Quotes by British Authors - Page 442

A little imagination goes a long way in Fes.
Tahir Shah
I had a hundred and seventeen days in which to convince Will Traynor that he had a reason to live.
Jojo Moyes
Friends have ways of speaking without words.
Alice Dalgliesh
All those books, all those prayers and she had got nothing from them. When everything went well for her she had been able to pray, she couldn't now. There was such urgency in her present situation that until the pressure was removed she couldn't think about God. She hadn't the patience to pray. It was a shock to her. Surely God was for these times?
Dorothy Whipple
If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary be not idle.
Samuel Johnson
One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.
Virginia Woolf
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
Douglas Adams
Check out that one at the end. He's taken the form of a footstool. Weird...but somehow I like his style.""That is a footstool.
Jonathan Stroud
And there, right in the middle of it, I find 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.' There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven.
C.S. Lewis
It is very seldom that one encounters what would appear to be sheer unadulterated evil in a human face; an evil, I mean, active, deliberate, deadly, dangerous. Folly, heedlessness, vanity, pride, craft, meanness, stupidity - yes. But even Iagos in this world are few, and devilry is as rare as witchcraft. ("Bad Company")
Walter de la Mare
Our desires always increase with our possessions. The knowledge that something remains yet unenjoyed impairs our enjoyment of the good before us.
Samuel Johnson
It is the one who accepts commitment who is strong. The true commitment is the artistic one. This is why artists are so often attacked. They are attacked for their morals, for their ideas – even for their work. Yet their essence – their commitment – is the secret which is unassailable. The true artist knows that creativity is its own reward. Ordinary people fear commitment, you see. Ordinary people fear creativity. They know that if they allow that seething cauldron of yellow liquid to boil over within themselves, then their whole lives will be changed. People fear change. People do not wish to be creative and artistic in any real sense. They wish to decorate, perhaps, and to make things around themselves pleasant – but this has little to do with creativity. … All spiritual paths should be creative. Creativity is involved with sacrifice. That stew of yellow liquid which boils in everyone is a sacrificial broth …
Mark Hedsel
A woman the more careful she is about her face is commonly the more careless about her house.
Ben Jonson
McGough: I'm sorry. I'm afraid I've caught poetry. Mr Bones: Oh really? Well, don't worry, sir - I used to suffer from short stories.McGough: Really? When?Mr Bones: Oh, once upon a time ...
Graham Chapman
A substantial daily intake of alcohol was the perfect way to stay in shape.
Simon Napier-Bell
It is a foolish judge who, before the evidence is presented, makes a judgement.
Peter Tremayne
Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin, and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen; such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of heaven on Earth.
John Wesley
He pinned me in place with a direct look, his dark brown eyes smoldering. “You’re Mary Jane,” he said finally. “And you have all these Flash Thompsons and Harry Osborns hovering around you, trying to make a move. Because...you’re basically amazing.
J.M. Richards
Having problems doesn't make you noble or virtuous, it makes you human. Nobility and virtue comes from the way that you handle your problems and either learn to move past them or live with them if out of your control.
Oli Anderson
In wartime, everyone loves a soldier, and a wounded hero even more so.
Jack Higgins
Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.
G.K. Chesterton
For in dreams we enter a world that is entirely our own. Let them swim in the deepest ocean or glide over the highest cloud. (Albus Dumbledore)
J.K. Rowling
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
Cyril Connolly
How is it you can talk so nicely?' Alice said, hoping to get it into a better temper by a compliment. 'I've been in many gardens before, but none of the flowers could talk.''Put your hand down, and feel the ground,' said the Tiger-lily. 'Then you'll know why.'Alice did so. 'It's very hard,' she said, 'but I don't see what that has to do with it.''In most gardens,' the Tiger-lily said, 'they make the beds too soft - so that the flowers are always asleep.
Lewis Carroll
Smiles, rainbows and a grain of rice.I could survive on that!
Anthony T.Hincks
What is reading but silent conversation?
Walter Savage Landor
All men would be cowards if they durst.
Earl of Rochester
Fill your mind before you empty your mouth.
Habeeb Akande
If anything should take place behind closed doors, it was cruelty and betrayal.
Edward St. Aubyn
Remember your name. Do not lose hope ---what you seek will be found.
Neil Gaiman
Expectation is the greatest impediment to living, running ahead to tomorrow, it loses today.
Lars Iyer
Hence, in a season of calm weatherThough inland far we be,Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
William Wordsworth
Skinny jeans were only good if you had skinny genes.
Matt Dunn
A true conversation is a co-creation.
Sarah Rozenthuler
More pernicious nonsense was never devised by man than treaties of commerce.
Benjamin Disraeli
I often wonder why the whole world is so prone to generalise. Generalisations are seldom if ever true and are usually utterly inaccurate.
Agatha Christie
Better foolish and honest than clever and false.
Paula Brackston
I don’t want the finer things in life, like preserves of jam and thick soft quilts, until I get what I need: the machinery to make that stuff for me.
M.C. Humphreys
God has created me to do some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good; I shall do His work.
John Henry Newman
Don't put down too many roots in terms of a domicile. I have lived in four countries and I think my life as a writer and our family's life have been enriched by this. I think a writer has to experience new environments. There is that adage: No man can really succeed if he doesn't move away from where he was born. I believe it is particularly true for the writer.
Arthur Hailey
It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams...No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream-alone...
Joseph Conrad
I had one of those ideas I do sometimes get, though admittedly a chump of the premier class.
P.G. Wodehouse
There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don’t much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world—or more probably comes at us via the Muslim world—I already consider it an obligation to resist it wherever I live. I would detest myself if I fled from it in any direction. Leo Strauss was right. The Jews will not be 'saved' or 'redeemed.' (Cheer up: neither will anyone else.) They/we will always be in exile whether they are in the greater Jerusalem area or not, and this in some ways is as it should be. They are, or we are, as a friend of Victor Klemperer's once put it to him in a very dark time, condemned and privileged to be 'a seismic people.' A critical register of the general health of civilization is the status of 'the Jewish question.' No insurance policy has ever been devised that can or will cover this risk.
Christopher Hitchens
He who studies old books will always find in them something new, and he who reads new books will always find in them something old.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
...Dickey Perrott, you Jago whelp, look at them - look hard. Some day if you are clever - cleverer than anyone in the Jago right now - if you're only scoundrel enough, and brazen enough, and lucky enough - one of a thousand - maybe you'll be like them: bursting with high living, drunk when you like, red and pimply. There it is - that's your aim in life - there's your pattern. Learn to read and write, learn all you can, learn cunning, spare nobody and stop at nothing, and perhaps - It's the best the world has for you, for the Jago's got you, and that's the only way out, except gaol and the gallows. So do your devil most, or God help you, Dicky Perrot - though he wont: for the Jago's got you!
Arthur Morrison
The battle for women's rights has been largely won.
Margaret Thatcher
Never laugh at live dragons.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Don't trust your head, Samwise, it is not the best part of you.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Dumbledore's man through and through, aren't you Potter?" "Yeah I am," said Harry. "Glad we straightened that out.
J.K. Rowling
I like to start slowly, and then ease up as the day progresses.
Fennel Hudson
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex.
Julian Barnes
Miss Benson had the power; which some people have, of carrying her wishes through to fulfillment; her will was strong, her sense was excellent, and people yielded to her – they did not know why.
Elizabeth Gaskell
New York is a glorious place for clearing your head and finding inspiration. Every time you step outside, you live a dozen lives.
Lindsey Kelk
The killers are the people who are ruining the world to line their pockets, poisoning us, burying us under garbage!
John Brunner
...they knew each other as much as they knew themselves, and their intimacy, rather like too many suitcases, was a matter of perpetual concern; together they moved slowly, clumsily, effecting lugubrious compromises, attending to delicate shifts of mood, repairing breaches. As individuals they didn't easily take offense; but together they managed to offend each other in surprising, unexpected ways; then the offender - it had happened twice since their arrival - became irritated by the cloying susceptibilities of the other, and they would continue to explore the twisting alleyways and sudden squares in silence, and with each step the city would recede as they locked tighter into each other's presence.
Ian McEwan
You came to me asking how my faith survived the Day of Judgement. I will tell you a secret. When the stars fell, when the seas boiled and the earth burned, my faith didn’t die. That is when I began to believe.God was real, and he hated us.
Aaron Dembski-Bowden
I'm the living embodiment of 'it could be worse'.
Dan Howell
A memory is lodged in the mind but a feeling inhabits the whole body
Denis Avey
Think sideways!
Edward de Bono
Destiny is variable, not fixed; it is forever changing depending upon your free will to make choices for what you want your life to be.
Steven Redhead