Quotes by British Authors - Page 394

Writing is draining. Every word is like lifting a stone and levering it into place. Your head aches, your muscles ache and every word you conjure up is heavier than the last one.
Chloe Thurlow
My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where the whole world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present movement. Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave.
H.G.Wells
Never lose sleep over someone who is not worth staying awake for.
Habeeb Akande
I thought that exile meant you had to leave your country and you could go anywhere--somewhere in the sun, a tropical island, say, or America. But exile doesn't mean that; it means you are banished to a specific place, and guess what, that place isn't in the sun and is no paradise, it's not even America. It's some cold, miserable place like Siberia, where you don't know anyone and you can barely survive. It's another prison.
Sally Green
England is seen at its worst when it has to deal with men like Wilde. In Germany Wilde and Byron are appreciated as authors: in England they still go pecking about their love-affairs. Anyone who calls a book ‘immoral’ or 'moral’ should be caned. A book by itself can be neither. It is only a question of the morality or immorality of the reader. But the English approach all questions of vice with such a curious mixture of curiosity and fear that it’s impossible to deal with them.
Charles Hamilton Sorley
Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.
J.K. Rowling
Your soul: pure glucose edged with hintsOf tentative and half-soiled tints
Edith Sitwell
...just because you see something, it doesn’t mean to say it’s there. And if you don’t see something, it doesn’t mean to say it’s not there. It’s only what your senses bring to your attention.
Douglas Adams
Whenever a person says to you that they are as innocent as lambs in all concerning money, look well after your own money, for they are dead certain to collar it, if they can. Whenever a person proclaims to you 'In worldly matters I'm a child,' you consider that that person is only a crying off from being held accountable, and that you have got that person's number, and it's Number One. Now, I am not a poetical man myself, except in a vocal way, when it goes round a company, but I'm a practical one, and that's my experience. So's this rule. Fast and loose in one thing, Fast and loose in everything. I never knew it fail. No more will you. Nor no one.
Charles Dickens
Real friends were the kind where you pick up where you’d left off, whether it be a week since you’d seen each other or two years.
Jojo Moyes
He that would govern others first should be master of himself.
Philip Massinger
Pain, or pleasure. I could not tell where one ended and the other began.
S.J. Watson
We are poor indeed if we are only sane.
D.W. Winnicott
Every age gets the lunatics it deserves.
Roy Porter
Liking colors doesn't make you shallow.It gives you depth!
Anthony T.Hincks
Reality depresses me. I need to find fantasy worlds and escape in them.
Noel Fielding
Within the eye, mysteries of the soul burn deeply beneath the fiery chasms of love and patiently wait for an awakening ...
Virginia Alison
Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you’d be okay. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved.
Jojo Moyes
My mother always says people should be able to take care of themselves, even if they're rich and important.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
If in doubt, cheese has been always the answer..
Lindsey Kelk
A king is a king, but a bard is the heart and soul of the people; he is their life in song, and the lamp which guides their steps along the paths of destiny. A bard is the essential spirit of the clan; he is the linking ring, the golden cord which unites the manifold ages of the clan, binding all that is past with all that is yet to come.
Stephen R. Lawhead
The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.
C.S. Lewis
He can run faster than Severus Snape confronted with shampoo.
J.K. Rowling
There are many sadnesses in the hearts of men who are far away from their countries.
Alexander McCall Smith
Your assignment from God is not to change your husband, but to love, follow, assist, and minister to him.
Elizabeth George
Maybe it is because I am an old man, but I find, M. Poirot, that there is something about the defenselessness of youth that moves me to tears. Youth is so vulnerable. It is so ruthless - so sure. So generous and so demanding.
Agatha Christie
A proverb is no proverb to you till life has illustrated it.
John Keats
Venice, it's temples and palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
I am far more fearful of the USA government than I am of North Korea.
Steven Magee
Fret not where the road will take you. Instead concentrate on the first step. That's the hardest part and that's what you are responsible for. Once you take that step let everything do what it naturally does and the rest will follow. Do not go with the flow. Be the flow.
Elif Shafak
The use of tobacco is one of the most evident of all the retrograde influences of our time. It invades all classes, destroys social life, and is turning, in the words of Mantegazza, the whole of Europe into a cigar divan.
Charles R. Drysdale
I'm going on an adventure
J.R.R. Tolkien
If we are willing to spend hours on end to learn to play the piano operate a computer or fly an airplane it is sheer nonsense for us to imagine that we can learn the high art of getting guidance through communion with the Lord without being willing to set aside time for it.
Paul Rees
A socialist must be 'class-conscious', recognizing his identity as a member of the working class and understanding his interests as permanently against those of the master class.
Robert Barltrop
Marriage is always something of a compromise, as I'm sure you're now aware. Any long-term relationship is - and one does have to see it in the long term, Charles. No, I expect your mother and myself will never divorce. It's uneconomic and, at my age, usually unnecessary.
Martin Amis
Mr. Satterthwaite looked cheered. Suddenly an idea struck him. His jaw fell. "My goodness," he cried, "I've only just realized it! That rascal, with his poisoned cocktail! Anyone might have drunk it! It might have been me!""There is an even more terrible possibility that you have not considered," said Poirot. "Eh?""It might have been me," said Hercule Poirot.
Agatha Christie
If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.
Winston S. Churchill
Arraigned at my own bar, Memory having given her evidence of the hopes, wishes, sentiments I had been cherishing since last night-- of the general state of mind which I have indulged for nearly a fortnight past; Reason having come forward and told in her own quiet way , a plain, unvarnished tale, showing how I had rejected the real, and rabidly devoured the ideal;-- I pronounced judgment to this effect:-- That a greater fool than Jane Eyre had never breathed the breath of life: that a more fantastic idiot had never surfeited herself on sweet lies, and swallowed the poison as if it were nectar.
Charlotte Brontë
What would you do if your cat suddenly went psycho and started to attack you for no apparent reason, lying in wait and pouncing or stalking you with a faraway look reminiscent of its predatory cousins and ancestors?
Nicholas Dodman
Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.
George Orwell
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaTruthful man:He who is, secretly, regarded by everyone as an enemy.
Idries Shah
If she did not wish to lead a virtuous life, at least she desired to enjoy a character for virtue, and we know that no lady in the genteel world can possess this desideratum, until she has put on a train and feathers and has been presented to her Sovereign at Court. From that august interview they come out stamped as honest women. The Lord Chamberlain gives them a certificate of virtue.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.
G.K. Chesterton
Things hit a limit, though, when I was set upon by a pickpocket in a baker's shop. I didn't notice that I was being set upon by a pickpocket, which I am glad of, because I like to work only with professionals.
Douglas Adams
Marriage is like the Middle East, isn't it? There's no solution.
Willy Russell
The money… will talk?' said Mr Spools carefully.'Imps,' said Moist. 'They're only a sort of intelligent spell. They don't even have to have a shape. We'll print them on the higher denominations.
Terry Pratchett
It’s as if he’s trodden in my footsteps, seen what I’ve seen, felt what I’ve felt, as I’ve criss-crossed the moors countless times.
Sanjida Kay
Mostly she just missed Vaughn. Missed all those quiet, unspectacular moments that, when added up, showed how entwined their lives had become. And right now, she missed being able to phone him, because it would be so easy to tap in the eleven digits that would put his voice on the line. ‘Grace, about bloody time,’ he’d say, and make it sound like an endearment.But she couldn’t call Vaughn, because she’d left him. Which was a novelty, until Grace remembered that he’d have left her eventually if she hadn’t done it first. She was never the one. She was never even the one before the one. She was the girl who seemed like a good idea at the time, but ultimately was just a phase that people went through.That was the way it had always been. Friends and lovers came and went because there was something about her which repelled them, and she didn’t have a clue what it was. It was a mystery that she couldn’t solve on her own, and there wasn’t a single person in the world who could help . . .
Sarra Manning
The standard modern measurement for inebriation is the Ose system. This has been considerably developed over the years, but the common medical consensus currently has jocose, verbose, morose, bellicose, lachrymose, comatose, adios.This is a workable but incomplete system, as it fails to take in otiose (meaning impractical) which comes just after jocose. Nor does it have grandiose preceding bellicose. And how they managed to miss out globose (amorphous or formless) before comatose is beyond me.
Mark Forsyth
Faith ... acts promptly and boldly on the occasion on slender evidence.
John Henry Cardinal Newman
But women living in fear of aging, and pulling painful and expensive tricks to hide it from the world, does not say something amazing about us as humans.
Caitlin Moran
Religion... has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever... If someone votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says 'I must [not] move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'I respect that'... Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be.
Douglas Adams
I came to this city to escape.
Jeanette Winterson
We all know that scientific words need an obscure classical origin to make them sound impressvie to those who wouldn't know an idiopathic craniofacial erythema if it hit them in the face.
Mark Forsyth
The great object of life is sensation- to feel that we exist, even though in pain.
George Gordon Byron
A winner knows how much he still has to learn, even when he is considered an expert by others; a loser wants to be considered an expert by others before he has learned enough to know how little he knows.
Sydney J. Harris
That's how it is for us servants. No one pays you much heed; mostly you're invisible as furniture. Yet you overhear a conversation here, and add a little gossip there. A writing desk lies open and you cannot help but read a paper. Then you find something, something you should not have found...
Martine Bailey
Birth after birth the line unchanging runs,And fathers live transmitted in their sons;Each passing year beholds the unvarying kinds,The same their manners, and the same their minds:Till, as erelong successive buds decay,And insect-shoals successive pass away,Increasing wants the pregnant parent vexWith the fond wish to form a softer sex. ..
Erasmus Darwin
Over complication only confuses the essence of things.
Steven Redhead
It seems to me that all the people involved in the Hank and Adria story thought they were doing something good. But they only revealed that our imagination is so limited, our arsenal of potential responses so narrow, that the only thing anyone can think to do with an inappropriate shamer like Adria is to punish her with a shaming. All of the shamers had themselves come from a place of shame, and it really felt parochial and self-defeating to instinctively slap shame onto shame like a clumsy builder covering cracks.
Jon Ronson