Quotes by British Authors - Page 374

But deciding not to have children is a very, very hard decision for a woman to make: the atmosphere is worryingly inconducive to saying, "I choose not to," or "it all sounds a bit vile, tbh." We call these women "selfish" The inference of the word "childless" is negative: one of lack, and loss. We think of nonmothers as rangy lone wolves--rattling around, as dangerous as teenage boys or men. We make women feel that their narrative has ground to a halt in their thirities if they don't "finish things" properly and have children.
Caitlin Moran
Writing does not exist unless there is someone to read it, and each reader will take something different from a novel, from a chapter, from a line.
Claire Fuller
Sexually progressive cultures gave us literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust.
Alan Moore
I came to understand that happiness and vulnerability are often the same thing.
Oliver Burkeman
The thing with dying, well, with death really, is that there's a difference between being someone who knows they can really die at any time and someone who doesn't.
Jo Walton
Just think, she said to herself. I could be living on the Right Bank. I could be married to a senior clerk at the Treasury. I could be sitting with my feet up, embroidering a linen handkerchief with a rambling-rose design. Instead I'm on the rue des Cordeliers in pursuit of a baguette, with a three-inch blade for comfort.
Hilary Mantel
You can't win because of the guns," said Adam with a sigh. "Machine guns, mortars, field guns, howitzers: it doesn't matter how much courage soldiers have, how much will; flesh and blood can't pass through bullets and shells, or at least not in sufficient numbers to have any effect. The guns win in the end and they always will. Not us, not the Germans - the guns.
Simon Tolkien
We must bear in mind, however sadly, that psychopathology is no longer the exclusive preserve of the degenerate and perverse. The Congo, Vietnam, Biafra -these are games that anyone can play. Their violence, and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration of sensation that is taking place now, within sex as elsewere (...). Were all this leads one can only speculate (...). What will follow is the psychopathology of sex, relationships so lunar and abstract that people will become mere extensions of the geometries of situations.
Ballard James G.
Good works" are those works that have their origin in Jesus Christ--whose activity is released through your body, presented to Him as a living sacrifice by a faith that expresses total dependence, as opposed to the Adamic independence (Rom. 12:1, 2).
W. Ian Thomas
The real problem here is a massive elephant in the room: our own culture. Our social values, our media - so influential on impressionable young girls - that have been allowed, for millenia, to send out this powerful, alienating message about girls and sport: that sport is unfeminine, that sport makes you sweaty and muscular, that sport is swearing and violence, that sport is ugliness in a world where women’s sole priority, value and focus should be beauty and becoming an object of desire.
Anna Kessel
There were ten tongues within one head, and one went out to fetch some bread, to feed the living and the dead." "What does it mean?" "A wren made a nest inside the skull of a gibbeted corpse, flying in and out of the jaw to feed its young. In the midst of death, as it were, life just keeps on happening.
Neil Gaiman
One of the greatest feelings in life is the conviction that you have lived the life you wanted to live-with the rough and the smooth, the good and the bad-but yours, shaped by your own choices, and not someone else's.
Michael Ignatieff
In fifteen hundred years someone will figure out a way to squeeze black juice out of the yellow sand, and that will get everyone very excited. Some people who were rich already will get a lot richer, and some people who were poor will be told that they're richer but will be pretty sure they're not.
Louise Carey
Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbor's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.
George Eliot
For the Stoics, then, our judgments about the world are all that we can control, but also all that we need to control in order to be happy; tranquility results from replacing our irrational judgments with rational ones
Oliver Burkeman
If I get married, I want to be very married.
Audrey Hepburn
The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.
E.M. Forster
The fashionable woman wears clothes. The clothes don't wear her.
Mary Quant
He seems to have become a part of my life and I'm disappointed if I don't see him. If I get to the end of the day without seeing someone who reminds me of him, I feel as if a dull shadow has fallen over me.
Dorothy Koomson
I wanted to be dead. No. That's not quite right. I didn't want to be dead, I just didn't want to be alive.
Matt Haig
You would say you don't see it: at least I flatter myself I read as much in your eye (beware, by-the-by, what you express with that organ, I am quick at interpreting its language).
Charlotte Brontë
I don't believe in a country where it's more acceptable to see two men holding guns than two men holding hands.
Brian Whitaker
Mannerism, especially when it takes the form of recurrent word or phrase, is by no means easy to represent; there is but a hair's breadth between the point at which the reader delightfully recognizes is as a revealing habit of speech, and the point at which its iteration begin to weary him.
Mary Lascelles
Similes are like songs of love: They much describe they nothing prove.
Matthew Prior
The profoundest of all sensualitiesis the sense of truthand the next deepest sensual experienceis the sense of justice.
D.H. Lawrence
I didn’t want the person standing there, beside the bed, to have the same face I’d found so attractive at the airport. But you were there all right: the blue eyes, blondish hair, and tiny scar. Only you didn’t look beautiful this time. Just evil.
Lucy Christopher
The lad, like many another, owed nothing to his father but his mere existence—Heaven knows whether that gift is oftenest a curse or a boon.
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
Be you, be true to your word, don't sell yourself short and don't waste your life worrying.
Sam Owen
Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct something to take its place.
Julian Huxley
There is no such thing as a plain fact of murder. Murder springs, nine times out of ten, out of the character and circumstances of the murdered person. Because the victim was the kind of person he or she was, therefore was he or she murdered! Until we can understand fully and completely exactly what kind of a person [she] was, we shall not be able to see clearly exactly the kind of person who murdered her. From that spring the necessity of our questions.
Agatha Christie
Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly.
Tariq Ali
Mr. Crossley suddenly wondered why he was why he was worrying about the note. It was only a joke, after all. He cleared his throat. Everyone looked up hopefully. 'Somebody,' said Mr. Crossley, 'seems to have sent me a Halloween message.' And he read out the note: 'SOMEONE IN THIS CLASS IS A WITCH.'6B thought this was splendid news. Hands shot up all over the room like a bed of beansprouts.'It's me, Mr. Crossley!''Mr. Crossley, I'm the witch!''Can I be the witch, Mr. Crossley?''Me, Mr. Crossley, me, me, me!
Diana Wynne Jones
The river this November afternoonRests in an equipoise of sun and cloud:A glooming light, a gleaming darkness shroudIts passage. All seems tranquil, all in tune.
Cecil Day-Lewis
HUMAN BEINGS MAKE LIFE SO INTERESTING. DO YOU KNOW, THAT IN A UNIVERSE SO FULL OF WONDERS, THEY HAVE MANAGED TO INVENT BOREDOM. (Death)
Terry Pratchett
She was wearing a beautiful dress with straps designed to be eaten off her shoulders.
Elise Valmorbida
She replaced her wardrobe with marvels of the season bought from boutiques of the Palais-Royal and rue de la Chaussee-d'Antin. Outfits for a ball detailed in the fashion pages of the January 1839 edition of Paris Elegant describe dresses of pale pink crépe garnished with lace and velvet roses and accessorized with white gloves, silk stockings, and white cashmere or taffeta shawls. In the spring of that year, misty tulle bonnets came into fashion worn with capes of Alencon lace - “little masterpieces of lightness and freshness.“Her bed was her stage, raised on a platform and curtained with sumptuous pink silk drapes. The adjoining cabinet de toilette was also a courtesan’s natural habitat, its dressing table a jumble of lace, bows, ribbons, embossed vases, crystal bottles of scents and lotions, brushes and combs of ivory and silver.She indulged her sweet tooth with cakes from Rollet the patissier, glaceed fruit from Boissier, and on one occasion sent for twelve biscuits, macaroons, and maraschino liqueur.
Julie Kavanagh
The "good old times"-all times when old are good.
Lord Byron
The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Language is the light of the mind.
John Stuart Mill
We can pay our debt to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.
John Buchan
This is the real power of joy, to make us certain that, beneath all grief, the most fundamental of realities is joy itself.
Wendy Beckett
He had made a vow, a private promise to the world in the long dark watches of the night, that if he did survive then in the great afterward he would always try to be kind, to live a good, quiet life. Like Candide, he would cultivate his garden. quietly. And that would be his redemption. Even if he could add only a feather to the balance it would be some kind of repayment for being spared. When it was all over and the reckoning fell due, it may be that he would be in need of that feather.
Kate Atkinson
The trouble is I'm not very good at trusting my own instincts. I've been wrong before. A lot.""About what? You worry too much, about everything. You're to hard on yourself.""I was wrong about Rory -""You were twenty-five, twenty-six! Everyone's allowed to be in love with the wrong person at some point. In fact, its a mistake not to be.
Harriet Evans
In those days I coercedOracular assuranceIn my favour out of every sign.
Ted Hughes
I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.
G.K. Chesterton
when someone dumps you, it's heartbreaking and insulting and horrible, sure, but being the one who breaks up is almost as bad.
Keren David
The dead live." "How do they live?" "By love.
John Fowles
Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.
Max Beerbohm
All age is a kind of tiredness, I think. When you’re young, the lines never show. Every morning you wake unmarked, wiped clear by sleep. One day, though, you see lines that itch, as though some crumb of existence has been creased into your skin. They can never be smoothed away, and after a while you forget that this heavy, irritable feeling wasn’t always there.
Amanda Craig
God does not comfort us to make us comfortable, but to make us comforters.
John Henry Jowett
Cats and monkeys - monkeys and cats - all human life is there!
Henry James
I am Mae Waylander from Halts-Walden, daughter of Robert Wallander, a good man who lost his life saving hers.' I point to Ellen. 'And I am the girl who has saved your brother's life on numerous occasions in the Waerg Woods - who fought off a wood nymph, a psychotic pre-adolescent prophet, and a determined flock of killer birds - only to have your father shoot an arrow in my side because I wouldn't let him kill my stag.
Sarah Dalton
These are burning times. And they call for Burning Women. Women embodied in their passion. Woman feeling in their bodies. Creative women. Courageous women. Women who have learned to run on a different power source to the world which is falling into flames around her. She has already disentangled herself from the wreckage of the patriarchal culture, so she will not be dazed, confused and disorientated by the systemic changes happening around her. Centred within herself, receptive to the Earth beyond her, she knows how to cultivate from the ashes, she knows how to find the embers to fuel the new fire.Burning Women arise.Our time is now.Our time has come.
Lucy H. Pearce
Enlightenment, and the death which comes before it, is the primary business of Varanasi.
Tahir Shah
A library — a place full of books! Imagine!" Ivy couldn't imagine a place closer to heaven. Think of all the books you could read!
Gemma Jackson
A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.
G.K. Chesterton
I want a man who knows something about himself. And is appalled. And has to forgive himself to get along.
C.P. Snow
No idea is above scrutiny and no people are beneath dignity.
Maajid Nawaz
Because I don’t believe that you are a slave to what you’ve become. I don’t believe that you simply can’t.
Bella Forrest
I hope you find someone who knows how to love you when you are sad.
Nikita Gill