Quotes by British Authors - Page 455

I don't care how impossible it seems.
David Byrne
You must learn to forgive a man when he's in love. He's always a nuisance.
Rudyard Kipling
Poor little place,' he murmured with a sigh.She heard him. He said the most melancholy things, but she noticed that directly he had said them he always seemed more cheerful than usual. All this phrase-making was a game, she thought, for if she had said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now.
Virginia Woolf
Terminological inexactitude
Winston Churchill
But the years came and went without bringing the careless boy; and when they met again Wendy was a married woman, and Peter was no more to her than a little dust in the box in which she had kept her toys.
J.M. Barrie
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
Alan W. Watts
Wedded she some years, and to a manOf fifty, and such husbands are in plenty;And yet, I think, instead of such a ONE'Twere better to have TWO of five and twenty...
George Gordon Byron
There is much that is immortal in this medieval lady. The dragons have gone, and so have the knights, but still she lingers in our midst. She reigned in many an early Victorian castle, and was Queen of much early Victorian song. It is sweet to protect her in the intervals of business, sweet to pay her honour when she has cooked our dinner well. But alas! the creature grows degenerate. In her heart also there are springing up strange desires. She too is enamoured of heavy winds, and vast panoramas, and green expanses of the sea. She has marked the kingdom of this world, how full it is of wealth, and beauty, and war--a radiant crust, built around the central fires, spinning towards the receding heavens. Men, declaring that she inspires them to it, move joyfully over the surface, having the most delightful meetings with other men, happy, not because they are masculine, but because they are alive. Before the show breaks up she would like to drop the august title of the Eternal Woman, and go there as her transitory self.
E.M. Forster
I could spend all day lost in someone else's imagination. I love reading.
Joanna Bolouri
Little tube of mighty pow'r Charmer of an idle hour Object of my warm desire.
Isaac Hawkins Browne
It is not any common earth,Water or wood or air,But Merlin’s Isle of GramaryeThat you and I will fare.
Rudyard Kipling
The murky world of terrorism is more relevant than ever today: terrorist organizations, whether Bolshevik at the beginning of the twentieth century or Jihadi at the start of the twenty-first, have much in common.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
No point carrying useless ballast. It won't change a thing.
Joanne Harris
And there was something else, it seemed, now permanently part of her life. Doubt, and suspicion too, filled all that there was room for in her waking thoughts.
Jane Gaskell
It did not last: the Devil howling 'Ho, Let Einstein be,' restored the status quo.
John Collings Squire
Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
A rumbling volcano is like a pimple.You know that they're both going to explode,but you just don't know when.
Anthony T.Hincks
The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
V.S. Pritchett
Don’t let anyone tell you what you can and can’t do or achieve. Do what you want to do and be who you want to be. Just encourage and include each other, don’t ostracize the gender in front of you.
Emma Watson
We are not punished for our sins, we are punished by them. We can't live with guilt for the whole of our lives..
Susan Hill
I may be a burglar...but I'm an honest one, I hope, more or less.
J.R.R. Tolkien
It's not the world that needs to change - it's our consciousness we must raise
Rasheed Ogunlaru
If you are never frightened, sir, you would never find out what you was made of and what you was capable of doing. You would never become a better man than what you started out being. P'raps this is what you will discover - what you are made of and what you are capable of. And when you finally do remember who you are, p'raps you will find that you have become a better man than he ever was. P'raps he was a man why never ever grew any more once he reached manhood. P'raps he needed to do something drastic like losing his memory so that he could get his life unstuck.
Mary Balogh
Philip thought that in throwing over the desire for happiness he was casting aside the last of his illusions. His life had seemed horrible when it was measured by its happiness, but now he seemed to gather strength as he realised that it might be measured by something else. Happiness mattered as little as pain. They came in, both of them, as all the other details of his life came in, to the elaboration of the design. He seemed for an instant to stand above the accidents of his existence, and he felt that they could not affect him again as they had done before. Whatever happened to him now would be one more motive to add to the complexity of the pattern, and when the end approached he would rejoice in its completion. It would be a work of art, and it would be none the less beautiful because he alone knew of its existence, and with his death it would at once cease to be.
W Somerset Maugham
It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.
Jo Walton
Once in a golden hour I cast to earth a seed. Up there came a flower, The people said, a weed.
Alfred Tennyson
Amelia envisaged that between York and the royal-infested Scottish Highlands there was a grimy wasteland of derelict cranes and abandoned mills and betrayed, yet still staunch, people. Oh and moorland, of course, vast tracts of brooding landscape under lowering skies, and across this heath strode brooding, lowering men intent on reaching their ancestral houses, where they were going to fling open doors and castigate orphaned yet resolute governesses. Or — preferably — the brooding, lowering men were on horseback, black horses with huge muscled haunches, glistening with sweat —
Kate Atkinson
Apparently, now, though, we writers and artists are not allowed to give offence. We must not question, criticise or insult the other, for fear of being hounded and murdered. These days a writer without bodyguards can hardly be considered serious. A bad review is the least of our problems.
Hanif Kureishi
At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.
Matt Ridley
I couldn't help wondering, is my husband so unattractive that no woman has ever wanted him? Except me, of course. I must have wanted him, in a way, once, but I've forgotten why, and I was too young to know what I was choosing.
Graham Greene
For the first time ever, I was alone in a different country. I was nervous about how I was going to cope in this big bustling city and so I employed a technique which still serves me well today. I imagined myself as someone who relished new exciting opportunities, who was utterly unafraid and perpetually optimistic. It was a kind of reinvention. Everyone I met was new. These people didn't know me, there was no shared history, so I could be anything or anyone I wanted to be. My theory was that if I behaved like a confident, cheerful person, eventually I would buy it myself, and become that. I always had traces of strength somewhere inside me, it wasn't fake. It was just a way of summoning my courage to the fore and not letting any creeping self-doubt hinder my adventures. This method worked then, and it works now.
Dawn French
What appears most disquieting to me in isolation is the dilemma of how to use time. There is either too much or too little of it; we either live inside painfully contracting horizons, or feel ourselves isolated in the vastness of space. I seem to have lived with the palm of my hand balanced on the tip of a knife, writing what in theory I would call the Preface to a Future Book. And the relation of time to creation should always appear like that, a ratio that describes the fullness of energy brought to a particular stage of one's life, so that each work is a preface to a stage at which one has still to arrive, the logical extension of which is death. I live for the blaze of metaphor that unites incongruities. The red wine-stain on my page is like an intoxicant to the dance of words. It is a little ritual I undertake, this sprinkling of wine-spots on paper.
Jeremy Reed
Can a mere song change a people's minds? I doubt that it is so. But a song can infiltrate your heart and the heart may change your mind.
Elvis Costello
Light is the only connection we have with the Universe beyond our solar system, and the only connection our ancestors had with anything beyond Earth. Follow the light and we can journey from the confines of our planet to other worlds that orbit the Sun without ever dreaming of spacecraft. To look up is to look back in time, because the ancient beams of light are messengers from the Universe's distant past.
Brian Cox
Generations of Humeans have… been misled into offering analyses of causation and of natural law that have been far too weak because they had no basis for accepting the existence of either cause and effect or natural laws… Hume’s scepticism about cause and effect and his agnosticism about the external world are of course jettisoned the moment he leaves his study.
Antony Flew
In moments of great stress, the mind focuses itself upon some quite unimportant matter which is remembered long afterwards with the utmost fidelity, driven in, as it were, by the mental stress of the moment. It may be some quite irrelevant detail, like the pattern of a wallpaper, but it will never be forgotten.
Agatha Christie
But she finally had the good sense to see that a long, dull and predictable future was an expensive price to pay for the satisfaction of a passing sexual attraction.
John Fowles
A central part of the torturer’s craft is to make his job easier by stripping the victim of protective dignity.
Jonathan Glover
These things hath Fate brought to pass, and we be but Fate's whipping-tops bandied what way she will.
E.R. Eddison
Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling was very strong upon me that night. Here was another side to my dream.
H.G.Wells
A man might as well hope to fight a swarm of flies with a sword as to master his own thoughts when they are set on by the devil.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Who can say they saw a whole play or read a whole book? Each has their own experience, their own play, their own book
Johnny Rich
Don't for God's sake speak as saint to sinner, but as you yourself to me myself - poor me!
Thomas Hardy
Reality, in fact, is always something you couldn't have guessed. That's one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It's a religion you couldn't have guessed.
C.S. Lewis
Better farPursue a frivolous trade by serious means,Than a sublime art frivolously.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
I dreamt that I was old. And you – you were beside me.Forever young – in your hand, a cup of stars.
Joanne Harris
I'm happily married to Peter senior; we're best friends as well as lovers, which is probably the best recipe for a successful relationship. We live in a lovely part of England.
Carole Mortimer
There was no beginning, middle and end to destiny, it wasn't neat and manageable. It was random and scary and if it wanted to it would.
Lisa Jewell
There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost every attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all BEGIN freely--a slight preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement. In nine cases out of ten a women had better show MORE affection than she feels. Bingley likes your sister undoubtedly; but he may never do more than like her, if she does not help him on.
Jane Austen
Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order.
Sidney Brenner
I always got a bit pissed off with those broadsheet sceptics who make their living being passionately angry about homeopathy, God, synchronicity or whatever, because it's as if they can't get past their emotions, and in their rage they become as faith-driven as the beliefs they criticise. I always said they give scientists a bad name. After all, science has to be about asking unthinkable questions, not closing down debate.
Scarlett Thomas
Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear which remains unsatisfied and even uneasy until it hears something better.
Charles Burney
There would be a lot fewer of us screwing up the game of life so brilliantly, if there was always a right answer instead of just a best--or even a less bad--answer.
Claire Cross
Shakespeare is getting flyblown; a paternal government might well forbid writing about him, as they put his monument at Stratford beyond the reach of scribbling fingers. With all this buzz of criticism about, one may hazard one's conjectures privately, make one's notes in the margin; but, knowing that someone has said it before, or said it better, the zest is gone. Illness, it its kingly sublimity, sweeps all that aside and leaves nothing but Shakespeare and oneself.
Virginia Woolf
Follow your gut, Storyteller, it will lead to your happy ending.
Isabel Greenberg
The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation.
Benjamin Disraeli
For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.
C.S. Lewis
An Arundel TombSide by side, their faces blurred,The earl and countess lie in stone,Their proper habits vaguely shownAs jointed armour, stiffened pleat,And that faint hint of the absurd -The little dogs under their feet.Such plainness of the pre-BaroqueHardly involves the eye, untilIt meets his left-hand gauntlett, stillClasped empty in the other, andOne sees with a sharp tender shockHis hand withdrawn, holding her hand.They would not think to lie so long,Such faithfulness in effigyWas just a detail friends would see,A sculptor's sweet commissioned graceThrown off in helping to prolongThe Latin names around the base.They would not guess how early inTheir supine stationary voyageThe air would change to soundless damage,Turn the old tenantry away;How soon succeeding eyes beingTo look, not read. Rigidly, theyPersisted, linked, through lengths and breadthsOf time. Snow fell, undated. LightEach summer thronged the grass. A brightLitter of birdcalls strewed the sameBone-littered ground. And up the pathsThe endless altered people cameWashing at their identity.Now helpless in the hollowOf an unarmorial age, a troughOf smoke in slow suspended skeinsAbove their scrap of history,Only an attitude remains.Time has transfigured them intoUntruth. The stone fidelityThey hardly meant has come to beTheir final blazon and to proveOur almost-instinct almost-true:What will survive of us is love.
Philip Larkin
Sneaky and underhanded, the Federal Reserve has been sucking the life blood out of the United States since 1913. Like a black widow spider, it weaves a web of corruption and deceit. Unknown to its prey, the FED's bite is poisonous, deep, long-lasting and brings financial upheaval and misery to Americans.
Jim McCarthy
There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals... We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for example, as "tick-tock, tick-tock" - even though it is actually "tick tick, tick tick.
Oliver Sacks