Quotes by British Authors - Page 404

So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read in school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
Jeanette Winterson
See the world for what it is.BEAUTIFUL!
Anthony T.Hincks
True biblical love is sacrificing, purifying, nurturing, and enduring.
Elizabeth George
It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.
Roald Dahl
M'sieur, I am as a slave to my wife." He kissed the tips of his fingers. "I am as the dirt beneath her feet." He clasped his hands. "I must bestow on her all that she desires, or die!""Pray make use of my sword, " invited his Grace. "It is in the corner behind you.
Georgette Heyer
The more people you have to ask for permission, the more dangerous a project gets.
Alain de Botton
Or perhaps it's the wickedness in him that she can't resist. There are such women.
Madeleine Brent
When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.
Cory Doctorow
The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.
Neil Gaiman
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree...The difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection , though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive of the theory.
Charles Darwin
Never compose anything unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you.
Gustav Hoist
Don't interfere!" The Doctor silenced her angrily. "I cannot will my own destruction.
Peter Grimwade
Who ran to help me when I fell And would some pretty story tell Or kiss the place to make it well? My mother.
Jane Taylor
That little glow of comfort lasted me right through the evening but was gone when I woke up next morning. Wakings are the worst times--almost before my eyes are open a great weight seems to roll on to my heart.
Dodie Smith
What had he done? Something horrible, something terrible, but something he'd done as a child. Can you commit murder in innocence? It's too big a thing for the human mind to take in, that's the problem. And it grew with the ever-larger newspaper pictures of a girl who was near enough an angel, even before she died. Only the young die good. And Angela Milton died young enough to be perfect.
Jonathan Trigell
It is great good health to believe as the Hindus do that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one s dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical. It is sickness of the profoundest kind to believe that there is one reality. There is sickness in any piece of work or any piece of art seriously attempting to suggest that the idea that there is more than one reality is somehow redundant.
Clive Barker
There was hardly an eminent writer in Paris who was unacquainted with the inside of the Conciergerie or the Bastille.
Lytton Strachey
And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job--where the machine seems to run on much as usual--I loath the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much.
C.S. Lewis
...disaster, when it is quite sure of its own strength, will announce itself by hardly moving its lips...
Chris Cleave
I independently produce scientific advancements to share with everyone, and that is over seven billion people!
Steven Magee
Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object – we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering.
C.S. Lewis
Scared?" Malfoy muttered, so that Lockhart couldn't hear him."You wish." said Harry out of the corner of his mouth.
J.K. Rowling
Why do I take a blade and slash my arms? Why do I drink myself into a stupor? Why do I swallow bottles of pills and end up in A&E having my stomach pumped? Am I seeking attention? Showing off? The pain of the cuts releases the mental pain of the memories, but the pain of healing lasts weeks. After every self-harming or overdosing incident I run the risk of being sectioned and returned to a psychiatric institution, a harrowing prospect I would not recommend to anyone.So, why do I do it? I don't. If I had power over the alters, I'd stop them. I don't have that power. When they are out, they're out. I experience blank spells and lose time, consciousness, dignity. If I, Alice Jamieson, wanted attention, I would have completed my PhD and started to climb the academic career ladder. Flaunting the label 'doctor' is more attention-grabbing that lying drained of hope in hospital with steri-strips up your arms and the vile taste of liquid charcoal absorbing the chemicals in your stomach. In most things we do, we anticipate some reward or payment. We study for status and to get better jobs; we work for money; our children are little mirrors of our social standing; the charity donation and trip to Oxfam make us feel good. Every kindness carries the potential gift of a responding kindness: you reap what you sow. There is no advantage in my harming myself; no reason for me to invent delusional memories of incest and ritual abuse. There is nothing to be gained in an A&E department.
Alice Jamieson
Gerald's look assured her that he and the others would be as near angels as children could be without ceasing to be human.
E Nesbit
I willingly accept Cassandra's fateTo speak the truth, although believed too late.
Anne Killigrew
When you by nature subscribe to the view that everyone except yourself is a berk or a wanker, it is hard to bond with anybody in any rational common cause.
Lynne Truss
The so-called new morality has too often the old immorality condoned.
Lord Shawcross
The butler entered the room a solemn procession of one.
P.G. Wodehouse
Instead of a feeling, think of love as an action. The feeling of love comes and goes on a whim; you can’t control it. But the action of love is something you can do, regardless of how you are feeling.
Russ Harris
I have nothing to offer but blood toil tears and sweat.
Winston Churchill
You are wrong if you think you cannot live without love, Edith.''No, I am not,' she said, slowly. 'I cannot live without it. Oh, I do not mean that I go into a decline, develop odd symptoms, become a caricature. I mean something far more serious than that. I mean that I cannot live well without it. I cannot think or act or speak or write or even dream with any kind of energy in the absence of love. I feel excluded from the living world. I become cold, fish-like, immobile. I implode. My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening.''You are a romantic, Edith,' repeated Mr Neville, with a smile.'It is you who are wrong,' she replied. 'I have been listening to that particular accusation for most of my life. I am not a romantic. I am a domestic animal. I do not sigh and yearn for extravagant displays of passion, for the grand affair, the world well lost for love. I know all that, and know that it leaves you lonely. No, what I crave is the simplicity of routine. An evening walk, arm in arm, in fine weather. A game of cards. Time for idle talk. Preparing a meal together.
Anita Brookner
Tragedy's language stresses that whatever is within us is obscure, many faceted, impossible to see. Performance gave this question of what is within a physical force. The spectators were far away from the performers, on that hill above the theatre. At the centre of their vision was a small hut, into which they could not see. The physical action presented to their attention was violent but mostly unseen. They inferred it, as they inferred inner movement, from words spoken by figures whose entrances and exits into and out of the visible space patterned the play. They saw its results when that facade opened to reveal a dead body. This genre, with its dialectics of seen and unseen, inside and outside, exit and entrance, was a simultaneously internal and external, intellectual and somatic expression of contemporary questions about the inward sources of harm, knowledge, power, and darkness.
Ruth Padel
Happiness that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life impels us through all its mazes and meanderings but leads none of us by the same route.
Charles Caleb Colton
what use was it to observe the human species and try to understand it? Their rules were fathomless and no mire fixed than the wind
Sarah Perry
She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.
Henry James
It's what you do when you grow up, apparently, face up to things you'd rather not and accept the fact that nobody is who you thought they were, maybe not even close.
Jenny Valentine
This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks. It is only this late in the day, and possibly only in Willesden, that you can find best friends Sita and Sharon, constantly mistaken for each other because Sita is white (her mother liked the name) and Sharon is Pakistani (her mother thought it best — less trouble).
Zadie Smith
Age does not count. It’s what you know about football that matters.
David Peace
There had been no moments when she could differentiate and say: Then, at such a moment, I love him; and again, Then, at such another, I loved him not. The stress had been constant. her love for him had been a straight black line drawn right through her life. It had hurt her, it had damaged her, it had diminished her, but she had been unable to curve away from it.
Vita Sackville-West
Aunt Lavinia always had a near-religious belief that it was wicked to inflict one's personal despair on others. Any display of self-pity or self-dissatisfaction she saw as a social cruelty that was very nearly criminal.
Caroline Blackwood
I stood in bars, clothed but naked, looking from their eyes to my feet and back again. Still there was the longing to contend with: the heavy, bloody, chemical urge to consume another body and spit out its bones in a new child. How do you make a stranger so intimate when they could so easily destroy you?
Nadifa Mohamed
The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them.
Hilary Mantel
Every organism requires an environment of friends partly to shield it from violent changes and partly to supply it with its wants.
Alfred North Whitehead
If I’d stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvelous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.
J.L. Carr
She searched her mind for a single day when it had felt good to be alive. There must have been one, surely?
Rachel Abbott
A mature society is one that reserves its moral outrage for what really matters: poverty and preventable diseases in the third world, arms sales, oppression, injustice. Bad language and sex might offend some, who certainly have a right to complain; but they do not have a right to censor. They do not have to watch or listen if they are offended: they have an 'off' button on their television sets and radios. After all, it is morally outrageous that moral outrage should be used as an excuse to perpetrate the outrage of censorship on others.
A.C. Grayling
It’s degrading being routinely subjected to a battery of medical tests to ensure I continue to deserve a place in this new world.
Siobhan Davis
The cork was in the bottle. He and the Atropos were trapped.
C.S. Forester
Life,” said Marvin dolefully, “loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.
Douglas Adams
This, let me remind you again, is a love story; you can see it by the imbecility, not a repulsive imbecility, the exalted imbecility of these proceedings, this station in torchlight, as if they had come there on purpose to have it out for the edification of concealed murderers.
Joseph Conrad
The past is always tense, the future perfect.
Zadie Smith
You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you've tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses.
Ted Hughes
I know very little with anything approaching certainty. I know that I was born, that I exist, and that I will die. For the most part, I can trust my brain's interpretation of the data presented to my senses: this is a rose, that is a car, she is my wife. I do not doubt the reality of the thoughts and emotions and impulses I experience in response to these things. . . . Yet apart from these primary perceptions, intuitions, inferences, and bits of information, the views that I hold about the things that really matter to me--meaning, truth, happiness, goodness, beauty--are finely woven tissues of belief and opinion.
Stephen Batchelor
I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.
Julian Barnes
War is ever the folly of the ignorant. But I have seen much to convince me some wars must be fought, to the bitterest end if need be.
Anthony Ryan
Anyway, what can one do here? I am seriously thinking of running away and joining the Foreign Legion or the North-West Mounted Police—whichever work the shorter hours.
Anthony Powell
Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good behave yourself and never mind the rest.
Beatrix Potter
In order to fix it, you need a passionate anger about something that doesn't work well.
James Dyson
Make your own Miracles, don't wait for miracles to happen; they need a spark of energy to make them real.
Steven Redhead
Control is an advertising concept.
Andrew Miller