Quotes by British Authors - Page 391

Yet man dies not whilst the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains. His name is lost, indeed, but the breath he breathed still stirs the pine-tops on the mountains, the sound of the words he spoke yet echoes on through space; the thoughts his brain gave birth to we have inherited to-day; his passions are our cause of life; the joys and sorrows that he knew are our familiar friends--the end from which he fled aghast will surely overtake us also!Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever.
H. Rider Haggard
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
W.H. Auden
My mother is not evil, Faith reminded herself. She is just a perfectly sensible snake, protecting her eggs and making her way in the world as best she can.
Frances Hardinge
Stop looking at the walls, look out the window.
Karl Pilkington
She sealed his lips with a wanton kiss; 'Though I forgive your breaking your vows to heaven, I expect you to keep your vows to me.
Matthew Lewis
The making of miracles to edification was as ardently admired by pious Victorians as it was sternly discouraged by Jesus of Nazareth. Not that the Victorians were unique in this respect. Modern writers also indulge in edifying miracles though they generally prefer to use them to procure unhappy endings, by which piece of thaumaturgy they win the title of realists.
Dorothy L. Sayers
That’s because they don’t know,’ said Tyburn. ‘It’s like economics. Everybody’s got a theory, and some people make it their religion.
Ben Aaronovitch
To live is like to love - all reason is against it and all healthy instinct for it.
Samuel Butler
The ties that bind us to life are tougher than you imagine, or than any one can who has not felt how roughly they may be pulled without breaking.
Anne Brontë
Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living
Emily Brontë
Okay, this is the wisdom. First, time spent on reconnaissanse is never wasted. Second, almost anything can be improved with the addition of bacon. And finally, there is no problem on Earth that can't be ameliorated by a hot bath and a cup of tea.
Jasper Fforde
The gastliness of nothing. Because I was nobody's sister now.
Rosamund Lupton
He could not afford to indulge misery, to live in the past and stumble through life facing backwards.
Jonathan Renshaw
It is a pity that there are no big creatures to prey on humanity. If there were enough dragons and rocs, perhaps mankind would turn its might against them. Unfortunately man is preyed upon by microbes, which are too small to be appreciated.
T.H. White
Just be yourself' is about the worst advice you can give some people.
Alain de Botton
If I ever meet myself,' said Zaphod, 'I'll hit myself so hard I won't know what's hit me.
Douglas Adams
A traditional Englishman drinks tea to the point where his blood has long-since been replaced with an infusion of Ceylon, Assam, and Darjeeling.
Fennel Hudson
Trust, like the lubricant in an engine, is noticed only when it is gone and the motor has seized up.
David Hurst
What we do makes a difference and what we think about influences what we do.
Sam Owen
Tolstoy was perfectly right to protest that history is not made to happen by the combination of such obscure entities as the ‘power’ or ‘mental activity’ assumed by naïve historians; indeed he was, in Kareev’s view, at his best when he denounced the tendency of metaphysically minded writers to attribute causal efficacy to, or idealise, such abstract entities as ‘heroes’, ‘historic forces’, ‘moral forces’, ‘nationalism’, ‘reason’ and so on, whereby they simultaneously committed the two deadly sins of inventing non-existent entities to explain concrete events and of giving free reign to personal, or national, or class, or metaphysical bias.
Isaiah Berlin
Talent helps, but it won't take you as far as ambition.
Paul Arden
I'm not just a reader or a writer; I inhale written words like they're my oxygen. It's not a hobby. It's a passion. People intrigue me. Life intrigues me. I see a story behind every pair of eyes I meet, history in every voice. I'll see someone wearing a smile and wonder what put it there. Words allow me to immerse myself in a whole other world. I get to become a different person.
Nicola Haken
Crucially we haven't been figuring out how to live in oneness, with the Earth & every other living thing; we have just been insanely trying to figure out how to live with each other, billions of each other, only we're not living with each other our crazy selves are living with each other, and perpetuating an epidemic of disconnection.
Thandie Newton
I’ll stick close to Sandy. I swear that woman isn’t afraid of anything or anybody.” Baldric gave Ralph a rare smile and winked.
D.F. Jones
Already she knew that an idea could pain him like a bruise. He had grey eyes that showed every thought, and sometimes Charlotte worried that he might be hurt in some way that she would not be able to prevent.
Lauren Owen
So much barbarism, however, still remains in the transactions of most civilized nations, that almost all independent countries choose to assert their nationality by having, to their inconvenience and that of their neighbors, a peculiar currency of their own.
John Stuart Mill
Science explained people, but could not understand them.
E.M. Forster
Lingering is so very lonely when one lingers all alone.
Mervyn Peake
This is glorious!' I cried, and then i looked at the sinner by my side. He sat with his head sunk on his breast and said 'Yes', without raising his eyes, as if afraid to see writ large on the clear sky of the offing the reproach of his romantic conscience.
Joseph Conrad
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can also hurt me. Stones and sticks break only skin, while words are ghosts that haunt me. Slant and curved the word-swords fall, it pierces and sticks inside me. Bats and bricks may ache through bones, but words can mortify me. Pain from words has left its' scar, on mind and hear that's tender. Cuts and bruises have not healed, it's words that I remember.
Ruby Redfort
Fake it till you feel it
Gemma Burgess
Humans elect leaders on the basis of the promises they make. We [vampires] try to elect ours based solely on the strength of their character.
Darren Shan
Just as we tell women today to vote, in honour of the suffragettes who campaigned for the right to do so, we owe it to these female sports pioneers to draw inspiration from their stories, to continue the fight.
Anna Kessel
Cathedrals Luxury liners laden with souls Holding to the east their hulls of stone.
W.H. Auden
There is no shortage of despicable law enforcement departments in the USA.
Steven Magee
It was the ring on the left hand that people at the Old Girls' Reunion looked for. Often, in fact nearly always, it was an uninteresting ring, sometimes no more than the plain gold band or the very smallest and dimmest of diamonds. Perhaps the husband was also of this variety, but as he was not seen at this female gathering he could only be imagined, and somehow I do not think we ever imagined the husbands to be quite so uninteresting as they probably were.
Barbara Pym
Jane: Mr. Rochester, if ever I did a good deed in my life-if ever I thought a good thought-if ever I prayed a sincere and blameless prayer-if ever I wished a righteous wish-I am rewarded now. To be your wife is, for me, to be as happy as I can be on earth.Mr. Rochester: Because you delight in sacrifice.Jane: Sacrifice! What do I sacrifice? Famine for food, expectation for content. To be privileged to put my arms round what I value-to press my lips to what I love-to repose on what I trust: is that to make a sacrifice? If so, then certainly I delight in sacrifice.
Charlotte Brontë
In reaction against the age-old slogan, "woman is the weaker vessel," or the still more offensive, "woman is a divine creature," we have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that "a woman is as good as a man," without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that. What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether, viz: (...) that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.
Dorothy L. Sayers
It's a rare man who can guard against beauty.
Anthony Ryan
To do anything in this world worth doing we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger but jump in and scramble through as well as we can.
Sydney Smith
We are all small-minded people, creeping about the earth grubbing for our own advantage and making the very mistakes for which we want to humiliate our neighbors.
Helen Simonson
If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.
Winston S. Churchill
If she does not respect you, she will replace you.
Habeeb Akande
It is infinitely more useful for a child to hear a story told by a person than by computer. Because the greatest part of the learning experience lies not in the particular words of the story but in the involvement with the individual reading it.
Frank Smith
Can officially confirm that the way to a man's heart these days is not through beauty, food, sex, or alluringness of character, but merely the ability to seem not very interested in him.
Helen Fielding
Perhaps there's given up being magic because people didn't believe in it any more.
E Nesbit
Living in the edge - that's what I feel like when I don't know what my bowels are going to do next.
Jane Wilson-Howarth
Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
Philip Larkin
Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time.
Jasper Fforde
I woke up feeling alone, so lonely. The night before, I had cried myself to sleep. I lay there on the floor, listening to the tube trains passing beneath me. I thought, All those hundreds and thousands and millions of people. London, London - I hate you. I picked myself up and got ready.
Tracey Emin
Far over misty mountains coldTo dungeons deep and caverns oldWe must away, ere break of day,To find our long-forgotten gold.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Peace and rest at length have come All the day's long toil is past And each heart is whispering "Home Home at last!"
Thomas Hood
When I was young and had no senseIn far-off MandalayI lost my heart to a Burmese girlAs lovely as the day.Her skin was gold, her hair was jet,her teeth were ivory;I said, "For twenty silver pieces,Maiden, sleep with me."She looked at me, so pure, so sad,The loveliest thing alive,And in her lisping, virgin voice,Stood out for twenty-five.
George Orwell
The things she said seemed to have very little relation to the last thing she had said a minute before. She was the sort of person, Tommy thought, who might know a great deal more than she chose to reveal.
Agatha Christie
It doesn't matter what you want," Toreth breathed into his ear. "All that matters is what I want. Say it.
Manna Francis
The nails from a suicide's coffin, and the skull of the parricide, were of course no trouble; for Vesquit never traveled without these household requisites.
Aleister Crowley
And this," cried Darcy, as he walked with quick steps across the room, "is your opinion of me! This is the estimation in which you hold me! I thank you for explaining it so fully.
Jane Austen
What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The narrator, I think, must succeed in frightening himself before he can think of frightening his reader…
E.F. Benson
The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the painin the world had found a voice
H.G.Wells