Quotes by British Authors - Page 337

Hanging on in Quiet Desperation is the English Way
Roger Waters
No, no- the sky will grow dark, cold rain will fall and all trace of the right way will be blotted out. You will be all alone. And still you will have to go on. There will be ghosts in the dark and voices in the air, disgusting prophecies coming true I wouldn’t wonder and absent faces present on every side, as the man said. And still you will have to go on. The last bridge will fall behind you and the last lights will go out, followed by the sun, the moon and the stars; and still you will have to go on. You will come to regions more desolate and wretched than you ever dreamed could exist, places of sorrow created entirely by that mean superstition which you yourself have put about for so long. But still you will have to go on
Richard Adams
We started to collect more and more of these words and concepts, and began to realize what an arbitrarily selective work the Oxford English Dictionary is. It simply doesn’t recognize huge wodges of human experience. Like, for instance, standing in the kitchen wondering what you went in there for. Everybody does it, but because there isn’t—or wasn’t—a word for it, everyone thinks it’s something that only they do and that they are therefore more stupid than other people. It is reassuring to realize that everybody is as stupid as you are and that all we are doing when we are standing in the kitchen wondering what we came in here for is “woking.
Douglas Adams
Volume II, Chapter 4"How unwise had the wanderers been, who had deserted its shelter, entangled themselves in the web of society, and entered on what men of the world call "life,"—that labyrinth of evil, that scheme of mutual torture. To live, according to this sense of the word, we must not only observe and learn, we must also feel; we must not be mere spectators of action, we must act; we must not describe, but be subjects of description. Deep sorrow must have been the inmate of our bosoms; fraud must have lain in wait for us; the artful must have deceived us; sickening doubt and false hope must have chequered our days; hilarity and joy, that lap the soul in ecstasy, must at times have possessed us. Who that knows what "life" is, would pine for this feverish species of existence? I have lived. I have spent days and nights of festivity; I have joined in ambitious hopes, and exulted in victory: now,—shut the door on the world, and build high the wall that is to separate me from the troubled scene enacted within its precincts. Let us live for each other and for happiness; let us seek peace in our dear home, near the inland murmur of streams, and the gracious waving of trees, the beauteous vesture of earth, and sublime pageantry of the skies. Let us leave "life," that we may live.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Wherever I am, if I've got a book with me, I have a place I can go and be h
J.K. Rowling
Logic pervades the world the limits of the world are also the limits of logic.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
We act out our lives to a soundtrack, thought Isabel, the music that becomes, for a spell, out favourite and is listened to again and again until it stands for the time itself. But that was about all the scripting that we achieved; the rest, for most of us, was extemporising.
Alexander McCall Smith
Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!.Yes. Anybody in the world. ..But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come...dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes... and let's go home.
Alan Moore
Men can be teenagers until well into their twenties. That is well known
Alexander McCall Smith
With a book he was regardless of time...
Jane Austen
Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had.
Bill Bryson
Nothing was so likely to do her good as a little quiet cheerfulness at home.
Jane Austen
My dear Mrs. Ali, I would hardly refer to you as old," he said. "You are in what I would call the very prime flowering of mature womanhood." It was a little grandiose but he hoped to surprise a blush. Instead she laughed out loud at him. "I have never heard anyone try to trowel such a thick layer of flattery on the wrinkles and fat deposits of advanced middle age, Major," she said. "I am fifty-eight years old and I think I have slipped beyond flowering. I can only hope now to dry out into one of those everlasting bouquets.
Helen Simonson
How to get the best of it all? One must conquer, achieve, get to the top; one must know the end to be convinced that one can win the end - to know there's no dream that mustn't be dared. . . Is this the summit, crowning the day? How cool and quiet! We're not exultant; but delighted, joyful; soberly astonished. . . Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves. Have we gained success? That word means nothing here. Have we won a kingdom? No. . . and yes. We have achieved an ultimate satisfaction. . . fulfilled a destiny. . . To struggle and to understand - never this last without the other; such is the law. . .
George Mallory
One weekend it rained for 48 hours without stopping. The rain beat like bony fingers against the window panes. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Fungus was growing on the walls. I polished off a bottle of gin sitting huddled over the two-bar electric fire and wrote a poem, one of the few that has lasted through the moves and the years. It is called 'Where Can I Go?'If this is not the place where tears are understood where do I go to cry? If this is not the place where my spirits can take wing where do I go to fly?If this is not the place where my feelings can be heard where do I go to speak? If this is not the place where you’ll accept me as I am where can I go to be me? If this is not the place where I can try and learn and grow where can I go to laugh and cry?
Alice Jamieson
Who you are and what you experience is based upon the choices you make. It's not your parents, your past relationships, your job, the economy, the book you read, what someone said, the weather, an argument, nor your age, that are to blame (or credit!). You, and only you, are responsible for every decision and choice you make. Period.
Mango Wodzak
She is probably slightly too old to pout, but they've been going out a short enough time for it still to be cute.
Jojo Moyes
What's the use of the wind if it won't take you away on it?
Samantha Young
I watched the stars and thought of other lives.
David Mitchell
Living in a democratic society means that I can express my opinion,Having a democratic government means that they don't have to listen.
Anthony Hincks
If you want to understand the causes of aggression, study police officers
Steven Magee
Great services are not canceled by one act or by one single error.
Benjamin Disraeli
2015 - the year of infinity - if you add all the numbers up you get 8 - which on it's side is the sign of infinity - and I think it's going to be one hell of a good year for us.
Jay Woodman
They never taste who always drink They always talk who never think.
Matthew Prior
...I realized that rewards are not the goal- if one seeks the ultimate it will elude you. The reward is life itself, in its richness, in its sadness, and joy.
Valerie Ann Worwood
As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I'm still looking for the door.
David Mitchell
To SorrowI bade good morrow,And thought to leave her far away behind;But cheerly, cheerly,She loves me dearly;She is so constant to me, and so kind.
John Keats
Ladies sheltering behind men, men sheltering behind servants - the whole system's wrong, and she must challenge it.
E.M. Forster
Yet in reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all those with a take on the future of the potato crisp, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.Our era is perverse in passing off an exception as a rule.
Alain de Botton
Jacob glanced across at the woman. 'She'd have you for breakfast, mate.''Yeah,' Luca countered, 'maybe I want to be had for breakfast.
Sharon Sant
A godly mother loves God with all her heart, soul, mind, and strength, and teaches her children to do the same.
Elizabeth George
It has truly been said that 'Humility is not so much a virtue as a necessity, in order to learn.
Idries Shah
Saint abroad and a devil at home.
John Bunyan
All this, I suspect, has been little more than the operation known as the pilgrimage from the cradle to the grave, but I have had a comfortable feeling that, however ordinary my enterprises may have been, they had at any rate the advantage of containing, for me, an element of sustained unfamiliarity. I am one of those persons who begin life by exclaiming they've "never seen anything like this before" and die in the hope that they may say the same of heaven.
Siegfried Sassoon
I have set off and found that there is no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no sooner begin, than a hundred more appear. Every time I try to narrow down my intent I expand it, and yet those straits and canals still lead me to the open sea, and then I realize how vast it all is, this matter of the mind. I am confounded by the shining water and the size of the world.
Jeanette Winterson
The author explores the result of endless choice. It is not only overload, but a profound loss of unity, solidity, and coherence in life.
Os Guinness
How many men can say, as I must, 'I am a man whose only friend is the King of England'? I have everything, you would think. And yet take Henry away, and I have nothing.
Hilary Mantel
The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend
Aldous Huxley
There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.
Terry Pratchett
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
William Blake
Success seems to be that which forms the distinction between confidence and conceit.
Charles Caleb Colton
The sad truth about bigotry is that most bigots either don't realize that they are bigots, or they convince themselves that their bigotry is perfectly justified.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Her albino hair illuminated my dreams, shining brighter than moonlight.
Anna Kavan
I got this to say. You're acting like a crowd of kids.
William Golding
Onward Christian soldiers Marching as to war With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
Sabine Baring-Gould
The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already sovered with scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulant as humanity.
G.K. Chesterton
It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.
Walter de la Mare
Don’t want no more rock,” Orc repeated.The bleeding stopped almost immediately.“Does it hurt?” Lana asked. “I mean the rock. I know the hole hurts.”“No. It don’t hurt.” Orc slammed his fist against his opposite arm, hard enough that any human arm would have been shattered. “I barely feel it. Even Drake’s whip, when we was fighting, I barely felt it.”Suddenly he was weeping. Tears rolled from human eyes onto cheeks of flesh and pebbles.“I don’t feel nothing except…” He pointed a thick stone finger at the flesh of his face.“Yeah,” Lana said. Her irritation was gone. Her burden was smaller, maybe, than Orc’s.
Michael Grant
I feel very strongly indeed that a Cambridge education for our scientists should include some contact with the humanistic side. The gift of expression is important to them as scientists; the best research is wasted when it is extremely difficult to discover what it is all about ... It is even more important when scientists are called upon to play their part in the world of affairs, as is happening to an increasing extent.
William Lawrence Bragg
...and no man gave you a fur coat without expecting to receive something inreturn. Except for one's husband, of course, who expected nothing beyond modest gratitude.
Kate Atkinson
The author explains the evidence for they would help from astronomy. He says that if planets are behaving in a way that cannot be explained by what is already known, then another planet is searched for which would explain their behavior. This, he says, is actually how the more distant planets were discovered. We look, then, for something that would explain what is not inexplicable from what we already see.
N.T. Wright
I routinely use my blue sky "Device" and it works very well for me.
Steven Magee
My Emma, does not every thing serve to prove more and more the beauty of truth and sincerity in all our dealings with each other?
Jane Austen
Go on, my dear," urges the snake. "Take one. Hear it? 'Pluck me,' it's saying. That big, shiny red one. 'Pluck me, pluck me now and pluck me hard.' You know you want to.", clever girl, "expressly forbids us to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge."?"Eve folds her arms schoolgirlishly. "God expressly forbade it. Adam said."The snake grins through his fangs, admiring Eve's playacting. "God is a nice enough chap in His way. I daresay He means well. But between you and The Tree of Knowledge, He is terribly insecure.""Insecure? He made the entire bloody universe! He's omnipotent.""Exactly! Almost neurotic, isn't it? All this worshiping, morning, noon, and night. It's 'Oh Praise Him, Oh Praise Him, Oh Praise the Everlassssting Lord.' I don't call that omnipotent. I call it pathetic. Most independent authorities agree that God has never sufficiently credited the work of virtual particles in the creation of the universssse. He raises you and Adam on this diet of myths while all the really interesting information is locked up in these juicy apples. Seven days? Give me a break.
David Mitchell
In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquility; and though prepared, as he told Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free from them there
Jane Austen
The thing is, Sara, writing's scary. You have to be prepared to go deep......And when your brain's shouting, 'No, no, no, I'm not going to think that thought; it's too dirty, it's too scary, it's too painful,' that's when you must make yourself think it and make yourself write it.
Felicity Everett
There is no wisdom equal to that which comes after the event.
Geraldine Jewsbury
While we are actually subjected to them, the 'moods' and 'spirits' of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, 'Look. Listen. Attend.
C.S. Lewis
Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: 'Learn, guys...
Neil Gaiman
Well we've moved through the funfair a bit - we've done the rollercoaster, now we're on the ghost train.
Steven Moffat