Quotes by British Authors - Page 377

The fridge had been emptied of all Dudley’s favorite things — fizzy drinks and cakes, chocolate bars and burgers — and filled instead with fruit and vegetables and the sorts of things that Uncle Vernon called “rabbit food.
J.K. Rowling
Nobody's bought this land. And no one's going to want it either. It's dying land, lonely land.""Like me, then," I said."Yes, like you." You chewed the corner of your lip. "You both need saving.
Lucy Christopher
A ruler who discerning justice refuseth to it the sanction of law, demanding abnegation of rights and self-sacrifice, will not drive his subjects to these virtues, virtuous only if free, but by unnaturally making justice unlawful, will drive them rather to rebellion against all law.
J.R.R. Tolkien
All that is gold does not glitter.Not all those who wander are lost:The old that is strong does not wither.Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
J.R.R. Tolkien
How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet.
Julian Barnes
Books! tis a dull and endless strife:Come, hear the woodland linnet,How sweet his music! on my life,There's more of wisdom in it.
William Wordsworth
The main danger is that of supposing that the thing to do is get a mind on the scale of Thomas (Aquinas)’s into your head, a task of compression that will be achieved only at your head’s peril. The only safe thing to do is to find a way of getting your mind into his, wherein yours has room to expand and grow, and explore the worlds his contains.
Denys Turner
Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.
J.G. Ballard
My sister having so much to do, was going to church vicariously, that is to say, Joe and I were going.
Charles Dickens
Perhaps with age came a more sedate appreciation of the passage of time.
Tim Lebbon
Remembering our personal growth that resulted from negative life experiences makes new obstacles easier to embrace.
Sam Owen
People change. Life changes. It's the way of the world. Maybe it's meant to be.
Sophie Kinsella
I feel as if I could be any thing or every thing, as if I could rant and storm, or sigh, or cut capers in any tragedy or comedy in the English language.
Jane Austen
Intelligence is just one dimension of ability. Don't limit yourself to it. Open up to instinct, intuition, creativity and thus possibility
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Bouillabaisse is only good because cooked by the French, who, if they cared to try, could produce an excellent and nutritious substitute out of cigar stumps and empty matchboxes.
Norman Douglas
War is an option of difficulties.
James Wolfe
You can't ever tell what's going to hurt people.
Evelyn Waugh
A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal...
Bertrand Russell
And the movement in your brainSends you out into the rain
Nick Drake
There are no secrets.' The thing smiled, showing a row of even, childlike teeth. 'None worth keeping. Only the ones you hide from yourself, which are the most damaging and hurtful of all. Truth is truth, and lie is lie. Tell yourself one's the other and all the world turns kilter.
David Hewson
Not long ago-incredible though it may seem-I heard a clerk of Oxford declare that he 'welcomed' the proximity of mass-production robot factories, and the roar of self-obstructive traffic, because it brought his university into 'contact with real life.' He may have meant that the way men were living and working in the twentieth century was increasing in barbarity at an alarming rate, and that the loud demonstration of this in the streets of Oxford might serve as a warning that it is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences, without actual offensive action (practical and intellectual). I fear he did not. In any case the expression 'real life' in this context seems to fall short of academic standards. The notion that motor-cars are more 'alive' than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more 'real' than, say, horses is pathetically absurd. How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm tree: poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist!
J.R.R. Tolkien
The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
William Blake
It hurt to think that a boy would not have him at his value of himself.
Richard Llewellyn
Though in single life your joys may not be very many, your sorrows, at least will not be more than you can bear. Marriage may change your circumstances for the better, but in my private opinion, it is far more likely to produce a contrary result
Anne Brontë
Heaven for climate hell for company.
James M. Barrie
Now he had chanced on one of he standard hard-on sessions of the shower, as on both sides of him and across the room three queens sported horizontal members which they turned around from time to time to conceal or display, barely exchanging looks as they resolved. The old men took no interest in this activity, knowing perhaps from long experience that it rarely meant anything or led anywhere, was a brief and helpless surrender to the forcing-house of the shower. In a few seconds the hard-on might pass from one end of the room to the other with the foolish perfection of a Busby Berkeley routine.
Alan Hollinghurst
There it was, happiness in a backward glance: happiness and the certainty of hope.
Samantha Bruce-Benjamin
One thing a death will do is make you reflect on how many kinds of love there are to be experienced in the world.
Barney Norris
Mister Rob Anybody and sundry others?" said one of the figures in a dreadful voice."There's naebody here o' that name!" shouted Rob Anybody. "We dinna know anythin'!""We have here a list of criminal and civil charges totaling nineteen thousand, seven hundred and sixty-three separate offenses-""We wasna there!" yelled Rob Anybody desperately. "Isn't that right, lads?""-including more than two thousand cases of Making an Affray, Causing a Public Nuisance, Being Found Drunk, Being Found Very Drunk, Using Offensive Language (taking into account ninety-seven cases of Using Language That Was Probably Offensive If Anyone Else Could Understand It), Committing a Breach of the Peace, Malicious Lingering-""It's mistaken identity!" shouted Rob Anybody. "It's no' oour fault! We wuz only standing there an' someone else did it and ran awa'!""-Grand Theft, Petty Theft, Burglary, Housebreaking, Loitering with Intent to Commit a Felony-""We wuz misunderstood when we was wee bairns!" yelled Rob Anybody. "Ye're only picking on us 'cause we're blue! We always get blamed for everythin'! The polis hate us! We wasna even in the country!
Terry Pratchett
It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.
John Maynard Keynes
I REMEMBER WHEN ALL THIS WILL BE AGAIN.
Terry Pratchett
We are never so free as when we own our sacred serfdom...
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
We still don't have a good word to describe what is missing in Cameroon, indeed in poor countries across the world. But we are starting to understand what it is. Some people call it 'social capital, or maybe 'trust'. Others call it 'the rule of law', or 'institutions'. But these are just labels. The problem is that Cameroon, like other poor countries, is a topsy-turvy world in which it's in most people's interest to take action that directly or indirectly damages everyone else.
Tim Harford
I began to enjoy myself: being apoplectic's quite invigorating.
Jonathan Gash
Mrs. Dalloway raised her hand to her eyes, and, as the maid shut the door to, and she heard the swish of Lucy's skirts, she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to old devotions.
Virginia Woolf
Nothing was true for long. In time, everything was deconstructed.
Sue Townsend
In this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good.
Bertrand Russell
The formation of Stalin’s character is particularly important because the nature of his rule was so personal.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
She had married him in order to be safe from the chaos. He had married her, she now understood, for the same reason. They were the last two people on earth who could make anyone safe from anything.
Kate Atkinson
I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact.
Winston S. Churchill
Sometimes I like her calm, unwild, gentle as a sleeping child,and wonder as she lies, a fur ring,curled upon my lap, unstirring -- is it me or Tibbles purring?
Ian Serraillier
He's turned his life around. He used to be depressed and miserable. Now he's miserable and depressed.
David Frost
We fitted together like the two halves of an oyster-shell. I was Narcissus, embracing the pond in which I was about to drown. However much we had to hide our love, however guarded we had to be about our pleasure, I could not long be miserable about a thing so very sweet. Nor, in my gladness, could I quite believe that anybody would be anything but happy for me if only they knew.
Sarah Waters
Good taste and humour are a contradiction in terms like a chaste whore.
Malcolm Muggeridge
If I have friends how come I always feel alone?
Sally Green
Furthermore, unlike so many of his evangelical contemporaries he did not hold the view that the various inter-denominational youth movements represented the most hopeful field of labour; indeed his doctrine of the church left him with little sympathy for that attitude.
Iain H. Murray
It's not really my problem if they think I'm weird.
Sid Vicious
Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.
Evelyn Waugh
The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it; for, however absurd it may be thought to boast an honour by an act which shows that it was conferred without merit, yet most men seem rather inclined to confess the want of virtue than of importance.
Samuel Johnson
advertising produces familiarity which produces sales
Paul Cookson
All gardening is landscape painting.
Alexander Pope
Act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done by hesitation.
Thomas Henry Huxley
If you ever doubt anything here, if you ever not know what to think or who to trust, you trust Todd, okay? You remember that.
Patrick Ness
I have been used to consider poetry as "the food of love" said Darcy."Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what isstrong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, Iam convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.
Jane Austen
Please understand there is no depression in this house and we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.
Victoria
If you write about a place, you need to be right about the place!
Laurence Bradbury
Matthew knew that phrenology was nonsense, and yet, years later, he found himself making judgments similar to those made by his father; slippery people looked slippery; they really did. And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudiced and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!
Alexander McCall Smith
If you looked round the rooms, you wouldn't think there was anything missing. But it's like one of those Spot the difference cartoons in a puzzle book. The changes are so subtle, yet glaringly obvious once you've seen them. A photo missing here, a cup there. A heart a bit more broken than it was before.
Liz Kessler
No reflection was to be allowed now, not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet, so deadly sad, that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank, something like then world when the deluge was gone by.
Charlotte Brontë
[Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief. (130)
Stephen Batchelor