Quotes by British Authors - Page 408

He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James."No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader.
George Eliot
Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.
Virginia Woolf
She recalled him as a forceful and witty speaker with a ready repartee and a penetrating voice. He had once, for example, put down a spokesman for the pesticide industry with a remark that people still quoted at parties: "And I presume on the eighth day God called you and said, 'I changed my mind about insects!
John Brunner
That’s no little kid. That’s Jason Steed, the biggest damn hero you will ever see!
Mark A. Cooper
Don't build yourself an ivory tower" the moralists say. But I am an ivory tower by the mere fact that I am. On the crude physical level the body is a frame of (ivory) bones on which the muscles are stretched, crowned by an (ivory) bone pill-box turret housing the brain — shielding it from the blows of 'reality' so that it can get on with its absurd work undisturbed. On the non-physical level my I-ness is an ivory tower of orderly individual views and vistas shielding 'me' from being swallowed up in chaos. Dear moralists: don't they see that life is a constant flight up and down the endless steps of the dark ivory tower seeking to escape from the horrid chaos of real freedom?
Nanamoli Thera
The Decision...I wiped my hands on my pinaforenow sullied and stainednot crisp or pressedas it had been before...
Muse
Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
Joseph Conrad
. . . in no instance has a system in regard to religion been ever established, but for the purpose, as well as with the effect of its being made an instrument of intimidation, corruption, and delusion, for the support of depredation and oppression in the hands of governments.
Jeremy Bentham
Sometimes he was weird, sometimes he was Captain Douchebag, but he was always my best friend.
Sharon Sant
In the digital domain trust is now important not only because we really need to know how to trust people and whom to trust but because we need others to trust us and have to learn how to help them do so.
David Amerland
I felt convinced that however it might have been in former times, in the present stage of the world, no man's faculties could be developed, no man's moral principle be enlarged and liberal, without an extensive acquaintance with books.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And -- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall-- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing. ((p. 62, Reading & Writing)
V.S. Naipaul
Hey," said Shadow. "Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are." The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes."Say 'Nevermore,'" said Shadow."Fuck you," said the raven.
Neil Gaiman
These were the facts. Facts were important. They separated fiction from reality, the tawdry world of Mike Longshott from the concrete spaces of Joe's world.
Lavie Tidhar
When you cannot pray as you would pray as you can.
Edward M. Goulburn
Cut privet still smells of sour apples, as it did when I was sixteen; but this is a rare, lingering exception. At that age, everything seemed more open to analogy, to metaphor, than it does now. There were more meanings, more interpretations, a greater variety of available truths. There was more symbolism, Things contained more.
Julian Barnes
We look before and after, And pine for what is not:Our sincerest laughterWith some pain is fraught;Our sweetest songs are those that tell Of saddest thought.Yet if we could scornHate, and pride, and fear;If we were things bornNot to shed a tear,I know not how thy joy we everShould come near.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Words had become overnight just little coins, insignificant and unfreighted, to be exchanged for ribbons, buttons, for an apple or an egg.
Jo Baker
We are perishing for lack of wonder, not for lack of wonders.
G.K. Chesterton
I didn't like it when he looked at me like that. I could never escape the feeling that i was being compared to someone else.
Jojo Moyes
The day may seem like a dream and a dream seem like a day.
Steven Redhead
To generalize is to be an idiot," said Blake. Perhaps he went too far. But to generalize is to be a finite mind. Generalities are the lenses with which our intellects have to manage.
C.S. Lewis
In fighting its war, the Ministry of the Interior has resorted to a novel tactic–marriage. No Saudi official will admit on the record that the Kingdom’s terrorist problem might boil down to sexual frustration, but if a social system bans hot-blooded young men from contact with the opposite sex in their most hot-blooded years, perhaps it is hardly surprising that some of them channel this frustration into violence. One cornerstone of the extremist rehab program is to get the “beneficiaries,” as they are called, settled down with a wife as soon as possible. The Ministry of the Interior pays each unmarried beneficiary 60,000 riyals (some $18,000), the going rate for a dowry, or bride price. The family arranges a marriage, and whenever he can, Prince Mohammed turns up for the wedding.When Khaled Al-Hubayshi was released from Al-Haier prison early in 2007, he wasted no time finding himself a bride at government expense.
Robert Lacey
Genetics, accidents of birth or events in early childhood have left criminals' brains and bodies with measurable flaws predisposing them to committing assault, murder and other antisocial acts. .... Many offenders also have impairments in their autonomic nervous system, the system responsible for the edgy, nervous feeling that can come with emotional arousal. This leads to a fearless, risk-taking personality, perhaps to compensate for chronic under-arousal. Many convicted criminals, like the Unabomber, have slow heartbeats. It also gives them lower heart rates, which explains why heart rate is such a good predictor of criminal tendencies. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, for example, had a resting heart rate of just 54 beats per minute, which put him in the bottom 3 per cent of the population.
Adrian Raine
Unless we can restore what George Orwell called patriotism as opposed to nationalism, we will see the rise of the far right, as is happening already in Europe.
Jonathan Sacks
The Ten Commandments don't tell you what you ought to do: They only put ideas into your head.
Elizabeth Bibesco
That explains a lot,' he said. 'I suppose it's also why we've never glimpsed that giant compass in the corner of the Atlantic. I have to say, I'm a little disappointed.
Gideon Defoe
How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?
Christopher Hitchens
I'm as religious as the next man - which is to say I'll keep in with the local parson for form's sake and read the lessons on feast-days because my tenants expect it, but I've never been fool enough to confuse religion with belief in God. That's where so many clergymen... go wrong
George MacDonald Fraser
Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
Alain de Botton
Man I’m hot,� I exclaimed, fanning myself. The combination of climbing out of the cave and the sun meant that I was perspiring like crazy. “Why thank you,� retorted Blaine, smirking. “I’m pleased that my presence causes that kind of reaction.
Adele Rose
Good humor like the jaundice makes every one of its own complexion.
Elizabeth Inchbald
It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.
John Fowles
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we learn to walk.
Cyril Connolly
Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.
Samuel Johnson
For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation
Graham Greene
I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Sex is a conversation carried out by other means. If you get on well out of bed half the problems of bed are solved.
Peter Ustinov
Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you.
Neil Gaiman
A microbe is so very small You cannot make him out at all.
Hilaire Belloc
The biggest enemy of western people is not war or terrorism, it is their own governments lack of regulation of public health and safety.
Steven Magee
We are all broken, but none of us are beyond fixing".
Bella Forrest
Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down onto the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky between the tree tops.
C.S. Lewis
The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self--all your wishes and precautions--to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call "ourselves," to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be "good.
C.S. Lewis
I think you'll be a great teacher," said Gary. That's his role in my life: blind encourager and ambassador of false senses of security.
Matthew Norman
Forgiveness is a heartache and difficult to achieve because strangely, it not only refuses to eliminate the original wound, but actually draws us closer to its source. To approach forgiveness is to close in on the nature of the hurt itself, the only remedy being, as we approach its raw centre, to reimagine our relation to it.
David Whyte
My house seems remarkably full of people," he observed. "Is it possible we were expected.
Georgette Heyer
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
William Blake
It is proven that the glass in your environment may be able to affect your health.
Steven Magee
Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.
China Miéville
You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I'm afraid, looks a fucking mess.
Julian Barnes
An important aspect of the ebbing of sex was that other things became interesting. Sex obliterates the individuality of young women more often than it does that of young men, because so much more of a woman than a man is used by sex.
Diana Athill
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light.
Jeremy Bentham
[To] mechanical progress there is apparently no end: for as in the past so in the future, each step in any direction will remove limits and bring in past barriers which have till then blocked the way in other directions; and so what for the time may appear to be a visible or practical limit will turn out to be but a bend in the road.(Opening address to the Mechanical Science Section, Meeting of the British Association, Manchester.)
Osborne Reynolds
The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes but in liking what one has to do.
James M. Barrie
Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
Samuel Johnson
At the dockside I was pleasantly surprised to find the North wasn't all hairy men in animal skins. There was also hairy women in animal skins.
Mark Lawrence
The important thing is not what they think of me, but what I think of them
Queen Victoria
Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.
W Somerset Maugham
Sleep not under a willow tree for she weeps many tears.
Anthony T.Hincks