Quotes by British Authors - Page 340

The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
Aldous Huxley
Universities are renowned for their tolerance of unusual characters, especially if they show originality and dedication to their research. I have often made the comment that not only are universities a 'cathedral' for worship of knowledge, they are also 'sheltered workshops' for the socially challenged.
Tony Attwood
Names turned over by time, like the plough turning the soil. Bringing up the new while the old were buried in the mud.
Joe Abercrombie
From the flames she rises, a bold, resplendent warrior ready to bring the world to its knees and cast away those who do not revere their Goddess. Enrapturing all those whom she favours there is no escaping her beguiling sensuality. Enfolding him to her breast, she enslaves his tumescence within her warm embrace and he is lost, within her passion, for eternity...
Virginia Alison
It is the brain, not the heart or lungs, that is the critical organ
Roger Bannister
All tales, then, are at some level a journey into the woods to find the missing part of us, to retrieve it and make ourselves whole. Storytelling is as simple - and complex - as that. That's the pattern. That's how we tell stories.
John Yorke
His sister, in a big turquoise Angora sweater, leaned upon the wood frame of the open nursery door, anxiously looking out to see if he was really going to show, beaming and waving like a pastel colored TV Muppet when she spotted him.
Alan Moore
So I find words I never thought to speakIn streets I never thought I should revisitWhen I left my body on a distant shore.
T.S Eliot
Human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves.
Ken Robinson
Sometimes you just need the comforts of home, the familiarity of your own family bed and only the pampering a mother can do.
Emily Williams
Dreaming's shit, but dying's worse; and watching someone die, that comes somewhere between the two, I guess. It ain't good, but it's got to be better than the other thing, better than doing it yourself. Hasn't it?
Chaz Brenchley
Some achieve greatness through people who lift them higher. Others find it when they have to stand alone.
Rachel Hamilton
The Reformer is always right about what's wrong. However, he's often wrong about what is right.
G.K. Chesterton
The wisest man I have ever known once said to me: 'Nine out of every ten people improve on acquaintance ' and I have found his words true.
Frank Swinnerton
All through dinner Arturo and I held hands under the table like a couple of kids, and that made the dinner quite wonderful, even though Mrs. Fletcher kept staring at Olivia as though committing her to memory. It got so bad that Olivia turned to her husband and said: "Has it happened at last, Gerald? Have I become a curiosity?
Helen Oyeyemi
Reality, my strange and precious one. Reality is fabric. Fabric isreality. And your reality here is far easier to live with than where Iwas on the other side. So that’s why I don’t want to go back, andwhy you wouldn’t like it.
Esme Ellis
He was an animal, that great thing for someone else to be.
Alan Hollinghurst
In the ancient recipe the three antidotes for dullness or boredom are sleep drink and travel. It is rather feeble. From sleep you wake up from drink you become sober and from travel you come home again. And then where are you? No the two sovereign remedies for dullness are love or a crusade.
D.H. Lawrence
Death and life were just adjacent verandas.
Salman Rushdie
The number of games went up or down according to the brutal, elegant logic of the economics of fun:a certain amount of difficultyplusa certain amount of your friendsplusa certain amount of interesting strangersplusa certain amount of rewardplusa certain amount of opportunityequaledfun
Cory Doctorow
Good judgment comes from experience, and experience - well, that comes from poor judgment.
A.A. Milne
Who breathes must suffer, and who thinks must mourn; And he alone is bless'd who ne'er was born.
Matthew Prior
Let Sporus tremble — "What? that thing of silk, Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk?Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?Who breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?"Yet let me flap this Bug with gilded wings,This painted Child of Dirt that stinks and stings; Whose Buzz the Witty and the Fair annoys,Yet Wit ne'er tastes, and Beauty ne'er enjoys,
Alexander Pope
Character is just an invention, but it's an invention that serves as both reason and justification for our behaviour. - Broken Verses
Kamila Shamsie
My power is everywhere propping up illusions, but I'm taking it back by letting go of them & just riding the stallion into wonderland. Let's see what you've got to say about the darkness in the mountains, I wonder if you know you can just turn it all to light. As we ride through the valley can you see the same water flowing that I do, or do dust clouds conceal it and block up your nose & throat? You're so thirsty for the end of the journey but I don't want you to miss the magic on the road.
Jay Woodman
This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.
Ian McEwan
Never tickle a sleeping dragon.
J.K. Rowling
There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.
Charles Dickens
if you don't have any weird moments, you're weird
bertie gilbert
A person whose desires and impulses are his own—are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture—is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character…
John Stuart Mill
About time, what I really learned from studying English is: time is different with timing.I understand the difference of these two words so well. I understand falling in love with the right person in the wrong timing could be the greatest sadness in a person's entire life.
Xiaolu Guo
We are alive in all our layers of self and selflessness - individuals becoming one.
Jay Woodman
Doctors know nothing. Well. That's kind of unfair. Let's just say the world is unpredictable. Science is unreliable. It can't tell you who you are or what you'll want or how you'll feel. All these researchers are going crazy in their labs, trying to fit us into these little boxes so they can justify their jobs, or their government funding, or their life's work. They can theorize and they can give you a mean, median and mode but it's all standardized guesswork, made official by arrogance. You have to be pretty into yourself to think you can play a part in defining the identity of a bunch of people you don't know, of human beings with complicated shit going on in their bodies. They still don't know what certain parts of our brains do, they still don't know how to cure a common cold, and they say they know about sexuality, about gender. Well, you're not a man because you like football and you're not a woman because you're attracted to men and you're not a chick because you like to be the one who gives and you're not a dude because you like to receive or because sometimes you cry at dumb movies.
Abigail Tarttelin
Great art, she felt, had a calming effect on the viewer; it made one stop in awe, which is exactly what Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol did not do. You did not stop in awe. They stopped you in your tracks, perhaps, but that was not the same thing; awe was something quite different
Alexander McCall Smith
Where does it hurt? She lifted her fingers to her cheekbone. Here.He moved slightly to place a soft, gentle kiss against the bruise.And here, she said, touching her forehead.He kissed her again.And here … She put her fingers to her mouth.
Marissa Farrar
Live that way long enough, and you will literally find yourself addicted to the acceptance of people. You will constantly need verbal affirmation. You will depend on always receiving a steady stream of invitations to events you don’t even want to attend. You will feel as though you need a significant other in your life at all times. I’m not exaggerating - this need for external acceptance will literally become an addiction. And that turns every one of your relationships - personal, professional, and romantic - into a codependent one. You are not in the relationship with a full heart able to give love away. You are in the relationship because you NEED it. You don’t know how you’d survive, much less thrive, without it. You are using every person to fill a void in your heart that you simply refuse to fill yourself. This is a mess.
Stephen Lovegrove
I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self,and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can helpand patience, and a certain difficult repentancelong difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneselffrom the endless repetition of the mistakewhich mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
D.H. Lawrence
Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.
Winston Churchill
Be militant in your own way! Those of you who can break windows, break them. Those of you who can still further attack the secret idol of property...do so. And my last word is to the Government: I incite this meeting to rebellion. Take me if you dare! (Emmeline Pankhurst, 1912)
Fran Abrams
Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art if it be art will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.
D.H. Lawrence
If you're going through hell, keep going
Winston Churchill
Ah! candid and unadulterated mind! you have learned early to reflect; but take care lest this habit, hitherto so well applied, should totally unfit you for society. It will strew thorns in your path, while other young women of your age seek only flowers. By imagining yourself in the place of others, as you now continually do, you will learn to feel for all the unhappy, or even for those who appear so; whereas it might save a great deal of (for the most part useless) pain, if you could contrive to feel only for yourself.
Charlotte Turner Smith
The moment of orgasm is like the first dramatic moment of birth when you draw breath and scream out that you are alive. It is hard to imagine the moment when you fade back into the vacuum and draw your last breath.
Chloe Thurlow
In starlit nights I saw you,So cruelly you kissed me.Your lips a magic world,Your sky all hung with jewels.The killing moonWill come too
Echo and the Bunnymen
Where is Wood?" said Harry, suddenly realizing he wasn't there."Still in the showers," said Fred. "We think he's trying to drown himself.
J.K. Rowling
Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.
C.S. Lewis
Ravings, in short, jealousy of the past, the worst kind of all.
Salman Rushdie
It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.
Paul Graham
The French don't snack. They will tear off the endo of a fres baguette (which, if it's warm, it's practically impossible to resist) and eat it as they leave the boulangerie. And that's usually all you will see being consumed on the street. Compare that with the public eating and drinking that goes on in America: pizza, hot dogs, nachos, tacos, heroes, potato chips, sandwiches, jerricans of coffee, half-gallon buckets of Coke (Diet, of cours) and heaven knows what else being demolished on the hoof, often on the way to the aerobic class.
Peter Mayle
Rincewind stared, and knew that there were far worse things than Evil. All the demons in Hell would torture your very soul, but that was precisely because they valued souls very highly; evil would always try to steal the universe, but at least it considered the universe worth stealing. But the gray world behind those empty eyes would trample and destroy without even according its victims the dignity of hatred. It wouldn't even notice them.
Terry Pratchett
The higher animals are in a sense drawn into Man when he loves them and makes them (as he does) much more nearly human than they would otherwise be.
C.S. Lewis
The mercy of heaven is greater than you or your sins. Let your sadness be dispersed by its glorious beams. Do not let apathy prevent you from seizing the moment for repentance. It matters not how wickedness has flourished. Divine grace can flourish still more abundantly.
Christopher St John
He (Macaulay) has occasional flashes of silence that make his conversation perfectly delightful.
Sydney Smith
No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders found, after a few days, that they didn't own their horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops.
Terry Pratchett
I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the metier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop this consciousness throughout his career. What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
T.S Eliot
Among those whom I like or admire I can find no common denominator but among those whom I love I can: all of them make me laugh.
W.H. Auden
Writing about the unholy is one way of writing about what is sacred.
Clive Barker
She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice.
Jeanette Winterson
Will was not without his intentions to be always generous, but our tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can be brought to bear.
George Eliot
Anger usually only serves us, and even then, only very fleetingly.
Sam Owen