Quotes by British Authors - Page 446

We are often jealous of our little secrets, though to another ear they generally convey neither profit nor entertainment.
Eden Phillpotts
Hold onto your periwigs, I'm going to start you off with a whirlwind tour of the history of Stuart Britain; a time that encompassed the vast majority of the seventeenth century and the first fourteen years of the eighteenth.
Andrea Zuvich
Why, when people are leaving their partners because they're having an affair with someone else, do they think it will seem better to pretend there is no one else involved? Do they think it will be less hurtful for their partners to think they just walked out because they couldn't stand them any more and then had the good fortune to meet some tall Omar Sharif-figure with a gentleman's handbag two weeks afterwards while the ex-partner is spending his evenings bursting into tears at the sight of the toothbrush mug? It's like those people who invent a lie as an excuse rather than the truth, even when the truth is better than the lie.
Helen Fielding
The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.
Penelope Lively
Know your number. If you don’t know it you might forget who you are.
Diane Samuels
Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized by a madness which forces them to commit the very acts which makes it certain that what they dread shall happen.
Dame Rebecca West
It was not very long afterwards that Michael woke up one morning with a curious feeling inside him. He knew, the moment he opened his eyes, that something was wrong but he was not quite sure what it was. "What is today, Mary Poppins?" He enquired, pushing the bedclothes away from him. "Tuesday," said Mary Poppins. "Go and turn on your bath. Hurry!" she said, as he made no effort to move. He turned over and pulled the bedclothes up over his head and the curious feeling increased. "What did I say?" said Mary Poppins in that cold, clear voice that was always a Warning. Michael knew now what was happening to him. He knew he was going to be naughty.
P.L. Travers
Put two macho groups together and give the first desperation and numbers, and the second truncheons and protective clothing, and the result is like a laboratory civil war.
Alexander Masters
The hated have no reason to love.
Terry Pratchett
I once had a published written debate with a religious apologist who, after I had argued the standard line that the idea of a loving and merciful deity is inconsistent with the fact of natural evil, said this meant his god was not all-powerful, and therefore was not to blame because it could not stop natural evil from occuring. This is a different tack from the more robust one that says natural evil is a response to humanity's moral evil. What this latter view in effect argues is that because of (say) Hitler's wrongdoings, thousands of babies deserve to be drowned in tsunamis.
A.C. Grayling
What is so addictive about fiction is that it is the one reliable place in which we can apprehend and participate in - fully understand - the inward world of another person.
Rick Gekoski
That dot is special. That dot is where LIFE lives. And I get it, it's biased of a living organism (like me) to think that life is important and special, but I don't care!Because stars don't care, galaxies don't care, but people do. Undoubtedly we're something special because, as far as we can tell, we are unique.
Charlie McDonnell
We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.
Samuel Butler
After all this time, I know exactly where I belong. Here. With Edmond. And that's how I live now.
Meg Rosoff
I don't think anyone is free - one creates one's own prison.
Graham Sutherland
You should visit the Palatine. It's at the top of that hill . . .""I know where the Palatine is, Dexter, I was visiting Rome before you were born.""Yes, who was emperor back then?
David Nicholls
He could remember all about it now; the pitiful figure he must have cut; the absurd way in which he had gone and done the very thing he had so often agreed with himself in thinking would be the most foolish thing in the world; and had met with exactly the consequences which, in these wise moods, he had always foretold were certain to follow, if he ever did make such a fool of himself.
Elizabeth Gaskell
One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once 'The Unnecessary War'.
Winston S. Churchill
The parrot had a range of phrases. His own name ('Niko, Niko'), the name of his original owner and now 'Stavros'. Occasionally he would also say 'Panagia mou', which could be an expression of piety but also a gentle expletive, depending on how it was said. With the parrot it was hard to tell. It did not sound pious.
Victoria Hislop
I think it is important for our society to wonder why it has lately become so ready to accept that human woe can be cured or soothed by chemicals. These chemicals do not alter or reform the ills of our civilisation. They adapt the human being to them.
Peter Hitchens
. . . they would neither hate nor envy us if they did not deem us so much happier than themselves.
Charlotte Brontë
It's much easier to wear your pain on the outside...
E.L. James
Depend on it. God's work done in God's way will never lack God's supply. He is too wise a God to frustrate His purposes for lack of funds, and He can just as easily supply them ahead of time as afterwards, and He much prefers doing so.
James Hudson Taylor
The ball and chain of creativity has no key
Benny Bellamacina
. . . nobody in particular is to blame, that I can see, for the state in which things are . . .
Charlotte Brontë
I was brought up to be honest; the trouble is it gets me nowhere." Liking her better, he smiled and said, "It'll get us to heaven." "Will it?" "If heaven existed." "Do you not believe in heaven, Mr. Fielding, may I ask?" she said, looking at him shyly. "I do not. Yet I believe that honesty gets us there.
E.M. Forster
In any evolutionary process even in the arts the search for novelty becomes corrupting.
Kenneth Boulding
The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimming when once the actions have become a lie.
George Eliot
never forget that it is not a pneumonia, but pneumonic man who is your patient
William Withey Gull
Nothing goes on forever. If it did, there wouldn't be anything else, would there?
M.R. Carey
Interesting Avil, the priests and the acolytes of the various religions and temples of Torea build their whole lives on a lie. At first, as children they believe it. Maybe as they grow older and more wise they see the absurdness of their beliefs, but by that time they have invested time and emotional energy into those beliefs, then seeing them crumble and fall apart would be too hard for them to bear. So the protect the lie, they shore it up with more lies and they ebb out their short lives, knowing what they preach is untrue, but preaching it all the same... Almost as if preaching it hard enough will make it true... Are they trying to convince their congregation? Or themselves? You are wiser than you look Avil.
Martyn Stanley
If you try to talk about a truth that’s merely moral, people always think it’s merely metaphorical. A real live man with two legs once said to me: ‘I only believe in the Holy Ghost in a spiritual sense.’ Naturally, I said: ‘In what other sense could you believe it?’ And then he thought I meant he needn’t believe in anything except evolution, or ethical fellowship, or some bilge. . . . -- The Secret of Father Brown
G.K. Chesterton
One particular aspect of Siddhartha’s revelation of the outside world has always struck me. Quite possibly he lived his first thirty years without any knowledge of number. How must he have felt, then, to see crowds of people mingling in the streets? Before that day he would not have believed that so many people existed in all the world. And what wonder it must have been to discover flocks of birds, and piles of stones, leaves on trees and blades of grass! To suddenly realise that, his whole life long, he had been kept at arm’s length from multiplicity.
Daniel Tammet
Now it turns out that a few broadsheet film critics in Britain do indeed belong to a category of people who would have resisted Hitler when he came to power. So the great shame is, clearly film critics should have been running Austria at the time, because Hitler would have represented no problem to them at all. [The Guardian's] Peter Bradshaw would have known exactly what to do, and he would not have been remotely fallible to any Nazi who threatened his life. No, he would have died in heroic acts of individual resistance. So it's a privilege to live among people who enjoy such moral certainty.
David Hare
...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.
Richard Dawkins
Every moment was a precious thing, having in it the essence of finality.
Daphne du Maurier
It never bored them to hear words, words; they breathed them with the cool night air, never stopping to analyse; the name of the poet, Hafiz, Hali, Iqbal, was sufficient guarantee. India—a hundred Indias—whispered outside beneath the indifferent moon, but for the time India seemed one and their own, and they regained their departed greatness by hearing its departure lamented, they felt young again because reminded that youth must fly.
E.M. Forster
A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.
George Orwell
When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humor.
John Lennon
A source of innocent merriment! Of innocent merriment.
W.S. Gilbert
They said a lot of things to each other that night, but nothing that involved words.
Michael Grant
In the big scheme of things, a little love is all we need
Benny Bellamacina
It is not how many years we live but rather what we do with them.
Evangeline Cory Booth
I think she cared more for that bloody dog than for me, for us. And maybe that's not so stupid, looking back... maybe it is easier living on your own looking after some stupid mutt than sharing your life with other actual human beings.
Mark Haddon
The children seemed to cast their Precursors like shadows about the house, sometimes tangibly, in the sound of a voice, sometimes by suggestion, because it was striking the hour for their return from a walk, sometimes mysteriously, because inside the shell of their mother's head the children were painted like angels on the roof of a chapel.
Enid Bagnold
You'd be surprised how rare loyalty is, sometimes.
Zoe Sugg
To live out God’s plan for your life calls for you to discipline yourself…and your body. To push yourself. To deny yourself.
Elizabeth George
Ah, Hannah, you have never longed to live as I long to live if you do not know that another day is the most precious thing.
Philippa Gregory
And don’t forget: Elvendork! It’s unisex!
J.K. Rowling
Indeed, for my own part, though I have been repeatedly told by persons for whom I have the greatest respect, that Miss Brown is an insignificant chit, and Mrs. White has nothing but her petit minois chiffonne, and Mrs. Black has not a word to say for herself; yet I know that I have had the most delightful conversations with Mrs. Black (of course, my dear Madam, they are inviolable): I see all the men in a cluster round Mrs. White's chair: all the young fellows battling to dance with Miss Brown; and so I am tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great compliment to a woman.
William Makepeace Thackeray
I liked him, but since his particular field of interest was Remote Suggestion--the skill of projecting thoughts into people's heads from a distance--I didn't know whether I actually liked him or he was just suggesting I like him, which was both creepy and unethical. In fact, the whole Remote Suggestion or "seeding" idea had been banned once it was discovered to be the key ingredient in promoting talent less boy bands, which had until then been something of a mystery.
Jasper Fforde
There are people who prefer to say 'yes' and there are people who prefer to say 'no'. Those who say 'yes' are rewarded by the adventures they have. Those who say 'no' are rewarded by the safety they attain.
Keith Johnstone
It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist.
Jeanette Winterson
Experience has taught me the power of trophies. You may have every knick-knack and useless contraption ever devised, but while they weigh you down, a simple trophy can go a long, long way.
Tahir Shah
When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
Cyril Connolly
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. Money suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. . . . And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money. I Corinthians xiii (adapted)
George Orwell
He was a stylist, not a thinker. He spent time trying to say things in as complicated a way as possible.
Peter Heather
It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world.
Ian Fleming
Spirituality can go hand-in-hand with ruthless single-mindedness when the individual is convinced his cause is just
Michela Wrong
It was woman that taught me cruelty, and on woman therefore I have exercised it.
Walter Scott