Quotes by British Authors - Page 417

This is a world where things move at their own pace, including a tiny lift Fortey and I shared with a scholarly looking elderly man with whom Fortey chatted genially and familiarly as we proceeded upwards at about the rate that sediments are laid down.When the man departed, Fortey said to me: "That was a very nice chap named Norman who's spent forty-two years studying one species of plant, St. John's wort. He retired in 1989, but he still comes in every week.""How do you spend forty-two years on one species of plant?" I asked."It's remarkable, isn't it?" Fortey agreed. He thought for a moment. "He's very thorough apparently." The lift door opened to reveal a bricked over opening. Fortey looked confounded. "That's very strange," he said. "That used to be Botany back there." He punched a button for another floor, and we found our way at length to Botany by means of back staircases and discreet trespass through yet more departments where investigators toiled lovingly over once-living objects.
Bill Bryson
This revolution - will it be a living?''We must hope so. Look, I have to go, I'm visiting a client. He's going to be hanged tomorrow.''Is that usual?''Oh, they always hang my clients. Even in property and matrimonial cases.
Hilary Mantel
Suddenly Damask found herself staring down at the flowers through a dazzle of tears. The words sounded so innocent and so disarming - she remembered that she hadn't wanted to come through the beautiful woods at all; and there was no danger, nothing wrong except the wickedness of her own heart. She looked at Danny's big, brown, work-scarred hands gently gathering the flowers and her love for him was a physical pain. Oh, how she loved him; how she wished that he would ask her to marry him!"Norah Lofts
Norah Lofts
There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford.
John Bradford
Most politicians are corrupt as they do not represent the masses that voted for them, but rather they choose to return numerous favors to the corporations that funded their election campaigns.
Steven Magee
What kind of God is it who's upset by a cartoon in Da
Salman Rushdie
Sometimes in the company of others I find a disagreeable spirit of competitiveness kicks in and each person is shamed into spending rather more than he would have wished. This is a historically established syndrome, of course. One Magus going to Bethlehem would probably have sprung for a box of After Eights. Three Magi on the same trip found themselves laden with gold, frankincense and myrrh and bitterly comtemplating their overdrafts.
James Hamilton-Paterson
[In 16th century European society] Marriage was the triumphal arch through which women, almost without exception, had to pass in order to reach the public eye. And after marriage followed, in theory, the total self-abnegation of the woman.
Antonia Fraser
There are times when life seems like a struggle where the only reward you get for hanging on is the chance to struggle some more.
Michael Marshall Smith
I always thought they were fabulous monsters!" said the Unicorn. "Is it alive?""It can talk," said Haigha, solemnly.The Unicorn looked dreamily at Alice, and said, "Talk, child."Alice could not help her lips curling up into a smile as she began: "Do you know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too! I never saw one alive before!""Well, now that we have seen each other," said the Unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?
Lewis Carroll
And I'm made up of everyone I've ever met who's changed the way I think. So who is "me"?
Terry Pratchett
Oh, of course," said Ron, clapping a hand to his forehead. "I forgot we'll be hunting down Voldemort in a mobile library.
J.K. Rowling
There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so often, of missing her. But she knew that this was an illusion, a mirage, and that the distance between them was now infinite, unyielding.
Jhumpa Lahiri
When you are in his sort of business - now my business - you are not defined by who you are but who you are not.
Anthony Horowitz
She was not a woman likely to settle for equality when sex gave her an advantage.
Anthony Delano
What you learn is often determined by what you need to know. If you think you're weak, you will learn that you are strong. If you think you are indestructible, you will learn that you are fragile. In the end though, you will learn that you are human. You are no more and no less than all those who are learning their lessons as you learn yours.
John Bingham
Yet for a moment it seemed to him that the men who had dragged marble from Italy and porphyry from Portugal, who had ransacked the jungle for its rarest woods and paid their millions to build this opulent and fantastical theatre, had done so in order that a young girl with loose brown hair should move across its stage, drawing her future from its empty air.
Eva Ibbotson
How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?”Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said.“Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?...
George Orwell
There are few sorrows however poignant in which a good income is of no avail.
Logan Pearsall Smith
She was, in short, melted by his distress, as so often happens with the female sex. Poets have frequently commented on this. You are probably familiar with the one who said, "Oh, woman in our hours of ease tum tumty tiddly something please, when something something something brow, a something something something thou.
P.G. Wodehouse
Positive thoughts and actions when persistent can turn around any negativity.
Steven Redhead
Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour--landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard...But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants?
Virginia Woolf
And oh, heaven - the crowded playhouse, the stench of perfume upon heated bodies, the silly laughter and the clatter, the party in the Royal box - the King himself present - the impatient crowd in the cheap seats stamping and shouting for the play to begin while they threw orange peel on to the stage.
Daphne du Maurier
I was wary of my sister's cooking, which invariably consisted of a tubular pasta and economy cheese, charred black on the surface, with either tinned tuna or lardy mince lurking beneath the molten crust ... So that evening, in a tiny flat in Tooting, I was pushed into the tiny kitchen where sixteen people sat crammed around a tiny trestle table designed for pasting wallpaper, one of my sister's notorious pasta bakes smouldering in its centre like a meteorite, smelling of toasted cat food.
David Nicholls
No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.
G.K. Chesterton
Human cruelty can be infinite. Human generosity can be boundless.
David Mitchell
The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.
G.K. Chesterton
Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey.
Ouida
Mind led bodyto the edge of the precipice.They stared in desireat the naked abyss.If you love me, said mind,take that step into silence.If you love me, said body,turn and exist.
Anne Stevenson
The truth may hurt, but lies-they're vicious. They hide coiled up inside you, ready to strike without warning, without your even knowing they're there. Until it's too late.
Katie Dale
Be healthy by being outdoors in the natural daylight with nature!
Steven Magee
Sometimes you may have nothing yet without hope you've got less
Benny Bellamacina
He was clearly not the murderer whom Hawksmoor was seeking, but it was generally the innocent who confessed: in the course of many enquiries, Hawksmoor had come across those who accused themselves of crimes which they had not committed and who demanded to be taken away before they could do more harm. He was acquainted with such people and recognised them at once - although they were noticeable, perhaps, only for a slight twitch in the eye or the awkward gait with which they moved through the world. And they inhabited small rooms to which Hawksmoor would sometimes be called: rooms with a bed and a chair but nothing besides, rooms where they shut the door and began talking out loud, rooms where they sat all evening and waited for the night, rooms where they experienced blind panic and then rage as they stared at their lives. And sometimes when he saw such people Hawksmoor thought, this is what I will become, I will be like them because I deserve to be like them, and only the smallest accident separates me from them now.
Peter Ackroyd
ILikeThe WayThat when youTiltPoemsOn their sideTheyLook likeMiniatureCities FromA long wayAway. SkyscrapersMade outOfWords.
Matt Haig
The future is only the past again, entered through another gate.
Arthur Wing Pinero
The greatest domestic terrorists in the USA are either working for the corporate government or are funding it.
Steven Magee
Actors," he says, "should only be superficial on the surface.
Johnny Rich
A ham sandwich is better than nothing. Nothing is better than eternal happiness. So eternal happiness is beaten by a ham sandwich.
Mark Forsyth
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.
William Blake
Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.
Nick Hornby
The sky above us seems huge, vast. It’s clear and crisp and visibility is so good that, when I look up, I feel like I'm staring at an inverted, endless ocean. I'm sure the blue is the colour of water above sand and the tiny, wispy clouds look like waves breaking over distant swells. I envy the birds I see overhead, zipping joyfully from left to right and so far above the death and decay that pollute the lower levels. A day like this should be enjoyed completely. I should be able to forget what dwells in the towns around us, I should find it in myself to dismiss what happened at that crossing, I should.
Jack Croxall
There is no sadder symbol of the crippling poverty in which millions of peasants were forced to live than the image of a peasant and his son struggling to drag a plough through the mud.
Orlando Figes
In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles.
Graham Greene
Good does not exist without the evil and right does not hold weight without knowing the wrong.
Stephanie Hudson
Those who remember, remembered live on; those who forget, forgotten are gone.
Jonathan Clark
There is so little in the New Testament about sexual love, and most of it consists of Paul heaving a deep sigh and tolerating it like a weakness.
Michel Faber
Who covets more is evermore a slave.
Robert Herrick
But Andrew was right about one thing. Human beings need to tell stories. Historically, it's the quickest way we have for transmitting useful information to other members of our species. Stories are not simply nice things to have; they are essential survival tools. And yes, the stories we tell ourselves are just as important as the stories we tell other people.
Hugh MacLeod
...and in repose one might have admired so fine a specimen of English manhood, until the foppish ways, the affected movements, the perpetual inane laugh, brought one's admiration of Sir Percy Blakeney to an abrupt close.
Emmuska Orczy
Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.
P.D. James
You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage.
Terry Pratchett
As usurpation is the exercise of power, which another hath a right to; so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which no body can have a right to. And this is making use of the power any one has in his hands, not for the good of those who are under it, but for his own private separate advantage. When the governor, however intitled, makes not the law, but his will, the rule; and his commands and actions are not directed to the preservation of the properties of his people, but the satisfaction of his own ambition, revenge, covetousness, or any other irregular passion.
John Locke
It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration.
W Somerset Maugham
He found a set of encyclopedias—like Wikipedia, but paper and very bulky.
Michael Grant
There's no shame in enjoying the quiet life.
Daniel Radcliffe
Give preference to things of the greatest lasting value.
Steven Redhead
An author, whether good or bad, or between both, is an animal whom every body is privileged to attack: for though all are not able to write books, all conceive themselves able to judge them.
Matthew Lewis
The strange thing about falling in love is, we know what it looks and feels like. But we can’t really explain why it occurs and where all the madness it brings with it comes from.“Or why it just seems to happen like magic between two particular people but not others.”“The appearance of love seems totally irrational, inexplicable and without reason. Yet, when it happens it feels like the only thing that makes any sense. True love, I guess, is when it keeps on making sense after you actually get to know the other person.
Charlie Maclean
Your pain and anger will pass, but the guilt would remain with you for always.
Dodie Smith
I forget your name," I said."Most people spew shit from their arse," he retorted, "you manage it with your mouth.""Your mother gave birth through her arse," I said, "and you still reek of her shit.
Bernard Cornwell