Quotes by British Authors - Page 350

the difference between the old and the new education being) in a word, the old was a kind of propagation - men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.
C.S. Lewis
How to stop time: kiss.How to travel in time: read.How to escape time: music.How to feel time: write.How to release time: breathe.
Matt Haig
The gods were there to do the duties of a megaphone, because who else would people listen to?
Terry Pratchett
Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor.
David Mitchell
The past is but the beginning of a beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
H.G.Wells
You will always have doubts, but only discover them at a useful time for your weakness to point them out.
Idries Shah
I turned into Little Red Riding Hood. I made a cake, packed it up and went through the forest until I met the wolves. That's something the story got wrong, wolves don't travel solo, they hunt in packs.
Louise Welsh
It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Common sense and every material reality insisted upon the unification of human life throughout the planet and the socialisation of its elementary needs, and pitted against that was the fact that every authority, every institution, every established way of thinking and living was framed to preserve the advantages of the ruling and possessing minority and the separate sovereignty of the militant states that had been evolved within the vanished circumstances of the past.
H.G.Wells
Sometime later the islanders on a little rimward atoll were amazed to find, washed into their little local lagoon, the wave-rocked corpse of a hideous sea monster, all beaks, eyes and tentacles. They were further astonished at its size, since it was rather larger than their village. But their surprise was tiny compared to the huge, stricken expression on the face of the dead monster, which appeared to be have been trampled to death.
Terry Pratchett
You renounce your friendship even in the hour of our need ' he said. 'Yet you were glad indeed to receive our aid when you came at last to these shores fainthearted loiterers and well-nigh emptyhanded. In huts on the beaches would you be dwelling still had not the Noldor carved out your haven and toiled upon your walls.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Churchill kept perspective on the crowds that gathered to hear him speak by conceding they would be twice as big if gathered to see him hanged.
Winston S. Churchill
Telling yourself you like the way you look is easy. Believing it is an entirely different kettle of whales.
Andrew Biss
Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.
Charles Dickens
You are the universe - that's why it shines!
Jay Woodman
In the mystifying world that was Victorian parenthood, obedience took precedence over all considerations of affection and happiness, and that odd, painful conviction remained the case in most well-heeled homes up until at least the time of the First World War.
Bill Bryson
This combination of ageism and sexism was also blatant in the Boston Herald's treatment of sixty-three-year-old Elizabeth Warren, whose 2012 Senate bid it sought to undermine by repeatedly dubbing her "Granny" in its pages, as if to imply that an older woman could not possibly be trusted with political responsibility.
Laura Bates
We must be free or die who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake the faith and morals hold Which Milton held.
William Wordsworth
We enter the world alone we leave it alone.
James Froude
I took a road that wasn't the road, but it was something I chose and that's fine.
Tom Rosenthal
Sam, Sam, quite contrary,bought a budgie,wanted a canary.Sam, Sam, quite contrary, kissed Suzannah,meant to kiss Marry.Sam, Sam, quite contrary,dressed as a pirate,playing a fairy.Sam Sam quite contrary,ate dark chocolate,says he likes diary.Sam, Sam, quite contarary,shaved his head,to make it hairy.
Chrissie Gittins
Contrary to what you have been told, metrosexuality is not about flip-flops and facials, ‘man-bags’ or ‘manscara’. Or about men becoming ‘girlie’ or ‘gay’. It’s about men becoming everything. To themselves. In much the way that women have been for some time. It’s the end of the sexual division of bathroom and bedroom labour. It’s the end of sexuality as we’ve known it.
Mark Simpson
A night of exhilaration, of boredom and terror, in which the merest of sounds took on other forms - grew large in the expanse of darkness. After several hours the sheep gradually stopped calling to each other from accross the river banks, and a brittle quiet descended. I desperately wanted to walk down to the water's edge. To see the black river in the moonlight. But a mixture of reason and fear kept me locked along the safe paths high above.
Richard Skelton
The Sufi must be able to alternate his thought between the relative and the Absolute, the approximate and the Real.
Idries Shah
Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.
Elizabeth von Arnim
When you embrace the darkness within, you will always live in the light.
Joseph D'Lacey
That was the main thing wrong with Mrs. Kamal. She spent such an extraordinary amount of mental energy feeling irritated that it was impossible not to feel irritated in turn. It was oxygen to her, this low-grade dissatisfaction, shading into anger; this sense that things weren't being done correctly, that everything from the traffic noise at night to the temperature of the hot water in the morning to the progress of Mohammed's potty training to the fact that Fatima wasn't being taught to read Urdu, only English, to the fact that Rohinka served only two dishes at dinner the night of her arrival to the cost of the car insurance for the VW Sharan to the fact that Shahid didn't have a 'proper job' and seemed to have no intention of getting one, let alone a wife, to the unfriendliness of London, the fact that it was an 'impossible city,' to the ostentatious way she complained about missing Lahore, especially at dinner time, giving meaningful, sad, reproachful looks at the food Rohinka had cooked.
John Lanchester
When a man is wrapped up in himself he makes a pretty small package.
John Ruskin
The radical hermeneutic of suspicion that characterizes all of post-modernity is essentially nihilistic, denying the very possibility of creative or healing love. In the cross and resurrection of Jesus we find the answer: the God who made the world is revealed in terms of a self-giving love that no hermeneutic of suspicion can ever touch, in a Self that found itself by giving itself away, in a Story that was never manipulative but always healing and recreating, and in a Reality that can truly be known, indeed to know which is to discover a new dimension of knowledge, the dimension of loving and being loved.
N.T. Wright
Low states are a like a poison to the psyche. Millions of people throughout the world take tranquillizers each day to combat depression, but this does not tackle its root cause, which is found in the basic state of the internal energies of the psyche.Basically the energy of the psyche needs to change, from low states to spiritual ones. It requires inner observation, the destruction of the egos, and alchemical transformation.
Belsebuub
The accusation of metaphysics has become in philosophy something like the accusation of being a security risk in the public service. I do not for my part know what is meant by the word 'metaphysics'. The only definition I have found that fits all cases is: 'a philosophical opinion not held by the present author'.
Bertrand Russell
The devil himself can become beauty, so we are told, to corrupt mankind."(Marco)
Iain Pears
The Consul looked at the sun. But he had lost the sun: it was not his sun. Like the truth, it was well-nigh impossible to face; he did not want to go anywhere near it, least of all, sit in its light, facing it.
Malcolm Lowry
Leadership is not about the power and status of one but the empowerment and service of all. That is what it should be and that is how it should be measured.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Besides, a long poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the Polar star of Poetry, as Fancy is the sails - and Imagination the rudder.
John Keats
I'm beginning to think you're the sort of person who does a great deal with very little."He meant a liar.
Jasper Fforde
On a hard jungle journey nothing is so important as having a team you can trust.
Tahir Shah
There were pools of light among the stacks, directly beneath the bulbs which Philip had switched on, but it was now with an unexpected fearfulness that he saw how the books stretched away into the darkness. They seemed to expand as soon as they reached the shadows, creating some dark world where there was no beginning and no end, no story, no meaning. And if you crossed the threshold into that world, you would be surrounded by words; you would crush them beneath your feet, you would knock against them with your head and arms, but if you tried to grasp them they would melt away. Philip did not dare turn his back upon these books. Not yet. It was almost, he thought, as if they had been speaking to each other while he slept.
Peter Ackroyd
There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
I think if I weren't so beautiful maybe I'd have more character.
Jerry Hall
I cannot, I cannot,' cried Marianne; 'leave me, leave me, if I distress you; leave me, hate me, forget me! But do not torture me so. Oh! how easy for those who have no sorrow of their own to talk of extertion!
Jane Austen
Little boys run in gangs, grown men organise teams.
Habeeb Akande
Your son is heir to an enormous fortune and name. Someone would be bound to bid for you him and take him as his ward.
Philippa Gregory
It is in the company of others that one can be really lonely, for then one's personality is forced openly to try to express what it's separate individuality is.
Nanamoli Thera
It’s all right now, Louisa: it’s all right, young Thomas,’ said Mr. Bounderby; ‘you won’t do so any more. I’ll answer for it’s being all over with father. Well, Louisa, that’s worth a kiss, isn’t it?’‘You can take one, Mr. Bounderby,’ returned Louisa, when she had coldly paused, and slowly walked across the room, and p. 18ungraciously raised her cheek towards him, with her face turned away.‘Always my pet; ain’t you, Louisa?’ said Mr. Bounderby. ‘Good-bye, Louisa!’He went his way, but she stood on the same spot, rubbing the cheek he had kissed, with her handkerchief, until it was burning red. She was still doing this, five minutes afterwards.‘What are you about, Loo?’ her brother sulkily remonstrated. ‘You’ll rub a hole in your face.’‘You may cut the piece out with your penknife if you like, Tom. I wouldn’t cry!
Charles Dickens
I find the medicine worse than the malady.
Beaumont and Fletcher
A time when sky blue love bids farewell to the day and before dusk falls, the sunset ignites the smouldering embers of the moonlit soul...
Virginia Alison
He kept his eyes on mine, his gaze unblinking, and I stared right back into the blue. He moved almost imperceptibly and in the space between a heartbeat his lips touched mine.
Sarah Alderson
The neck in front of her came up. The head swivelled 180 degrees and the horse looked at Kin with bright insectile eyes.'YOUR WISH IS MY COMMAND,' it said inside Kin's head.'Hell!''THOSE ARE NOT MEANINGFUL CO-ORDINATES.
Terry Pratchett
The popular idea that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea which has been impressed on them in very tender years.
Agatha Christie
Mr Lorry asks the witness questions:Ever been kicked? Might have been.Frequently? No. Ever kicked down stairs? Decidedly not; once received a kick at the top of a staircase, and fell down stairs of his own accord.
Charles Dickens
Cats will be cats.
Morrissey
To be fair, her expected hatred of all things male has not materialised because it is clear that she simply dislikes everyone. I suspect that this is an attempt to remain aloof from the minions but it has backfired badly. The women, who were looking upon her as a potential saviour, now regard her as a traitor to her sex. The blokes are just relieved.
Dougie Brimson
It's a curious, wanting thing.
Sarah Waters
But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker, I knew equally well. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?
Charles Dickens
Ah! happy years! once more who would not be a boy!
Lord Byron
I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world." ... I wonderes if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.
Neil Gaiman
We rode through a three-thousand-year-old country, saw the ruined capital of the Queen of Sheba and the underground red-rock city of Lalibela, fraternized with a tribe of leaden-skinned troglogytes living among the mountains, scrapped with brigands, outwitted crocodiles, and eventually emerged battered and in rags with a book of adventures and 1,000 feet of film.
Rosita Forbes
Empathy is easier than anger, in the long-run.
Sam Owen
[We] need people who are kind by instinct, not by effort. But that is what we lack in this time. For progress, we have eaten our souls up, and nothing matters anymore.
Claire North