Quotes by British Authors - Page 420

Old age is the new childhood.
Hanif Kureishi
She kissed him but he didn't seem to recognize it.
Naomi Wood
Believing, too, that is not enough. You cannot just believe. Your belief must have a purpose.
Ian Baucom
The perfect surrender and humiliation were undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man.
C.S. Lewis
The ideal adventurer needs... the quality of not being content to mind his own affairs...
P.G. Wodehouse
If you always make the right decision, the safe decision, the one most people make, you will be the same as everyone else.
Paul Arden
The painter must give a completely free rein to any feeling or sensations he may have and reject nothing to which he is naturally drawn.
Lucian Freud
Most often it is in heartache that we love more boldly.
Jill Telford
It is no longer a question of a Christian going about to convert others to the faith, but of each one being ready to listen to the other and so to grow together in mutual understanding.
Bede Griffiths
After Puckoon I swore I'd never write another book. This is it
Spike Milligan
If you want to be a writer, you have to keep writing, all the time, and when you're not writing, be thinking about and planning writing.
May J. Panayi
To establish that a rule is likely to be true, one must try to prove it false.
Stuart Sutherland
Around them there was nothing but silence, as if all the world were holding its breath.
Philip Pullman
I didn't get the impression that the policeman cared much about the whole thing either. After another thirty minutes of ruthless interrogation ('Can you ve'fy you eat banan' pancake?') he let me go asking me not to leave Khao San within 24 hours
Alex Garland
Socrates famously said that the unconsidered life is not worth living. He meant that a life lived without forethought or principle is a life so vulnerable to chance, and so dependent on the choices and actions of others, that it is of little real value to the person living it. He further meant that a life well lived is one which has goals, and integrity, which is chosen and directed by the one who lives it, to the fullest extent possible to a human agent caught in the webs of society and history.
A.C. Grayling
I don't believe that consciousness is generated by the brain. I believe that the brain is more of a reciever of consciousness.
Graham Hancock
To be without trees would, in the most literal way, to be without our roots.
Richard Mabey
A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things.
Bill Bryson
The smart strategist allows strategy to be shaped by events. Good reactions can make great strategy. Strategy involves competition of goals, and the risk is the difference between those goals and the ability of the organization to achieve them. So part of the risk is created by the strategy.
Max McKeown
Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas every day, we read novels by the millions, and buy records by the billions. 'We the people'--affect the making and quality of most of our culture, but not our art.
Banksy
They want dancing girls! They want thrills! They want elephants! They want people falling off roofs! They want dreams! The world is full of little people with big dreams!
Terry Pratchett
The ego hurts you like this: you become obsessed with the one person who does not love you. blind to the rest who do.
Warsan Shire
Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.
John Fowles
It takes me a while to drag him out, he's got himself stuck to the axle, and by the time I am done and stand over the body something strange has started to happen. The alley's filled with a half-dozen cats, runty little things with their ribs showing and their tails worn high like they're pointing to the moon. I stand there, breathing froth into the snowflakes and watch them gather round me, soft kitty paws, and now and then a patrol car rolls past in the distance. The cats are circling us, tails cocked at the moon, their muzzles bloodied by the tail lights' glow. They are vicious bastards, let me tell you: frost on their whiskers, eyes like cut glass, a half-dozen pairs, on me and the dead man. And then they start licking. Licking at the snow I mean, the blood in the snow, they lap it up like mother's milk. And all the while from their throats, from their whole bodies, there issues this sound, you hear it with your skin, it's like an engine running under your palm. That's when I realize they are purring, man, purring as they feed on the midget's death.
Dan Vyleta
Why doesn't hatred kill desire? I would have given anything to sleep. I would have behaved like a schoolboy if I had believed in the possibility of a substitute. But there was a time when I had tried to find a substitute, and it hadn't worked.
Graham Greene
It did not seem odd to Max that what he had imagined about Stumps was really true, because this was exactly how games you made up worked. Of course they were true. In your mind.
Pauline Clarke
Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake.
Julian Barnes
The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.
Alain de Botton
Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes–characters even–caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you
Diane Setterfield
I found most of my friends quite content to be used as tax-material, even though the sums of money taken from them were employed against their own beliefs and interests. They had lived so long under the system of using others, and then in their turn being used by them, that they were like hypnotized subjects, and looked on this subjecting and using of each other as a part of the necessary and even Providential order of things. The great machine had taken possession of their souls.
Auberon Herbert
Our task is to take suffering in stride, not as if it is a pleasure (it isn’t), but in the knowledge that God will not let it overwhelm us and that He will use it, by His own supernatural alchemy, to three good ends, at least. 1) Our suffering produces character; 2) Our suffering glorifies God; 3) Suffering fulfills the law of the harvest (John 12:24), Rediscovering Holiness by J.I. Packer, pgs. 232-239.
J.I. Packer
You wind back the clock several decades when you visit a Lonely Place; and when you touch down, you half expect a cabin attendant to announce, "We have now landed in Lonely Place's Down-at-Heels Airport, where the local time is 1943 and the temperature is...frozen.
Pico Iyer
Hi!'The chirpy little voice greeted me with such energised enthusiasm it made me jump nearly a foot out of my seat. I turned around, expecting to see the usual cocky little Bezzer-in-training Tyler, who every once in a while enjoys pissing off as many people on the bus as possible, but to my surprise it was the scruffy little quiet Year 7 who sits at the front of the bus with his big orange hair bouncing around.'Hello,' I replied dubiously. (You can't assume that a kid isn't intending to give you grief just because he has ginger hair, not these days. What is the world coming to?)
Tom Clempson
The deep Feminine, the mystery of consciousness, She who is life, is longing for our transformation as much as we are. She holds back, allowing us free reign to choose, nudging us occasionally with synchronicities, illness, births and deaths… But when we make space for Her, she rushes into all the gaps, engulfing us with her desire for life and expression. This is what She longs for, this is what we are for: experiencing the Feminine through ourselves. We simply need to slow down, and find where to put our conscious attention. And it is this, this willingness to look again, this willingness to put consciousness onto our places of unconscious, to express what we have always avoided, which starts the process of unblocking, so that She may flow through.
Lucy H. Pearce
There are some upon this earth of yours who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name; who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.
Charles Dickens
This … perception of impermanence … gives rise to the knowledge that even those things which seem most intimate to us – such as our emotions – are transient states which come and go. … From … detached observation it … becomes clear that even one's conscious mind is but a process like everything else. Most people regard their mental life as their true inner essence ( … ), but insight meditation discloses that the stream of consciousness is just one more facet of the complex interaction of the five factors of individuality, and not what one 'really is'.
Damien Keown
It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can.
Bill Bryson
All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.
Diane Setterfield
Proportion is the heart of beauty.
Ken Follett
It's a kind of arrogance to be so certain you're past redemption.
Ellis Peters
The promise of power wasn't enough, he thought. So now she tempts me with knowledge.
Anthony Ryan
...it’s not just the person who fills a house, it’s their I’ll be back later!s, their toothbrushes and unused hats and coats, their belongingnesses.
David Mitchell
Some things you cannot stop happening.
Christie Watson
Sufism is experiential. Capacities, even those for learning beyond a certain point, are provoked by Sufis, by one's own efforts and what results from them, and by an element of what is referred to by Sufis as the Divine.
Idries Shah
The doctor asked me recently how I was feeling within myself, I replied, “absolutely fine doctor, but I’m terribly lonely without myself.
Benny Bellamacina
Do not seek praise. Seek criticism.
Paul Arden
When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.
Virginia Woolf
When I saw how many people were objecting to the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea, I realized that there needed to be an open and honest discussion about the toxicity of the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit and the health and safety issues of astronomical observatories.
Steven Magee
What a waste of time it would be to insist that everyone develop each of the specialties we call upon to an equal level. We'd get bogged down in remedial training programs, trying to get the cornet players up to speed with the computer programmers, sacrificing the tends to be exceptional in so many individual situations in order to be average in all of them.
Robert Watson
But a part of me lies buried in lace and roses on a riverbank in France-a part of me is broken off forever. A part of me will be unflyable, stuck in the climb.
Elizabeth Wein
... Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism....
Terry Eagleton
The age can be impressed. Anything will be accepted by men if you will but preach it with tremendous enthusiasm, emotion, persuasionnergy and living earnestness.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
A sense of the value of time ... is an essential preliminary to efficient work it is the only method of avoiding hurry.
Arnold Bennett
He thought of the number of girls and women she had seen marry, how many homes with children in them she had seen grow up around her, how she had contentedly pursued her own lone quite path-for him.~ Stephen speaking of Rachael
Charles Dickens
Always be wary of people who use quotes. I don't know who said that.' - Murdoc Niccals
Gorillaz
But you will come to regret this, Abigail. This won’t be like one of the memories that fritters away into nothing when you come out of that game. This will leave a stain. You’ll carry for it for ever, when you could have had a few more years of blissful innocence. Are you sure, now?
Alastair Reynolds
My darling love, I think you have a fundamental misconception about what it means to be a great dandy. I have better taste than anyone else so I don't care what anyone else thinks about anything. I am right and they are wrong.
Miranda Neville
Yes,' said Dumbledore. 'He'll have that scar for ever.''Couldn't you do something about it, Dumbledore?''Even if I could, I wouldn't. Scars can come in useful. I have one myself above my left knee which is a perfect map of the London underground.
J.K. Rowling
When two Englishmen meet their first talk is of the weather.
Samuel Johnson
When she at last pressed her mouth to his, it felt like coming home. He tasted of fire and smoke and earth, and fresh bread and soap and something so clean, so pure, it was like spring water to her lips.
Rebecca Brooks