Quotes by British Authors - Page 342

You see, the catch about portrait painting—I've looked into the thing a bit— is that you can't startpainting portraits till people come along and ask you to, andthey won't come and ask you to until you've painted a lot first.This makes it kind of difficult for a chappie.
P.G. Wodehouse
You totally ruined my life, you know that?' said Rincewind hotly. 'I could have really made it as a wizard if you hadn't decided to use me as a sort of portable spellbook. I can't remember any other spells, they're all too frightened to stay in the same head as you!
Terry Pratchett
Examine this statement: ‘A woman cannot be a poet.’ Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?
Jeanette Winterson
He was digging in his garden--digging, too, in his own mind, laboriously turning up the substance of his thought. Death--and he drove in his spade once, and again, and yet again. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools they way to dusty death. A convincing thunder rumbled through the words. He lifted another spadeful of earth. Why had Linda died? Why had she been allowed to become gradually less than human and at last... He shuddered. A good kissing carrion. He planted his foot on his spade and stamped it fiercely into the tough ground. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kills us for their sport. Thunder again; words that proclaimed themselves true--truer somehow than truth itself. And yet that same Gloucester had called them ever-gentle gods. Besides, thy best of rest is sleep, and that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st thy death which is no more. No more than sleep. Sleep. Perchance to dream. His spade struck against a stone; he stooped to pick it up. For in that sleep of death, what dreams...?
Aldous Huxley
I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is the language I don't understand.
Edward Appleton
I realized that the whole time I was holding this beautiful stranger in my arms, feeding on her, it felt like I was betraying Sofia.
Bella Forrest
And that's how we measure out our real respect for people—by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate—and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you.
Ted Hughes
You have to be grateful for the small things, when any minute might be your last.
Joe Abercrombie
You no longer speak of your old friends, your Council, your home. I fear that you are forgetting them, and forgetting your reason for coming here.”Hunter sighed. “It’s difficult to talk about them, they don’t belong here. Anyway, I thought you wanted me to give up my old life. Congratulations, you’ve won.”The Abate smiled sadly. “Perhaps I did, I wanted you to abandon your violent past and adopt our ways. But I see that you are giving up everything and taking on nothing. What are you afraid of George?
K.S. Marsden
Sacrificing a part of yourself so others can go on to fafill there greatness, their destiny. Is greatness in itself but in a much smaller way that won't be written about or put in history books. But it is far more great in many ways.
Thomas Brodie Sangster
A few caring kind quality friends are worth more than any amount of shallow popularity.
Rachel Hamilton
Living with a dog is one way to retain something of a child's spirit.
Michael Rosen
Scrimgeour: "It's time you learned some respect!" Harry: "It's time you earned it.
J.K. Rowling
Now I understand why you grow so many flowers."She shifted her head, not understanding.I said, "To cover the stink of sulphur.
John Fowles
Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy profession, and a large number of its practitioners spend many nights drowning their sorrows in Ouisghian Zodahs.
Douglas Adams
Self-acceptance should not be confused with an over-vaulting aggrandisement of self over others. That individual's exaggerated positive view of self relies upon a comparison with others - they sustain their own positive self-view, relatively, by maintaining a negative view of others.
Dave Mearns
Because the world is in a sick condition and we are all somehow infected, against our will, even if we think we are whole in mind and soul and body.
Robert Graves
So long as you have a society with a lot of guns- and America has more guns per capita than any other county in the world- children will be at risk of being shot. The questions are how much risk, and what, if anything, is being done to minimize it? If one thinks of various ways in which commonplace items, from car seats to medicine bottle tops, have been childproofed, it's clear that society's general desire has been to eliminate as many potential dangers from children as possible, even when the number of those who might be harmed is relatively small. If one child's death is preventable, then the proper question isn't "Why should we do this" but rather "Why shouldn't we?" It would be strange for that principle to apply to everything but guns.
Gary Younge
Let a clear understanding of your identity In Christ shed light on all the ways you can live out your purpose.
Elizabeth George
You can like people and still betray them, if it was for a cause you believed in passionately enough. You have to betray other people rather than betray yourself--if that's what it comes to.
Anne Perry
The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.
T.H. White
I keep drawing the trees, the rocks, the river, I'm still learning how to see them; I'm still discovering how to render their forms. I will spend a lifetime doing that. Maybe someday I'll get it right.
Alan Lee
Every book is a journey, a map into the complexities of the human mind and soul.
Elif Shafak
Our contradictions are never so to ourselves.
Jeanette Winterson
And there was Tara, again with that shy half-smile and her burgundy lips slightly puckered, that shy kink, an incomplete curlicue at the corner of her mouth; he'd seen it before many times but never noted it, and now it had him mesmerized.
Graham Joyce
Neither love without knowledge nor knowledge without love can produce a good life.
Bertrand Russell
Eagles, buffalos and deserts vast, it’s no good living in the fucking past.
Mark Jackman
The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.
W Somerset Maugham
He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.
Alain de Botton
Every child of God is not called by the Lord to establish schools and orphan houses and to trust in the Lord for means for them. Yet, there is no reason why you may not experience, far more abundantly than we do now, His willingness to answer the prayers of His children.
George Müller
You're always in a rush, or else you're too exhausted to have a proper conversation. Soon enough, the long hours, the traveling, the broken sleep have all crept into your being and become part of you, so everyone can see it, in your posture, your gaze, the way you move and talk.
Kazuo Ishiguro
A colleague once described political theorists as people who were obsessed with two dozen books; after half a century of grappling with Mill's essay On Liberty, or Hobbes's Leviathan, I have sometimes thought two dozen might be a little on the high side.
Alan Ryan
Even more alarming were persistent rumors that someone had smuggled an Emotion Amplifier on board 'Mentor'. The so-called joy machines were banned on all planets, except under strict medical control; but there would always be people to whom reality was not good enough, and who would want to try something better.
Arthur C. Clarke
It was important not to offend against the laws of magic. If a woman left you it was because you did not cast the right spell over her, or else because someone else cast a stronger enchantment than yours, or else because your marriage was cursed in such a way that it cut the ties of love between husband and wife. Why did So-and-so enjoy success in his businesses? Because he visited the right enchanter. There was a thing in the emperor that rebelled against all this flummery, for was it not a kind of infantilization of the self to give up one's power of agency and believe that such power resided outside oneself rather than within? This was also his objection to God, that his existence deprived human beings of the right to form ethical structures by themselves.
Salman Rushdie
There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl The feat of reason and the flow of soul.
Alexander Pope
I think that a writer should observe the real world before imagining a non-existent one.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Aestheticism and radicalism must lead us to jettison reason, and to replace it by a desperate hope for political miracles. This irrational attitude which springs from intoxication with dreams of a beautiful world is what I call Romanticism. It may seek its heavenly city in the past or in the future; it may preach ‘back to nature’ or ‘forward to a world of love and beauty’; but its appeal is always to our emotions rather than to reason. Even with the best intentions of making heaven on earth it only succeeds in making it a hell – that hell which man alone prepares for his fellow-men.
Karl R. Popper
Asking in prayer helps you to see your problem in the light of God’s power.
Elizabeth George
Chance looked up at him, her dark grey eyes out. 'I knew you were gonna be like this.''How'd you know?' Reaper said, reaching out and putting his arm around her shoulders.'I am my father's daughter, ain't I?' said Chance.Reaper smiled. 'You sure as hell you are.
Sean Black
But maybe that's what the dead do. They stay. They linger. Benign and sweet and painful. They don't need us. They echo all by themselves.
Sangu Mandanna
Darkling I listen; and, for many a timet I have been half in love with easeful Death,t Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,t To take into the air my quiet breath;t Now more than ever seems it rich to die,To cease upon the midnight with no pain,While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroadt In such an ecstasy!
John Keats
Nobody could hold the same place in your heart as your sister. Love or hate her, she was the only person who grew up exactly like you, who knew the secrets of your household—the laughter that only the walls of your house contained or the screaming at a level low enough the neighbors couldn’t hear, the passive aggressive compliments or the little put-downs. Only your sister could know how it felt to grow up in the house that made you you.
Jessica Taylor
Plantie is a very strong Protestant, that is to say, he's against all churches, especially the Protestant: and he thinks a lot of Buddha, Karma and Confucius. He is also a bit of an anarchist and three or four years ago he took up Einstein and vitamins.
Joyce Cary
Life… has a way of testing the fault line
Josephine Hart
When you write something down, it stays forever.It's like a little part of you that you're giving to the universe
Emma Abdullah
Whoever is trying to bring you down is already beneath you.
Habeeb Akande
Imagine your body becoming that of a stranger. Imagine the sensation of it being not yours, as you discover what it feels like to do this, or to have this happen to you, for the very first time. Imagine it happening with sickening slowness, or with shocking speed, that discovery. And then imagine knowing it has come too late.
Neil Bartlett
Progress is made by the improvement of people, not the improvement of machines.
Adrian Tchaikovsky
I am too much of an imitator to be a true writer.
Zia Haider Rahman
Our struggle is--isn't it?--to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already
C.S. Lewis
That's what I like about the modern world: choice. We all choose what we have to live with.
Dorothy Koomson
Ideas are bulletproof
Steve Moore
If he was in danger of anything at all, it was spontaneous submissive combustion due to his master’s teasing.
Kim Dare
Persistence drives the achievement of the desired outcome for reality.
Steven Redhead
When a Lady chooses to Change Her Mind,' said the Mouse with a touch of hauteur, 'a Gentleman would consider it no more than her Privilege, and not Badger Her About It.
Noel Langley
Curse us and crush us, my precious is lost!
J.R.R. Tolkien
And all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape.
Thomas Hardy
I long fora little life,an everyday life,a splash of sunlightthrough a windowa smile from a stranger -a heart to hold in mine.
Menna van Praag
The goal is not simply to 'work hard, play hard.' The goal is to make our work and our play indistinguishable.
Simon Sinek
…having once seen him put forth his strength in battle, methinks I could know him again among a thousand warriors. He rushes into the fray as if he were summoned to a banquet. There is more than mere strength—there seems as if the whole soul and spirit of the champion were given to every blow which he deals upon his enemies. God assoilzie him of the sin of bloodshed! It is fearful, yet magnificent, to behold how the arm and heart of one man can triumph over hundreds.
Walter Scott