Quotes by British Authors - Page 422

The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?" "You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers," said the Controller sarcastically. "You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to.
Aldous Huxley
The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
G.K. Chesterton
Pain is inevitable... Suffering is optional. We will all have to endure trauma and challenges. What matters is how we move forward afterward. Do we keep carrying the trauma and its causes in our mind? Or can we find a way to let go of them, to end our own suffering?...This is where mindfulness can help us.
David Michie
For my last birthday, Dad bought me a pocket-sized Collins English Dictionary. It would only fit in a pocket that had been specially designed.
Joe Dunthorne
A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.
Virginia Woolf
Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness.
Charles Stross
It's clever but is it art?
Rudyard Kipling
There are no perfect leaders.
Max McKeown
If you feel that you are going without go within
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Misery generates hate.
Charlotte Brontë
Obsessed with Christine to the end, his last statement as he left his cell was, 'to kill is the final possession'. But Muldowney was wrong. He had never possessed Christine; the resistance burning within her was too great.
Clare Mulley
Everything passed, and what trace of its passage remained? It seemed to Kitty that they were all, the human race, like the drops of water in that river and they flowed on, each so close to the other and yet so far apart, a nameless flood, to the sea. When all things lasted so short a time and nothing mattered very much, it seemed pitiful that men, attaching an absurd importance to trivial objects, should make themselves and one another so unhappy.
W Somerset Maugham
His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at their feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet.
Virginia Woolf
Dear . . .You’re the poem I couldn’t finish The journey I should have never started I saw tragedy in our ending My pen bled its heart out trying to change it But you were the fight I didn’t want to lose The addiction I didn’t want to quitYet there was only one of us holding on I wasn’t attached to the man you areBut the one you could be I tried to build where there was no foundationCreate a fairy tale on blank pages But some stories need not be told, let alone written You’ll read my words and won’t be moved Your arrogance will not soften You won’t be changed Your heart, if you should have one, will not bend or break The worst part of it all Is this poem is about you and you’ll never even know it
Samantha King
So what are you doing around here?" I ask, feeling all jittery, but this time it's in a good way."Oh, I was just in the area." he says vaguely. "I thought I'd take Welly for a walk..." He trails off and stuffs his hands in his pockets. Those butterflies are going crazy in there.
Alexandra Potter
This visit has compacted the court's quarrels and intrigues, trapped them in the small space within the town's walls. The travelers have become as intimate with each other as cards in a pack: contiguous, but their paper eyes blind.
Hilary Mantel
I am grateful, and would thank the Gods(if there were any to thank) that I have finally mastered this art of forgetting--of murdering the memory.
Caryl Phillips
But God is the God of the waves and the billows, and they are still His when they come over us; and again and again we have proved that the overwhelming thing does not overwhelm. Once more by His interposition deliverance came. We were cast down, but not destroyed.
Amy Carmichael
Harry: "Have you…" he began. "I mean, who … has anyone you known ever died?" "Yes," said Luna simply, "my mother. She was a quite extraordinary witch, you know, but she did like to experiment and one of her spells went rather badly wrong one day. I was nine." "I’m sorry," Harry mumbled. "Yes, it was rather horrible," said Luna conversationally. "I still feel very sad about it sometimes. But I’ve still got Dad. And anyway, it’s not as though I’ll never see Mum again, is it?" "Er – isn’t it?" said Harry uncertainly. She shook her head in disbelief. "Oh, come on. You heard them, just behind the veil, didn’t you?" " You mean…" "In that room in the archway. They were just lurking out of sight, that’s all, you heard them.
J.K. Rowling
What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?
Logan Pearsall Smith
Whose ideas breathe through me? Am I a thief? Do I dream my own dreams?
Suzy Davies
If life seems jolly rotten, There’s something you’ve forgotten.
Graham Chapman
He would never understand women, he thought. They were life’s great mystery.
Conn Iggulden
We wish to discuss a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid. (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biologic interest.
Rosalind Franklin
Yes – But – Well, it is yours to choose. I do not force anyone. Is it a hard choice?” “No-o.” Judith shook her head. “Except that I do not know which to choose.
Jane Gaskell
One hour of life crowded to the full with glorious action and filled with noble risks is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum.
Walter Scott
Kissing don't last: cookery do.
George Meredith
There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.
G.K. Chesterton
Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man's soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory––away the aeroplane shot.
Virginia Woolf
As the light upon the leaves of trees, as the voice of clear waters, as the stars above the mists of the world, such was her glory and her loveliness; and in her face was a shining light.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Thank goodness my education was neglected.
Beatrix Potter
Study history, Alleluia. In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economics is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects. This Gibreel of yours: maybe he's how history happens to you.
Salman Rushdie
I need complicated railroad journeys and people speaking to me in foreign languages to keep me happy. I want to see the world and write stories about everything I see.
Elizabeth Wein
Alien Affairs. Bad name I always thought, makes it sound like they're shagging them rather than investigating them.
Peter F. Hamilton
In my inmost heart I believed that I could succeed where others failed, and now I had the opportunity to test myself.
Arthur Conan Doyle
There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.
Virginia Woolf
...A vision from a universe where the Equal Rights Amendment--with its redefinition of personhood--is rejected by the house of deputies: A universe where to die is to become property and to be created outwith a gift of parental DNA is to be doomed to slavery.
Charles Stross
...we spoke about dying. [Prim] told me how she'd nearly died of malaria. She said that she didn't mind the thought of death. That realizing you're going to die actually makes life better as it's only then that you decide to live the life you really want to live.
Jennifer Ryan
I'm living so far beyond my means that we may almost be said to be living apart.
Saki
Your grief is something to be admired – the pain of severance. A scar where something used to be.
Simon Van Booy
We are beginning to play with ideas of ecology, and although we immediately trivialize these into commerce or politics, there is at least an impulse still in the human breast to unify and thereby sanctify the total natural world, of which we are. ... There have been, and still are, in the world many different and even contrasting epistemologies which have been alike in stressing an ultimate unity, and, although this is less sure, which have also stressed the notion that ultimate unity is aesthetic. The uniformity of these views gives hope that perhaps the great authority of quantitative science may be insufficient to deny an ultimate unifying beauty. I hold to the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply, an epistemological mistake.
Gregory Bateson
Many of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too.
Salman Rushdie
Freedom within is embodied in things as well as people. Like coins tossed into a wishing well, they contain our hopes and dreams.
Fennel Hudson
The first time you meet Winston [Churchill] you see all his faults and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.
Lady Constance Lytton
I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.
P.G. Wodehouse
Mothers were much too sharp. They were like dogs. Buster always sensed when anything was out of the ordinary, and so did mothers. Mothers and dogs both had a kind of second sight that made them see into people's minds and know when anything unusual was going on.
Enid Blyton
Abelard to Heloise – Banish me, therefore, for ever from your heart – it is the best advice I can give, for the remembrance of a person we have loved guiltily can not be hurtful, whatever advances we may have made in the way of virtue.
Emily Williams
...somehow, the very errors and faults of one individual served to call out the higher excellencies in another, and so they re-acted upon each other, and the result of short discords was exceeding harmony and peace.
Elizabeth Gaskell
Places are people as well as rocks, trees and buildings. Places are moments in time.
A.J. Dalton
The true moments of one's life were sadder for the fact that they must always be synchronized with the ordinary: with rail timetables, with breaks in traffic.
Chris Cleave
Don't think it. Do it!
Anthony T.Hincks
Very few of the common people realize that the political and legal systems have been corrupted by decades of corporate lobbying.
Steven Magee
Inspiring others is the pathway to your own discoveries
Robin Craig Clark
If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.
Roald Dahl
Some people are thoroughly self-centred. This thing goes with me. I need it for moral support.
Diana Wynne Jones
The clock in the church tower said 4.32, as it had done for three hundred years. It was right once a day and that was better than no clock at all.
Spike Milligan
My father was one of those men who sit in a room and you can feel it: the simmer, the sense of some unpredictable force that might, at any moment, break loose, and do something terrible. [Burnside, p. 27]
John Burnside
There is no correct way to write a novel, or rather, there is only one, and that one way is to make it interesting. That is very easily said, but how do you make your writing interesting?The answer to the question is, that you write interestingly only about the things that genuinely interest you. This is an infallible rule.
Ted Hughes
Poor Mr. Smith, having been so rudely dragged from his high horse, was never able to mount it again, and completed the lecture in a manner not at all comfortable to himself.
Anthony Trollope
Open your mind to the infinite possibilities that exist for you. Born through your dreams, crystallised into form by your desires, given impetus by your expectations, then made real through your beliefs.
Steven Redhead