Quotes by British Authors - Page 439

The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us.
George Eliot
Martin Luther spent two hours a day in prayer. John Wesley spent two hours a day in prayer. According to a recent poll taken on both sides of the Atlantic, the average church leader, pastor, priest, evangelist, teacher today spends four minutes a day in prayer and you wonder why the church is powerless.
R.T. Kendall
The world out there is nothing more than a load of places with people in ’em. And the people out there are neither more interesting, nor better, nor lower, than us here in Angle Tar. It’s humans, Rue. We’re the same wherever you go, no matter what we surround ourselves with.
Laure Eve
We are most of us two people, your Highness. There is something lacking in the man who is one thing only, and so, as he believes, at peace with the world and with himself.
Robert Aickman
Winners are the favourites of heaven.
Tom Holland
Religion, for instance, cannot be accepted or rejected out of hand, until the student knows exactly what religion means.
Idries Shah
...home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down.
Pico Iyer
I was much crazier than I had imagined. Or maybe it was a bad idea to read DSM-IV when you're not a trained professional. Or maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder.
Jon Ronson
Skill is fine and genius is splendid but the right contacts are more valuable than either.
Sir Archibald Mclndoe
Everyone who doubts knows that he is doubting, so that he is certain of this truth at least, namely the fact that he doubts. Thus every one who doubts whether there is such a thing as truth, knows at least one truth, so that his very capacity to doubt should convince him that there is such a thing as truth.
Frederick Charles Copleston
When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Everyone’s thought is forensic, everyone is simply putting a “case” with deliberate suppression of his opponent’s point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends.
George Orwell
I don't advise. You mutn't give any weight to what I say, except in so far as your own judgment approves it.
George Gissing
The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.
Richard Dawkins
As the uneasiness and... reluctance to face [his problems] cut him off more and more from all real happiness... habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo... All the healthy and outgoing activities [he shouldn't want to avoid] can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may... "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked." The Christians describe [Heavenly Father] as one "without whom Nothing is strong." And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in [dire] sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them... in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
C.S. Lewis
Because I believe there is nothing so self-destroying, and no emotion quite so despicable, as jealousy.
Daphne du Maurier
Look beyond yourself.
Michael J. Jackson
The world is full of confusion and contradiction. We cannot expect to do anything that is absolutely right. We can only measure rightness by the truth within ourselves. And our own truth will never be quite the same as somebody else's.
Jay Woodman
How can there ever be any serious expectation of living in paradise, if one cannot behave appropriately, or be trusted to respect and honour all life?
Mango Wodzak
Why should we look to the past in order to prepare for the future? Because there is nowhere else to look.
James Burke
All I can think about is how I wanted to share those firsts with Logan and how I never knew it was an impossibility because it had already been taken away from me.
Siobhan Davis
When statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.
Robert Bolt
There is a moment when time stops, when the air grows still, when you enter a state of nothingness, a state of purity and perfection. That is the moment to strive for.
Chloe Thurlow
I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.
Henry James
...even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
G.K. Chesterton
Once upon a time there was a young lady who lived in a marsh, and her name was Poison.
Chris Wooding
We dress ourselves up in lies,So that the nakedness of truth doesn't come out.
Anthony T.Hincks
Every winner is inclined to think he will be triumphant forever. Every loser tends to fear that he is going to be beaten forever. But both are wrong for the same reason: Everything changes except the face of god.
Elif Shafak
Contemporary feminism is enamored with consumer choice and has fully accepted it as a substitute for freedom.
Holly Grigg-Spall
I mean No is power. No says, "I'm in charge." Think about how many times you've said yes in the past year, and how many times you would've liked to have said no instead. Maybe being able to say no is the one thing that keeps us sane. Some people go through their whole lives saying yes over and over again--yes to things they don't want to do but feel obliged to; yes to things that allow other people to take advantage of them, just because that's the way things are, the way things have always been. Some people need to learn how to say no. Because every time they say yes, they say no to themselves.
Danny Wallace
Out of the will of God, there is no such thing as success, in the will of God there cannot be any failure.
Elizabeth George
... Mr Jellyband was indeed a typical rural John Bull of those days --- the days when our prejudiced insularity was at its height, when to an Englishman, be he lord, yeoman, or peasant, the whole of the continent of Europe was a den of immorality and the rest of the world an unexploited land of savages and cannibals.
Emmuska Orczy
It was only one man who had gone, but it felt like forever, something so permanent and unstoppable that it blasted her. If she were a tree, she would drop all her leaves.
Jenny Downham
It is not that I do not want you. Only that I might want you too much. And for too long
Samantha Shannon
May love always be with you, and you always surrounded by love
Elif Shafak
THOMASINA:But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!
Tom Stoppard
A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.
Marina Warner
In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage.
Ian McEwan
The voice came from the night all around him, in his head and out of it."What do you want?' it repeated.He wondered if he dared to turn and look, realised he did not.'Well? You come here every night, in a place where the living are not welcome. I have seen you.Why?''I wanted to meet you,' he said, without looking around. 'I want to live for ever.' His voice crackedas he said it.He had stepped over the precipice. There was no going back. In his imagination, he could alreadyfeel the prick of needle-sharp fangs in his neck, a sharp prelude to eternal life.The sound began. It was low and sad, like the rushing of an underground river. It took him severallong seconds to recognise it as laughter.'This is not life,' said the voice.It said nothing more, and after a while the young man knew he was alone in the graveyard.
Neil Gaiman
She was a spiky teenager rebelling against the soul-suck mirror reflected back at her in her mother’s blank stare, her question mark of a spine. Determined to beat the odds, she completed high school with distinction. But there was a caveat. Beydan was allowed to roam and educate herself – up to a point. On her eighteenth birthday her Father sat her down and held out his Rolexed wrist. Studded with crystals and flecks of diamond, the watch dazzled in the light. All Beydan could hear, however, was tick-tock-tick-tick-tick-tick - time to neatly fold all her hard work, to parcel up her progress, send it to the attic in her subconscious and let dust gather on her dreams. There was a lump in her throat and a stopwatch in her womb.
Diriye Osman
The word “depressed” is spoken phonetically as “deep rest”. We can view depression not as a mental illness, but on a deeper level, as a profound, and very misunderstood, state of deep rest, entered into when we are completely exhausted by the weight of our own identity.
Jeff Foster
I don’t know how to talk to you, Mrs. Huntingdon . . . you are only half a woman--your nature must be half human, half angelic. Such goodness overawes me; I don’t know what to make of it.
Anne Brontë
The matter with human beans," the BFG went on, "is that they is absolutely refusing to believe in anything unless they is actually seeing it right in front of their own schnozzles.
Roald Dahl
The difference between one man and another is not mere ability . . . it is energy.
Thomas Arnold
Just as well then that kings did not grow old.
Edoardo Albert
I will meet you where moon shines down upon our naked, writhing bodies, undulating together in a moment, which brings ecstasy to entwined hearts, beating as one...
Virginia Alison
This was a favourite dress, one of Sally Parker's, the last almost she ever made, alas, for Sally had now retired, living at Ealing, and if ever I have a moment, thought Clarissa (but never would she have a moment any more), I shall go and see her at Ealing.
Virginia Woolf
Taken together, New Labour policies have helped to build a series of overlapping chav caricatures: the feckless, the non-aspirational, the scrounger, the dysfunctional and the disorderly. To hear this sort of rhetoric from Labour, rather than the Tories, has confirmed the stereotypes and prejudices many middle-class people have about working-class communities and individuals. But it can be far subtler than outright attacks. Many of New Labour's underlying philosophies were steeped in middle-class triumphalism. They were based on the assumption that the tattered remnants of the working-class were are on the wrong side of history - and must be made to join 'Middle England' like the rest of us.
Owen Jones
He mourns the dead who lives as they desire.
Edward Young
Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness.
Martin Amis
Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.
Christopher Morcom
I am an average good Christian, when you don't push my Christianity too far. And all the rest of you—which is a great comfort—are, in this respect, much the same as I am.
Wilkie Collins
But you're dead,' said Harry.'Oh, yes,' said Dumbledore matter-of-factly.'Then... am I dead too?''Ah,' said Dumbledore, smiling still more broadly. 'That is the question, isn't it? On the whole, dear boy, I think not.
J.K. Rowling
MiaowConsider me.I sit here like Tiberius,inscrutable and grand.I will let "I dare not"wait upon "I would"and bear the twanglingof your small guitarbecause you are my owland foster me with milk.Why wet my paw?Just keep me in a bagand no one knows the truth.I am familiar with witchesand stand a better chance in hell than youfor I can dance on hot bricks,leap your heightand land on all fours.I am the servant of the Living God.I worship in my way. Look into these slit green stonesand follow your reflected lights into the dark.Michel, Duc de Montaigne, knew.You don't play with me.I play with you.
Mark Haddon
Public schoolboys are not merely conservatives, they are by nature totalitarian reactionaries.
David Benedictus
Perhaps there are many "nows" of varying duration, depending on just what it is we are doing. We must face up to the fact that, at least in the case of humans, the subject experiencing subjective time is not a perfect, structureless observer, but a complex, multilayered, multifaceted psyche. Different levels of our consciousness may experience time in quite different ways. This is evidently the case in terms of response time. You have probably had the slightly unnerving experience of jumping at the sound of a telephone a moment or two before you actually hear it ring. The shrill noise induces a reflex response through the nervous system much faster than the time it takes to create the conscious experience of the sound.It is fashionable to attribute certain qualities, such as speech ability, to the left side of the brain, whereas others, such as musical appreciation, belong to processes occurring on the right side. But why should both hemispheres experience a common time? And why should the subconscious use the same mental clock as the conscious?
Paul Davies
We aren't either afraid or brave, we’re usually both.
Beth Kempton
[I was advised] to read Jordan's 'Cours d'analyse'; and I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that remarkable work, the first inspiration for so many mathematicians of my generation, and learnt for the first time as I read it what mathematics really meant.
G H Hardy
We don't rise to the level of our abilities, we fall to the level of our excuses
Peter James
Pucker up, Hollywood. By the time I’m finished with you, the neighbors are gonna need a cigarette.
Kate Meader
Captain Harcourt-Bruce was not only dashing, handsome, and brave, he was also rather romantic. The reappearance of magic in England thrilled him immensely. He was a great reader of the more exciting sort of history - and his head was full of ancient battles in which the English were outnumbered by the French and doomed to die, when all at once would be heard the sound of strange, unearthly music, and upon a hilltop would appear the Raven King in his tall, black helmet with it's mantling of raven-feathers streaming in the wind; he would gallop down the hillside on his tall, black horse with a hundred human knights and a hundred fairy knights at his back, and he would defeat the French by magic.That was Captain Harcourt-Bruce's idea of a magician. That was the sort of thing which he now expected to see reproduced on every battlefield on the Continent. So when he saw Mr Norrell in his drawing-room in Hanoversquare, and after he had sat and watched Mr Norrell peevishly complain to his footman, first that the cream in his tea was too creamy, and next that it was too watery - well, I shall not surprize you when I say he was somewhat disappointed. In fact he was so downcast by the whole undertaking that Admiral Paycocke, a bluff old gentleman, felt rather sorry for him and only had the heart to laugh at him and tease him very moderately about it.
Susanna Clarke