Quotes by British Authors - Page 416

A man who writes a book, thinks himself wiser or wittier than the rest of mankind; he supposes that he can instruct or amuse them, and the publick to whom he appeals, must, after all, be the judges of his pretensions.
Samuel Johnson
Oh Julie, wouldn’t I know if you were dead? Wouldn’t I feel it happening, like a jolt of electricity to my heart?
Elizabeth Wein
In the heat of the 2000 election, then Governor George W. Bush of Texas made an off-the-cuff statement that we ought to take the log out of our own eye before calling attention to the speck in the eye of our neighbor. The New York Times reported the remark as a minor gaffe -- what it termed "an interesting variation on the saying about the pot and the kettle."The reporter -- actually a fine and balanced journalist -- did not recognize the biblical reference. Neither did his editors. And this, of course, was not an obscure biblical reference. Not only is it found in the red letters of the New Testament, it is taken from the Sermon on the Mount.
Paul Marshall
The Church right now has more fashion than passion, is more pathetic than prophetic, is more superficial than supernatural.
Leonard Ravenhill
And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
Douglas Adams
So we rode through a broken gate in a broken wall into a broken town, and it was dusk, and the day's rain had finally lifted, and a shaft of red sunlight came from beneath the western clouds as we entered the ruined town. We rode straight into the light of that swollen sun which reflected from my helm that had the silver wolf on its crest, and it shone from my mail coat and from my arm rings and from the hilts of my two swords, and someone shouted that I was the king. I rode Witnere, who tossed his great head and pawed at the ground, and I was dressed in my shining war glory.
Bernard Cornwell
But how can we know that dragons did not exist? We have never actually BEEN to the Dark Ages.
Cressida Cowell
He had heard the voice of London that lives and breathes beneath the rumble of traffic, a voice like the continual high-pitched shriek you hear when you put your head beneath the waves of the sea. It is the sound of millions and millions of creatures living and struggling and dying and being born. It commands those who hear it to eat or be eaten..
Amanda Craig
A pessimist is a liar, unless he destroys himself, and no less of a hypocrite than a priest who defiles the holy.
Mark Samuels
We must love one another or die
W.H. Auden
What I’ve learnt is: buy the damn shoes. Kiss the boy. You can lose a life in indecision, and regret is a waste of an emotion.
Kate Lord Brown
That's what marriage is, isn't it? Taking the rough with the smooth. At least, that's what it should be.
Laura Barnett
I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything.
Sebastian Faulks
Just past hell lies paradise.Sometimes we have to remind ourselves of that.Serina Hartwell Author of The Hidden Saga
Serina Hartwell
Happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.
Jeanette Winterson
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
Douglas Adams
Know then thyself; presume not God to scan,The proper study of mankind is Man.Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,A being darkly wise and rudely great:With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,And too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest;In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;In doubt his mind or body to prefer;Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err.Alike in ignorance, his reason such,Whether he thinks too little or too much.
Alexander Pope
We have invented a moral sense which is rotting now that we can't give it employment, and when a moral sense begins to rot, it is worse than when you had none. I suppose that all endeavors which are directed to a purely worldly end, as my precious civilization was, contain within themselves the germs of their own corruption.
T.H. White
I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.
Winston S. Churchill
Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
Winston Churchill
Such meeting reveal that which we all darkly suspect about those whose art we have loved: that they are unlikely to be whatever it is we imagine them to be.
Morrissey
Well, wouldn't it have been easier if she'd just asked me whether I liked her better than you?""Girls don't often ask questions like that," said Hermione."Well, they should!" said Harry forcefully.
J.K. Rowling
Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.
Jeanette Winterson
I always suspect an artist who is successful before he is dead.
John Murray Gibbon
The affair seems absurdly trifling, and yet I dare call nothing trivial when I reflect that some of my most classic cases have had the least promising commencement. You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth which the parsley had sunk into the butter upon a hot day.
Arthur Conan Doyle
We should not allow ourselves to be deceived by our outward show of ‘civilized’ manners and ‘cultured’ social behavior into believing that self-concern, desirous attachment, aversion, and indifference are steadily losing their hold over us.
Stephen Batchelor
The trick, it seems to me, is to stave off regret. That’s what the whole thing is about. And we can’t stave it off forever, because it is impossible not to make the mistakes that let regret in, but the best of us manage to limp on into our sixties or seventies before we succumb. Me, I made it to about thirty-seven, and David made it to the same age, and my brother gave up the ghost even before that. And I’m not sure that there is a cure for regret. I suspect not.
Nick Hornby
I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity.The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain.
Pico Iyer
I want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable--indescribable--my misery amazing.
Charles Dickens
I took my pill at eleven. An hour and half later I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers -- a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-coloured carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation -- the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
Aldous Huxley
I am not sure,' Mordecai told Thomas, 'whether omens can be trusted.''Of course they can.''I should like to hear your reasons. But show me your urine first.''You said I was cured,' Thomas protested. 'Eternal vigilance, dear Thomas, is the price of health. Piss for me.
Bernard Cornwell
I try not to make plans. God always laughs at your plans. I’m going to keep the door open, and keep the page blank, and see what gets painted upon it.
Tom Hiddleston
But for a moment Dirk had a sense of inifinite loss and sadness that somewhere among the frenzy of information noise that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods.
Douglas Adams
I flung open the door. I got a momentary flash of about a hundred and fifteen cats of all sizes and colours scrapping in the middle of the room, and then they all shot past me with a rush and out of the front door; and all that was left of the mobscene was the head of a whacking big fish, lying on the carpet and staring up at me in a rather austere sort of way, as if it wanted a written explanation and apology.
P.G. Wodehouse
It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now--independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one's own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with one's neighbors--are essentially those on which the of an individualist society rests. Collectivism has nothing to put in their place, and in so far as it already has destroyed then it has left a void filled by nothing but the demand for obedience and the compulsion of the individual to what is collectively decided to be good.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Well, then, what's the plan now? You can't stay here forever.'My plan was indeed to stay there forever.
Olivia Sudjic
I wanted so badly for there to be more. I ached for there to be more than my crappy little life.' He shakes his head. 'And there was more. I just couldn't see it.
Patrick Ness
When a man admits guilt we have to believe him. We cannot set ourselves to proving to him that he is wrong. Otherwise the law courts would never function.
Hilary Mantel
Living is Easy with Eyes Closed.
John Lennon
Her stomach lurches. She fancies him sooo much - she is powerless to resist. How can she possibly? She knows it's wrong: he has a girlfriend - he lives with her, for goodness' sake - and what they're doing is unfair, cruel. She is not sure what he's said to his girlfriend to wangle a night away and she doesn't want to know. She would hate it if it was done to her - she has never seen herself as the kind of girl who would steal another woman's man. She and Anna have always been most disapproving about women who do that, arguing through college and beyond that there are plenty of available men out there, that it is quite unnecessary to go for those already spoken for. But she has liked Simon since day one, and he is the one who initiated this whole thing. He is the one who blew her away with a clandestine kiss just a week ago, who asked if he could come back and stay at hers afterwards; he is the one who doubtless made unconvincing excuses when he returned home the next day. And it only took that single night to open this Pandora's box of mutual passion, being together was far, far better than it should have been, were it only a one-night stand. Karen senses that he really likes her.
Sarah Rayner
The avarice, the hunger for materialistic possessions and the dependency upon alcohol had gradually become stronger and stronger. And now, it was the sum total of what she was.
Sue Fortin
Caricature: putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.
Joseph Conrad
Do not let us speak of darker days let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days: these are great days - the greatest days our country has ever lived.
Winston Churchill
The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.
Margot Fonteyn
The adult world may seem a cold and empty place, with no fairies and no Father Christmas, no Toyland or Narnia, no Happy Hunting Ground where mourned pets go, and no angels - guardian or garden variety. But there are also no devils, no hellfire, no wicked witches, no ghosts, no haunted houses, no daemonic possession, no bogeymen or ogres. Yes, Teddy and Dolly turn out not to be really alive. But there are warm, live, speaking, thinking, adult bedf ellows to hold, and many of us find it a more rewarding kind of love than the childish affection for stuffed toys, however soft and cuddly they may be.
Richard Dawkins
And he glanced down at Mercy beside him, and saw in her face such radiant goodness, such a calm certainty, that it seemed to him that if he could only be with her all his life, he should know a love, and happiness, and peace that he had never known before.
Edward Rutherfurd
The bonds of family bind us up, support us, help us. And they are also a bond from which it is difficult, perhaps impossible to extricate oneself.
Neil Gaiman
For the rest, she grew used to the life that she was leading - used to the enormous sleepless nights, the cold, the dirt, the boredom, and the horrible communism of the Square. After a day or two she had ceased to feel even a flicker of surprise at her situation. She had come, like everyone about her, to accept this monstrous existence almost as though it were normal. The dazed, witless feeling that she had known on the way to the hopfields had come back upon her more strongly than before. It is the common effect of sleeplessness and still more of exposure. To live continuously in the open air, never going under a roof for more than an hour or two, blurs your perceptions like a strong light glaring in your eyes or a noise drumming in your ears. You act and plan and suffer, and yet all the while it is as though everything were a little out of focus, a little unreal. The world, inner and outer, grows dimmer till it reaches almost the vagueness of a dream.
George Orwell
Your authority as a believer comes from Jesus’s triumph over the enemy.
Pedro Okoro
Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.
Simon Schama
I don't want to sew.How else will the buttons get onto the coat?
Diane Samuels
Spirituality is for people. It’s not just for those who you might have read about in books, it’s for people.
Belsebuub
If in the place of God we write “Reality”, “Nature”, “Unknowable”, or “Zero”, it matters not one whit; the equation is just as obscure; for all we have done is to replace a by b, c, d, or e, not knowing what these letters mean. The symbol has changed, but what it symbolizes remains as inscrutable.
J.F.C. Fuller
The man who can keep order can rule the world, but the man who can bear disorder is truly free.
Gillian Cross
In History, stagnant waters, whether they be stagnant waters of custom or those of despotism, harbour no life; life is dependent on the ripples created by a few eccentric individuals. In homage to that life and vitality, the community has to brave certain perils and must countenance a measure of heresy. One must live dangerously if one wants to live at all.
Herbert Read
You can't know, you can only believe - or not.
C.S. Lewis
The power of Allah: no sound, no shape, no form. But when it manifests, none can resist it.
Idries Shah
Inspiration comes from your writing. Thoughts meander subliminally through our subconscious, at night when we sleep the brain is working. In the act of writing, phrases come out and you think: wow, did I write this? Did I have that insight? Sometimes you know something is good, good within your own limits, and those parts make life worth living.
Chloe Thurlow
Girls are much too clever to fall out of their prams
J.M. Barrie
I'm not unlucky at love, just incredibly lucky with celibacy.
Tim Heaton