Quotes by British Authors - Page 379

Now, watching her sleep, and closing his eyes, he felt, in this particular intimacy - stowed beneath her duvet - that he was intruding. At the same time, he knew, settling down, you couldn´t dislike anyone you'd seen sleep
Hanif Kureishi
The Brigadier had no wish to shake hands with the improbable young man in the ridiculous frock-coat.
Peter Grimwade
Jesus does not suffer so as to exclude your suffering. He bears a cross, not that you may escape it, but that you may endure it.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
He's got a box with a demon in it that draws pictures," said Rincewind shortly. "Do what the madman says and he will give you gold.
Terry Pratchett
What we do upon some great occasion will probably depend on what we already are and what we are will be the result of previous years of self-discipline.
H. P. Liddon
There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there are few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be.Someone had stolen a book.
Terry Pratchett
And friends abroad must bear in mindFriends at home they leave behind.Oh, I shall be stiff and coldWhen I forget you, hearts of gold;The land where I shall mind you notIs the land where all's forgot.And if my foot returns no moreTo Teme nor Corve nor Severn shore,Luck, my lads, be with you stillBy falling stream and standing hill,By chiming tower and whispering tree,Men that made a man of me.About your work in town and farmStill you'll keep my head from harm,Still you'll help me, hands that gaveA grasp to friend me to the grave.
A.E. Housman
When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels— welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.
C.S. Lewis
The conjunction of ruling and dreaming generates tyranny.
Michael Oakeshott
Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed.
J.G. Ballard
Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other.
W Somerset Maugham
Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like ared flag to a bu... was like putting something very annoying in front ofsomeone who was annoyed by it.
Terry Pratchett
I always try to believe the best of everybody -it saves so much trouble.
Rudyard Kipling
When you do exams you never want to be the one who finishes first and you never want to be the one who finishes last.
Anthony T.Hincks
When sitting down to write a letter, it always pays to calm one’s mood, collect one’s thoughts, and have a plan.
Fennel Hudson
I'm sick and tired of it," he said, "It's the same all the time. 'These are my claws, so this is my cowslip." 'These are my teeth, so this is my burrow.' I'll tell you, if I ever get into the Owsla, I'll treat outskirters with a bit of decency.
Richard Adams
I was reborn...as ME!
Anthony T.Hincks
There's nothing like a re-creation of the event. Which is lucky. Think if one could fully remember perfume or kisses! How wearisome the reality of them would be!
Aldous Huxley
Observation is a dying art.
Stanley Kubrick
Where there is murder, anything can happen.
Agatha Christie
I know nothing, except what everyone knows - if there when Grace dances, I should dance.
W.H. Auden
If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter.
Isaiah Berlin
You’re as plain as the nose on your face,” said Mr. Pennyworth. “And your nose is remarkably obvious. As is the rest of your face, young man. As are you. For the sake of all that is holy, empty your mind. Now. You are an empty alleyway. You are a vacant doorway. You are nothing. Eyes will not see you. Minds will not hold you. Where you are is nothing and nobody.
Neil Gaiman
One can't love humanity. One can only love people.
Graham Greene
They'll come a time - in fact many times - when all the tools & techniques will fail you or desert you. Then - at last - is the moment to trust, use & follow your heart
Rasheed Ogunlaru
The more you care, the more you fear.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Once upon a time fairy tales were told to audiences of young and old alike. It is only in the last century that such tales were deemed fit only for small children, stripped of much of their original complexity, sensuality, and power to frighten and delight.
Terri Windling
If you help them (the crew) create good memories, they'll forget all the bad stuff
Geoff Dyer
Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what’s called at home.
Christopher Isherwood
[E]very heresy is due to an overemphasis upon some truth, without allowing other truths to qualify and balance it.
John R.W. Stott
Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.
E.M. Forster
Mawdryn stared at the Brigadier with such a look of pain and longing. For a moment the old soldier's mind went back thirty-five years to his first taste of action as a young lieutenant in Palestine, with his platoon badly shot up by terrorists, and he remembered the mangled conscript who screamed at the officer to take his rifle and kill him.
Peter Grimwade
Everyone’s alone—or so it seems to me.They make noises, and think they are talking to each other;They make faces, and think they understand each other,And I’m sure they don’t. Is that delusion?Can we only loveSomething created in our own imaginations?
T.S Eliot
Familiarity breeds contempt, for others at first, but then inwardly, contempt towards ourselves.
Oli Anderson
Most people today couldn't tell a bombardier from a brigadier" - said during a lecture in aid of the Army Benevolent Fund in 2009
Richard Holmes
I wondered if perhaps I'd gone mad. I had known this man less than twenty-four hours and already I wanted to raise his children.
Lucy Robinson
If you believe in something, then you shouldn’t give up on it.
Harry Styles
As far as informing the headmaster, Harry had no idea where Dumbledore went during the summer holidays. He amused himself for a moment, picturing Dumbledore, with his long silver beard, full-length wizard's robes, and pointed hat, stretched out on a beach somewhere, rubbing suntan lotion onto his long crooked nose.
J.K. Rowling
Strange how it is that men never act crueler than when they're fighting for the sake of an idea. We've been killing since Cain over who stands closer to god. It seems to me that cruelty is just in the way of things. You drive yourself mad if you take it all personal. Those who hurt you don't have the power over you they would like. That's why they do what they do.
Marcel Theroux
Was he a pleasant man hiding behind a mask of seeming carelessness or an unpleasant man hiding behind a mask of charm & smiles? Or like most humans, was he a dizzying mix of contradictory charactersticks?
Mary Balogh
Pretty Stones
Virginia Woolf
These men are in prison: that is the Outsider’s verdict. They are quite contented in prison—caged animals who have never known freedom; but it is prison all the same. And the Outsider? He is in prison too: nearly every Outsider in this book has told us so in a different language; but he knows it. His desire is to escape. But a prison-break is not an easy matter; you must know all about your prison, otherwise you might spend years in tunnelling, like the Abbe in The Count of Monte Cristo, and only find yourself in the next cell.
Colin Wilson
The liberal state has no view on whether witchcraft is more valuable than all-in wrestling. Like a tactful publican, it has as few opinions as possible. Many liberals suspect passionate convictions are latently authoritarian. But liberalism should surely be a passionate conviction. Liberals are not necessarily lukewarm. Only the more macho leftist suspects that they have no balls. You can be ardently neutral, and fiercely indifferent.
Terry Eagleton
Some of us have resolved to escape into drunkenness before the sleep takes us.
Neil Gaiman
Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.
George Orwell
Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.
George Orwell
Obvious choices for the east window: the two bloody bargains on which civilization claimed to be based. The bargain, Rivers though, looking at Abraham and Isaac. The one on which all patriarchal societies were founded. If you, who are young and strong, will obey me, who am old and weak, even to the extent of being prepared to sacrifice your life, then in the course of time you will peacefully inherit, and be able to exact the same obedience from your sons. Only we’re breaking the bargain, Rivers thought. All over northern France, at this very moment, in trenches and dugouts and flooded shell-holes, the inheritors were dying, not one by one, while old men, and women of all ages, gathered together and sang hymns.
Pat Barker
A brand is a story. And you have to tell it well. The good news in this connected world great stories travel fast. And, these days, they travel for free. So there has never been a better time or a cheaper time to start something.
David Hieatt
If you want to succeed in the world you must make your own opportunities.
John B. Gough
The minister paused in his narrative. At that moment there came a tremendous blast of wind which shook the windows of the manse, and burst open the hall door, and caused the candles to flicker and the fire to go roaring up the chimney. It is not too much to say that, what with the uncanny story, and the howling storm, we all felt that creeping sort of uneasiness which so often seems like the touch of something from another world - a hand stretched across the boundary-line of time and eternity, the coldness and mystery of which make the stoutest heart tremble. ("Sandy The Tinker")
Charlotte Riddell
Which was how Britteny ended up nestled next to Mickey, under the shelter of a painter's drop cloth.She felt no pain.She saw no light.She heard, but barely.Her heart was still and silent.Yet she did not die.
Michael Grant
But why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?""It is required of every man," the Ghost returned, "that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world--oh, woe is me!--and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!...I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere. My spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole; and weary journeys lie before me!
Charles Dickens
He wasn't an especially charismatic or commanding individual, but what he lacked in personality he emphatically made up for in diligence.
Dan Jones
Kill a politician and you're tied to the motive that made you pull the trigger.
J.G. Ballard
I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.
Virginia Woolf
The little town of Dayton - not far from where Katz and I now sat, as it happened - was the scene of the famous Scopes trial in 1925, when the state prosecuted a schoolteacher named John Thomas Scopes for rashly promulgating Darwinian hogwash. As nearly everyone knows, Clarence Darrow, for the defense, roundly humiliated William Jennings Bryan, for the prosecution, but what most people don't realize is that Darrow lost the case. Scopes was convicted, and the law wasn't overturned in Tennessee until 1967. And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn't so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them.
Bill Bryson
While there is tea, there is hope.")
Arthur Wing Pinero
There is a presence, a silence, a stillness which is here by itself. There is no doer of it, no creator of this stillness. It is simply here in you, with you. It is the fragrance of your own self. There is nothing to do about this, it is naturally present. This fragrance of peace, this spaciousness, it is the fragrance of your own being.
Mooji
It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.
Jerome K. Jerome
Blessings be on this house," Granny said, perfunctorily. It was always a good opening remark for a witch. It concentrated people's minds on what other things might be on this house.
Terry Pratchett