Quotes by British Authors - Page 371

I know you don't think that any tongue I speak is mine; it must be rented. I am always denial, or pretense. A child born mid-flight has no nation. I can pull on either culture, but they always melt like a dream, trickle away, water on the oiled pelt of foreign.
Jasmine Ann Cooray
The Way of the Sufis cannot be understood by means of the intellect or by ordinary book learning.
Idries Shah
The Sufis,' runs the saying, 'understand with their hearts what the most learned scholars cannot understand with their minds
Idries Shah
Court life for a queen of France at that time was, however, stultifyingly routine. Eleanor found that she was expected to be no more than a decorative asset to her husband, the mother of his heirs and the arbiter of good taste and modesty.
Alison Weir
Nothing is yet in its true form.
C.S. Lewis
[“What is the most real thing you can think of?”]Jacques thought for a long time before answering; he tried to weigh up what was most vital and enduring in all that he had known. Eventually, no longer smiling, he said, ‘Memory’.
Sebastian Faulks
I dragged myself to my feet, and with my hellhound in tow started off once more through the fastness of the wood, feeling, as the poet did before me, that my companion would be with me through the nights and through the days and down the arches of the years, and I should never be rid of him.
Daphne du Maurier
A pen that has clocked up a million words, a lifetime’s memories, is worth more than the centrepiece in a jeweller’s window.
Fennel Hudson
Love is the colour of spring sunshine muted through old windows. Love has a taste, a texture - dark chocolate with pistachios; a sound - wind chimes echoing from a distant hill; a rhythm - the tango, obviously.
Chloe Thurlow
So long divided and so differently situated, the ties of blood were little more than nothing.
Jane Austen
Simplicity is an exact medium between too little and too much.
Sir Joshua Reynolds
Azhrarn, Lord of Terrors, terrified.
Tanith Lee
If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
Charles Darwin
Practices are cultural: they do not submit to the meanings that an individual wants them to have, either for herself or for others.
Clare Chambers
For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations....Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.
Alain de Botton
I’ve never liked urban myths. I’ve never liked pretending to believe in them; never understood why everyone else doesn’t see straight through them. Why is it they’ve always happened to a friend of a friend - someone you’ve never met? Why does everyone smile and nod and pull the right faces, when they must know they’re not true? Pointless. A waste of breath. So I sneered at the myths about Scaderstone Pit. It was just an old quarry – nothing more. I never believed in the rumours of discarded dynamite. It had decayed, they said. It exploded at the slightest touch, had even blown someone’s hand off. I shrugged off the talk of the toxic waste. It was dumped in the dead of night, they said. The canisters rusting away, leaking deadly poisons that could blind you, burn your lungs. I laughed at the ghost stories. You could hear the moans, they said, of quarrymen buried alive and never found. You could see their nightwalking souls, searching for their poor crushed bodies.I didn’t believe any of it – not one word. Now, after everything that’s happened, I wonder whether I should’ve listened to those stories. Maybe then, these things would’ve happened to someone else, and I could’ve smiled and said they were impossible.But this is not an urban myth. And it did not happen to someone else, but to me. I’ve set it down as best I can remember. Whether you believe it or not, is up to you.
Mikey Campling
The horror of that moment the King went on "I shall never forget." "You will though " the Queen said "if you don't make a memorandum of it."
Lewis Carroll
An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong.
G.K. Chesterton
Every man, every woman, every child has some talent, some power, some opportunity of getting good and doing good. Each day offers some occasion for using this talent. As we use it, it gradually increases, improves, becomes native to the character. As we neglect it, it dwindles, withers, and disappears. This is the stern but benign law by which we live.
James Clarke
He found himself in a room not unlike the shop. All books again, packed tight on shelves or laying in piles on every surface. It was a cozy room, for all that ; it smelled of warm, rich words and very deep thoughts.
Jenny Nimmo
It is very strange that the years teach us patience - that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.
Elizabeth Taylor
You don't make money from peace.You make money from wars!
Anthony T.Hincks
There have been bleak nights along my way, many of my own making, but life is all the brighter for them now. To the human eye, without the darkness there are no stars.
Sumangali Morhall
The effect of a concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The effect of a tool-driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explained.
Frank Watson Dyson
Have a smile for breakfast, you'll be shitting joy by lunch.
Joe Abercrombie
If you cannot sit on a throne like a king, seize, like a tent-pitcher, the rope of the Royal tent.
Idries Shah
Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange.Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could.
Susanna Clarke
It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma or want of dogma that the danger lies.
Samuel Butler
Peace within us starts when we learn to forgive and let go
Mimi Novic
I do not spoil women. ... I don't send them flowers and gifts. . . . I'm saving those gestures until I am an unpleasant old man who must resort to bribery to win a woman's synthetic affections.
George Sanders
I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house tonight or never.
Jane Austen
Aspire to decency. Practice civility toward one another. Admire and emulate ethical behavior wherever you find it. Apply a rigid standard of morality to your lives; and if, periodically, you fail ­ as you surely will ­ adjust your lives, not the standards.
Ted Koppel
Foras Road has a sordid reputation (…) Old crones sat in doorways, while their daughters were pushed out to earn money. It is intriguing that a society which is very covert with sexuality should be so straightforward about prostitution.
Tahir Shah
Don't reach for the halo too soon. You have plenty of time to enjoy yourself, even a little maliciously sometimes, before you settle down to being a saint.
Ellis Peters
You have striven so hard and so long to compel life. Can't you now slowly change and let life slowly drift into you ... let the invisible life steal into you and slowly possess you.
D.H. Lawrence
You can lose a friend in springtime easier than any other season if you're too curious.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Let us not neglect the forbidden. Let us not sophisticate ourselves out of the cheap thrill and chill of it: the story told for perversity's sake, and all the better for that; the image created because an artist gets tired of reasons sometimes, and wants to dredge up some picture he's been haunted by, and parade it like a new tattoo. I go with it, readily.
Clive Barker
You can't not help people just because they're stupid or forgetful or unpleasant... If I don't help them, who will?
Terry Pratchett
Hello, Minister!" bellowed Percy, sending a neat jinx straight at Thicknesse, who dropped his wand and clawed at the front of his robes, apparently in awful discomfort. "Did I mention I'm resigning?
J.K. Rowling
If you can find no way of getting the Notes duplicated, why not try the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, who might be sympathetic (provided they do not actually read them)? I must, however, confess to a rooted dislike—perhaps you share it?—of seeking the help of Official (particularly Government) Bodies. Whenever anyone addresses me in his official capacity, I am at once filled with a desire to attack the Official Body he represents. I have every sympathy with the Irishman who, on being fined five shillings for Contempt of Court, asked the Magistrate to make it ten shillings; 'Five shillings' he explained 'do not adequately express the Contempt I have for this Court'. I am quite unable to identify myself with any organized body or cause (even if it is a body of opposition or a lost cause). I am a born blackleg. I thoroughly approve of E. M. Forster's declaration, 'If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country'. For me, there is no doubt that the very small word in the centre of the blank canvas at the end of 'The Artist at Work' is solitaire, not solidaire.
Nanavira Thera
Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth.
Peter Ustinov
If all the seven stones were laid out before me now, I should shut my eyes and put my hands in my pockets.
J.R.R. Tolkien
My second thoughts condemnAnd wonder how I dareTo look you in the eye.What right have I to swearEven at one a.m.To love you till I die?Earth meets too many crimesFor fibs to interest her;If I can give my word,Forgiveness can recurAny number of timesIn Time. Which is absurd.Tempus fugit. Quite.So finish up your drink.All flesh is grass. It is. But who on earth can thinkWith heavy heart or lightOf what will come of this?
W.H. Auden
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
T.S Eliot
How does one kill fear? ... How do you shoot a specter through the heart slash off its spectral head take it by its spectral throat?
Joseph Conrad
We have yet to establish a permanent Mars colony for this reason: Trying to colonize Mars with humans is a known suicide mission that no one is talking about.
Steven Magee
...trapped in limbo, believing in a lack of belief, but not necessarily lacking the belief to believe.
Ian Rankin
You are protected, in short, by your ability to love!
J.K. Rowling
When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,—or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge’s phrase, for unity in variety.
Bronowski
The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne's impulse to go straightway to see her.
Henry James
The silence of a wounded soul roars louder than any tempest...
Virginia Alison
Even as individuals become families and families become communities, and communities become nations, so eventually must the nations draw together in peace.
Marjorie Watts
Lord Peter Wimsey: Facts, Bunter, must have facts. When I was a small boy, I always hated facts. Thought they were nasty, hard things, all nobs. Mervyn Bunter: Yes, my lord. My old mother always used to say... Lord Peter Wimsey: Your mother, Bunter? Oh, I never knew you had one. I always thought you just sort of came along already-made, so it were. Oh, excuse me. How infernally rude of me. Beg pardon, I'm sure. Mervyn Bunter: That's all right, my lord. Lord Peter Wimsey: Thank you. Mervyn Bunter: Yes indeed, I was one of seven. Lord Peter Wimsey: That is pure invention, Bunter, I know better. You are unique. But you were going to tell me about your mater. Mervyn Bunter: Oh yes, my lord. My old mother always used to say that facts are like cows. If you stare them in the face hard enough, and they generally run away. Lord Peter Wimsey: By Jove, that's courageous, Bunter. What a splendid person she must be. Mervyn Bunter: I think so, my lord.
Dorothy L. Sayers
We all practice self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There's not enough room in a man's head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns. I’m well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on.
Mark Lawrence
How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?
Joseph Conrad
We are largely the playthings of our fears. To one fear of the dark to another of physical pain to a third of public ridicule to a fourth of poverty to a fifth of loneliness ... for all of us our particular creature waits in ambush.
Horace Walpole
If you don't learn how to be scared, you'll never really learn how to be brave.
Simon Holt
If the requirements of world-structure are so inexorable, what scope is there for a free providence in distributing pleasures and pains? If pains are the natural rubs of a world-structure bearing on sentient creatures, what need have we to view them as instruments of a disciplinary providence?
Jocelyn Gibb
What if the thing that God wants us to receive most in our conversations with Him is not some alternate reality, but an assurance of a divine presence within, and a divine perspective on, our current reality – a presence and perspective that will ultimately change our response to our circumstances and lead us to be responsible within those circumstances? So prayer doesn’t just become some ‘spiritual exercise’ in order to exert our authority over the external world, it becomes a spiritually-physical relationship with a greater authority that brings transformation internally, leading to responsibility externally.
Tristan Sherwin
In 2006, there is no army of recovered memory therapists, and Dr McNally’s assumptions about patients with PTSD and those working in this field are troubling. Owing to past debates, those working in the PTSD field are perhaps more knowledgeable than others about malingered, factitious, and iatrogenic variants.Why, then, does Dr McNally attack PTSD as a valid diagnosis, demean those working in the field, and suggest that sufferers are mostly malingered or iatrogenic, while giving little or no consideration is given to such variants of other psychiatric conditions? Perhaps the trauma field has been “so often embroiled in serious controversy” (4, p 816) for the same reason Dr McNally and others have trouble imagining the traumatization of a Vietnam War cook or clerk. One theory suggests that there is a conscious decision on the part of some individuals to deny trauma and its impact. Another suggests that some individuals may use dissociation or repression to block from consciousness what is quite obvious to those who listen to real-life patients."Cameron, C., & Heber, A. (2006). Re: Troubles in Traumatology, and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory/Reply: Troubles in Traumatology and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory. Canadian journal of psychiatry, 51(6), 402.
Colin Cameron