Quotes by British Authors - Page 344

If she is efficient and capable or ambitious, it is assumed that she has failed to find satisfaction as a normal woman, even to the extent of implying a glandular abnormality or sexual perversion.
Germaine Greer
Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
Aldous Huxley
Committing your thoughts and feelings to words is like putting your soul on a plate and hoping the diners will like what they eat.
Fennel Hudson
Because two people in love don't make a hive mind. Neither should they want to be a hive mind, to think the same, to know the same. It's about being separate and still loving each other, being distinct from each other. One is the violin string one is the bow.
Graham Joyce
When the Bible itself becomes irksome, inquire whether you have not been spoiling your appetite by sweetmeats and renounce them; and believe that the Word is the wire along which the voice of God will certainly come to you if the heart is hushed and the attention fixed.
F.B. Meyer
I don’t want to wake up. I can’t feel the cold of life. I can’t feel fear in my dreams. When awake we are green and red bits glowing under a machine, lights turn off and on, and people of science convince themselves they know what’s going on. Backs are patted, hand are shaken. Test, record, collect. They tell us what we already know. We are all dying, dying slow. When awake, there is a feeling of impending doom, and if you can’t feel it, close your eyes, or open them further. When we’re in a box underground, heaven is finally above us, but it’s not in the sky. Heaven is the planet we lived on, and all of the angels are people. Here, in a dream, it’s just me floating in the back of my mind, among parts we don’t fully understand.
Craig Stone
Hello, Professor McGonagall,” said Moody calmly, bouncing the ferret still higher.“What — what are you doing?” said Professor McGonagall, her eyes following the bouncing ferret’s progress through the air.“Teaching,” said
J.K. Rowling
Considering he was neither priest nor scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful replies -- the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not believe. Present a statement to him in flagrant contradiction to all Christian doctrine and he could be persuaded to agree on its good sense, unless he remembered it was the sort of thing of which pyres are made for the incautious.
Iain Pears
Despair and Genius are too oft connected
George Gordon Byron
I have an income nearly sufficient for my wants (no one's income is ever quite sufficient, you know).
Anthony Hope
A man in drink can be like a ravening wolf.
Agatha Christie
After all, Sergios was not all bad. He was tough, ruthless, arrogant and selfish, but while he might have the morals of an alley cat, he had been remarkably kind to her mother.
Lynne Graham
am i insane" asked alice"yes, but all the best people are" replied her father
Lewis Carroll
The awful part of the writing game is that you can never be sure the stuff is any good.
P.G. Wodehouse
Those close to [Patricia Highsmith], particularly her family, often commented on how Highsmith's vision of reality was a warped one. In April 1947, she transcribed into her notebook what was, presumably, a real dialogue between herself and her mother, in which Mary accused her of not facing the world. Highsmith replied that she did indeed view the world 'sideways, but since the world faces reality sideways, sideways is the only way the world can be looked at in true perspective.' The problem, Highsmith said, was that her psychic optics were different to those around her, but if that was the case, her mother replied, then she should equip herself with a pair of new spectacles. Highsmith was not convinced. 'Then I need a new birth,' she concluded.
Andrew Wilson
...Gentlemen don't understand anything, however wise they may be.
Georgette Heyer
Float beyond the world of trees. Out into the whispering breeze, past the rushes, past the weeds, past the marsh's waving reeds.
J.R.R. Tolkien
A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked not endured with patient resignation.
Bertrand Russell
I’m not sure what’s more worrying. The list of demands or the fact he seems unaware the French stopped using francs in the last century and that Africa is a continent?” - Jerome
Jamie Scallion
if people do not have responsibility, do not expect them to behave responsibly.
Carne Ross
On bad days you wonder, ‘Why not just back off from the war and lead a quiet metalife?
David Mitchell
She couldn't have told you whether it was because she was afraid, or because such a voice in the darkness seemed of necessity a boon; but she listened to him as she had never listened before; his words dropped deep into her soul.
Henry James
In these days of conflict between ancient and modern studies, there must surely be something to be said for a study which did not begin with Pythagoras, and will not end with Einstein, but is the oldest and the youngest of all.
G H Hardy
People were animals, and animals were nothing but teeth. You bit first, and you bit often, That was the only way to survive.
Frances Hardinge
If the man who turnips cries Cry not when his father dies 'Tis proof that he had rather Have a turnip than his father.
Samuel Johnson
The dead and not-yet dead, we are company all together.
Rosie Thomas
I tell you, money can't build your spire for you. Build it of gold and it would simply sink deeper.
William Golding
When the dog bites, when the bee stings... I simply remember I have a boyfriend and suddenly things don't seem quite so completely shit.
Sophie Kinsella
A life lived in fear is a life half lived.
Carrie Hope Fletcher
Time neither flies nor sleeps. It is flexible, plastic, ever changing. Spend two hours watching a movie curled up with your lover and time ceases to exist. Spend two hours waiting for your lover to come and time is the iron bars of a prison
Chloe Thurlow
The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas. It may be thought 'dogmatic,' for instance, in some circles accounted progressive, to assume the perfection or improvement of man in another world. But it is not thought "dogmatic" to assume the perfection or improvement of man in this world; though that idea of progress is quite as unproved as the idea of immortality, and from a rationalistic point of view quite as improbable. Progress happens to be one of our dogmas, and a dogma means a thing which is not thought dogmatic.
G.K. Chesterton
The grey-rain curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I guessed life was like that. You gained and you lost, and if you saved anything from the ruins, even if only a shred of self-respect, it was enough to take you through the next bit.
Dick Francis
It is not our abilities that show who we truly are, it is our choices.
J.K. Rowling
I hate you.”He chuckled. “No, you don’t. Come here, I’ll apologize.”She snorted. “No, you won’t. You’ll feel me up.”“That too,” he admitted with a smile. “Come here.
Suzanne Wright
There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.
R. Dawkins
The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism.
C.S. Lewis
No matter how eloquently a dog may bark he cannot tell you that his parents were poor but honest.
Bertrand Russell
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.
Charles Mackay
I thought it sounded a bit like Percy singing... maybe you've got to attack him while he's in the shower, Harry.
J.K. Rowling
Never forget you are the successful product of a harsh universe; the simple fact that you exist, whence trillions of other organisms do not, is a mathematical miracle.
Matt Parker
It's an insidious idea, this notion that there is life after death. The promise of a reward in the afterlife has been used as an excuse to deny help to the poor, helpless and oppressed; to explain away human misery rather than deal with it. It is an idea that is used to encourage young men and women to kill themselves, and others, so that they can become martyrs. It allows victims of injustice to be told not to worry because justice will be done in the afterlife. It depresses me to think that so many people on the planet live their lives with this notion. Can we truly fulfill our potential as a species as long as we hold on to, and encourage, the perpetuation of the lie of life after death?
Alom Shaha
When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends - using my favourite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world - she just laughed. 'You like it,' she said. 'You say you're isolated, boyo, but you really think you're different.
John Fowles
I regret it is not possible to marry by post.
Janet Mullany
They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions' who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.
E.M. Forster
Because I haven't yet learned the simplest and most important thing of all: the world is difficult, and we are all breakable. So just be kind.
Caitlin Moran
They themselves do not see the world of light as we do, but our shapes cast shadows in their minds, which only the noon sun destroys.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Foreign, for sure. But we all bleed the same color red. No doubt about that. The truth of that statement was plain to see. Reacher put the guy out of misery. A single shot, close range, behind the ear. An unnecessary round expended, but good manners had a price
Lee Child
Quality of life is more important than the quantity
Marilyn L Rice
In life there are squares and there are circles, sometimes it's best to be an oblong
Benny Bellamacina
The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal endings.
Anthony Powell
Revenge can only be found on the road to self-destruction.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
All day we've witnessed each other's crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die?
Ian McEwan
There are certain songs, and books, and films that are like points of high ground in the memory. Like they are even larger than your own experiences. They never go away.
Graham Joyce
Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling? The reason is clearly that the human heart as modern civilisation has made it is more prone to hatred than to friendship. And it is prone to hatred because it is dissatisfied, because it feels deply, perhaps even unconsciously, that it has somehow missed the meaning of life, that perhaps others, but not we ourselves, have secured the good things which nature offers man's enjoyment.
Bertrand Russell
Don't be afraid to let yourself get bored because some of the most amazing things are created through boredom.
Rachel Hamilton
We each come to create the reality we believe we deserve.
Steven Redhead
None think the great unhappy but the great.
Edward Young
We’re programmed to imagine bad things happening to us, as opposed to good things, even if the good are more likely. It’s kind of a protective pessimism: if we worry about the worst happening, it may miss our door.
Ruth Dugdall
It can certainly be misleading to take the attributes of a movement, or the anxieties and contradictions of a moment, and to personalize or 'objectify' them in the figure of one individual. Yet ordinary discourse would be unfeasible without the use of portmanteau terms—like 'Stalinism,' say—just as the most scrupulous insistence on historical forces will often have to concede to the sheer personality of a Napoleon or a Hitler. I thought then, and I think now, that Osama bin Laden was a near-flawless personification of the mentality of a real force: the force of Islamic jihad. And I also thought, and think now, that this force absolutely deserves to be called evil, and that the recent decapitation of its most notorious demagogue and organizer is to be welcomed without reserve. Osama bin Laden's writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself.
Christopher Hitchens