exodus 21). The second is from the Gospels and says that only those without sin should cast the first stone. The first is a moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativistic and "nonjudgmental" that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra vindictiveness and ultracompassion.
Christopher Hitchens
You ask me if I do not think that men are strange beings - I do indeed, I have often thought so - and I think too that the mode of bringing them up is strange, they are not half sufficiently guarded from temptation - Girls are protected as if they were something very frail and silly indeed while boys are turned loose on the world as if they - of all beings in existence, were the wisest and the least liable to be led astray.
Charlotte Brontë
Simplicity may be simple, but like complexity it requires linguistic precision, and may therefore call for relatively obscure expressions at times.
John White
The quickest way is sometimes the longest.
Neil Gaiman
I really believe that there is an enormous appetite amongst readers for an originality of vision. In other words, be true to your own dreams and there will always be people who want to hear them.
Clive Barker