Quotes by British Authors - Page 458

My love of consistency with my own doctrinal views is not great enough to allow me knowingly to alter a single text of Scripture. I have great respect for orthodoxy, but my reverence for inspiration is far greater. I would sooner a hundred times over appear to be inconsistent with myself than be inconsistent with the word of God. I never thought it to be any very great crime to seem to be inconsistent with myself; for who am I that I should everlastingly be consistent? But I do think it a great crime to be so inconsistent with the word of God that I should want to lop away a bough or even a twig from so much as a single tree of the forest of Scripture. God forbid that I should cut or shape, even in the least degree, any divine expression.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
But I see you're not standing in a bleedin' shadow, Perks, nor have you done anything to change your bleedin' shape, you're silhouetted against the bleedin' light and your sabre's shining like a diamond in a chimney-sweep's bleedin' ear'ole! Explain!""It's because of the one C, sarge!" said Polly, still staring straight ahead. "And that is?" "Colour, sarge! I'm wearing bleedin' red and white in a bleedin' grey forest, sarge!
Terry Pratchett
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?
George Orwell
...the sole test of music is its power to exalt the soul.
Aleister Crowley
Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.
Graham Greene
No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.
Niall Ferguson
God's Fatherly prerogative, " is a kingly attribute so sweetly veiled in love, that the King's crown is forgotten in the King's face, and His sceptre becomes, not a rod of iron, but a silver sceptre of mercy—the sceptre indeed seems to be forgotten in the tender hand of Him who wields it.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.
Graham Greene
Tell me of this Wizard Howl of yours". Sophie's teeth chattered but she said proudly, "He's the best wizard in Ingary or anywhere else. If he'd only had time, he would have defeated that djinn. And he's sly and selfish and vain as a peacock and cowardly, and you can't pin him down to anything.
Diana Wynne Jones
Truth does not surround itself with lies.
John Christopher
Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...
C.S. Lewis
It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.
Agatha Christie
Social ascendency, innocently disguised as high fashion, good taste or prestigious expenditure, was the same the world over.
John Keay
Trigger warnings are the most ridiculous, patronizing and infantilizing creations ever to come out of feminism....But feminists adore trigger warnings because it reinforces the idea that women are ruled by their emotions, are incapable of recovering from trauma and are just generally hysterical nitwits unprepared to confront adulthood and reality.
Janet Bloomfield
He's a sweet man whose crime was that he didn't love me quite enough, and because this wasn't much of a crime I had to make up some bigger ones.
Nick Hornby
If you introduce the human figure you at once arouse either disgust or desire.
E.M. Forster
Don’t get smart - you two are in a heap of trouble!” snarled Anderson. “Names!”“Names?” repeated the long-haired driver. “Er — well, let’s see. There’s Wilberforce . . . Bathsheba . . . Elvendork . . .”“And what’s nice about that one is, you can use it for a boy or a girl,” said the boy in glasses.“Oh, our names, did you mean?” asked the first, as Anderson spluttered with rage. “You should’ve said! This here is James Potter, and I’m Sirius Black!”“Things’ll be seriously black for you in a minute, you cheeky little —
J.K. Rowling
So then I thought, I'd like you to have something to remember me by, you know, if you ever meet some veela when you're off doing whatever you're doing.'I think dating opportunities are going to be pretty thin on the ground, to be honest.'There's a silver lining I've been looking for,' she whispered, and then she was kissing him as she never kissed him before, and Harry was kissing her back, and it was a blissful oblivion, better than firewhiskey; she was the only real thing in the world, Ginny, the feel of her, one hand on her back, the other in her long sweet-smelling hair...
J.K. Rowling
Getting money is not all a man's business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.
Samuel Johnson
Although you can’t go back in time and alter your natural level of potential, you can determine how much of that ability you tap into, exploit and develop for the future.
Steve Backley
Good evening, Mrs. Grey," Christian says softly. He's standing by the piano, dressed in a tight black T-shirt, and jeans...those jeans- the ones he wore in the playroom. Oh my. They are over washed pale-blue denim, snug, ripped at the knee and hot. He saunters over to me, his feet bare, the top button of the jeans undone, his smoldering eyes never leaving mine. "Good to have you home. I've been waiting for you.
E.L. James
Move thy tongue,For silence is a sign of discontent.
Elizabeth Cary
Six wives the King's had now.' Barak's words dragged me from my reverie. 'We can't even get one between us.
C.J. Sansom
To be perfectly honest, if I had my way women wouldn’t even be allowed inside grounds, and I certainly believe that if a ground is sold out and a male of the species is locked outside, someone should go in, grab the nearest female and throw her out so that the bloke can have her seat.
Dougie Brimson
William: "I'm sure we can all pull together, sir."Vetinari: "Oh, I do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.
Terry Pratchett
Start each day asking, "How do I want others to feel?" Then act accordingly.
Jill Telford
To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world is almost a palpable movement. To enjoy the epic form of that gratification it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night, and, having first expanded with a sense of difference from the mass of civilized mankind, who are diregardful of all such proceedings at this time, long and quietly watch your stately progress through the stars.
Thomas Hardy
Mechanically I carried on across the Irish Sea, noticing with a jaundiced eye that it had suddenly lost the sinister threat of no-man's-land and was transformed into a placid highway where ferry-steamers would soon chug peacefully over the unmarked graves of gallant seamen.
Jackie Moggridge
Unmoor the boat, we could go…downriver...History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities surface towards us and then sink away and some we hook out and others we ignore. And as the pattern changes so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time that returns everything, changes everything. ..a bundle of abandoned clothes. The end of one identity and the beginning of another. …History is a madman's museum. I think I understand some of this, But it’s all subject to the tide. Unmoor the boat. Part miracle part madness. My life is a series of set sails and shipwrecks. I run aground I cut loose, the rim is dangerously near the waterline. I feel like a saint in a coracle. Head thrown back, sun on my throat. Unmoor the boat.
Jeanette Winterson
Don't kill me,' said the knight. 'I yield. I yield. You can't kill a man at mercy.'Lancelot put up his sword and went back from the knight, as if he were going back from his own soul. He felt in his heart cruelty and cowardice, the things which made him brave and kind.'Get up,' he said. 'I won't hurt you. Get up, go.'The knight looked at him, on all fours like a dog, and stood up, crouching uncertainly.Lancelot went away and was sick.
T.H. White
I am a massive slag!" I think to myself, in a motivational way. "I'm a Lady Sex Adventuress! I'm a Pirate of Privates! I'm a swashfuckler!" ... I think of "Teenage Whore" by Courtney Love as my personal anthem.
Caitlin Moran
Modern traveling is not traveling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.
John Ruskin
One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn't, of course. It's a small niggling thing.
Josephine Tey
As I child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn’t here. Before that, my parents weren’t here. And before that…
John Burnside
Far from marking the end of nationalism, the IPL is the ultimate triumph of that principle: a global tournament in which the same nation always wins.
Gideon Haigh
For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.
G.K. Chesterton
The ruthlessness of the godly invalidated their claims of virtue.
Salman Rushdie
It's important to understand that while honor is an entitlement to respect--and shame comes when you lose that title--a person of honor cares first of all not about being respected but about being worthy of respect.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
They have no imagination. A tail is just a tail to them, just a little something extra in the back.
A.A. Milne
Perhaps above everything compassion is the most important thing to embrace and emanate in life. It will enhance your life - and it's the one thing that will elevate and heal mankind
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Maybe being married is talking to oneself with one's other self listening.
Ruth Rendell
There's no beauty without difference and diversity. Love unconditionally.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
On the warm stone walls, climbing roses were just coming into bloom and great twisted branches of honeysuckle and clematis wrestled each other as they tumbled up and over the top of the wall. Against another wall were white apple blossoms on branches cut into sharp crucifixes and forced to lie flat against the stone. Below, the huge frilled lips of giant tulips in shades of white and cream nodded in their beds. They were almost finished now, spread open too far, splayed, exposing obscene black centers. I've never had my own garden but I suddenly recognized something in the tangle of this one that wasn't beauty. Passion, maybe. And something else. Rage.
Meg Rosoff
A bad girl is a far more dangerous thing than a bad boy.
Roald Dahl
Franklin, I was absolutely terrified of having a child. Before I got pregnant, my visions of child rearing- reading stories about cabooses with smiley faces at bedtime, feeding glop into slack mouths- all seemed like pictures of someone else. I dreaded confrontation with what could prove a closed, stony nature, my own selfishness and lack of generosity, the thick tarry powers of my own resentment. However intrigued by a “turn of the page,” I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else’s story. And I believe that this terror is precisely what must have snagged me, the way a ledge will tempt one to jump off. The very surmountability of the task, its very unattractiveness , was in the end what attracted me to it. (32)
Lionel Shriver
The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
J.B.S. Haldane
Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
P.D. James
Love is an optical illusion that makes you believe the object of your affection is the most beautiful person in the world.
Tom Holt
To struggle against darkness is not to blunder ignorantly; intelligence is needed to generate right action. Wisdom guides whether to act or not, and if so how. Sometimes darkness is overwhelming and intelligent action is required. Sometimes silence and inaction is required, but a silence which is the result of intelligence is different from that born of ego states such as pride, fear and laziness.
Belsebuub
He could feel her laughter against his chest, and at that moment he thought that there was no better feeling than making Emma Morley laugh.
David Nicholls
In fact there is only your own instinct?Not instinct, Hastings. Instinct is a bad word. It is my knowledge-my experience-that tells me that something about that letter is wrong-
Agatha Christie
But one day, when Toby is old enough, I will take down a shoe box from a shelf where it is kept, and I will tell him again the story of his sister, Isabel Margaret Cavendish, the girl who came before.
J.P. Delaney
We like to think of individuals as unique. Yet if this is true of everyone, then we all share the same quality, namely our uniqueness. What we have in common is the fact that we are all uncommon. Everybody is special, which means that nobody is. The truth, however, is that human beings are uncommon only up to a point. There are no qualities that are peculiar to one person alone. Regrettably, there could not be a world in which only one individual was irascible, vindictive or lethally aggressive. This is because human beings are not fundamentally all that different from each other, a truth postmodernists are reluctant to concede. We share an enormous amount in common simply by virtue of being human, and this is revealed by the vocabularies we have for discussing human character. We even share the social processes by which we come to individuate ourselves.
Terry Eagleton
The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy ... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?
Henry James
It may be the character of his mind, to be always in singular need of occupation. That may be, in part, natural to it; in part, the result of affliction. The less it was occupied with healthy things, the more it would be in danger of turning in the unhealthy direction. He may have observed himself, and made the discovery.
Charles Dickens
Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?
C.S. Lewis
In other words - and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxywide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.
Douglas Adams
Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible. [on hearing a famous violinist]
Samuel Johnson
Ron's ears turned bright red and he become engrossed in a tuft of grass at his feet, which he prodded with his toe 'he must've known I'd run out on you'.'No', Harry corrected him, 'He must've known you'd always want to come back
J.K. Rowling
I don't mean to be rude—" he began, in a tone that threatened rudeness in every syllable."Yet, sadly, accidental rudeness occurs alarmingly often," Dumbledore finished the sentence gravely.
J.K. Rowling