Quotes by British Authors - Page 402

Where ever there's guilt there's violence, and if guilt is a smell then violence is a taste: strawberries and formaldehyde and ironish blood.
Glen Duncan
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
W Somerset Maugham
War is always an adventure to those who've never seen it.
Anthony Ryan
To lose your own language was like forgetting your mother, and as sad, in a way.
Alexander McCall Smith
At the time I could not see beyond the moral dilemma that is presented to the weak in a world governed by the strong: Break the rules, or perish.
George Orwell
Maybe home isn't a place. Maybe it's a feeling you have inside of you, being around the people who matter to you
Justin Somper
Out in the shadows of the city, in the houses and cellars, in the secret rooms and locked attics, a stirring cold be sensed. The ghosts and spirits-of-place whispered and muttered on the edge of hearing, glided and flowed on the edge of sight. They were pleased with the turn of events; it was they who had driven the small garrison of Polypontian troops out to die in the snow. It was they who’d haunted their movements through the cities. And it was they who had joined them on watch in the dark of the night, filling their minds with a slow-growing fear, which had evolved into a terror that had driven them mad… The Queen had returned, and some of the people, and the rest of the folk would one day come back and they could slip back into their minds, becoming the warp and the weft of the legend and stories. Becoming the fireside companions of long winter nights, living their lives for a while in the minds of the breathing, in the blood that still flowed, in the feelings that still thrilled to nerves that still sensed.
Stuart Hill
To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away...
Virginia Woolf
This world needs much more kissing and far less fighting.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Freedom is not to defy, it is to co-exist. It is a challenge for the imagination
Ilyas Kassam
It is particularly important to note that, in a democracy, education has never been concerned only with supplying the needs of the economy or ensuring effective socialisation; it also has strong traditions of preparing for citizenship, extending possibilities for learning and promoting social progress.
Gaby Weiner
I suspect Nargles are behind it.
J.K. Rowling
A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
Samuel Butler
Like music, said Peg. Even when it was over, it kept living inside you.
Rachel Joyce
Chalmers, thanks to Baudelaire, knew all about Taffreuse Juive, opium, absinthe, negresses, Lesbos and the metamorphoses of the vampire ... Needless to say, Chalmers and myself were both virgins, in every possible meaning of the word.
Christopher Isherwood
I don't think it's possible to c-call yourself a C-Christian and... and j-just leave out the awkward bits.' -Wilfred Owen
Pat Barker
This is the mythosphere. It's made up of all the stories, theories and beliefs, legends, myths and hopes, that are generated here on Earth. As you can see, it's constantly growing and moving as people invent new tales to tell or find new things to believe. The older strands move out to become these spirals, where things tend to become quite crude and dangerous. They've hardened off, you see.
Diana Wynne Jones
Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.
Alain de Botton
Born to love, cursed to feel.
Samantha King
I was not always a Muslim, but once I was led into the absorption of prayer and the mysteries of the Qur’an, something troubled in me became still.
Camilla Gibb
The English never draw a line without blurring it.
Winston Churchill
I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) has not been lost: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in ‘the High Countries’.
C.S. Lewis
Do you know, André, I sometimes think that you have no heart.' 'Presumably because I sometimes betray intelligence.
Rafael Sabatini
The pleasure-house is dust:—behind, before,This is no common waste, no common gloom;But Nature, in due course of time, once moreShall here put on her beauty and her bloom.She leaves these objects to a slow decay,That what we are, and have been, may be known;But at the coming of the milder day,These monuments shall all be overgrown.
William Wordsworth
It was one of those late summer days trying its best to convince everyone that winter would never seep through and ravage the earth.
A.J. Waines
It is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.
J.R.R. Tolkien
If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Under-world in a second, and examined it at leisure.
H.G.Wells
They want to be natural, the anti-social little beasts. They just don't realize that everyone's good depends on everyone's cooperation.
Richard Adams
When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. They seemed to go on the assumption that there is no failure greater than the failure of not trying, and so they continued to try in the face of repeated failures.
John Powell
There's a time in your life when you have to stop looking back and start looking forward because otherwise you're going to walk down the road one day and bump into a lamppost. But it's not easy.
Anna Maxted
Keep thinking back about what Mum said about being real and the Velveteen Rabbit book (though frankly have had enough trouble with rabbits in this particular house). My favorite book, she claims of which I have no memory was about how little kids get one toy that they love more than all the others, and even when its fur has been rubbed off, and it's gone saggy with bits missing, the little child still thinks it's the most beautiful toy in the world, and can't bear to be parted from it.That's how it works, when people really love each other, Mum whispered on the way out in the Debenhams lift, as if she was confessing some hideous and embarrassing secret. But, the thing is, darling, it doesn't happen to ones who have sharp edges, or break if they get dropped, or ones made of silly synthetic stuff that doesn't last. You have to be brave and let the other person know who you are and what you feel.
Helen Fielding
It's impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren't feeling twinkly yourself
Roald Dahl
It is foolish to regret anything form one's past.
Mary Balogh
Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles.
Ian Fleming
Do you know how wizards like to be buried?""Yes!""Well, how?"Granny Weatherwax paused at the bottom of the stairs."Reluctantly.
Terry Pratchett
The history of almost every civilization furnishes examples of geographical expansion coinciding with deterioration in quality.
Arnold Toynbee
Keep your heart and mind in perfect sync while bring the conscious and subconscious into unison.
Steven Redhead
A neon-pink 3 flickered and instantly disappeared again into the dark. The sight of it on my own device now made me sick. I held my finger down on the menu screen; each little app logo began to vibrate. I deleted the 3. I contemplated deleting everything. Cleaning it all away. The idea had a charm, a self-cancellation, many little suicides, a way to dispatch myself without actually going anywhere.
Olivia Sudjic
Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze.
Elinor Glyn
Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources
C.E.M. Joad
There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.
W Somerset Maugham
We need never be ashamed of our tears.
Charles Dickens
I have often observed that the state of motherhood can turn quite ordinary females into heroines . . .
Kate Saunders
You can want and want and want, but if he doesn't want you back ... you might as well wish the sky were red.
Sophie Kinsella
People who enjoy waving flags don't deserve to have one
Banksy
The night became silver again; looking up, it was as if they saw the moon sailing through the clouds instead of the other way around; racing smoothly across the sky, passing puffs and wisps of cloud on either side, and yet never moving from its place.
Susan Cooper
One can imagine that if humanity suddenly disappeared from the planet, the cat would shrug its shoulders, raise its tail, and return to its forest habitat, there to live as its ancestors have done for two million years, forever in search of something small, furry, and squeaky to play with.
Eric Chaline
Evolution by natural selection is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our lives in our own society. If we were to be guided by the evolution principle, then we would be living in a kind of ultra-Thatcherite, Reaganite society.Study your Darwinism for two reasons - because it explains why you’re here, and the second reason is, study your Darwinism in order to learn what to avoid in setting up society. What we need is a truly anti-Darwinian society. Anti-Darwinian in the sense that we don’t wish to live in a society where the weakest go to the wall, where the strongest suppress the weak, and even kill the weak. We — I, at least — do not wish to live in that kind of society. I want to live in the sort of society where we take care of the sick, where we take care of the weak, take care of the oppressed, which is a very anti-Darwinian society.
Richard Dawkins
[T]he wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile.
Charles Dickens
As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two: this I like; this I don't like.For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don't like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don't like it.
W.H. Auden
Cause honey your soulcould never grow oldits evergreen
Ed Sheeran
Maybe you are just a liquid dream. Seeping into my soul in the dead of night when everything sleeps apart from my memories from another life, another electric, terrifying, lasciviously greedy time, when your lips touched my body, while mapping the skincape unfolding beneath your breath leaving a ripple of mesmerising carnal pleasures, lingering in my veins...Or maybe you are not...
Virginia Alison
There is a distinct difference between "suspense" and "surprise," and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I'll explain what I mean. We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!" In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.
Alfred Hitchcock
There are three types of people in this world. Firstly, there are people who make things happen. Then there are people who watch things happen. Lastly, there are people who ask, what happened? Which do you want to be?
Steve Backley
There is nothing quite as unpleasant as wearing a pair of briefs which have been trailed through a Calcutta courtyard. Nothing, that is, except having one's elbows and knees lacerated by unseen slivers of glass and discarded razor blades.
Tahir Shah
We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic - now mercifully stilled, thank God - might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion as it had before.
Daphne du Maurier
I still don't belong to anyone - I am mine.
Morrissey
No man is equal to his book. All the best products of his mental activity go into his book, where they come separated from the mass of inferior products with which they are mingled in his daily talk.
Herbert Spencer
When your diary is full and your life is empty, get a date
Benny Bellamacina
When people have a hard task to do - one which stretches them - they become less concerned with trivial matters.
Idries Shah