Quotes by British Authors - Page 328

You’re a good boy. I wish you didn’t have to be quite so good
Patrick Ness
All the habits of Man are evil. And above all, no animal must ever tyrannise over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal.
George Orwell
To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or
Dorothy L. Sayers
Early one beautiful summer evening, when everyone else was drinking indoors, Tony and I walked down to the river. We lay on the grass under a tree and chatted. At one point, Tony said, "Look at the pattern of lace the leaves make against the sky." I looked at the canopy above us, and suddenly saw what he saw. My perspective completely shifted. I realized I didn't have his "eyes" -- though once he pointed it out, it became obvious. It made me think, "My God, I never look enough," and in the years since, I've tried very hard to look -- and look again.
Julie Andrews Edwards
See and live life for the wonderful gift that it is ...acknowledging everyone's beauty, flaws, frailty, strength, gifts and possibilities. Honour and cherish it and above be loving and compassionate. Here is the birthplace of inner and worldly peace.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
In the newspapers the row about the prospect of genetically modified food raged on, and yet here were consumers effectively demanding lambs with four back legs.
Rose Prince
I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.
George Orwell
Don't hate me for being different.Just be thankful I'm not you.
Anthony T.Hincks
What use were his talons and fangs to the dying tiger? In the clutches, say, to make matters worse, of a boa-constrictor? But apparently this improbable tiger had no intention of dying just yet. On the contrary, he intended taking a little walk, taking the boa-constrictor with him, even to pretend, for a while, it wasn't there.
Malcolm Lowry
You could be the ugliest, nastiest most miserable piece of shit known to man, but if you had a beating heart there was always a chance you'd turn into a diamond after a million years.
Conrad Williams
When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, of a family line, connection. All around him, men were walking silently with their thoughts, reforming their lives, making resolutions. If I ever get out of this lot... They could never be counted, the dreamed-up children, mentally conceived on the walk into Dunkirk, and later made flesh.
Ian McEwan
Sufism is experiential
Idries Shah
Incredible. It is just incredible that you can notice something like that when your face is so cold you can't feel it anymore, and you know perfectly well you are surrounded by death, and the only way to stay alive is to endure the howling wind and hold your course. And still the sky is beautiful.
Elizabeth Wein
Sam was stiff and tired. He crept onto the houseboat, careful not to wake anyone, and sidled down the narrow passage to his bunk. The shades were drawn and of course there were no lights, so he felt his way to the edge of his bed and crawled across it on hands and knees to find his pillow.He collapsed on his back.But even at the edge of sleep he was aware of something different about the bed.Then he felt soft breath on his cheek.He turned and her lips were on his. Not gentle. Not soft. She kissed him hard, and it was like he’d been awakened by an electric power line.She kissed him and slid on top of him.Their bodies did the rest.At some point in the hours that followed he said, “Astrid?”“Don’t you think you should have made sure of that about three times ago?” Astrid said in her familiar, slightly condescending tone.They said many things to each other after that, but nothing that involved words.
Michael Grant
Hope that star of life's tremulous ocean.
Paul Moon James
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
Winston Churchill
Gray clouds were charging across tissues of white, which stretched and shredded and tore slowly, until through their final layers there gleamed a hint of the disappearing blue. Summer was retreating. The wind roared, the trees groaned, yet the noise seemed insufficient for those vast operations in heaven. The weather was breaking up, breaking, broken, and it is a sense of the fit rather than of the supernatural that equips such crises with the salvos of angelic artillery.
E.M. Forster
Most people hate the taste of beer to begin with. It is however a prejudice that many people have been able to overcome.
Winston Churchill
The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.
George Orwell
Lyra learns to her great cost that fantasy isn’t enough. She has been lying all her life, telling stories to people, making up fantasies, and suddenly she comes to a point where that’s not enough. All she can do is tell the truth. She tells the truth about her childhood, about the experiences she had in Oxford, and that is what saves her. True experience, not fantasy - reality, not lies - is what saves us in the end.
Philip Pullman
If one could order a crime as one does a dinner, what would you choose? . . . Let’s review the menu. Robbery? Frogery? No, I think not. Rather too vegetarian. It must be murder—red-blooded murder—with trimmings, of course.
Agatha Christie
As Luxenberg's work has only recently been published we must await its scholarly assessment before we can pass any judgements. But if his analysis is correct then suicide bombers, or rather prospective martyrs, would do well to abandon their culture of death, and instead concentrate on getting laid 72 times in this world, unless of course they would really prefer chilled or white raisins, according to their taste, in the next.
Ibn Warraq
Never start with a clear idea of storyline. Instead, commence blindly, with a vague notion of trying to include a reference to your favourite band, gift shop, or chocolate bar.
Alan C. Martin
All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.
Edward Gibbon
Some abusers organise themselves in groups to abuse children and other adults in a more formally ritualised way. Men and women in these groups can be abusers with both sexes involved in all aspects of the abuse. Children are often forced to abuse other children. Pornography and prostitution are sometimes part of the abuse as is the use of drugs, hypnotism and mind control. Some groups use complex rituals to terrify, silence and convince victims of the tremendous power of the abusers. the purpose is to gain and maintain power over the child in order to exploit. Some groups are so highly organised that they also have links internationally through trade in child-pornography, drugs and arms.Some abusers organise themselves around a religion or faith and the teaching and training of the children within this faith, often takes the form of severe and sustained torture and abuse. Whether or not the adults within this type of group believe that what they are doing is, in some way 'right' is immaterial to the child on the receiving end of the 'teachings' and abuse.
Laurie Matthew
Behaviour comes from a life of indoctrination.
Steven Redhead
Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire.
Jeanette Winterson
You can live each day in the confidence of God’s promises.
Elizabeth George
She was walking toward the beauty shop when Shay came out the door moving fast. The first thing Jill noticed was Shay’s hair and how it appeared really big. As Shay drew closer, Jill realized she looked like she was wearing a mask with big blue streaks over the eyes and giant red pouty lips. “What happened to you?” Jill asked in shock. “I’m not sure,” Shay said, looking just as stunned. “One minute, I was reading a magazine, and the next, two women that looked like Dolly Parton descended on me like vultures. They started putting stuff on my face, then they did all kinds of things to my hair.” Anne walked out of the shop next; her Napoleon hat ’do rode higher than ever. Ella followed with her little red hair ball reinflated. “Doesn’t Shay just look beautiful?” Ella chirped. She looked like a hooker who’d just survived a wind tunnel, but Jill nodded and tried to smile.
Robin Alexander
Does he know about me? George wonders; do any of them? Oh yes, probably. It wouldn't interest them. They don't want to know about my feelings or my glands or anything below my neck. I could just as well be a severed head carried into the classroom to lecture to them from a dish.
Christopher Isherwood
Some folks rail against other folks, because other folks have what some folks would be glad of.
Henry Fielding
I don't like my voice. I don't like the way I look. I don't like the way I move. I don't like the way I act. I mean period. So you know I don't like myself.
Elizabeth Taylor
Long gone was the cheery welcome of the seaside hotelier, replaced by a weary nostalgia for the good old days.
Alan Gibbons
Generosity without delicacy, like wit without judgement, generally gives as much pain as pleasure.
Fanny Burney
There are plenty of other ways to mend a broken heart, and doing some list full of stuff that you don't want to do doesn't have to be one of them.
Anna Bell
Writing is a lonely pursuit. The only thing working is imagination and hands.The only difference between writing and masturbation is one is presumably intended for a mass audience.
Mark Bell
Cutting honest throats by whispers.
Walter Scott
In inventing [General Juan Manuel de] Rosas’ self-justification, I have taken the liberty of drawing almost exclusively on the words of Tony Blair, and the various self-justifications he produced to defend his foreign policy adventures with George Bush in the Middle East and the Central Asia.
Harry Thompson
You may possibly become rich by just caring about yourself and what you want to gain from life but you cannot possibly enrich the lives of everyone you meet that way. The pathway to enlightenment and transformation and liberation is the heart not the mind.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
That natural disasters are required to provide Americans with a glimpse of reality in their own country is an indication of the deep rot infecting the official political culture.
Tariq Ali
the rent here may be low but i believe we have it on very hard terms --sense & sensibility
Jane Austen
It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.
Ian McEwan
Get place and wealth if possible with grace If not by any means get wealth and place.
Alexander Pope
Today will die tomorrow.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
How about this,' I said. 'We modify our plans with regard to ongoing facts as they become known to us, then remodify them as the situation unfolds. 'You mean make it all up as we go along?' asked Perkins.'Right.
Jasper Fforde
If you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison' it is certain to disagree with you sooner or later.
Lewis Carroll
The moonlight covered the tombstones with an ethereal glow, and the statues above the tombs stood like silent guards waiting for something to happen.
Alan Kinross
Our whole family thrives under pressure. It's like our family motto or something.Apart from my brother Peter, of course. He had a nervous break down. But the rest of us.
Sophie Kinsella
Money is far commoner than time. When one reflects, one perceives that money is just about the commonest thing there is.
Arnold Bennett
And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. Yet is it the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are "important"; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial." And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.
Virginia Woolf
Always walk as if you’re running late, it’s healthier.
Benny Bellamacina
Elena glanced up at him, taking in his words. “If you get rid of your fear? You know, I never look at you as someone who’s afraid.”“That’s because every time you look at me, I’m looking right back, and the only time I’m not afraid, is when I see you. And I do see you, Elena. I see everything you’ve been through, from so young – how you struggled through it; how you never let it destroy your hope and faith – and I’m afraid of nothing."(Karl and Elena)
Dianna Hardy
I'm not going near anything that's going in the crack of his ass!
Mina Carter
Odder still how possessed I am with the feeling that now, aged 50, I’m just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are. Therefore all this flitter flutter of weekly newspapers interests me not at all. These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism. And to alter now, cleanly and sanely, I want to shuffle off this loose living randomness: people; reviews; fame; all the glittering scales; and be withdrawn, and concentrated.
Virginia Woolf
The world you acquire and partake in is purely driven by the choices taken.
Steven Redhead
One of the greatest lies ever told is that there’s no power in vulnerability.
Dianna Hardy
People don't ever seem to realize that doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune.
William McFee
He had a certain air of being a handsome man--which he was not; and a certain air of being a well-bred man--which he was not. It was mere swagger and challenge; but in this particular, as in many others, blustering assertion goes for proof, half over the world.
Charles Dickens
I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said.But he never liked anyone who--our friends,' said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry her.Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than I've ever been since, he thought. And as if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall. There above them it hung, that moon. She too seemed to be sitting with him on the terrace, in the moonlight.
Virginia Woolf
Evil is unspectacular and always human,And shares our bed and eats at our own table ....
W.H. Auden