Quotes by British Authors - Page 405

Reinette: One may tolerate a world of demons for the sake of an angel.
Steven Moffat
Oh I am a cook and a captain bold And the mate of the Nancy brig And a bo'sun tight and a midshipmate And the crew of the captain's gig.
W.S. Gilbert
Despite the fact that an Indonesian island chicken has probably had a much more natural life than one raised on a battery farm in England, people who wouldn't think twice about buying something oven-ready become much more upset about a chicken that they've been on a boat with, so there is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you've been introduced to socially.
Douglas Adams
The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
Alain de Botton
God,” she butted her head into his chest, “I'm so angry with myself.”“What? Why?”“Because … this is my mess I dragged you into, and you don't deserve any of it, and I feel like I'm ruining you with every single thing I say, and…” she lifted her head, eyes shimmering, “I'm a selfish, selfish bitch. Because all I can think about, is whether I'll regret it in three hours, when we walk out of here, and I never know, not even once, what it's like to be with a really nice guy.
Dianna Hardy
Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.
Alan W. Watts
Such is the state of life that none are happy but by the anticipation of change. The change itself is nothing when we have made it the next wish is to change again.
Samuel Johnson
And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cogwheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves....On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness; all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also, and we know the height of it only, when we see the clouds settling upon him.
John Ruskin
I remember the lights turning into blurs of blazing fire. I remember the air-conditioning chilling my arms. The smell of coffee smudging into the smell of eucalyptus.
Lucy Christopher
Don't be ashamed to weep; 'tis right to grieve. Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and fruit cannot grow without water. But there must be sunlight also. A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of our lost ones is sealed inside to comfort us.
Brian Jacques
Whatever happens in the world - whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over - eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. Wars, famine, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment - they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked into the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes. So the history of household life isn't just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves ... but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything else that has ever happened. Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up.
Bill Bryson
You have to look at yourself objectively. Analyze yourself like an instrument. You have to be absolutely frank with yourself. Face your handicaps, don't try to hide them. Instead, develop something else.
Audrey Hepburn
January grey is here Like a sexton by her grave February bears the bier March with grief doth howl and rave And April weeps - but O ye hours! Follow with May's fairest flowers.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
I must indeed abide the Doom of Men whether I will or nill: the loss and the silence. But I say to you, King of the Numenoreans, not till now have I understood the tale of your people and their fall. As wicked fools I scorned them, but I pity them at last. For if this is indeed, as the Elves say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The source of all light is in the eye.
Alan W. Watts
The poor things keep calling in those – those pumbles, I think they're called – you know, the ones who mend pipes and things – ""Plumbers?"" – exactly, yes, but of course they're flummoxed.
J.K. Rowling
At this point, a few words on this term 'horror' are perhaps called for. Some amateurs of this kind of literature engage in endless hairsplitting disputes, centered around this word and its close companion 'terror', as to which' stories may so be categorized and which may not, and whether or not descriptions such as weird or fantasy or macabre are preferable. The designation 'horror', with its connotations of revulsion, satisfies me no more than it does the purists but I believe that it is the only term which embraces all the stories in this collection and which succinctly suggests to the majority of readers what is in store for them. Horror then, in this instance, covers tales of the Supernatural and of physical terror, of ghosts and necromancy and of inhuman violence and all the dark corners and crevices of human belief and behavior that lie in between. ("An Age In Horror" - introduction)
Michel Parry
A Sufi school comes into being in order to flourish and disappear, not to leave traces in mechanical ritual, or anthropologically survivals.
Idries Shah
I might go anywhere and do any magic I pleased if I were Peter, not Prunella.
Zen Cho
[the only acting advice he would give] What is acting but lying and what is good lying but convincing lying?
Laurence Olivier
Now I know what the atom looks like.
Ernest Rutherford
What you are prepared to do in order to achieve what you want is the only cost involved in achieving that goal.
Steven Redhead
Harry — I think I've just understood something! I've got to go to the library!”And she sprinted away, up the s
J.K. Rowling
And then the days came when I was alone.
Jean Rhys
Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.
C.S. Lewis
Such indeed was her image, that neither could Shakespeare describe, nor Hogarth paint, nor Clive act, a fury in higher perfection.
Henry Fielding
Come on," I say, "let's go be star-crossed lovers and court disaster.
Sangu Mandanna
Poor fellow! I think he is in love with you.'I am not aware of it. And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her... I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me.
George Eliot
When I am dead, I hope it may be said, 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.
Hilaire Belloc
And in that moment, I felt my own ignorance spread suddenly out behind me like a pair of wings, and every single thing I didn’t know was a feather on those wings. I could feel them tugging at the air, restless to be airborne.
Frank Cottrell Boyce
Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them.If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is 'nothing better' now to be had.
C.S. Lewis
It is not commercial success but originality and proof of autonomy which are admired.
Angela Phillips
Every man with a vote was considered a foe to woman suffrage unless he was prepared to be actively a friend.
Emmeline Pankhurst
With him everything is a test, affection is measured, that given weighed against that which has been received, and the balance, more often than not, disappointing him.
S.J. Watson
I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?
Douglas Adams
I have known many true connoisseurs, with excellent tastes that range across the humanities and the culinary arts--and they never fail to have a fatal effect on my self-esteem. When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has somehow also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about the opera, have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters, an encyclopedic knowledge of the English civil war, of French wines--I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential. How did she find the time?
Zadie Smith
The radiation detoxification process exists in nature. It is called: Hibernation.
Steven Magee
...to give a clear picture of the whole scene of Italian gastronomy.
Anna Del Conte
She picked up the book and then walked back past him into the tent, but as she did so, she brushed the top of his head lightly with her hand. He closed his eyes at her touch, and hated himself for wishing that what she said was true: that Dumbledore had really cared.
J.K. Rowling
He had opened the book at random several times, seeking a sortes Virgilianae, before he chose the sentences on which his code was to be based. 'You say: I am not free. But I have lifted my hand and let it fall.' It was as if in choosing that passage, he were transmitting a signal of defiance to both the services. The last word of the message, when it was decoded by Boris or another, would read 'goodbye.
Graham Greene
Fairy tales for adult readers remained popular throughout Europe well into the 19th century — particularly in Germany, where the Brothers Grimm published their massive collection of German fairy tales (revised and edited to reflect the Brothers’ patriotic and patriarchal ideals), providing inpiration for novelists, poets, and playrights among the German Romantics. Recently, fairy tale scholars have re–discovered the enormous body of work produced by women writers associated with the German Romantics: Grisela von Arnim, Sophie Tieck Bernhardi, Karoline von Günderrode, Julie Berger, and Sophie Albrecht, to name just a few.
Terri Windling
O Light Invisible, we praise Thee! Too bright for mortal vision. O Greater Light, we praise Thee for the less; The eastern light our spires touch at morning, The light that slants upon our western doors at evening, The twilight over stagnant pools at batflight, Moon light and star light, owl and moth light, Glow-worm glowlight on a grassblade. O Light Invisible, we worship Thee! We thank Thee for the light that we have kindled, The light of altar and of sanctuary; Small lights of those who meditate at midnight And lights directed through the coloured panes of windows And light reflected from the polished stone, The gilded carven wood, the coloured fresco. Our gaze is submarine, our eyes look upward And see the light that fractures through unquiet water. We see the light but see not whence it comes. O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!
T.S Eliot
It felt like he’d been dragged through the nine circles of hell — by his testicles.
Kay Berrisford
Can the law get blood out of a stone? I haven't any money.
W Somerset Maugham
Birth copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks.
T.S Eliot
The falseness of your own hearts, if you look not to them, may undo you(15).
Richard Baxter
To exemplify, -a beautiful glossy nut, which, blessed with original strength, has outlived all the storms of autumn. Not a puncture, not a weak spot any where. -This nut... while so many of its brethren have fallen and been trodden under foot, is still in possession of all the happiness that a hazel-nut can be supposed capable of.
Jane Austen
One of the thousand objections to the sin of pride lies precisely in this, that self-consciousness of necessity destroys sel-revelation. A man who thinks a great deal about himself will try to be many-sided, attempt a theatrical excellence at all points, will try to be an encyclopedia of culture, and his own real personality will be lost in that false universalism.
G.K. Chesterton
One day we took the children to see a goldsmith refine gold after the ancient manner of the East. He was sitting beside his little charcoal fire. ("He shall sit as a refiner"; the gold- or silversmith never leaves his crucible once it is on the fire.) In the red glow lay a common curved roof tile; another tile covered it like a lid. This was the crucible. In it was the medicine made of salt, tamarind fruit and burnt brick dust, and imbedded in it was the gold. The medicine does its appointed work on the gold, "then the fire eats it," and the goldsmith lifts the gold out with a pair of tongs, lets it cool, rubs it between his fingers, and if not satisfied puts it back again in fresh medicine. This time he blows the fire hotter than it was before, and each time he puts the gold into the crucible, the heat of the fire is increased; "it could not bear it so hot at first, but it can bear it now; what would have destroyed it then helps it now." "How do you know when the gold is purified?" we asked him, and he answered, "When I can see my face in it [the liquid gold in the crucible] then it is pure.
Amy Carmichael
I was moved beyond words. The train ride over the mountains from lake Titticaca to Cusco reminded me of Africa where I grew up; and 4 days walking on the Inca Trail, then more in the jungle, just magnificent - time, space, and splendour. Our planet is superb!
Jay Woodman
You never think it’s going to happen to you, do you?
Sarah Lotz
Sometimes when I wake up, I forget that she's gone and then I remember and my heart drops like it does when you miss a step or trip over a kerb.
Annabel Pitcher
Those freckles make you seem like a galaxy of stars, just waiting to be explored and loved.
Nikita Gill
I may have spent long enough in your orbit to have absorbed your ferocious conviction that a happy family cannot be a mere myth or that even if it is, better to die trying for the fine if unattainable than sulking in passive, cynical resignation that hell is other people you're related to.
Lionel Shriver
Those who complain most are most to be complained of.
Matthew Henry
Are the gods not just?' 'Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?
C.S. Lewis
Some people are oil and water.
John Christopher
Luther’s doctrine of justification depends upon two things: the constant preaching of the wrath of God in the face of sin; and the realization that every Christian is at once righteous and a sinner, thus needing the hammer of the law to terrify and break the sinful conscience.
Carl R. Trueman
Imagine living in a world where we no longer believe that war can lead to peace. War can't lead to peace anymore than ignorance can lead to knowledge. War leads to premature death, pain, suffering, hatred, fear and more separation.
Renée Paule
Something like panic struck at Hurlow. Moffat's calm confession of fear withdrew the prop upon which he had leaned. Down there, among the motionless shadows, lurked invisible things, things that were nameless, shapeless and malignant; things which could see without being seen. One of the long lost terrors of childhood returned to him, and like a child he put his hand into Moffat's.
A.M. Burrage