Quotes by British Authors - Page 347

One of the curious things about our educational system, I would note, is that the better trained you are in a discipline, the less used to dialectical method you're likely to be. In fact, young children are very dialectical; they see everything in motion, in contradictions and transformations. We have to put an immense effort into training kids out of being good dialecticians. Marx wants to recover the intuitive power of the dialectical method and put it to work in understanding how everything is in process, everything is in motion. He doesn't simply talk about labor; he talks about the labor process. Capital is not a thing, but rather a process that exists only in motion. When circulation stops, value disappears and the whole system comes tumbling down.
David Harvey
The universe is big. It's vast and complicated and ridiculous. And sometimes—very rarely—impossible things just happen and we call them miracles.
Steven Moffat
Pick up a bee from kindness, and learn the limitations of kindness.
Idries Shah
Things are continually beginning again; they’re never really resolved, you know. They are only resolved temporarily. We live in a society that peddles solutions, whether it’s solutions to those extra pounds you’re carrying, or to your thinning hair, or to your loss of appetite, loss of love. We are always looking for solutions, but actually what we are engaged in is a process throughout life during which you never get it right. You have to keep being open, you have to keep moving forward. You have to keep finding out who you are and how you are changing, and only that makes life tolerable.
Jeanette Winterson
The queer thing is that we do trust you," said Bodisham. "In spite of your -- extremism.""You'd better," said Rud with grim conviction. "I'm right. What is extremism? The whole truth and nothing but the truth. I ask you.""It's because of his extremism you trust him," said Chiffan. "It's because in the last resort we believe in his indiscretion, and know he won't fail us even if we fail ourselves. All leadership is extravagance. Extra-vagance. Going a bit ahead."Rud did not quite understand that. "It's because you know I'm right," he said."It's because," said Chiffan, letting his thoughts run away with him," to make a new world, the leader must be a fundamentally destructive man, a recklessly destructive man. He breaks his way through the jungle and we follow...We cannot do without you, Rud.
H.G.Wells
The half-moon westers low, my love,And the wind brings up the rain;And wide apart lie we, my love,And seas between the twain.I know not if it rains, my love, In the land where you do lie;And oh, so sound you sleep, my love,You know no more than I.
A.E. Housman
Here's what I think...There is no unfucked up. People think there is, but there's not. We're all fucked up in different ways. It's simply a question of making your fuck-ups work for you."-Aidan
Gemma Burgess
White IrisThe iris danced acrossthe ancient Grecian skiesgliding with her embossedsatiny milken sides ...
Muse
Sir Beldevere: What makes you think she's a witch? Peasant 3: Well, she turned me into a newt! Sir Beldevere: A newt? Peasant 3: [meekly after a long pause] ... I got better. Crowd: [shouts] Burn her anyway!
Graham Chapman
Travel far enough, you meet yourself.
David Mitchell
MAGHRIBI: Learning is in activity. Learning through words alone is minor activity.
Idries Shah
Books were safer than other people anyway.
Neil Gaiman
Avoid letting circumstances control your decisions and dictate your actions, thereby controlling your life.
Steven Redhead
Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them.
Germaine Greer
Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage.
Joe Abercrombie
From that original colony sprang seven names that still feature on the landscape: Roanoke (which has the distinction of being the first Indian word borrowed by English settlers), Cape Fear, Cape Hatteras, the Chowan and Neuse Rivers, Chesapeake, and Virginia. (Previously, Virginia had been called Windgancon, meaning "what gay clothes you wear" - apparently what the locals had replied when an early reconnoitering party had asked the place's name.)
Bill Bryson
What after all, is a halo? It's only one more thing to keep clean.
Christopher Fry
She was sensible and clever, but eager in everything; her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation.
Jane Austen
Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library.
Walter Savage Landor
She spent the foggy day in endless, aimless walking, for it seemed to her that if she moved quickly enough she would escape the fear that hunted her. It was a vague and shadowy fear of something cruel and stupid that had caught her and would never let her go. She had always known that it was there - hidden under the more of less pleasant surface of things. Always. Ever since she was a child.You could argue about hunger or cold or loneliness, but with that fear you couldn't argue. It went too deep. You were too mysteriously sure of its terror. You could only walk very fast and try to leave it behind you.
Jean Rhys
Never does a man know the force that is in him till some mighty affection or grief has humanized the soul.
Frederick W. Robertson
HELLO, my name is your potential. But you can call me impossible. I am the missed opportunities. I am the expectations you will never fulfil. I am always taunting you, regardless of how hard you try, how hard you hope.
Nathan Filer
The case of the general talk of "progress" is, indeed, an extreme one. As enunciated today, "progress" is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative. We meet every ideal of religion, patriotism, beauty, or brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of progress—that is to say, we meet every proposal of getting something that we know about, with an alternative proposal of getting a great deal more of nobody knows what.
G.K. Chesterton
You used to get it in your fishnetsNow you only get it in your nightdressDiscarded all the naughty nights for niceness......Remeber when the boys were all electric?
Arctic Monkeys
It's a nebulous thing, but it is my belief—my experience also—that women do not have the need to collect that men have.
Deborah Meyler
Each of us is born to follow a star, be it bright and shining or dark and fated. Sometimes the path of these stars will cross, bringing love or hatred. However, if you look up at the skies on a clear night, out of all the countless lights that twinkle and shine, there will come one. That star will be seen in a blaze, burning a path of light across the roof of the earth, a great comet.
Brian Jacques
Up the narrow stairs and into the kitchen. Rosie's mother looked around and made a face as if to indicate that it did not meet her standards of hygiene, containing as it did, edible foodstuffs. "Coffee? Water?" Don't say wax fruit. "Wax fruit?" Damn.
Neil Gaiman
The ideal committee is one with me as chairman and two other members in bed with flu.
Lord Milverton
I hate the thought of someone never being missed,' said Ianto sadly. 'It's the ultimate humiliation, surely. So unimportant in life that no one even notices when you die.
Trevor Baxendale
Secrets, secrets, secrets. People are filled to the brim with them if you look closely.
Sarah Pinborough
The human will be the only mammal in history to fully understand that its own self inflicted extinction is well underway.
Steven Magee
Mr. Moony presents his compliments to Professor Snape, and begs him to keep his abnormally large nose out of other people's business.Mr. Prongs agrees with Mr. Moony, and would like to add that Professor Snape is an ugly git.Mr. Padfoot would like to register his astonishment that an idiot like that ever became a professor.Mr. Wormtail bids Professor Snape good day, and advises him to wash his hair, the slimeball.
J.K. Rowling
I looked over at him, running in the distance. Another faulty, fucked-up brain in a healthy body.
S.J. Watson
But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.
Thomas de Quincey
Reality is only a dream, based on values and well worn principles, whereas the dream goes on forever.
Ian Thomas Curtis
It's like people care more about their pride than about what's correct, about the truth.
Terry Pratchett
In the depths of his tiredness, surrounded by these blank, sheep-like visages, he found himself pondering the accidents that had brought all of them into being. Every birth was, viewed properly, mere chance. With a hundred million sperm swimming blindly through the darkness, the odds against a person becoming themselves were staggering.
Robert Galbraith
The clock’s pendulum catches the firelight, and in the rattle-breathed final moments of Jacob de Zoet, amber shadows in the far corner coagulate into a woman’s form. She slips between the bigger, taller onlookers unnoticed … … and adjusts her headscarf, the better to hide her burn. She places her cool palms on Jacob’s fever-glazed face.Jacob sees himself, when he was young, in her narrow eyes. Her lips touch the place between his eyebrows. A well-waxed paper door slides open.
David Mitchell
Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.
Arthur C. Clarke
It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this -- and much more than this is true -- why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us--why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him.Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.
Virginia Woolf
We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
J.K. Rowling
Falling in love was simple; one had only to yield. Digesting another person, however, and sustaining love, was bloody work, and not a soft job.
Hanif Kureishi
We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Richard Dawkins
I could still taste her kiss on my lips as I walked along a deserted Chalk Farm Road at sunrise.
Charlie Maclean
Miss Runcible wore trousers and Miles touched up his eye-lashes in the dining-room of the hotel where they stopped for luncheon. So they were asked to leave.
Evelyn Waugh
Speech is the deadliest of revealers.' - Hercule Poirot, Cards on the Table
Agatha Christie
But one never does form a just idea of anybody beforehand. One takes up a notion and runs away with it.
Jane Austen
Status: the perpetual carrot that entices us from the front and prods us in the back.
Fennel Hudson
See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind ... is the one fundamental treason which the scholar's mind must not allow is the bond uniting all the Oxford people in the last resort.
Dorothy L. Sayers
De-calcify the pineal gland with the detergent of imagination
Dean Cavanagh
Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
Charles Darwin
Yes you can let a guy bite you but not on the first date! he has to pay for dinner ! But you can bite him on the first date at no cost that is quite normal
Amy Mah
It doesn't really matter who you used to be, what matters is who you've become.
Robert Tew
When the shit hits the fan, you really have to ask yourself why you weren't sitting on the toilet.
Anthony T.Hincks
The gap that was created during those transatlantic voyages hundreds of years ago.That gap is the matrix of Saudade – The Longing, I think, that all Africans in the West have, that is at the root of the blues and jazz and soul and rap. If you listen you can hear it, elusive, fleeting, full of melancholy anger.
Bonnie Greer
The author challenges how much sanctity has to do with sameness, as he says saints are as different from each other as those in any group -- even murderers.
G.K. Chesterton
Other things my best friend said to me: That two years was but a short span.
Helen Oyeyemi
We will go on producing myths, ways of explaining ourselves to ourselves but, like everything else about us, they are in constant transition and we must not fundamentalise any of them.
Richard Holloway
Living communion with God in which He is real, alive, fresh, and present to your soul energizes a God-centered life.
Colin S. Smith
I only want to write. And there's no college for that except life.
Dodie Smith