Quotes by British Authors - Page 352

Antistatic devices (ASD) are commonly used in many industries and may present a health hazard to those who work with these.
Steven Magee
Don't count your owls before they are delivered.
J.K. Rowling
Don't ever run away from your problems. Chase after them like a crazy person till they're too afraid to come near you again.
Zanib Mian
I think cruelty is just loneliness disguised as bitterness.
Tom Hiddleston
Forsaking all other thoughts, he rutted into her, in a fashion more animal than human. His eruption he held fast within, so that she squirmed against the sensation before accepting her own fall into oblivion, her walls pulsing to an echoing rhythm. from The Gentlemen's Club
Emmanuelle de Maupassant
If a book is well written, I always find it too short.
Jane Austen
Everything you mean to me,I can't put into words,because when you're as perfect as you,no amount of words will do.
Anthony T.Hincks
I had loved Kitty -I would always love Kitty. But I had lived with her a kind of queer half-life, hiding from my own true self. Since then I had refused to love at all, had become - or so I thought - a creature beyond passion, driving others to their secret, humiliating confessions of lust; but never offering my own.
Sarah Waters
It is no ipso facto escape from dogma to assert (knowingly or not) non-dogmatism dogmatically.It is no ipso facto escape from credulity to believe in one's own scepticism.
Nanamoli Thera
You cannot live your life in ifs and maybes...you cannot live it in week commencings. You live it right here. You live it now.
Stella Newman
Machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate: only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers, don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty! You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure! Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world . . .
Charlie Chaplin
It seemed as though he had a fundamental belief that the merit of his argument depended on the strength of his feelings about the matter, and since he always felt uncontrollably passionate about everything, then clearly he was always right. This irrational claptrap, coming as it did from a swarthy, excitable, plump Celtic demi-dwarf, struck me not just as thoroughly impertinent but also as a noisy and ignorant attempt to undermine the most basic principles of the Enlightenment.
John Cleese
She had to quickly pop back to the fifteenth century to find a word for how beautiful he was. The boy was makeless.
Helen Oyeyemi
The red sands of Marrakesh, sprawling at the foot of the Atlas like a wounded Leviathan....
Rosita Forbes
Nothing else wounds so deeply and irreparably. Nothing else robs us of hope so much as being unloved by one we love
Clive Barker
What I've learnt - to my cost - on several occasions in my life, is that people will put up with all manner of bad behaviour so long as you're giving them what they want. They'll laugh and get into it and enjoy the anecdotes and the craziness and the mayhem as long as you're going your job well, but the minute you're not, you're fucked. They'll wipe their hands of you without a second glance.
Russell Brand
You can Cut Back or you can Make More Money
Sophie Kinsella
I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.
Neil Gaiman
In God's garden even the weeds are beautiful.In my garden, I've only got weeds. I think they're a nuisance.
Anthony T.Hincks
Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.
Terry Pratchett
Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. — It is not fair. — He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths. — I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it — but fear I must.
Jane Austen
In the secret recesses of man's nature the grace is given disposing and enabling him to yield. Though the will must at last act from its own resources and deliberate impulse, it is influenced through the feeling and the understanding in such a manner as to give it strength. It is utterly hopeless to penetrate this mystery: it is the secret between God's Spirit and man's agency. There is a Divine operation which works the desire and acts in such a manner as not to interfere with the natural freedom of the will. The man determines himself, through Divine grace, to salvation: never so free as when swayed by grace.
William Burton Pope
Each of us at our root is consciousness, and in the highest of the spiritual realms life and form become light. I experienced this in an OBE in which I went to the outer ring of the source of creation.
Belsebuub
I’m afraid you cannot leave,' said Zarniwoop, 'you are entwined in the Improbability Field. You cannot escape.' He smiled the smile that Zaphod had wanted to hit and this time Zaphod hit it.
Douglas Adams
Wide reading is important. You don’t have to like it, but it’s important to grapple with things you don’t understand. I’ve been spending the last six months getting up an hour early to try to understand economics because I need to. I don’t want to be one of these bewildered schmucks. The things that you understand will inform your writing. The bigger your mind, the better your work is going to be. You’re not born with a big mind; you have to build it. If I don’t read for an hour a day, I get ill.
Jeanette Winterson
A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.
Douglas Adams
If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonders.
Andrew Harvey
Bring your heart power into play to create the things that you wish in your life through energising your desires with your heart energy.
Steven Redhead
Oh, pity the poor gluttonWhose troubles all beginIn struggling on and on to turnWhat's out into what's in.
Walter de la Mare
Well, you know, there are limits to the sacred claims of friendship.
P.G. Wodehouse
Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.
W.H. Auden
There are a hundred ways in which a boy can injure—if not indeed kill—himself. The more adventurous he is and the greater his initiative, the more ways he will find. If you protect him from each of the first hundred, he is sure to find the hundred and first. Though most men can look back on their boyhood and tremble at the narrowness of some of their escapes, most boys do in fact survive more or less intact, and the wise father is the trusting father.
Christopher Milne
When the New York Times scratches its head, get ready for total baldness as you tear out your hair.
Christopher Hitchens
Within himself Jack had not the slightest doubt of victory, but it would never do to let this conviction take the form of even unspoken words; it must remain in the state of that inward glow which had inhabited him ever since the retaking of the Africaine, and which had now increased to fill the whole of his heart - a glow that he believed to be his most private secret, although in fact it was evident to everyone aboard from Stephen Maturin to the adenoidal third-class boy who closed the muster-book.
Patrick O'Brian
The romance of travel wasn't always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it.
Bill Bryson
When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.
Virginia Woolf
If you make a deal with a fool, don't be surprised when they act foolishly.
Jeffrey Archer
He walks the soft grass, wet with fresh rain, jeans slung low on his hips and shirt hanging open, still dripping from the fevered maelstrom that set fire to the night sky. Fury in his step and passion furrowing his brow...He is my perfect storm...
Virginia Alison
Kaufman almost smiled at the perfection of its horror. He felt an offer of insanity tickling the base of his skull, tempting him into oblivion, promising a blank indifference to the world.
Clive Barker
My life seems to have become suddenly hollow and I do not know what is hanging over me. I cannot even put the shadow that has fallen on me into words. At least into written words. I would give a great deal for a friend's voice.
John Addington Symonds
Has what you do for God become more important to you than the Lord Himself?
Colin S. Smith
Just as stars shine brightest in the darkest night, your joy blazes brilliantly through life’s problems when you count them as joy.
Elizabeth George
Bring a torch, if you've got one. It's as dark as hell and stinks of something far worse than cheese.
Anthony Powell
Virtually all organisations known to you work largely by means of your greed.
Idries Shah
Question everything, unless it's the answer
Benny Bellamacina
It is easier to believe that there was nothing before there was something than that there was something before there was nothing.
Julian Huxley
Don't play too much golf. Two rounds a day are plenty.
Harry Vardon
There's always a choice,' said Torak, and walked backward off the cliff.
Michelle Paver
Take care, take care. This city thrives! It's money gives you wings to soar. But it is a yoke on your shoulders and you would do well to take note of the bruise around your neck.
Jessie Burton
I never knew any man in my life who could not bear another's misfortunes perfectly like a Christian.
Alexander Pope
If I had to choose a companion to be at the return of eternal darkness with, I'd choose you.'No offence, but I'd choose someone massive and really good at magic.
J.K. Rowling
If someone called me fat, that affects me way more than someone calling me a f----t. I think just because I've accepted that, if someone calls me a f----t, it's like, I am gay and I'm proud to be gay so there's no issues there. If something calls you fat, that's something I want to change.
Sam Smith
She [Mrs. Badger] was surrounded in the drawing-room by various objects, indicative of her painting a little, playing the piano a little, playing the guitar a little, playing the harp a little, singing a little, working a little, reading a little, writing poetry a little, and botanizing a little. She was a lady of about fifty, I should think, youthfully dressed, and of a very fine complexion. If I add to the little list of her accomplishments that she rouged a little, I do not mean that there was any harm in it.
Charles Dickens
Of course, that’s one of the dreams of modernist literature, whether realist or fantastic: that the more stories we tell each other about such tragedies, the fewer of them there will be. We’re still waiting for the results.
Charles Finch
So I'm up the ghostie creek without an EMF meter
JoAnne Kenrick
A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.
C.S. Lewis
Accept the long night patiently, quietly, humbly, and resignedly as intended for your true good. It is not a punishment for sin committed but an instrument of annihilating egoism.
Paul Brunton
E: When one has at last reached freedom, can one even contemplate going back?HC: But if it is not possible to go back, or to choose to go back, then it is not freedom!~Ericsson; Hilary Craven
Agatha Christie
Yea, she hath passed hereby, and blessed the sheaves,And the great garths, and stacks, and quiet farms,And all the tawny, and the crimson leaves.Yea, she hath passed with poppies in her arms,Under the star of dusk, through stealing mist,And blessed the earth, and gone, while no man wist.With slow, reluctant feet, and weary eyes,And eye-lids heavy with the coming sleep,With small breasts lifted up in stress of sighs,She passed, as shadows pass, among the sheep;While the earth dreamed, and only I was wareOf that faint fragrance blown from her soft hair.The land lay steeped in peace of silent dreams;There was no sound amid the sacred boughs.Nor any mournful music in her streams:Only I saw the shadow on her brows,Only I knew her for the yearly slain,And wept, and weep until she come again.
Frederic Manning
Looking at things is never time wasted. If your children want to stand and stare, let them. When I was marvelling at the beauty of a painting or enjoying a great view it did not occur to me that the experience, however intense, would be of value many years later. But there it has remained, tucked away in hidden bits of my mind and now it comes, shouldering aside even the most passionate love affairs.
Diana Athill