Quotes by British Authors - Page 380

I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours and a fixed salary and very little original thinking to do. The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.
Roald Dahl
[T]here [is] no limit to what might not be achieved by an alliance between an imperial monarchy and revelations, if truly believed to be heaven-sent, of a prophet.
Tom Holland
A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen.
George Eliot
Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone's life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble.
Nadeem Aslam
Monthly, out of common courtesy, he went to inquire after the invalid Charles, who refused either to die or get better.
Winston Graham
It is an undisputed truth of the modern age that there are now only two kinds of people in the world: people who call and people who text.
Lindsey Kelk
I would rather be a conscious wrongdoer than a mindless saint.
Habeeb Akande
A poem a day keeps the doctor away.
Jill Telford
Being here to witness the beauty, to learn, to be astonished, to love - is enough. Being able to create in addition is a delightful honour.
Jay Woodman
Smiles and tears are so alike with me, they are neither of them confined to any particular feelings: I often cry when I am happy, and smile when I am sad.
Anne Brontë
When people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the big bang, so there is no time for god to make the universe in. It’s like asking directions to the edge of the earth; The Earth is a sphere; it doesn’t have an edge; so looking for it is a futile exercise. We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is; there is no god. No one created our universe,and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization; There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.
Stephen Hawking
Broadcasting is really too important to be left to the broadcasters.
Tony Benn
to the glory of His name let me witness that in far away lands, in loneliness (deepest sometimes when it seems least so), in times of downheartedness and tiredness and sadness, always always He is near. He does comfort, if we let Him. Perhaps someone as weak and good-for-nothing as even I am may read this. Don't be afraid! Through all circumstances, outside, inside, He can keep me close.
Amy Carmichael
You're confident he'll have found him, then?""Well, no. I didn't sat that.""If there's one thing I hate," Volyova said, looking coldly at the other Triumvir, "it's mindless optimism.
Alastair Reynolds
Wearing all that weight of learning like a flower.
Alfred Tennyson
Walking out of the office, her nervous fingers made an ear out of the tissue in her pocket – luckily the thin sheets wouldn't hold the shape, and unfurled as she threw it on the pavement. On the journey home, her bus ticket became a tongue.
Kirsty Logan
It's 1am, I have fiction to write!
C.S. Woolley
If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t going to wait for you whether you’re inspired or not.You have to write when you’re not inspired. And you have to write the scenes that don’t inspire you. And the weird thing is that six months later, a year later, you’ll look back at them and you can’t remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you just wrote because they had to be written next.The process of writing can be magical. …Mostly it’s a process of putting one word after another.
Neil Gaiman
Death is just the birth of yet another odyssey.
Anthony T.Hincks
To love you as I should, I must worship God as Creator. When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest t all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.
C.S. Lewis
To undo a Jew is charity and not sin.
Christopher Marlowe
For I see not what there is desirable in publick esteeme, were I able to acquire & maintaine it. It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing which I chiefly study to decline.
Isaac Newton
There are questions that you don't ask because you're afraid of the answers to them.
Agatha Christie
Humans would become very sick without natural radio frequency (RF) exposures.
Steven Magee
It's when I'm feeling blue that I think of my little color pink.
Anthony T.Hincks
Heaven help us! The girls have only to turn the tables,and say of one of their own sex,'She is as vain as a man,' and they will have perfect reason. The bearded creatures are quite as eager for praise, quite as finikin over their toilets, quite as proud of their personal advantages, quite as conscious of their powers of fascinations, as any coquette in the world.
William Makepeace Thackeray
He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down and without walls.
Taylor Caldwell
That's the fashion. Fast as the speed of light, they say. Ha! It's got no soul, sir, no heart.
Terry Pratchett
The spirits of children are remote and wise...
Frances Cornford
...And talking of the dear family party which would then be restored, of their mutual pursuits and cheerful society, as the only happiness worth a wish.
Jane Austen
Without free speech one cannot claim other liberties, or defend them when they are attacked. Without free speech one cannot have a democratic process, which requires the statement and testing of policy proposals and party platforms. Without free speech one cannot have a due process at law, in which one can defend oneself, accuse, collect and examine evidence, make a case or refute one. Without free speech there cannot be genuine education and research, enquiry, debate, exchange of information, challenges to falsehood, questioning of governments, proposal and examination of opinion. Without free speech there cannot be a free press, which...is necessary...as one of the two essential estates of a free society (the other being an independent judiciary).
A.C. Grayling
If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society... It is the education which gives a man a clear, conscious view of their own opinions and judgements, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought to detect what is sophistical and to discard what is irrelevant.
John Henry Newman
But the truth is that there is no more conscious inconsistency between the humility of a Christian and the rapacity of a Christian than there is between the humility of a lover and the rapacity of a lover. The truth is that there are no things for which men will make such herculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy. There never was a man in love who did not declare that, if he strained every nerve to breaking, he was going to have his desire. And there never was a man in love who did not declare also that he ought not to have it.
G.K. Chesterton
Now there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world.
Roma Tearne
No, Geo—underneath all that, Nan really loves me. It’s just she wants me to see things her way. You know, she’s two years older; that meant a lot when we were children. I’ve always thought of her as being sort of like a road—I mean, she leads somewhere. With her, I’ll never lose my way.
Christopher Isherwood
Dancing is the loftiest the most moving the most beautiful of the arts because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life it is life itself.
Havelock Ellis
Would you like me to put you out of your misery, before I put you out of your misery?
Paul Cude
You'll find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first...
Evelyn Waugh
Why is it that one of the best songs in the world has to be written by the BeeGees?"Benedict
Tricia Walker
…one half of her should not be always so much wiser than the other half…
Jane Austen
Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?
Sebastian Faulks
Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.
David Mitchell
It was inevitable, as soon as legends of miracles became attached to the names of the great mystics, that the credulous masses should applaud imposture more than true devotion; the cult of the saints, against which orthodox Islam ineffectually protested, promoted ignorance and superstition, and confounded charlatanry with lofty speculation. To live scandalously, to act impudently, to speak unintelligibly—this was the easy highroad to fame, wealth, and power.
A.J. Arberry
It seems that I have been held in some dreaming stateA tourist in the waking world world, never quite awake.No kiss, no gentle word could wake me from this slumber,Until I realised that it was you who held me under.
Florence + the Machine
Soprano basso even the contralto Wished him five fathom under the Rialto.
Lord Byron
It's when you sit alone with your thoughts that you begin to miss what you have left behind. That is when the tears start. That is when you feel so down. That is when you are the most vulnerable.But we can't change what is done. We can only hope that the fallout is not nuclear.
Anthony T.Hincks
The ones that love us never really leave us.
J.K. Rowling
The creature was there, a curiously shaped creature no doubt, but all loathing had vanished clean out of his mind, so that neither then nor at any other time could he remember it, nor ever understand again why one should quarrel with an animal for having more legs or eyes than oneself.
C.S. Lewis
Pornography is to sex what McDonalds is to food. A plasticized, generic version of the real thing.
Gail Dines
There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point. . . . The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.
Richard Dawkins
The young girl inspected her flounces and smoothed her ribbons again; and Winterbourne presently risked an observation upon the beauty of the view. He was ceasing to be embarrassed, for he had begun to perceive that she was not in the least embarrassed herself.
Henry James
Mind being the seat of the soul, and literature being the expression of the mind, literature, it follows, is the soul of an age, the surviving and immortal part of it.
Rafael Sabatini
Perhaps it is weariness that causes seers not to act on what they see; for whereas the wisdom of the world can be vast, it includes the many futilities. Ideas do not have legs with which to run and hands with which to craft. They are wisps of smoke floating into a universe of pain and ignorance that overwhelm the capacity of one small human body and the mind trapped inside it.
Kate Horsley
You lose a child and you do understand each other's grief at first, but if you get out of step with each other, it's all over. Suddenly each of you is alone.
Alison Bruce
It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.
Anthony Burgess
I am made of words. When you cut me, I bleed sentences. When you read me, I speak to your soul.
Chloe Thurlow
When Adam ate the irrevocable apple, ThouSaw'st beyond death the resurrection of the dead
C.S. Lewis
Oh, you mean fairy gossip, Eric,” she giggled. “I get the picture,” she said fluttering her lacy wings. “Don’t look so sad, Eric. There isn’t a day that passes when your nosy beak doesn’t find its way into someone’s business. I’m sure you’ll find the best-ever story before
Caz Greenham
You see? That's the point. It's all a big guess. They hope, they pray, they cook and garden and get a better job to pay the mortgage and read dirty books to keep bedtime interesting, but they don't know. There are no guarantees. Sometimes you just stop loving someone. You just stop.
Tania Kindersley
Tiffany found her mind filling up with an invisible gray mist, and in that thought there was nothing but grief. She could feel herself trying to push back time, but even the best witchcraft could not do that.
Terry Pratchett