Quotes by British Authors - Page 37

Top question of the dying: "What made me sick?
Steven Magee
Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Back therefore we find ourselves returning. Back to the wisdom of the plough; back to the wisdom of those who follow the sea. It is all a matter of the wheel coming full-circle. For the sophisticated system of mental reactions to which we finally give our adherence is only the intellectualised reproduction of what more happily constituted natures, without knowing what they possess, possess. Thus between true philosophers and the true simple people there is a magnetic understanding; whereas, the clever ones whose bastard culture only divorces them from the wisdom of the earth remain pilloried and paralysed on the prongs of their own conceit".
John Cowper Powys
Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.
Jhumpa Lahiri
...it's technically impossible for a woman to argue against feminism. Without feminism you wouldn't be allowed to have a debate on a woman's place in society. You'd be too busy giving birth on the kitchen floor -- biting down on a wooden spoon, so as not to disturb the men's card game -- before going back to hoeing the rutabaga field.
Caitlin Moran
The most visceral science fiction always takes place in the past and focuses on the humdrum
Dean Cavanagh
There is something about riding a unicorn, for those people who still can, which is unlike any other experience: exhilarating, and intoxicating, and fine.
Neil Gaiman
Needing to express what it’s like here.... / Trying to digest the incoming stream .... / And dream it all over again.
Jay Woodman
They were making a riotous noise, but it was much more like music - rather advanced music which you don't quite take in at the first hearing - than birds' songs ever are in our world.
C.S. Lewis
CUSTOMER: If I were to, say... meet the love of my life in this bookshop, what section do you think they would be standing in?
Jen Campbell
The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already... begun to be warped, had been subtly manoeuvred in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result… The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress.
C.S. Lewis
He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves.
Hilary Mantel
Dark times call for dark choices. Choose me.
Mark Lawrence
I collected pictures and I drew pictures and I looked at the pictures by myself. And because no one else ever saw them, the pictures were perfect and true. They were alive.
Helen Oyeyemi
But your book is wrong, Mrs. Strunk, says George, when it tells you that Jim is the substitute I found for a real son, a real kid brother, a real husband, a real wife. Jim wasn't a substitute for anything. And there is no substitute for Jim, if you'll forgive my saying so, anywhere.
Christopher Isherwood
The coolly logical part of her brain noted almost sardonically that Edilio had a superpower after all: being Edilio.
Michael Grant
That kind of monotony that running generates - the one soundtracked by heavy breathing and the steady rhythm of feet on pavements - became a kind of metaphor for depression.
Matt Haig
Yes," she thought, "nature is the refuge and home for women: they have no public career—no aim nor end beyond their domestic circle; but they can extend that, and make all the creations of nature their own, to foster and do good to.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Sometimes you remind me a lot of James. He called it my 'furry little problem' in company. Many people were under the impression that I owned a badly behaved rabbit.
J.K. Rowling
Your thoughts are transparent.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
The sky and the sun are always there. It's the clouds that come and go.
Rachel Joyce
Let's dance and sing and make good cheer For Christmas comes but once a year.
G. MacFarren
I instantly like people who laugh at my jokes. It's a weakness of mine.
Matthew Norman
Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold! Bright and yellow hard and cold
Thomas Hood
Frightfully pale and perpetually odd
Sue Perkins
Nearer my God to Thee - Nearer to Thee - E'en though it be a cross That raiseth me Still all my song shall be Nearer my God to Thee Nearer to Thee!
Sarah Flower Adams
I ran out the door but it was to late..... i felt a sharp pain in my back as i heard the gun shoot
Andy Lane
The spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to Him, the more intensely missionary we become.
Henry Martyn
Only poor people are corrupt. If you don't believe me, just go and ask a rich person.
Anthony T.Hincks
That's best Which God sends. 'Twas His will: it is mine.
Owen Meredith
We were young and thought we were invincible and we threw ourselves into the gears of history and it ground us up.
Ian McDonald
Working on the summit of Mauna Kea was comparable to working on the hospital pulmonary ward with sick people sucking on oxygen cylinders.
Steven Magee
If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life he will soon find himself left alone.
Samuel Johnson
I remember an hypothesis argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, 'Whether supposing that the flavour of a big who obtained his death by whipping (per flagellationem extremem) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting an animal to death?' I forget the decision.
Charles Lamb
I'm the idea of the human imagination, which, when you think about it, is the only thing we can really be certain ISN'T imaginary.
Alan Moore
Mordred and Agravaine thought Arthur hypocritical—as all decent men must be, if you assume that decency can’t exist.
T.H. White
The brave man is not he who feels no fear For that were stupid and irrational But he whose noble soul its fear subdues And barely dares the danger nature shrinks from.
Joanna Baillie
Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.
John Lennon
It takes more than wings to release one from the bonds of kinship.
Betsy Tobin
A writer who takes up journalism abandons the slow tempo of literature for a faster one and the change will do him harm. By degrees the flippancy of journalism will become a habit and the pleasure of being paid on the nail and more especially of being praised on the nail grow indispensable.
Cyril Connolly
God surely did not create us, and cause us to live, with the sole end of wishing always to die. I believe, in my heart, we were intended to prize life and enjoy it, so long as we retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me, among the rest.
Charlotte Brontë
It’s the remarkable thing about academics: they look at Shakespeare and always see their own faces in him.
Amanda Craig
Get into Parliament, make tiresome speeches; you will have great offers; do not accept them at first, then do: then make great provision for yourself and family, and then call yourself an independent country gentleman.
Hans Stanley
Well, the terrible fact is that though we are all more or less thinking of something or other all the time, some of us are thinking more and some less.Some brains are battling and working and remembering and puzzling things over all the time and other brains are just lying down, snoring and occasionally turning over. It is to the lazy minds that I am now speaking, and from my own experience I imagine this includes nineteen people out of every twenty. I am one of that clan myself and always have been.
Ted Hughes
She found out that having something to do prevented you from feeling seasick, and that even a job like scrubbing a deck could be satisfying, if it was done in a seamanlike way. She was very taken with this notion, and later on she folded the blankets on her bunk in a seamanlike way, and put her possessions in the closet in a seamanlike way, and used 'stow' instead of 'tidy' for the process of doing so. After two days at sea, Lyra decided that this was the life for her.
Philip Pullman
Women's magazines sadly remark that children can have a disruptive effect on the conjugal relationship, that the young wife's involvement with her children and her exhaustion can interfere with her husband's claims on her. What a notion- a family that is threatened by its children! Contraception has increased the egotism of the couple: planned children have a pattern to fit into; at least unplanned children had some of the advantages of contingency. First and foremost they were whether their parents liked it or not. In the limited nuclear family the parents are the principals and children are theirs to manipulate in a newly purposive way. The generation gap is being intensified in these families where children must not inconvenience their parents, where they are disposed of in special living quarters at special times of day, their own rooms and so forth. Anything less than this is squalor. Mother must not have more children than she can control: control means full attention for much of the day, then isolation.
Germaine Greer
We have no government and no laws, if by law is meant a stereotyped convention supported by force, and not to be altered without the aid of cumbersome machinery.
Olaf Stapledon
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.
W.H. Auden
It [being very rich] used to worry me, and I thought it wrong to have so many beautiful things when others had nothing. Now I realize that it is possible for the rich to sin by coveting the privileges of the poor. The poor have always been the favourites of God and his saints, but I believe that is is one of the special achievements of Grace to sanctify the whole of life, riches included.
Evelyn Waugh
Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.
David Mitchell
Why do people always wonder whether books are any good, without wondering whether they are themselves in a state to profit from them?
Idries Shah
In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving
Thomas Hardy
It's as though a smile is ageless, or perhaps eternal, independent of the decay and collapse of the surrounding features.
Justin Cartwright
There is no straight road to finding yourself, to making something.
Edmund de Waal
No one loves me, - no one cares for me, but you, mother.
Elizabeth Gaskell
The first lesson of branding: memorability. It's very difficult buying something you can't remember.
John Hegarty
Break break break On thy cold gray stones O sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
She felt as if she had no bones, like a jellyfish, hooked from the sea. She walked slowly towards them, her ears ringing, but they ignored her. All except for Levi, who stood at the end of the bridge, his hands in his pockets, smiling.
Sanjida Kay
Books can be immensely powerful. The ideas in them can change the way people think. Yet it was the Nazis and Stalin's officers who committed terrible crimes, and not Mein Kampf or the Communist Manifesto - and of course, the Manifesto contained many key ideas that are still relevant and important today, long after Stalin has gone. There is a crucial distinction between the book and its effect - it's crucial because if you talk about a book being harmful rather than its effect you begin to legitimise censorship. Abhorrent ideas need to be challenged by better ones, not banned.
John Farndon
Faith is the road, but communion with Jesus is the well from which the pilgrim drinks.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon