Quotes by British Authors - Page 368

Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
Alan W. Watts
If money is all that a man makes, then he will be poor — poor in happiness, poor in all that makes life worth living.
Herbert N. Casson
The ministry has fallen. Scrimgeour is dead. They are coming.
J.K. Rowling
Tread not into the fearsome nightBut pull the covers high,Step not into the wild dark woodFor the Hobbers are dancing nigh
Robin Jarvis
Drink from the cup of life, you will be fulfilled.Yet...drink from the milk container in the fridge,and your wife will make you wish that you had drunk from the cup of life.
Anthony T.Hincks
It’s not how far you’ve come that matters. It’s where you’ve come from.
Alastair Reynolds
Feeling unable to maintain this detachment of attitude towards human- and, in especial, matrimonial- affairs, I asked whether it was not true that she had married Bob Duport. She nodded; not exactly conveying, it seemed to me, that by some happy chance their union had introduced her to an unexpected terrestrial paradise.
Anthony Powell
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
Iris Murdoch
The great misfortune of our generation is that the direction which by the amazing progress of the natural sciences has been given to its interests is not one which assists us in comprehending the larger process of which as individuals we form merely a part or in appreciating how we constantly contribute to a common effort without either directing it or submitting to orders of others.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Men would be as gods, if they had foreknowledge.
Mary Renault
You have many fine qualities that I admire. But you are out of time. You should have been born a century ago, when values such as yours meant something.
Jasper Fforde
You noticed things. You're not sure when you start. It's only when you've noticed - noticed that you know you've noticed. Maybe between the first time when you're staring to think, Is this what I think it is? and the second time when you think, Yes, between those two times, there's a silence. A pause.
Jackie Kay
Even the dry and dusty arid desert air could not get her sweet perfume out of his nostrils. That one night was all it took. She stole his heart; he could do nothing about it, but accept his fate.
Virginia Alison
... Weber insists that one should not give up or lose faith in the face of this struggle. Indeed, he calls for us to engage in, rather than withdraw from, the problems of this world. He reminds us, for example, that while 'successful political action is always the "art of the possible" ... the possible is often reached only by striving to attain the impossible that lies beyond it'.
Nicholas Gane
She was more exposed to the elements now: the wind and rain howled through the metal cage enclosing her. It seemed impossible that someone could fall or be shoved from the bridge. She forced herself to look down. She had to prepare for the worst.
Sanjida Kay
She was as one who, in madness, was resolute to throw herself from a precipice, but to whom some remnant of sanity remained which forced her to seek those who would save her from herself.
Anthony Trollope
No architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.
John Ruskin
As children', wrote Alice Raikes (Mrs. Wilson Fox) in The Times, January 22, 1932, 'we lived in Onslow Square and used to play in the garden behind the houses. Charles Dodgson used to stay with an old uncle there, and walk up and down, his hands behind him, on the strip of lawn. One day, hearing my name, he called me to him saying, "So you are another Alice. I'm very found of Alices. Would you like to come and see something which is rather puzzling?" We followed him into his house which opened, as ours did, upon the garden, into a room full of furniture with a tall mirror standing across one corner.' "Now", he said giving me an orange, "first tell me which hand you have got that in." "The right" I said. "Now", he said, "go and stand before that glass, and tell me which hand the little girl you see there has got it in." After some perplexed contemplation, I said, "The left hand." "Exactly," he said, "and how do you explain that?" I couldn't explain it, but seeing that some solution was expected, I ventured, "If I was on the other side of the glass, wouldn't the orange still be in my right hand?" I can remember his laugh. "Well done, little Alice," he said. "The best answer I've heard yet." "I heard no more then, but in after years was told that he said that had given him his first idea for Through the Looking-Glass, a copy of which, together with each of his other books, he regularly sent me.
Lewis Carroll
If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles one would hardly see anybody.
Agatha Christie
Aberystwyth (n.)A nostalgic yearning which is in itself more pleasant than the thing being yearned for.
Douglas Adams
He might be better considered as an exponent of Tartar financial, military, and political methods, who used the shifting alliances of khans and princes to replace the Tartar yoke with a Muscovite one. In his struggle with the Golden Horde, whose hegemony he definitively rejected after 1480, his closest ally was the Khan of the Crimea, who helped him to attack the autonomy of his fellow Christian principalities to a degree that the Tartars had never attempted. From the Muscovite point of view, which later enjoyed a monopoly, ‘Ivan the Great’ was the restorer of ‘Russian’ hegemony. From the viewpoint of the Novgorodians or the Pskovians he was the Antichrist, the destroyer of Russia’s best traditions. When he came to write his will, he described himself, as his father had done, as ‘the much-sinning slave of God’.
Norman Davies
They're simply seeking an interlude from emotional pain and searing mental agony, a sleep from which they'll awaken to discover they're the person they always wanted to be.
Gillibran Brown
what's real within the story is real within the story
Jo Walton
Was that what it was really like to be alive? The feeling of darkness dragging you forward?How could they live with it? And yet they did, and even seemed to find enjoyment in it, when surely the only sensible course would be to despair. Amazing. To feel you were a tiny living thing, sandwiched between two cliffs of darkness. How could they stand to be alive?
Terry Pratchett
One must avoid snobbery and misanthropy. But one must also be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator, and who sometimes succeed in finding it. This criticism would be effortless if there were no "people" waiting for just such an appeal. Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it. And the fact that kings and bishops and billionaires often have more say than most in forming appetites and emotions of the crowd is not irrelevant, either.
Christopher Hitchens
I am the prince of procrastination. It is my besetting sin. I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do - the day after
Gyles Brandreth
Please don’t think so lightly of liking someone. It’s terribly important. It is a kind of loving, you know, and one that frequently lasts a lot longer than romance. You can fall out of love, as well in. Most of us do, especially if you don’t actually like the person as well. It doesn’t always grow into love by any means, but sometimes it does.
Anne Perry
To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combinations of atoms is like saying that Shakespeare's Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters.
Ernst F. Schumacher
The Inquisitor waited for silence. "Do you believe in anything?""Not if I can help it. Belief alone is nothing to be proud of, Inquisitor. Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage.
Joe Abercrombie
A moment passed, perhaps half a second when their faces said what they felt, and then Emma was smiling, laughing, her arms around his neck.
David Nicholls
Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine.
C.S. Lewis
Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.
Diane Setterfield
A critic is a man created to praise greater men than himself, but he is never able to find them.
Richard Le Gallienne
We get together with people because they’re the same or because they’re different, and in the end we split with them for exactly the same reasons.
Nick Hornby
I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time.
Anna Freud
You would think it best to save your breath for running, but I often find screaming helps.
Mark Lawrence
Although distortion of the past is widespread, the most common travesty is one of omission, wherein populist leaders neglect to mention the crimes committed by their own side or recollect them in such a way that evades accepting full responsibility. That politicians are so able to evoke historical arguments in these ways results from a prior failure of the society to engage in a full and frank encounter with past wrongdoings.
Richard Ashby Wilson
Desires kept within the mind are simply unrealised dreams.
Steven Redhead
I think too often we forget that girls can like sport; we are not biologically programmed to detest it, we are - in the main - conditioned against it. But shouldn’t we try to change that?
Anna Kessel
It doesn’t matter what you’ve got in your pants if there is nothing in your brain to connect it to.
Paul Joannides
There are times when your body takes control. Times when the gazelle says, ‘Fuck you, lioness,’ and delivers the biggest kick of its whole gazelley life.
Harry Bingham
Moral beauty existed as clearly as any other form of beauty and perhaps that was where we could find the God who was so vividly, and sometimes bizarrely, described in our noisy religious explanations. It was an intriguing thought, as it meant that a concert could be a spiritual experience, a secular painting a religious icon, a beguiling face a passing angel.
Alexander McCall Smith
The police frequently do not enforce the rule of law.
Steven Magee
Always guarding one's real, precious self in a cocoon of tranquility within a thousand masks.Life itself had become a secret affair.
Mary Balogh
Life gives you what you expect, what you are prepared to put up with or can change.
Steven Redhead
Much sheer effort goes into avoiding the truth left to itself it sweeps in like the tide.
Fay Weldon
Wherever there are wild animals in the world, there is always an opportunity for caring, compassion and kindness.
Paul Oxton
Thou I cannot so freely say, My heart is with thee, my soul longeth after thee ; yet can I say, I long for such a longing heart (648).
Richard Baxter
That may be. But to decide that I was never going to live as a proper woman was not your choice to make.' 'What do you mean a proper woman?' 'A proper woman marries - she has children -' 'Then what does that make me? Am I not a proper woman? Last time I looked I certainly was.
Jessie Burton
In the center lay the exploded carcass of a lonely sperm whale that hadn't lived long enough to be disappointed with its lot.
Douglas Adams
she allowed herself to dwell on the cause of this strange, apprehensive exultation that she sensed flickering at the edge of her mind: it was the rarest thing of all - a man whom she knew at once, and without any qualification, to be her equal.
Philip Pullman
Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.
Duke of Wellington
As a rule of thumb, it was always safer if the Commander-in-Chief formulated a risky plan.
Rowena Cherry
Forgetting isn’t the key to moving on. Remembering is, because only once we’ve remembered can we forget.
Emma Hart
And there was born that so mysterious thing that we call 'love' between man and woman; the thing that transcends, uplifts, indeed is the sole enoblement of our act of lust.
Bryan Islip
I know what things are good: friendship and work and conversation.
Rupert Brooke
You think too much of your "toilette", Adele; but you may have a flower." I took a rose from a vase and fastened it in her sash. She sighed a sign of ineffable satisfaction, as if her cup of happiness were now full. I turned my face away to conceal a smile I could not suppress; there was something ludicrous as well as painful in the little Parisienne's earnest and innate devotion to matters of dress.
Charlotte Brontë
There seemed to be endless obstacles-it seemed that the root cause of them all was fear.
Joanna Field
Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
V.S. Pritchett
Perhaps man was neither good nor bad, was only a machine in an insensate universe--his courage no more than a reflex to danger, like the automatic jump at the pin-prick. Perhaps there were no virtues, unless jumping at pin-pricks was a virtue, and humanity only a mechanical donkey led on by the iron carrot of love, through the pointless treadmill of reproduction.
T.H. White