Quotes by British Authors - Page 427

Charity knew that she had to be up early in the morning. And she knew that a weepy, silly, ridiculously old-fashioned love story was not the thing to watch with a broken heart. Nevertheless, she watched. And wept. And was still smiling when she fell asleep at three o'clock in the morning, with the remote in her hand and the telly still going.
Elizabeth Jane Howard
Without a story there is no meaning.And the nature of the meaning depends on the nature of the story.To understand this is to understand the true power of stories.And so, to control the stories, to be the one doing the telling...Well now, wouldn't that be quite a thing...?
Steven Hall
As has been long observed, men are people, but women are women.
Cordelia Fine
In an earlier age, it might have been possible to believe that goodness would prevail over pride, but not anymore. The proud could be proud with impunity, because there was nobody to contradict him in his pride and because narcissism was no longer considered a vice. That was what the whole cult of celebrity was about, she thought; and we fêted these people and fed their vanity.
Alexander McCall Smith
The Law saith, Where is thy righteousness, goodness, and satisfaction? The Gospel saith, Christ is thy righteousness, goodness, and satisfaction.
Patrick Hamilton
Hermione was screaming again: the sound went through Harry like physical pain.
J.K. Rowling
But miracles are not for the asking; they come only when the stern eyes of God droop shut for a moment, and Our Lady takes advantage of His inattention to grant an illicit mercy. God...is an Anglican, whereas Our Lady is of the True Faith; the two of Them have an uneasy relationship, unable to agree on anything, except that if They divorce, the Devil will leap gleefully into the breach.
Michel Faber
He was, after all, just a man. And not merely a narrative.
Hanif Kureishi
The true strong and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small.
Samuel Johnson
I came to get you. I knew you'd freak
Holly Smale
Marianne was silent; it was impossible for her to say what she did not feel, however trivial the occasion…
Jane Austen
A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.
Charles Lamb
It is not easy to be a pioneer-but oh it is fascinating! I would not trade one moment even the worst moment for all the riches in the world.
Elizabeth Blackwell
The world is full of beauty as other worlds above And if we did our duty it might be as full of love.
Gerald Massey
Take what life can give you, Ana, and do not trouble about the offerings which are laid in the tombs for time to crumble.
H. Rider Haggard
Typical of Hell, thought Chen: overdone and ostentatious and overwhelming, designed to cow an already beaten populace."Wow" he said. The demon grinned sympathetically."It is a bit excessive, isn't it?""Who does it belong to?""My employer is the First Lord of Banking. Head of the Ministry of Wealth.
Liz Williams
Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it.
Richard Dawkins
Perhaps everything you say is true and these are the death throes of the human race, but even if that was true, I would not lose faith. There must be hope, and I must fight for my Emperor against Chaos and it's servants. That is insanity.Wrong, it's being human.
Ben Counter
James had taken his own life, but the need to do so was not something easily explained. He had the life he wanted: money, a home, a job, a wife, a good friend. I’d known people who died at their own hand because life became unbearable, or because something happened, something terrible. That wasn’t so for James—there was something inside him, something a part of him, something over which he had no control, but which had absolute control over him.
Hazel Butler
Each time he came he would twist my defenceless body into a different pose, as if I were his very own doll
Rachel Abbott
I collect words--they are sweets in the mouth of sound.
Sally Gardner
Were there none who were discontented with what they have the world would never reach anything better.
Florence Nightingale
The ultimate paradox, of course, is that even though we're all going to die, we've all got to live in the meantime…
Brian Cox
As the story grew, it put down roots into the past and threw out unexpected branches .
J.R.R. Tolkien
It is notorious that the news of the Emancipation Proclamation was kept from the people of Texas and not celebrated until 'Juneteenth'. There may be those in Texas now who believe they can insulate their state—a state that had its own courageous revolution—from the news of evolution and from the writing in 1786 of a Constitution that refuses to mention religion except when demarcating and limiting its role in the public square. But we promise them today that they will join their fore-runners in the flat-earth community, and in the mad clerical clique of those who believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Yes, they will be in schoolbooks—as a joke on the epic scale of William Jennings Bryan. We shall be fair, and take care to ensure that their tale is told.
Christopher Hitchens
I got my dad a great father's Day present. He called to say: 'Ach. Zis present is so good I now think it vas almost vorth having children.
Johann Hari
As if reading her mind, he leaned into her again, pupils dark, irises glowing like a forest caught in the last rays of sun before dusk… “Do you want me to make you come?”“Is that a trick question?
Dianna Hardy
They had holes to fill on every page and jammed in any vaguely newsworthy string of words provided it didn't include expletives, which they were apparently saving for their own use around the office.
Tom Rachman
Every time you see someone's bright-and-shiny, remember: They have their own crappy truths too. Of course they do. And every time you see your own crappy truth and feel despair and think, 'Is this my life?', remember: It's not. Everyone's got a bright-and-shiny, even if it's hard to find sometimes.
Sophie Kinsella
The acquisition of knowledge has become too intimidating a prospect for them, so they shun it in favour of faith.
Mark Hodder
Diazapam (that's valium), temazepam, lithium, ECT, HRT - how long must I stay on this stuff? Don't give me anymore!
Morrissey
Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
There is no greater will on earth than the will to survive. These fine people, answering my father's call to arms, had the will in spades and droves. - Lord Tristan Dracanburh, Ethandun
Alexandra May
I will always miss the person I thought U are. But not the selfish, unkind, insensitive and heartless person U turned out to be.
Lily Amis
The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same.
George Eliot
Witches never existed, except in people’s minds. All there was in the olden days was women and some men who believed in herbal cures and in folklore and in the wish to fly. Witches? We’re all witches in one way or another. Witches was the invention of mankind, son. We’re all witches beneath the skin.
Ian Rankin
... go down to the country, take a house, get interested in local politics, in local scandal, in village gossip. Take an inquisitive and violent interest in your neighbours.
Agatha Christie
After all, you’re only an immortal until someone manages to kill you. After that, you were just long-lived.
Simon R. Green
I don't believe in angels and I have trouble with the whole God thing. I don't want to say I don't believe in God but I don't think I do. But I believe in people who do.
Billy Connolly
If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were uneducated. But, as it is, a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. To be ignorant and simple now -- not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground -- would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether. Most of all, perhaps we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many place is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune form the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.
C.S. Lewis
I have a bad habit of wolfing down things that catch my eye.
Katze Snow
What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?
W Somerset Maugham
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty?
George Orwell
They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then—how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal.
Daphne du Maurier
There is hardly anything in the world that some man can't make a little worse and sell a little cheaper and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.
John Ruskin
I stand out not because I am six feet tall,But because I feel six feet tall.
Anthony T.Hincks
The importance of setting a date, as in choosing a colour, is a matter of selection. Orange may be seen equally well as 'the decline and fall of red' or 'the rise and triumph of yellow'.
Donald Thomas
Love is the only effective counter to death.
Maureen Duffy
To the sea, to the sea! The white gulls are crying,The wind is blowing, and the white foam is flying.West, west away, the round sun is falling, Grey ship, grey ship, do you hear them calling, The voices of my people that have gone before me? I will leave, I will leave the woods that bore me;For our days are ending and our years failing.I will pass the wide waters lonely sailing.Long are the waves on the Last Shore falling,Sweet are the voices in the Lost Isle calling,In Eressea, in Elvenhome that no man can discover,Where the leaves fall not: land of my people forever!
J.R.R. Tolkien
What', said he, ' makes the difference between man and all the rest of the animal creation? Every beast that strays beside me has the same corporeal necessities with myself; he is hungry and crops the grass, he is thirsty and drinks the stream, his thirst and hunger are appeased, he is satisfied and sleeps; he rises again and is hungry, he is again fed and is at rest. I am hungry and thirsty like him, but when thirst and hunger cease I am not at rest; I am, like him, pained with want, but am not, like him, satisfied with fullness. The intermediate hours are tedious and gloomy; I long again to be hungry that I may again quicken my attention. The birds peck the berries or the corn, and fly away to the groves where they sit in seeming happiness on the branches, and waste their lives in tuning one unvaried series of sounds. I likewise can call the lutanist and the singer, but the sounds that pleased me yesterday weary me today, and will grow yet more wearisome tomorrow. I can discover within me no power of perception which is not glutted with its proper pleasure, yet I do not feel myself delighted. Man has surely some latent sense for which this place affords no gratification, or he has some desires distinct from sense which must be satisfied before he can be happy.
Samuel Johnson
For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.
Arthur Conan Doyle
He knows not where he's going,For the ocean will decide,Its not the destination,It's the glory of the ride
Edward Monkton
The progress of the world can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world.
George Eliot
He said that it was very difficult to become an astronaut. I said that I knew. You had to become an officer in the air force and you had to take lots of orders and be prepared to kill other human beings, and I couldn't take orders. Also I didn't have 20/20 vision, which you needed to be a pilot.
Mark Haddon
Marriages would in general be as happy and often more so if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor.
Samuel Johnson
It’s not about the content we are creating but how much content our customers are creating for us.
Roger James Hamilton
The dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its meaningless-ness.
Martin Esslin
And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. (...) almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. (...) [women in fiction were] not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that
Virginia Woolf
Happy the man and happy he alone He who can call today his own He who secure within can say "Tomorrow do thy worst For I have lived today."
Henry Fielding
Who shall I shoot? You choose. Now, listen very carefully: where's your coffee? You've got coffee, haven't you? C'mon, everyone's got coffee! Spill the beans!
Terry Pratchett