Quotes by British Authors - Page 358

We are all failures- at least the best of us are.
J.M. Barrie
In peace-armies discipline meant the hunt, not of an average but of an absolute; the hundred per cent standard in which the ninety-nine were played down to the level of the weakest man on parade…. The deeper the discipline, the lower was the individual excellence; also the more sure the performance. – T. E. Lawrence Seven Pillars of Wisdom
T.E. Lawrence
Fair and unfair are for children
Michelle Lovric
The authority of the Church was thrown over by the authority of the state. Twenty years only have passed, and the authority of the state is already thrown over by the authority of conscience. ... I fear for those yet unborn, that they are already betrayed. Robbed of the truth we can inherit, they will know their sins as only misery, and their forgiveness they will not know at all because they do not know God. Then at last men will be free of God. Then they will be slaves indeed.
Lucy Beckett
Answer me one thing,” she says in a rigidly controlled voice. “Do you love Logan?”Perhaps I should lie, but in that moment, after what I’ve just witnessed, I’m incapable of expressing anything but the truth of what’s in my heart. “With all my heart,” I sob.
Siobhan Davis
Deep in my heart I know I am a loner. I have tried to blend in with the world and be sociable, but the more people I meet the more disappointed I am, so I’ve learned to enjoy myself, my family and a few good friends.
Steven Aitchison
Courting is a much sweeter term than 'dating'. It sounds like it has more intent, more like an agreement that two people enter into with a future in mind.
Kim Cattrall
When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose—not simply accept—the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person.
George Orwell
Pride,’ observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, ‘is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary.
Jane Austen
When you stand on top of that mountain and you look out, you will know that you will never again look back.
Anthony T.Hincks
The risen Christ! Once morefaith is upon us, a jubilant brief keeningwith respite:Obedience, bitter joy,the elements, clouds,winds, louvres where the bellmakes its wild mouths:Holy Rus – into the rain’shorizons, peacock-dyed tail feathers of storm,so it goes on.
Geoffrey Hill
What is literature, and why do I try to write about it? I don’t know. Likewise, I don’t know why I go on living, most of the time. But this not knowing is precisely what I want to preserve. As readers, the closest way we can engage with a literary work is to protect its indeterminacy; to return ourselves and it to a place that precludes complete recognition. Really, when I’m reading, all I want is to stand amazed in front of an unknown object at odds with the world.
M. John Harrison
To Europe she was America. To America she was the gateway to the earth. But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social history of the world.
H.G.Wells
There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons, And I want to go back—and I will.
Robert Service
This is why magic is worse even than quantum physics. Because, while both spit in the eye of common sense, I've never yet had a Higgs bosun turn up and try to have a conversation with me.
Ben Aaronovitch
Travel became distinguishable from pain and began to be regarded as an intellectual pleasur...These factors--the voluntariness of departure, the freedom implicit in the indeterminancies of mobility, the pleasure of travel free from necessity, the notion that travel signifies autonomy and is a means for demonstrating what one 'really' is independent of one context or set of defining associations--remain the characteristics of the modern conception of travel.Eric Leed
Robin Jarvis
I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.
Aldous Huxley
And he thought of the two people who had held his job before him: Sam and Astrid. Both beaten into despair by trying to hold this group of kids together in the face of one disaster after another. Both of them now happy to let Edilio handle it.“No wonder,” Edilio muttered.“Stay inside unless absolutely necessary,” Edilio shouted, and not for the first or last time wished he was still just Sam’s faithful sidekick.
Michael Grant
[..] the great modern commandment - the eleventh commandment which has wiped out all the others: 'Thou shalt not lose thy job.
George Orwell
Many parents have experienced the fact that kids don’t seem to honor their parents the way that previous generations of children did. The question we need to ask is, how did we get to this position? How did this lack of respect infiltrate even the closest family relationships? Most importantly, how can we make sure that it doesn’t ruin our bond with our own teens?
Fiona Dimas-Herd
Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l'admire.A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Passion is like the lightening, it is beautiful and it links the earth to heaven, but it blinds.
H. Rider Haggard
Everything about this is embarrassing" she said. "D'you know how embarrassing it is to mention good and evil in a scientific laboratory? Have you any idea? One of the reasons I became a scientist was not to have to think about that kind of thing.
Philip Pullman
I did wonder if I'd have cause to rue my action. Now I believe it can safely be filed under Necessary Regrets.
Anthony Ryan
As it stands, the diagnostic criteria for depression are so loose that two people with absolutely no symptoms in common can both end up with the same unitary diagnosis of depression. For this reason especially, the concept of depression as a mental disorder has been charged with being little more than a socially constructed dustbin for all manner of human suffering.
Neel Burton
[Credit is a system whereby] a person who can't pay, gets another person who can't pay, to guarantee that he can pay.
Charles Dickens
I was woken early and had breakfast with the guru. We had some spicy Rice Krispies and a spicy biscuit with some really sweet, milky tea. Not the way I normally like it, but I drank it anyway as I didn’t want to offend him. I suppose that is my heart telling me how to act instead of my head again. My arse may get involved later though.
Karl Pilkington
There is so much to see and learn here that I often find I'm not blinking in case I miss anything. I have to use artificial tears to moisten my eyes.
Jay Woodman
Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.
Leonard Woolf
Why it is that life can change so quickly?""How it's possible for a heart to stop beating so suddenly, instantly breaking all the hearts that were ever connected to it? But the truth is there is no sense in what happened to Jarrod. None that I can see. I wish I had a better answer, but I don't.
Samantha Young
We are governed not by armies and police but by ideas.
Mona Caird
Perfume counters in department stores, Holly Deblin smells of, the middle of July, and cinnamon Tic Tacs.
David Mitchell
Ocular infidelity is unfortunately rampant in this so called "artist's world.
Muse
Humans need fantasy to be human.
Terry Pratchett
Never worry about what you say to a man. They're so conceited that they never believe you mean it if it's unflattering.”-Caroline to Ursual.
Agatha Christie
The chances of finding out what’s really going on in the universe are so remote, the only thing to do is hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied.
Douglas Adams
Arrogance created to project a self-image of superiority is the very trait that demonstrates to others deeply hidden inferiority.
Sam Owen
A man to whom a woman cannot look up, she cannot love. Yet, it is marvelous how a woman contrives to find something to look up to in a man.
Arnold Haultain
He didn't mind how he looked to other people, because the nursery magic had made him Real, and when you are Real shabbiness doesn't matter.
Margery Williams Bianco
When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of your engagement in the social media environment what counts are: Comments and Sentiment.
David Amerland
If there'd been an astronaut on the moon right then, I'm sure I could have seen him. Perhaps he could have looked down and seen me too... the only one who could.
Lucy Christopher
D’yer see it? This finger, laddie, could send ye to meet yer Maker!”Sgt. Deisenburger stared at the black and purple nail a few inches from his face. As an offensive weapon it rated quite highly, especially if it was ever used in the preparation of food.
Terry Pratchett
Bella Swan: Jasper? Are you sure there's nothing I can do to help? Jasper Hale: Well just your presence alone, your scent, will distract the newborns. Their hunting instinct will take over, and drive 'em crazy. Bella Swan: Good, I'm glad. [Jasper nods and begins to walk away] Bella Swan: . Bella Swan: Hey, [Jasper turns around] Bella Swan: how do you know so much about this? Jasper Hale: I didn't have quite the same upbringing as my adopted siblings. [Rolls up sleeves and shows Bella his arms, which have bite marks on them] Jasper Hale: . Bella Swan: [Hops off Jeep] Those bites are like mine. Jasper Hale: Battle scars [smiles] Jasper Hale: . All the training the Confederate Army gave me was useless against the newborns, but still, I never lost a fight. Bella Swan: Hey, this - this happened during the Civil War? Jasper Hale: I was the youngest major in the Texas Calvary, all without having seen any real battle. Bella Swan: Until...? Jasper Hale: Till I met a certain immortal... Maria
David Slade
The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.
Wilkie Collins
Queer creatures, females," mused Mr. Standen, shaking his head. "Fellow's only got to be a rake to have 'em all dangling after him. Silly, really, because it stands to reason---- Well never mind that!
Georgette Heyer
I'm looking at the ruins of my own existence and knowing, with a sickening certainty, that my old home and my old life have been truly destroyed.
K.C. Finn
We shall not flag or fail. We shall fight in France we shall fight on the seas and oceans we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be we shall fight on the beaches we shall fight on the landing grounds we shall fight in the fields and in the streets we shall fight in the hills we shall never surrender.
Winston Churchill
It contained a sad, but too common story of the hard-heartedness of the wealthy, and the misery endured by the children of the highborn. Blood is not water, it is said, but gold with them is dearer far than the ties of nature; to keep and augment their possessions being the aim and end of their lives, the existence, and, more especially, the happiness of their children, appears to them a consideration at once trivial and impertinent, when it would compete with family views and family greatness. To this common and and iniquitous feeling these luckless beings were sacrificed; they had endured the worst, and could be injured no more; but their orphan child was a living victim, less thought of than the progeny of the meanest animal which might serve to augment their possessions.Mrs. Baker felt some complacency on reading this letter; with the common English respect for wealth and rank, she was glad to find that her humble roof had sheltered a man who was the son — she did not exactly know of whom, but of somebody, who had younger sons and elder sons, and possessed, through wealth, the power of behaving frightfully ill to a vast number of persons.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The most important thing to wear is a smile.
Ann Taylor
I used to dread getting older because I thought I would not be able to do all the things I wanted to do but now that I am older I find that I don't want to do them.
Lady Nancy Astor
There is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for.
J.R.R. Tolkien
If the rock band U2 had been born in Orange County, California, would they have become just another church worship band?
Steve Turner
It is as though we are understanding now what (William) Blake intuited, the senses were, in Eden, spread over the whole being. It might seem, then, that our bodies still live in Eden, but our minds refuse to know it.
Peter Redgrove
Write as though your life depended on it.
Jill Telford
Those who do not complain are never pitied.
Jane Austen
Be still when you have nothing to say when genuine passion moves you say what you've got to say and say it hot.
D.H. Lawrence
I loved my father, but I was not like him. I never needed to believe the best of people. I took them as they were: two-faced, desperate, kind - perhaps all at once. But to Pa, they were all children of god, poor troubled sheep, who only needed love and an even break. He needed the world to back up what his religion told him about people. And when it came down to a choice between reason and faith, he let go of reason.
Marcel Theroux
What is happening is something new in my life. I think many people have a sense of shape, of unfolding, in their lives. This sense makes it possible for them to say: Yes, this new person is important to me: he, or she, is the beginning of something I must live through. Or: This emotion, which I have not felt before, is not the alien I believed it to be. It will now be part of me and I must deal with it.It is easy now, looking back over my life to say: That Anna, in that time, was such and such a person. And then, five years later, she was such and such. A year, two years, five years of a certain kind of being can be rolled up and tucked away, or ‘named’ — yes, during that time I was like that. Well now I am in the middle of such a period, and when it is over I shall glance back at it casually and say: Yes, that’s what I was.
Doris Lessing
Laugh, and the world laughs with you.Scream, and everyone ignores you.
Anthony T.Hincks
Don't allow yourself to get into the habit of dressing carelessly when there is 'only' your husband to see you. Depend upon it he has no use for faded tea-gowns and badly dressed hair, and he abhors the sight of curling pins as much as other men do. He is a man after all, and if his wife does not take the trouble to charm him, there are plenty of other women who will.
Blanche Ebbutt