Quotes by British Authors - Page 378

Chuck Norris can unscramble an egg.
Oliver Oliver Reed
I don't think we are cut out to be evil sorcerers, brothers," said Fentongoose. "If we were truly evil, we would not feel such sorrow at the deaths of our friends. We would just go, 'Ha! Ha! Ha!' or something.
Philip Reeve
There is no me. I do not exist. There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed
Peter Sellers
To pass its threshold was to return to stagnation; to cross the silent hall, to ascend the darksome staircase, to seek my own lonely little room, and then to meet tranquil Mrs. Fairfax, and spend the long winter evening with her, and her only, was to quell wholly the faint excitement wakened by my walk,—to slip again over my faculties the viewless fetters of an uniform and too still existence; of an existence whose very privileges of security and ease I was becoming incapable of appreciating. What good it would have done me at that time to have been tossed in the storms of an uncertain struggling life, and to have been taught by rough and bitter experience to long for the calm amidst which I now repined! Yes, just as much good as it would do a man tired of sitting still in a “too easy chair” to take a long walk: and just as natural was the wish to stir, under my circumstances, as it would be under his.
Charlotte Brontë
Trusting that you will some time or other do me greater justice than you can do now.
Jane Austen
We all have it in us to be something other than what we are, I thought, but we don't often get a glimpse of what we could have been
Alastair Reynolds
Honesty can be a dirty gift. It can muddy a sparkling stream of memories.
Colin Cotterill
Love addicts often pick partners who are emotionally unavailable because deep down, they don’t feel worthy of having a healthy, loving relationship. A love addict craves and obsesses about becoming enmeshed or ‘one’ with another human being at all costs, even if it means putting themselves in potential danger.
Christopher Dines
When in doubt go the library
J.K. Rowling
Sonnet: Political GreatnessNor happiness, nor majesty, nor fame,Nor peace, nor strength, nor skill in arms or arts,Shepherd those herds whom tyranny makes tame;Verse echoes not one beating of their hearts,History is but the shadow of their shame,Art veils her glass, or from the pageant startsAs to oblivion their blind millions fleet,Staining that Heaven with obscene imageryOf their own likeness. What are numbers knitBy force or custom? Man who man would be,Must rule the empire of himself; in itMust be supreme, establishing his throneOn vanquished will, quelling the anarchyOf hopes and fears, being himself alone.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
You have to count on living every single day in a way you believe will make you feel good about your life- so that if it were over tomorrow you'd be content with yourself.
Jane Seymour
Most true is it that 'beauty is in the eye of the gazer.' My master’s colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth, — all energy, decision, will, — were not beautiful, according to rule; but they were more than beautiful to me; they were full of an interest, an influence that quite mastered me, — that took my feelings from my own power and fettered them in his. I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously arrived, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.
Charlotte Brontë
The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished not by doing something but by refraining from doing. Great is truth but still greater from a practical point of view is silence about truth.
Aldous Huxley
Faith is the cure that heals all troubles. Without faith there is no hope and no love. Faith comes before hope, and before love. (Sheikh Muhammad ibn Zaidi bani Tihama)
Paul Torday
When you were young, and your heart, was an open book. You used to say, live and let live.
Paul McCartney
The law. Lady Frances, is an uncertain animal. It has twists and turns that surprise the non-legal mind.
Agatha Christie
These black times go as they come and we do not know how they come or why they go. But we know that God controls them, as he controls the whole vast cobweb of the mystery of things.
Elizabeth Goudge
Actually, what we really need to remember about Galileo is that most of the people who use his name in argument could barely spell it, let alone tell us what actually happened to the man. His case is used over and over again because critics can't think of any other scientists who were mistreated by the Church. And in this instance they're right. There may have been some people in the scientific world who did not enjoy Church support and were even challenged by Catholicism but, sorry to disappoint, there weren't very many of them. The Church has been the handmaiden of science and scientific discovery, and those who refer to Galileo tend to forget that Louis Pasteur, the inventor of pasteurization, was a devout Catholic, as was Alexander Fleming, who gave us penicillin. Or Father Nicolaus Copernicus, who first proposed the theory of the earth revolving around the sun - this was precisely what Galileo stated, but Copernicus taught it as theory and not fact. Or Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, a Belgian Roman Catholic priest and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven, who proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe. In the field of acceleration, Fr. Giambattista Riccioli changed the way we understand that particular science; the father of modern Egyptology was Fr. Athanasius Kircher, and the Yugoslavian Fr. Roger Boscovich was the founder of modern atomic theory.
Michael Coren
People go their whole lives wanting to be admired for their hidden qualities.
Hanif Kureishi
Be wise. Be brave. Be tricky.
Neil Gaiman
But those coins are wishes! You’re stealing other people’s wishes!”The look Matteo gave her was so flinty, she could have chipped a tooth on it. “If you have money to waste on wishes, you don’t need the wishes as badly as I need the money.
Katherine Rundell
Forget ideas, Mr. Author. What kind of pen do you use?
Stephen Fry
How quickly the dead faded into each other,
Ian McEwan
We can’t be trapped by fear. Lives lived within such walls are just slower deaths.
Mark Lawrence
The people and successes in your life mirror your beliefs.
Steve Backley
Perhaps the single most enjoyable part of my researches, which covered a period of about four years, was meeting the artists themselves, the people who provide the luxuries. All of them, from tailors and boot makers to truffle hunters and champagne blenders, were happy in their work, generous with their time, and fascinating about their particular skills. To listen to a knowledgeable enthusiast, whether he's talking about a Panama hat or the delicate business of poaching foie gras in Sauternes, is a revelation, and I often came away wondering why the price wasn't higher for the talent and patience involved.
Peter Mayle
..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.
Henry James
Words can be a fortress or a drawbridge to disaster
Benny Bellamacina
He never sat an examination in economics: his knowledge came from pondering problems and discussing them as much as from book-learning.
Richard Davenport-Hines
Meantime the clang of the bows and the shouts of the combatants mixed fearfully with the sound of the trumpets, and drowned the groans of those who fell, and lay rolling defenceless beneath the feet of the horses. The splendid armour of the combatants was now defaced with dust and blood, and gave way at every stroke of the sword and battle-axe. The gay plumage, shorn from the crests, drifted upon the breeze like snowflakes. All that was beautiful in the martial array had disappeared, and what was now visibke was only calculated to awaken terror or compassion.
Walter Scott
Men are much more unwilling to have their weaknesses and their imperfections known than their crimes.
Lord Chesterfield
The guard looked down at the scarlet bloodstains blooming on his chest. He appeared to think of something that he needed to say, but as his lips began to form the words, his knees gave up the strain of supporting his ruined bulk. He collapsed to the floor, his throat issuing a final sound like a bubbling casserole.
R.D. Ronald
Organic life cannot be far from water.
Fennel Hudson
What's the use of stories that aren't even true?
Salman Rushdie
I let it go. It's like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home.
Joanne Harris
God's everywhere.So remember when you go to the toilet not to laugh.
Anthony T.Hincks
If you were going to be successful in the world of crime, you needed a reputation for honesty.
Terry Pratchett
Marriages are like pianos. They go in and out of tune.
Sarah Waters
The mountains were so wild and so stark and so very beautiful that I wanted to cry. I breathed in another wonderful moment to keep safe in my heart.
Jane Wilson-Howarth
And then he again uneasily saw, as he had latterly seen with more and more frequency, the scorn of Nature for man’s finer emotions, and her lack of interest in his aspirations.
Thomas Hardy
Happiness is not something to be pursued, it is something met, an encounter. Most encounters, however, have a sequel; this is their promise. The encounter with happiness has no sequel. All is there instantly. Happiness is what pierces grief.
John Berger
I don't need you to agree with me," she said quietly." I'll go away happy with a little bit of doubt. Doubt is good. It's an emotion we can build on. Perhaps if we feed it with curiosity it will blossom into something useful, like suspicion - and action.
Jasper Fforde
When humility is exercised, people begin to realise that they do not, as it were, exist at all.
Idries Shah
Dreaming is the poetry of Life, and we must be forgiven if we indulge in it a little.
John Galsworthy
I believe in transhumanism: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.
Julian Huxley
... but now men who could work preferred to beg, and the artists forgot that their calling was noble and became imitators instead of creators, charging exorbitant sums for the rubbish they churned out with one eye closed.
Pauline Gedge
Her family... Love and involvement brought joy, but as well could become a hideously heavy millstone slung about one's neck. And the worst was that she felt useless because there was not a mortal thing she could do to help resolve their problems.
Rosamunde Pilcher
Our best canvas is all around us, in everything we touch and do.
Fennel Hudson
Sudden shifts and changes are no bad preparation for political life.
Charles Dickens
Do noble things do not dream them all day long.
Charles Kingsley
This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person's comforting, defining sense of having solid ground beneath their feet.
Salman Rushdie
... waiting for the spell to end, as all spells must.
Angie Sage
If you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, then you don't know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong.
Terry Pratchett
Do not think that your magic ring will work if you are not yourself Solomon.
Idries Shah
Grief is a hone to a hard mind.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Let's be honest: women are still only really valued for two things--their looks and their role as mothers. I'm not beautiful, and I can't have kids, so what does that make me? Worthless.
Paula Hawkins
[S]ocial change is not clearly linear and rarely totally beneficial or detrimental. Social change nearly nearly always produces positive and negative effects that are distributed differentially in the affected population.
Peter Conrad
Here’s what I believe. We have control over ourselves at every single moment. We don’t control the world. We don’t control other people (or at least, we shouldn’t.) But we are in control of our experience at all times.
Stephen Lovegrove
Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I am not sure that you can be taught how to love. In many ways it is innate - just watch and see what small child effortlessly does. But you can be reminded of it and invited to it and reminded of it.
Rasheed Ogunlaru