Quotes by British Authors - Page 434

Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game 'or else people won't take it seriously'. Apparently it's like that. Your bid - for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity - will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.
C.S. Lewis
And a beautiful world we live in, when it is possible, and when many other such things are possible, and not only possible, but done-- done, see you!-- under that sky there, every day.
Charles Dickens
Who would care to question the ground of forgiveness or compassion?
Joseph Conrad
Don't worry. You're just as sane as I am-Luna Lovegood
J.K. Rowling
It is far. But there is no journey upon this earth that a man may not make if he sets his heart to it. There is nothing, Umbopa, that he cannot do, there are no mountains he may not climb, there are no deserts he cannot cross; save a mountain and a a desert of which you are spared the knowledge, if love leads him and he holds his life in his hand counting it as nothing, ready to keep it or to lose it as Providence may order.
H. Rider Haggard
You know what I'm sick of? Using my brain. All day long it's people and words and stress and meetings and books that you don't remember you're not really into until you open them on the train home and compromise and sometimes I just want to look at a picture of a dress. Followed by a picture of some cupcakes. And then a kitten.
Robyn Wilder
An electrical utility company that blatantly lies to law enforcement about an electrical fraud researcher would be considered suicidal by many people.
Steven Magee
In Collegium it had been the fashion, while he had been resident there, to paint death as a grey-skinned, balding Beetle man in plain robes, perhaps with a doctor's bag but more often an artificer's toolstrip and apron, like the man who came in, at the close of the day, to put out the lamps and still the workings of the machines.Among his own people, death was a swift insect, gleaming black, its wings a blur - too fast to be outrun and too agile to be avoided, the unplumbed void in which he swam was but the depth of a single facet of its darkly jewelled eyes.
Adrian Tchaikovsky
It is possible there are some things you want so badly that you will change your life to make them happen.
Elizabeth Wein
He realized this early on, and realized too that what people think are their lives are merely its conditions. The truth is closer than thought and lies buried in what we already know.
Simon Van Booy
When several creatures, men or animals, have worked together to overcome something offering resistance and have at last succeeded, there follows often a pause, as though they felt the propriety of paying respect to the adversary who has put up so good a fight. The great tree falls, splitting, cracking, rushing down in leaves to the final, shuddering blow along the ground. Then the foresters are silent, and do not at once sit down. After hours, the deep snowdrift has been cleared and the lorry is ready to take the men home out of the cold. But they stand a while, leaning on their spades and only nodding unsmilingly as the car-drivers go through, waving their thanks.
Richard Adams
In short, Nance, even was you going to the very devil himself, your mother and I would rather see you fly from us in joy, than stay with us in sorrow - and grow, maybe, to hate us, for keeping you from your fate.
Sarah Waters
Every trace of the passionate plumage of the cloudy sunset had been swept away, and a naked moon stood in a naked sky. The moon was so strong and full, that (by a paradox often to be noticed) it seemed like a weaker sun. It gave, not the sense of bright moonshine, but rather of a dead daylight.
G.K. Chesterton
When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth.
Terry Pratchett
I will do what I can
Jude Morgan
The practice is simple. Whatever you're doing, do that with total awareness.
Tony Samara
I don't understand, then, why, in the midst of all this, pregnant women - women trying to make rational decisions about their futures and, usually, that of their families, too - should be subject to more pressure about preserving life than, say, Vladimir Putin, the World Bank, or the Catholic Church.
Caitlin Moran
Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.
Christopher Hitchens
A student will find that he is more affected by one book which he has truly mastered than by 20 books which he has merely skimmed.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Is the whole world doomed to emotional trauma?
Helen Fielding
The house is seventies modern with sliding windows, gas-effect and a giant TV in the living room. There are almost no books. I'm not making any judgement. It's just the sort of thing I can't help but notice.
Anthony Horowitz
But the culture-vultures and the intellectual snobs, and the self-appointed guardians of the Muses, often frighten off the average person from the free development of this appetite.
Sydney J. Harris
Some are imprisoned by their own perception of reality.
Steven Redhead
I can get on with someone really, really, really well… and if they’re no good at having sex with me, it really upsets me, because I think, “oh God, this is someone I’d really like to spend the rest of my life with, but I cannot face having bad sex for the rest of my life.
Lily Allen
The attendance of that brother was now become like the attendance of a demon on some devoted being that had sold himself to destruction
James Hogg
I worked on Mauna Kea for over five years and saw my health severely degrade during that time. Thetwo long term summit workers that I knew well died of disease conditions, another worker went on tocommit suicide, and others were argumentative.
Steven Magee
The conquest of the earth which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves is not a pretty thing when you look into it.
Joseph Conrad
Ionizing smoke detectors unnaturally raise the background radiation levels in the human environment.
Steven Magee
Christianity . . . sees the necessity for man to have spiritual values and it shows him how to get at those through physical sacraments.
Malcolm Muggeridge
Paige, you will have two tasks tonight,” he said, turning to face me. “Both will test the limits of your sanity. Will you believe me if I tell you that they will help you?”“Not likely,” I said, “but let's get on with it.
Samantha Shannon
There's nothing like active employment, I suppose, to console the afflicted.
Anne Brontë
To live is to change and to be perfect is to change often.
John Henry Cardinal Newman
The DreamLord ByronOur life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world,A boundary between the things misnamedDeath and existence: Sleep hath its own world,And a wide realm of wild reality,And dreams in their development have breath,And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,They take a weight from off waking toils,They do divide our being; they becomeA portion of ourselves as of our time,And look like heralds of eternity;They pass like spirits of the past -they speakLike sibyls of the future; they have power -The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;They make us what we were not -what they will,And shake us with the vision that's gone by,The dread of vanished shadows -Are they so?Is not the past all shadow? -What are they?Creations of the mind? -The mind can makeSubstances, and people planets of its ownWith beings brighter than have been, and giveA breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.I would recall a vision which I dreamedPerchance in sleep -for in itself a thought,A slumbering thought, is capable of years,And curdles a long life into one hour.----------Il sognoLord ByronDuplice è la nostra vita: il Sonno ha il suo proprio mondo,un confine tra le cose chiamate impropriamentemorte e esistenza: il Sonno ha il proprio mondo,e un vasto reame di sfrenata realtà;e nel loro svolgersi i sogni hanno respiro,e lacrime e tormenti e sfiorano la gioia;lasciano un peso sui nostri pensieri da svegli,tolgono un peso dalle nostre fatiche da svegli,dividono il nostro essere; diventanoparte di noi stessi e del nostro tempo,e sembrano gli araldi dell'eternità;passano come fantasmi del passato, parlanocome Sibille dell'avvenire; hanno potere -la tirannia del piacere e del dolore;ci rendono ciò che non fummo, secondo il loro volere,e ci scuotono con dissolte visioni,col terrore di svanite ombre. Ma sono veramente così?Non è forse tutto un'ombra il passato? Cosa sono?Creazioni della mente? La mente sa crearesostanza, e popolare pianeti, di sua fattura,di esseri più splendenti di quelli mai esistiti, e darerespiro e forma che sopravvivono alla carne.Vorrei richiamare una visione che ho sognatoforse nel sonno, poiché in sé un pensiero,un pensiero assopito, racchiude anni,e in un'ora condensa una lunga vita.
George Gordon Byron
The author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
Benjamin Disraeli
What makes humility so desirable is the marvelous thing it does to us it creates in us a capacity for the closest possible intimacy with God.
Monica Baldwin
Sir Humphrey looked like a sleepy old hippo -- and when he yawned in that big, big, hippopotamus way Charity couldn't help doing likewise.
Elizabeth Jane Howard
The resulting texts always took a narrative term, enigmatic at first but ultimately explicit and often premonitory. The semantic distribution of these basic elements diverted them from their original meaning, thus revealing their real significance. Henceforth, every form of writing will consist of an operation of decoding, of contamination, and of sense perversion. All this because all language is essentially mystification, and everything is fiction.
Brion Gysin
Hello, my name is your potential. But you can call me impossible. I am the missed opportunities. I am the expectations you will never fulfill. I am always taunting you, regardless of how hard you try, regardless of how much you hope.
Nathan Filer
It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as in "It's a nice day," or "You're very tall," or "So this is it, we're going to die."His first theory was that if human beings didn't keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably shriveled up.After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this--"If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.
Douglas Adams
She was finally beginning to understand that her fixation on being a size ten had been another excuse to spend her life in preparation, instead of living it and taking risks and maybe getting hurt in the process.
Sarra Manning
The only kind of appeal that wins any instinctive response in party politics is an appeal to hostile feeling; the men who perceive the need of cooperation are powerless. Until education has been directed for a generation into new channels, and the Press has abandoned incitements to hatred, only harmful policies have any chance of being adopted in practice by our present political methods. But there is no obvious means of altering education and the Press until our political system is altered. From this dilemma there is no issue by means of ordinary action, at any rate for a long time to come. The best that can be hoped, it seems to me, is that we should, as many of us as possible, become political skeptics, rigidly abstaining from belief in the various attractive party programmes that are put before us from time to time.
Bertrand Russell
Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood. With such a book the impact isn't necessarily obvious at first...but the more you read it and re-read it, and live with it, and travel with it, the more it speaks to you, and the more you realize that you cannot live without that book. It's then that the wisdom hidden inside, the seed, is passed on.
Tahir Shah
In science, mistakes always precede the truth.
Horace Walpole
One good deed is more worth than a thousand brilliant theories. Let us not wait for large opportunities, or for a different kind of work, but do just the things we "find to do" day by day.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her.
Jeanette Winterson
Defeated misery is what all sport is about, eventually, if you follow the story for long enough; all sportsmen know this.
Nick Hornby
No animal, according to the rules of animal-etiquette, is ever expected to do anything strenuous, or heroic, or even moderately active during the off-season of winter.
Kenneth Grahame
The bonding of women that is woman-loving, or Gyn/affection, is very different from male bonding. Male bonding has been the glue of male dominance. It has been based upon recognition of the difference men see between themselves and women, and is a form of the behaviour, masculinity, that creates and maintains male power… Male comradeship/bonding depends upon energy drained from women.
Sheila Jeffreys
…This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the main events. For the main events, only experience will answer.
Martin Amis
Dakin: The more you read, though, the more you'll see that literature is actually about losers.Scripps: No.Dakin: It's consolation. All literature is consolation.
Alan Bennett
When people fuck with you, you gotta choice. You can fuck back or swallow down. Swallow down enough times and you start to choke. Or you can learn to accept. Let go. Breathe easy.
Kit de Waal
We look back to times past, and we mass them together, and say in such a year such and such events took place, such wars occupied that year, and during the next there was peace. Yet each year was then divided into weeks, days, minute, and slow-moving seconds, during which there were human minds to note and distinguish them, as now.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
City of Wizards is normally quite a GOOD thing, since only Good WIZARDS seem able to live together. . . .There have been cities of EVIL Wizards in the past. You will occasionally come across the sites of these, reduced to a glassy slag during the ultimate disagreement.
Diana Wynne Jones
To wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect
Jane Austen
The despotism of custom is everywhere standing up to human advancement.
John Stuart Mill
Maybe all you needed in life was the belief you could change things. Somehow. Some way.
Holly Bourne
Millions of us daily take advantage of [Skype], delighted to carry the severed heads of family members under our arms as we move from the deck to the cool of inside, or steering them around our new homes, bobbing them like babies on a seasickening tour. Skype can be a wonderful consolation prize in the ongoing tournament of globalization, though typically the first place it transforms us is to ourselves. How often are the initial seconds of a video's call takeoff occupied by two wary, diagonal glances, with a quick muss or flick of the hair, or a more generous tilt of the screen in respect to the chin? Please attend to your own mask first. Yet, despite the obvious cheer of seeing a faraway face, lonesomeness surely persists in the impossibility of eye contact. You can offer up your eyes to the other person, but your own view will be of the webcam's unwarm aperture. ... The problem lies in the fact that we can't bring our silence with us through walls. In phone conversations, while silence can be both awkward and intimate, there is no doubt that each of you inhabits the same darkness, breathing the same dead air. Perversely, a phone silence is a thick rope tying two speakers together in the private void of their suspended conversation. This binding may be unpleasant and to be avoided, but it isn't as estranging as its visual counterpart. When talk runs to ground on Skype, and if the purpose of the call is to chat, I can quickly sense that my silence isn't their silence. For some reason silence can't cross the membrane of the computer screen as it can uncoil down phone lines. While we may be lulled into thinking that a Skype call, being visual, is more akin to a hang-out than a phone conversation, it is in many ways more demanding than its aural predecessor. Not until Skype has it become clear how much companionable quiet has depended on co-inhabiting an atmosphere, with a simple act of sharing the particulars of a place -- the objects in the room, the light through the window -- offering a lovely alternative to talk.
Laurence Scott
What art thou Faustus, but a man condemned to die?
Christopher Marlowe
I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.
Jo Walton
Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.
Stephen Fry