Quotes by British Authors - Page 395

...the holy men sat in an atmospherereeking of antiquity, so thick with thedust of ages that you can't see through it--nor can they.
Gertrude Bell
...accustomed like the white blackbird to the loneliness of eccentricity yet never quite reconciled to it, they found in each other's oddness a most comforting compatibility.
Elizabeth Goudge
Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.
Virginia Woolf
Let us be vulgar and have some fun, let us invite the President.
Henry James
I went back to my room and spent all night contemplating whether it was possible in life not to be constantly let down. If it could ever be worth pinning your happiness to another person, when all other people ever seemed to do was disappear.
Olivia Sudjic
Anyhow, with their extraordinary gift for, and experience in, affairs of the heart from the double point of view, both of the man and of the woman it is not difficult to see that these people have a special work to do as reconcilers and interpreters of the two sexes to each other.
Edward Carpenter
The Prancer stepped back and studied her for a moment. Then, with a gleam in his eye, he said, 'All unicorns know the Land. Few humans do. But no unicorn knows how to brew ale.''I’m glad humans have some use.''Only those who can brew ale.
Chrys Cymri
A timid mind is apt to mistake every scratch for a mortal wound.
George Gordon Byron
Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.
Samuel Johnson
As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.
Virginia Woolf
She would see it as betrayal. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Samantha Young
Are we just dreamingIn the city that never sleeps?Cause I can't be seeingWhat my eyes tell me.
Bring Me The Horizon
Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered life? Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one’s own life.
D.H. Lawrence
The future was with Fate. The present was our own.~ The Poison Belt
Arthur Conan Doyle
Just resolve to shine, constantly and steadily, like a warm lamp in the corner, and people will want to move towards you in order to feel happy, and to read things more clearly. You will be bright and constant in a world of dark and flux, and this will save you the anxiety of other, ultimately less satisfying things like ‘being cool’, ‘being more successful than everyone else’ and ‘being very thin’.
Caitlin Moran
I was aware of Darwin's views fourteen years before I adopted them and I have done so solely and entirely from an independent study of the plants themselves.[Letter to W.H. Harvey]
Joseph Dalton Hooker
Artists could never, would never, harm anybody. They’re too busy painting. Same with ad drunks. They might be a bit useless at functional tasks, they may break things (small objects, precious objects, door handles, car accessories, and such), but they’re too pissed to get seriously involved in anything.
Andrew Miller
Once you were in the hands of a Grand Vizier, you were dead. Grand Viziers were always scheming megalomaniacs. It was probably in the job description: "Are you a devious, plotting, unreliable madman? Ah, good, then you can be my most trusted minister.
Terry Pratchett
We read to know we are not alone.
C.S. Lewis
We need more moral compasses and less Sat Navs
Dean Cavanagh
I think that I had better go, Holmes.""Not a bit, doctor. Stay where you are. I am lost without my Boswell.
Arthur Conan Doyle
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, They danced by the light of the moon.
Edward Lear
Trust is what monetizes the attention economy.
David Amerland
If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.
George Orwell
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
E.M. Forster
Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil -- or else an absolute ignorance.
Graham Greene
It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" -- that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.
John Wyndham
But psychology is a more tricky field, in which even outstanding authorities have been known to run in circles, 'describing things which everyone knows in language which no one understands'.
Raymond Cattell
For a split second they stared at each other. A fleeting, lasting moment. One person noticing another person out of a whole crowd of strangers.
Alexandra Potter
The Japanese had no idea what elements of Western culture and institutions where the crucial ones, so they ended up copying everything, from western clothes and hair styles to the European practice of colonizing foreign people. Unfortunately, they took up empire-building at precisely the moment when the cost of imperialism began to exceed the benefits.
Niall Ferguson
But however minimal, however threadbare, it (collective memory) is ballast of a kind. We all need that seven-eighths of the iceberg, the ballast of the past, a general past, the place from which we came.That is why history should be taught in school. to all children, as much of it as possible. If you have no sense of the past, no access to historical narrative, you are afloat, untethered; you cannot see yourself as a part of the narrative, you cannot place yourself within a context. You will not have an understanding of time, and a respect for memory and its subtle victory over the remorselessness of time.
Penelope Lively
Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike, reverential; which an old woman could take from a young man without loss of dignity, and woe betide the girl––pray Heaven it was none of her daughters!––who did not feel the worth of it, and all that it implied, to the marrow of her bones!
Virginia Woolf
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
George Orwell
Money is made at Christmas out of holly and mistletoe, but who save the vendors would greatly care if no green branch were procurable? One symbol, indeed, has obscured all others--the minted round of metal. And one may safely say that, of all the ages since a coin first became the symbol of power, ours is that in which it yields to the majority of its possessors the poorest return in heart's contentment.
George Gissing
Some women are born mothers, some women become mothers, and some have motherhood thrust upon them. I struggled against it all my life, but I think the truth is I was probably born to it. I don't do badly, I don't do well, I just do it.
Fay Weldon
. . . at this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It's a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it's white, and looking at it, instead of saying "Oh that's nice blossom" ... last week looking at it through the window when I'm writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There's no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance ... not that I'm interested in reassuring people - bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.
Dennis Potter
City of Vassillian a party of five sage princes with four horses. The princes, who are of course brave, noble and wise, travel widely in distant lands, fight giant ogres, pursue exotic philosophies, take tea with weird gods and rescue beautiful monsters from ravening princesses before finally announcing that they have achieved enlightenment and that their wanderings are therefore accomplished. The second, and much longer, part of each song would then tell of all their bickerings about which one of them is going to have to walk back. All this lay in the planet’s remote past.
Douglas Adams
It's the right idea, but not the right time.
John Dalton
It was nearing 9 O'clock, and the fist duck was drawing down. Behind the trees, the first star pricked out, low and brilliant. The light breeze of the day had dropped, and the evening was very still. The stream sounded loud. I walked down to the gate and stood leaning on the top bar, enjoying the scent of the roses, and straining to listen for any sound from the lane or the road beyond.
Mary Stewart
Because I fuckin' love you Mia...That didn't come out exactly as I'd planned, but it is the truth. I'm in love with you...
Samantha Towle
On occasions the person may appear ill-mannered; for example, one young man with Asperger's Syndrome wanted to attract his mother;s attention while she was talking to a group of her friends, and loudly said, 'Hey, you!', apparently unaware of the more appropriate means of addressing his mother in public. The child, being impulsive and not aware of the consequences, says the first thing that comes into their mind. Strangers may consider the child to be rude, inconsiderate or spoilt, giving the parents a withering look and assuming the unusual social behavior is a result of parental incompetence. They may comment, 'Well, if I had him for two weeks he would be a different child.' The parents' reaction may be that they would gladly let them have the child, as they need a rest, and to prove a point.
Tony Attwood
People cannot handle prejudice because they try to deal with the symptom. Prejudice is the symptom, wrong assumptions are the cause.'Prejudice is the daughter of assumption.
Idries Shah
Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram into it!
Winston Churchill
There are stories told to him only at this time of year. Fantastic, magical stories, the old Hollier in the woods finding only three red berries, which peel back in the night to reveal gifts of frankincense, gold and myrrh, Christmas in hot deserts, dust-blown countries, the necklace of tears, and the story of the robin.
Sarah Hall
For instance, take the two words "fuming" and "furious." Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first. Now open your mouth and speak. If your thoughts incline ever so little towards " fuming," you will say "fuming-furious;" if they turn, by even a hair's breadth, towards "furious," you will say "furious-fuming;" but if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say "frumious.
Lewis Carroll
It was a piece of thoroughly picturesque and proper violence. I like a violent man, really, a man who's a bit of a brute in a decent straightforward way.
Iris Murdoch
The only reality is the now. Why live in the tomorrows and the yesterdays? Live now.
Jill Telford
Moons have passed since last we met, battles fought and enemies fallen. At the bridge of Anrag I took fifteen heads. I overthrew the tyrant Dagrud War-Scythe and took his cattle as tribute to my skill. It was a glorious day.’ ‘Sounds pretty wild. I’m having a new patio put down. You and me both, eh?’ ‘Square slabs or crazy paving?’ ‘Square slabs.
Toby Frost
Sadly, like many times in life, including winning the lottery, we don’t always get what we wish for.
Adele Rose
You're a romantic,” said Crabbe. “You expect too much. Reality's always dull, you know, but when we see that it's all there is, well-it miraculously ceases to be dull.
Anthony Burgess
I have started a new blog W.A.R.(Writers Amongst Readers) for all those writing or reading books. Quotes, excerpts, comments from the world's greatest writers. See robinhawdonblog
Robin Hawdon
The future is certain. It is just not known.
Johnny Rich
Put all your pain on a piece of paper, write it all down, every experience, every ache, every hurtful moment. Then take a match, and set fire to that piece of paper. All the hurt you have inside you is burning just as it burnt inside of you, until it is completely gone. From this moment forward you are free. Nothing can harm you. No past. No present. No future. You are reborn into water, and nothing in the entirety of this world can set fire to water, nor crush it. Whatever pressures you face, you will float. Whatever tries to sink you, you will rise up. Today, right now, in this moment, you are a warrior. Now smile, it will set fire to those who sought to burn you...
Seja Majeed
The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes but in liking what one does.
J.M. Barrie
The genocide [in Rwanda] was not a spontaneous eruption of tribal hatred, it was planned by people wanting to keep power. There was a long government-led hat campaign against the Tutsis.
Jonathan Glover
we are affirming our trust that creation means well within us all, and that whatever painful growth and change may lie ahead, it is leading us to Life, not destruction
Margaret Silf
What's the point of a good job if you're dead?
Andrew Garve
Personally I do not agree with sex being brought into science at all. The idea of 'women and science' is entirely irrelevant. Either a woman is a good scientist, or she is not; in any case she should be given opportunities, and her work should be studied from the scientific, not the sex, point of view
Hertha Ayrton
People believe, thought Shadow. It's what people do. They believe. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen.
Neil Gaiman
Alone man enters the world; alone he must launch forth upon eternity; and between the two periods there is many a moment when, despite himself, man is compelled to feel what it is to be utterly alone.
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna