Quotes by British Authors - Page 413

In the dark I rest,unready for the light which dawnsday after day,eager to be shared.Black silk, shelter me.I needmore of the night before I openeyes and heartto illumination. I must stillgrow in the dark like a rootnot ready, not ready at all.
Denise Levertov
People bear loneliness every day. They think they won't be able to, that they won't survive, but somehow one second slips into another, becomes an hour, a day, a week, and they are still living. They are still alone, even in the middle of a crowd of people. Even with a partner, a child.
Laura Barnett
… you were so worried about legal and illegal that you never stopped to think about whether it was right or wrong.
Terry Pratchett
Hermione launched herself forwards and started punching every inch of him that she could reach.'Ouch — ow — gerroff! What the — ? Hermione — OW!'“You — complete — arse — Ronald — Weasley!”She punctuated every word with a blow: Ron backed away, shielding his head as Hermione advanced.
J.K. Rowling
The assumption now is that the interests of the brand and of the game overlap to the degree that cricket need hardly be mentioned.
Gideon Haigh
Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can.
Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton
I wonder if your mother was frightened by Peter Pan before you were born?
Charlotte Lamb
You make someone into a object of – not so much of pity as of weakness, sickness, stupidity, inefectiveness, do you see what I mean? You hit them for their stupidity and their inability to respond, and when you’ve hurt them, marked them, they’re even more sick and ugly, aren’t they? And they’re afraid and cringing too. Oh, I know this isn’t very pleasant, but you did ask.”“Go on” he said.“So you’ve got a frightened, stupid, even disabled person, silenced, made ugly, and what can you do with someone like that, someone who’s unworthy of being treated well? You treat them badly because that’s what they deserve. One thinks of poor little kids that no one love because they’re dirty, sovered in snot and shit, and always screaming. So you beat them because they’re hateful, they’re low, they’re sub-human. That’s all they’re good for, being hit, being reduced even further.
Ruth Rendell
He had always felt that he lived on the edges of life, Constantine realized, watching everyone else living, sometimes helping them do it.
Mary Balogh
God is a pure mathematician!' declared British astronomer Sir James Jeans. The physical Universe does seem to be organised around elegant mathematical relationships. And one number above all others has exercised an enduring fascination for physicists: 137.0359991.... It is known as the fine-structure constant and is denoted by the Greek letter alpha (α).
Paul Davies
Knowledge gives nothing to a man until he gives everything to it.
Idries Shah
No man can be satisfied with his attainment although he may be satisfied with his circumstances.
Frank Swinnerton
Would you like me to [kill you] now?" asked Snape, his voice heavy with irony. "Or would you like a few moments to compose an epitaph?
J.K. Rowling
Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.
George Orwell
Choose a life format that is the most desirable to you.
Steven Redhead
We know of no spectacle more ridiculous—or more contemptible—than that of the religious reactionaries who dare to re-write the history of our republic. Or who try to do so. Is it possible that, in their vanity and stupidity, they suppose that they can erase the name of Thomas Jefferson and replace it with the name of some faith-based mediocrity whose name is already obscure? If so, we cheerfully resolve to mock them, and to give them the lie in their teeth.
Christopher Hitchens
So little is actually worthy of belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disapprove . . .
David Mitchell
[Caine]"Interesting. Me, I've always wanted to know who my real parents were."[Sam]"Let me guess: you're secretly a wizard who was raised by muggles.
Michael Grant
You're not really in control, not with this falling-for-people stuff. You don't plan who you're going to fall in love with. It's all random - chance accidents of time and place.
Julia Green
Rather than being medicalized or romanticized, mental disorders, or mental dis-eases, should be understood as nothing less or more than what they are, an expression of our deepest human nature. By recognizing their traits in ourselves and reflecting upon them, we may be able both to contain them and to put them to good use. This is, no doubt, the highest form of genius.
Neel Burton
I’ve had enough of this destiny bullshit, OK?
Giselle Simlett
I'm not the kind of person who likes to shout out my personal issues from the rooftops, but with my bipolar becoming public, I hope fellow sufferers will know it's completely controllable. I hope I can help remove any stigma attached to it, and that those who don't have it under control will seek help with all that is available to treat it.
Catherine Zeta-Jones
No one thinks of Winter when the grass is green.
Rudyard Kipling
I write into an old book that smells of dust and whose pages are floppy with damp. Sometimes the ink splodges onto the paper, other times it will barely leave the nib of my pen.
Fennel Hudson
It is easier for the leaders to reject the prophecy and the prophet, particularly if there are some unresolved character issues in the life of the prophet. It provides a legitimate reason to reject the word in the eyes of the people, though not necessarily in the eyes of the Lord. Prophecy has a way of testing our true motives.
Graham Cooke
[Jellyfish] are 97% water or something, so how much are they doing? Just give them another 3% and make them water. It's more useful.
Karl Pilkington
All of creation expands and evolves.
Jay Woodman
That there is indeed a limit upon science is made very likely by the existence of questions that science cannot answer and that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer… It is not to science, therefore but to metaphysics, imaginative literature or religion that we must turn for answers to questions having to do with first and last things.
Peter Medawar
If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient - at others, so bewildered and so weak - and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! - We are to be sure a miracle every way - but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out.
Jane Austen
For I need not remind such an audience as this that the neat sorting out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers, has only a very sketchy relation with the habits of any real readers. Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table.
C.S. Lewis
The world is awash with colours unseen and abuzz with unheard frequencies. Undetected and disregarded. The wise have always known that these inaccessible realms, these dimensions that cannot be breached by our beautifully blunt senses, hold the very codes to our existence, the invisible, electromagnetic foundations upon which our gross reality clumsily rests.
Russell Brand
Do you want this to be a love story?
Jenny Downham
We often fear that the Revolution needed is too big for what we can give.Too much change is required inside, outside.And we are too small.But all that is required is that you step into the truth of your life. And speak it, write it, paint it, dance it.That you shine your light on your truth, for the world to see.And as hundreds, then thousands, then millions do this – each sparking the courage of yet more – Suddenly we have a world alight with truth.
Lucy H. Pearce
Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.
Terry Pratchett
You turned your head to the side. Faced me. Your eyes never left mine, I read them with ease. You said nothing to them, yet everything to me. I nodded.But only when no one was watching.
Ali Land
No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients-- failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.
George Orwell
The desert became grim, dark and foreboding. A silence of death lay over the land, and it seemed as though the very stars held their breath and twinkled no more.
Alan Kinross
If you keep doing it everyday as regularly as soldiers go through drill, we shall see what will happend and find out if the experiment succeeds. You learn things by saying them over and over and thinking about them until they stay in your mind for ever, and I think it will be the same with Magic. If you keep calling it to come to you and help you, it will get to be part of you and it will stay and do things.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
What is love? Imagine a helium balloon tied down and then you cut the ropes on a windy day. That is love.
Chloe Thurlow
If asked which words one associated with the Sahara, only the most dedicated surrealist might be expected to offer "whale".
Eamonn Gearon
Being a mother is not a matter of running through a succession of chores.
Naomi Stadlen
All primitive people are frightened of owls,' said Harley. 'The villagers here are scared to death of the gufo. Birds of ill omen. If they see one, they think they'll die. But they never do. See one, I mean, of course,' he added with a laugh.
Francis Brett Young
A psychiatrist is a man who goes to the Folies-Bergere and looks at the audience.
Mervyn Stockwood
If you're tired of triviality, maybe it's time you changed your life.
Anthony T.Hincks
Genocide is the responsibility of the entire world.
Ann Clwyd
They've given Harry the attributes of pistachio nuts and crack cocaine without the health risks (opening thousands of pistachio nuts can cause severe thumb-bruising, I can tell you from bitter experience of my life on the edge).
David Mitchell
Then what’s this?” She raised her glass of expensive wine, used it to indicate their plush surroundings.His gaze followed her indication around the dim-lit, upmarket Italian restaurant. “Dinner in comfort.”“With a side order of persuasion?”“More like an offer I’m hoping you can’t refuse.
Monique DeVere
Never stop loving yourself, for how can you truly love someone if you don't love yourself first. And never be afraid to love, for it is one of the most beautiful uglist things of this world.
Adrian Ross
The sky is grey, with a thin TV-static drizzle that hangs in the air like it's been freeze-framed.
Scarlett Thomas
There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either
Robert Graves
Imagine that the genome is a book.There are twenty-three chapters, called CHROMOSOMES.Each chapter contains several thousand stories, called GENES.Each story is made up of paragraphs, called EXTONS, which are interrupted by advertisements called INTRONS.Each paragraph is made up of words, called CODONS.Each word is written in letters called BASES.
Matt Ridley
We, the public, are easily, lethally offended. We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From this high ground we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities. We take pride in our short fuses. Our anger elevates, transcends.
Salman Rushdie
The happy man is he who knows his limitations yet bows to no false gods.
Robert W. Service
A book can’t be a half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant
David Mitchell
Gods are fragile things, they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense. They thrive on servility and shrink before independence. They feed upon worship as kings do upon flattery. That is why the cry of gods at all times is “Worship us or we perish.” A dethroned monarch may retain some of his human dignity while driving a taxi for a living. But a god without his thunderbolt is a poor object.
Chapman Cohen
The events of childhood do not pass but repeat themselves like seasons of the year.
Eleanor Farjeon
And what percentage of people take up the option to die off?’ She looked at me, her glance telling me to be calm. ‘Oh, a hundred per cent, of course. Over many thousands of years, calculated by old time, of course. But yes, everyone takes the option, sooner or later.’‘So it’s just like the first time round? You always die in the end?’‘Yes, except don’t forget the quality of life here is much better. People die when they decide they’ve had enough, not before. The second time round it’s altogether more satisfying because it’s willed.’ She paused, then added, ‘As I say, we cater for what people want.’I hadn’t been blaming her. I’m not that sort. I just wanted to find out how the system worked. ‘So … even people, religious people, who come here to worship God throughout eternity … they end up throwing in the towel after a few years, hundred years, thousand years?’‘Certainly. As I said, there are still a few Old Heaveners around, but their numbers are diminishing all the time.
Julian Barnes
A man must love a thing very much if he practices it without any hope of fame or money, but even practice it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it.
G.K. Chesterton
Does this make us the biggest band on the planet or what?” Burt
Jamie Scallion
Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror."I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves.Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.
David Mitchell