Quotes by British Authors - Page 457

All the best women are married, yes, they are - to all the worst men' There was an infinite slow caress in her tone but she went on rapidly 'So I shall never marry you. How should I marry a kind man, a good man? I am a barbarian, and want a barbarian lover, to crush and scarify me, but you are so tender and I am so crude. When your soft eyes look on me they look on a volcano.
A.E. Coppard
An unhappy ending makes it literature rather than romantic fiction.
Victoria Clayton
We have found each other for a reason to fill each other’s empty heart in every season!
Lily Amis
While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination." (from "The Third and Final Continent")
Jhumpa Lahiri
Your attitude toward others, work, and your daily life is a reflection of your attitude toward God.
Elizabeth George
One just has to look at the thing from a perspective that interests you personally.
Zadie Smith
How hard it is to kill hope! Time after time, one thinks one has trodden it down, stamped it to death. Time after time, like a noxious insect, it begins to stir again, it shivers back again into a faint tremulous life. Once more it worms its way into one's heart, to instil its poison, to gnaw away the solid hard foundations of life and leave in their place the hollow phantom of illusion.
Dorothy Bussy
There is at Christmas time a great deal of hypocrisy, honourable hypocrisy, hypocrisy undertaken pour le bon motif, c'est entendu, but nevertheless hypocrisy!
Agatha Christie
But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don't recognize that, then that's the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares someone else's fate to some extent.
Malcolm Bradbury
Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.
E.M. Forster
Joan Durbeyfield always manged to find consolation somewhere: 'Well, as one of the genuine stock, she ought to make her way with 'en, if she plays her trump car aright. And if he don't marry her afore he will after. For that he's all afire wi' love for her any eye can see.' 'What's her trump card? Her d'Urberville blood, you mean?' 'No, stupid; her face - as 'twas mine.
Thomas Hardy
History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes follies and misfortunes of mankind.
Edward Gibbon
Train your subconscious to be positive by using the heart intelligence.
Steven Redhead
Another anti-theoretical stratagem is to claim that in order to launch some fundamental critique of our culture, we would need to be standing at some Archimedean point beyond it. What this fails to see is that reflecting critically on our situation is part of our situation. It is a feature of the peculiar way we belong to the world. It is not some impossible light-in-the-refrigerator attempt to scrutinize ourselves when we are not there. Curving back on ourselves is as natural to us as it is to cosmic space or a wave of the sea. It does not entail jumping out of our own skin. Without such self-monitoring we would not have survived as a species.
Terry Eagleton
There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.
Arthur C. Clarke
With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes -- one of the tragedies of married life.
Virginia Woolf
Good taste is death. Vulgarity is life.
Mary Quant
This caterpillar does not just simply grow wingsFirst, it must alter its mind; transform the very being of itselfIt must climb the tallest tree, the highest mountainSwim the deepest of oceansWalk through the fiercest of flamesAnd then, if it chooses, this caterpillar can become a butterfly
Aubrey Moore
You're very old, aren't you?""Just as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.
Philippa Pearce
I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it's very difficult to find anyone.' I should think so — in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!
J.R.R. Tolkien
I looked for any footmarks of course, but naturally, with all this rain, there wasn't a sign. Of course, if this were a detective story, there'd have been a convenient shower exactly an hour before the crime and a beautiful set of marks which could only have come there between two and three in the morning, but this being real life in a London November, you might as well expect footprints in Niagara. I searched the roofs right along—and came to the jolly conclusion that any person in any blessed flat in the blessed row might have done it.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Having a fishing rod in your hand is merely an excuse to explore out-of-sight depths and reveal mysteries that previously only existed in dreams.
Fennel Hudson
USA corporations are legally regulated by laws which their managers know are rarely enforced. This criminal activity is what the USA government calls: Deregulation.
Steven Magee
I had rather that the human race, having a certain quality in their lives, should continue for only a few centuries than that, losing freedom, friendship, dignity, and mercy, and learning to be quite content without them, they should continue for millions of millennia.
C.S. Lewis
The development of Nikola Tesla's ideas by corporate governments has created a sick and dangerous world.
Steven Magee
When you suspect old age is catching up with you, live faster!
Benny Bellamacina
Am I really admitting that my sister is determined to marry a man she has only seen once and doesn't much like the look of? It is half real and half pretense - and I have an idea that it is a game most girls play when they meet an eligible young men. They just...wonder.
Dodie Smith
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat in the active and passive.
Dean William R. Inge
The feast of reason and the flow of soul.
Alexander Pope
Police not enforcing laws results in a high crime rate that is formally reported as a low crime rate in police statistics.
Steven Magee
Life is far too short for any silly nonsense.
Steven Redhead
There was certainly plenty to watch and listen to. The tree which Digory had noticed was now a full-grown beech whose branches swayed gently above his head. They stood on cool, green grass, sprinkled with daisies and buttercups. A little way off, along the river bank, willows were growing. On the other side tangles of flowering currant, lilac, wild rose, and rhododendron closed them in.
C.S. Lewis
Unless a person can give reasons, there is, literally, no reason why anyone else should take that person seriously. But without reasons, all we are left with is emotional blackmail. We sometimes call it 'moral blackmail,' but it has nothing to do with morals, only with the implied juvenile threat of having a tantrum unless everyone else gives in.
N.T. Wright
I have fallen for someone who's so emotionally shut down, I will only get hurt.
E.L. James
I was scripting for a series on the Arts programme which was shown very late on a Sunday evening, and I was sent off to get the low down on several up and coming musicians who would be featured each week. To the music world, they may have been up and coming, I would have preferred them to be down and going and preferably out of range.
Lucinda E. Clarke
I do not remember asking adults about anything, except as a last resort.
Neil Gaiman
People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe.
Jeanette Winterson
Elliot and I were more 'adult' about it all. We'd kiss hello and goodbye and we'd kiss as part of foreplay, but we wouldn't kiss just for the sake of it. not when we got together properly.I would love to snog Jack Britcham. I would love to inhale the smell of him, feast in the scent of him, become intoxicated by him. And of course there is nothing wrong with looking at him. I would love to run my fingers over the lines of his body, touch him and see if I could absorb him through the pads of my fingers, have him enter my bloodstream and race through my veins. I would love to taste him. See if he tastes as good as he looks.I don't know why he's got so far under my skin, but he has. And that's not a bad thing, I didn't think. It gives me something to look forward to, I suppose.Loved-up saddo
Dorothy Koomson
Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.
Hilary Mantel
What if we changed the story that has been peddled to us over thousands of years by those religions that want to control us, that this life is merely a stepping stone to something better or something worse, and that we can only achieve the better by passing through the doors of their institutions and following their rules? What if we trash this arcane story which has caused so much suffering and hostility, and accept that we have already arrived in heaven and that there is nothing more gorgeous than here and now?
Danny Scheinmann
There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.
Charles Dickens
Marianne could never love by halves; and her whole heart became, in time, as much devoted to her husband, as it had once been to Willoughby.
Jane Austen
That is one of the functions of art: to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.
C.S. Lewis
But I’ve learned that sometimes, somehow, no matter how much time we spend apart from the ones we care most about, our love for them never fades, for time apart only makes our love grow stronger.
Rebecah McManus
We can no longer believe that after death, if we have sinned, we shall enter hell. Hell has been acted out here on Earth in the time of Nazi Germany, when even the innocent went in their millions to a hell that beggars the imagination. A profound change in attitude has come about as a result.
Brian W. Aldiss
He then departed, to make himself still more interesting, in the midst of an heavy rain.
Jane Austen
Pain of the past never goes away, you just find a way to deal with it. And in the future....... all the promise it holds.... that's what keeps you moving forward, and out of the darkness.
Samantha Towle
The history of the human race doesn’t make happy reading, does it? I’ve seen a lot of sadness during my time, but I’ve seen seen a lot of things that have kept my faith in humanity alive too. If there were no bad things in the world, we’d have nothing to measure the good against, would we? The light can only shine in darkness.
Peter James
This was never what I wanted for us, but things change. Plans change. People change. I've faced the reality of my destiny and now I need to embrace that.
Siobhan Davis
As for Iago’s jealousy, one cannot believe that a seriously jealous man could behave towards his wife as Iago behaves towards Emilia, for the wife of a jealous husband is the first person to suffer. Not only is the relation of Iago and Emilia, as we see it on stage, without emotional tension, but also Emilia openly refers to a rumor of her infidelity as something already disposed of.Some such squire it wasThat turned your wit, the seamy side withoutAnd made you to suspect me with the Moor.At one point Iago states that, in order to revenge himself on Othello, he will not rest till he is even with him, wife for wife, but, in the play, no attempt at Desdemona’s seduction is made. Iago does not encourage Cassio to make one, and he even prevents Roderigo from getting anywhere near her.Finally, one who seriously desires personal revenge desires to reveal himself. The revenger’s greatest satisfaction is to be able to tell his victim to his face – "You thought you were all-powerful and untouchable and could injure me with impunity. Now you see that you were wrong. Perhaps you have forgotten what you did; let me have the pleasure of reminding you."When at the end of the play, Othello asks Iago in bewilderment why he has thus ensnared his soul and body, if his real motive were revenge for having been cuckolded or unjustly denied promotion, he could have said so, instead of refusing to explain.
W.H. Auden
His was not the hatred that arises suddenly like a storm and as suddenly abates. It was, once the initial shock of anger and pain was over, a calculated thing that grew in a bloodless way.
Mervyn Peake
There is a camaraderie that grows up among those who work with old books and old papers, largely, I suspect, because we understand that we are at odds with the rest of the world: we are travelling backwards, while all those around us are still moving forward.
Peter Ackroyd
Good heavens television is something you appear on you don't watch.
Noël Coward
The home is the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose, and that is to support the ultimate career.
C.S. Lewis
My heart is set, as firmly as ever heart of man was set on woman. I have no thought, no view, no hope, in life beyond her; and if you oppose me in this great stake, you take my peace and happiness in your hands, and cast them to the wind.
Charles Dickens
If people reach perfection they vanish, you know.
T.H. White
Conspiracy theory, like causality, works fantastically well as an explanatory model but only if you use it backwards. The fact that we cannot predict much about tomorrow strongly indicates that most of the explanations we develop about how something happened yesterday have (like history in general) a high bullshit content.
Peter J. Carroll
Take God at His Word – because winning the battle doesn't requirephysical brawn, but spiritual brains!
Pedro Okoro