Quotes by British Authors - Page 396

She looks very virtuous and very melancholy.""Virtue is like the precious odors, most fragrant when it is crushed.
Emmuska Orczy
They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix.
Lionel Shriver
Littlewood, on Hardy's own estimate, is the finest mathematician he has ever known. He was the man most likely to storm and smash a really deep and formidable problem; there was no one else who could command such a combination of insight, technique and power.
Henry Hallett Dale
In their huge bedroom that night, Tyr said to Thor, "I hope you know what you are doing.""Of course I do," said Thor. But he didn't. He was just doing whatever he felt like doing. That was what Thor did best.
Neil Gaiman
Everything at the moment, my dear, no doubt seems disgusting. I know the mood too well. But being in that mood, Ross, is like being out in the frost. If we do not keep on the move we shall perish.
Winston Graham
A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends.
Christopher Hitchens
My favourite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelli
Arthur C. Clarke
I like nothing better in this world than a good clean book, brother.
Anthony Burgess
It was not, after all, so easy to die.
J.K. Rowling
If "Manners maketh man," as someone saidThen he's the hero of the dayIt takes a man to suffer ignorance and smileBe yourself, no matter what they
Sting
Both men accepted that the nature of the request, its intimacy and self-conscious reflection on their friendship, had created, for the moment, an uncomfortable emotional proximity which was best dealt with by their parting without another word.
Ian McEwan
Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.
Bill Bryson
God help me! I am small and alone but I must help them; and I most not waste a moment, because every moment another soul dies.
Leslie H. Hardman
He had discovered that the choice between self-love or love of something other than self offers no escape from suffering either way, it is merely a choice between two woundings, of the pride or of the heart.
Elizabeth Goudge
Many of the great economic masters, though they had originally favored radio-bliss in moderation as an opiate for the discontented workers, now turned against it. Their craving was for power; and for power they needed slaves whose labor they could command for their great industrial ventures. They therefore developed an instrument which was at once an opiate and a spur. By every method of propaganda they sought to rouse the passions of nationalism and racial hatred. They created, in fact, the "Other Fascism", complete with lies, with mystical cult of race and state, with scorn of reason, with praise of brutal mastery, with appeal at once to the vilest and to the generous motives of the deluded young.
Olaf Stapledon
Fire is easy to work with if you keep your mind clear, but pain . . . pain fights back. Pain is alive. Pain is the enemy.
Terry Pratchett
She looked at the last thing she had written and she felt calm. Then she crossed the words out vehemently, scribbling until even the shape of the sentence was destroyed.
Helen Oyeyemi
And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.
C.S. Lewis
We are limited only by our unwillingness to take action.
Steven Redhead
You may find that you have been telling yourself that practicing optimism is a risk, as though, somehow, a positive attitude will invite disaster and so if you practice optimism it may increase your feelings of vulnerability. The trick is to increase your tolerance for vulnerable feelings, rather than avoid them altogether.[…]Optimism does not mean continual happiness, glazed eyes and a fixed grin. When I talk about the desirability of optimism I do not mean that we should delude ourselves about reality. But practicing optimism does mean focusing more on the positive fall-out of an event than on the negative. … I am not advocating the kind of optimism that means you blow all your savings on a horse running at a hundred to one; I am talking about being optimistic enough to sow some seeds in the hope that some of them will germinate and grow into flowers.
Philippa Perry
Just a child. All this time we've feared you, sought you. And you're nothing more than a human child.
Joshua Winning
An apology for the Devil - it must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
Samuel Butler
There is a whole lot more to life than winning.
Jojo Moyes
Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and, therefore, the foundation of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
J.K. Rowling
If you always make the right decision, the safe decision,the one most people make, you will be the same as everyone else.
Paul Arden
For, truly, the man who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.
John Ruskin
Nowhere in the world, Rud reflected, was journalism anything but a malignant and wanton power. Later on, as the Common-sense Movement grew, he had to think a lot about that. He had to spread a new system of ideas throughout the world, and journalism would neither instruct nor inform nor lend itself consistently to any sustained propaganda.
H.G.Wells
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
Isaac Newton
All good things pass away.
Philip Pullman
While police officers who blatantly shaft the common people believe that they are God, they are the Devil to those that they wrong.
Steven Magee
She watched him take the trumpet from its case and fit the mouthpiece. She watched as he raised it to his lips and then, so suddenly, from that tiny cup of metal against his flesh, the sound would burst out like a glorious, brilliant knife dividing the air. And the little room would reverberate and the flies, jolted out of their torpor, would buzz round and round as if riding the swirling notes.
Alexander McCall Smith
We had been hopelessly labouring to plough waste lands; to make nationality grow in a place full of the certainty of God… Among the tribes our creed could be only like the desert grass – a beautiful swift seeming of spring; which, after a day’s heat, fell dusty.
T.E. Lawrence
Success requires a focused attention of your time and energy. This is true no matter what you want to achieve – to change the world or simply change apartments. All success stories come down to one person having a focused aim – so focused at times it can look like an obsession.
Nigel Cumberland
Even the moon cannot escape your intoxicating charms...
Virginia Alison
There you go, Harry!” Ron shouted over the noise. “You weren’t being thick after all — you were showing moral fiber!
J.K. Rowling
A good book is not the same as a successful one.
Johnny Rich
She was only really a female to him.But perhaps that was better. And after all, he was kind to the female in her, which no man had ever been. Men were very kind to the person she was, but rather cruel to the female, despising her or ignoring her altogether. Men were awfully kind to Constance Reid or to Lady Chatterley; but not to her womb they weren’t kind. And he took no notice of Constance or of Lady Chatterley; he just softly stroked her loins or her breasts.
D.H. Lawrence
And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
Julian Barnes
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheardAre sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.
John Keats
He dropped his head and kissed her. He kissed her and it was a kiss of utter certainty, the kind of kiss during which monarchs die and whole continents fall without your even noticing. When Jess extricated herself, it was only because she didn't want the children to see her lose the ability to stand.
Jojo Moyes
It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt,It lies behind stars and under hills,And empty holes it fills,It comes first and follows after,Ends life, kills laughter.
J.R.R. Tolkien
All I can say to people who hate their mothers for giving birth to them is "get the fuck out of your scaredy shells and kiss the world".
Jay Woodman
Being in love means being at the mercy of someone's childhood.
Hanif Kureishi
It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should.
Alain de Botton
A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.
Zadie Smith
Why do gentlemen's voices carry so clearly, when women's are so easily stifled?
Sarah Waters
On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgment and efforts to get things done, hurry and impatience are sure marks of the amateur.
Evelyn Underhill
While parenthood served as no disadvantage at all to men, there was evidence of a substantial "motherhood penalty". Mothers received only half as many callbacks as their identically qualified childless counterparts.
Cordelia Fine
It is the true nature of mankind to learn from mistakes not from example.
Fred Hoyle
During our first date,I wanted to hold your hand so badI almost cut mine offand threw it at youto see if you would catch it
Colin Gilbert
We're all prostitutes sir we're all selling ourselves for something
Saira Viola
The dusk light is impossibly bright. Timothy Squire is still pale, casting backwards glances as we run. After we are well free of the neighbourhood, I gesture for him to stop.'You all right?' he pants.I time it perfectly, and my fist connects, hard, with his stomach. He stumbles, falls to his knees on the wet pavement. Although his grip is strong I have taken him by surprise, and soon the knife is in my hands.
John Owen Theobald
Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams...
Joseph Conrad
It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.
P.G. Wodehouse
The man who prays grows and the muscles of the soul swell from this whipcord to iron bands.
F.B. Meyer
Happiness does not depend on outward circumstances, but on the state of the heart.
J.C. Ryle
In matters of commerce the fault of the Dutch Is offering too little and asking too much. The French are with equal advantage content So we clap on Dutch bottoms just 20%.
George Canning
Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.
Samuel Johnson
They say I am a reformer. They say wrong: for I have long since given up any such chimerical idea, as that of being able to make men happier who are wicked and miserable by prescription. Withdrawing, therefore, from any such Utopian and hopeless attempt, I believed the best thing I could do was, to relieve, where I could, individual distress, and to lighten the chains that villany often imposes on simplicity under the name of law. In this I have done some good, and what else ought a man to do on this earth?
Charlotte Turner Smith
Achievement of any kind is the crown of effort,the diadem of thought.By the aid of self-control, resolution, purity, righteousness, and well-directed thought a man ascends.By the aid of animality,indolence,impurity,corruption,and confusion of thought a man descends.
James Allen