Quotes by British Authors - Page 459

Law is a bottomless pit.
J. Arbuthnot
When I should have been producing obscure volumes of verse entitled the Triumph of Humpty Dumpty or the Nose with the Luminous Dong! Or at best, like Clare, "weaving fearful vision" ... A frustrated poet in every man. Though it is perhaps a good idea under the circumstances to pretend at least to be proceeding with one's great work on "Secret Knowledge," then one can always say when it never comes out that the title explains the deficiency.
Malcolm Lowry
The sight of such aching beauty would infuse his soul with pain.
Tabitha Suzuma
Ah, dear Jude; that's because you are like a totally deaf manobserving people listening to music. You say 'What are theyregarding? Nothing is there.' But something is.
Thomas Hardy
Lions and tigers, bitches and bears, oh my.
Bryony Pearce
I'm a writer by profession and it's totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so frequent, the diversity of voices I engage with is far higher than in the pre-Internet age—and all this has helped me become more modest as a thinker, more open to error, less fixated on what I do know, and more respectful of what I don't. If this is a deterioration in my brain, then more, please."The problem is finding the space and time when this engagement stops, and calm, quiet, thinking and reading of longer-form arguments, novels, essays can begin. Worse, this also needs time for the mind to transition out of an instant gratification mode to me a more long-term, thoughtful calm. I find this takes at least a day of detox. Getting weekends back has helped. But if there were a way to channel the amazing insights of blogging into the longer, calmer modes of thinking ... we'd be getting somewhere."I'm working on it.
Andrew Sullivan
Write from your heart, write with blood and courage.
Olivia Jardine
...in that rich earth a richer dust concealed.(I'm flogging a dead horse w/ this one but this is the 1st time I've even seen this quotes feature! I just wanted to post something.)
Rupert Brooke
But I’m old now and Ward has made himself rich and powerful. He has the resources to ensure that one day he’ll perfect his standardising system and if that happens, instead of a thousand Wards there will be a hundred thousand, a million, a billion. He’ll grow exponentially until there’s nothing and no one else left. Just Ward, Ward, Ward in every house, in every town and every city, in every country in the world. Forever.
Steven Hall
I’ve learned a lot about love over these last months. And part of what I’ve learned is that you have to want someone for who they are, not who you want them to be. You have to love a real person, not some dream in your head.
Zoë Marriott
And the tiresome part of sorrows is that they do not hurt in proportion to their validity and excusability. If we are to be sympathetic, we can remember always that silly suffering hurts just as much as sensible suffering.
Menie Muriel Dowie
The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.
Neil Gaiman
Father Brown got to his feet, putting his hands behind him. 'Odd, isn't it,' he said, 'that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man?
G.K. Chesterton
Some among the Armenians in the diaspora would never want the Turks to recognize the genocide. If they do so, they'll pull the rug out from under our feet and take the strongest bond that unites us. Just like the Turks have been in the habit of denying their wrongdoing, the Armenians have been in the habit of savoring the cocoon of victim hood. Apparently, there are some old habits that need to be changes on both sides." Baron Baghdassarian
Elif Shafak
I think, yes, a man and a woman can be good friends, but it isn't easy for them being as no one else will suppose that that is what they are. And then there's the problem of being different sexes. I think if they are good friends, then whatever else they are - or are not - is better.
A.S. Byatt
And remember also that in fighting against man we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices.
George Orwell
In order to reach our goals we sometimes need a plan B. Other times we go all the way through to plan Z.
Jo Linsdell
Did you ever want to set someone's head on fire, just to see what it looked like? Did you ever stand in the street and think to yourself, I could make that nun go blind just by giving her a kiss? Did you ever lay out plans for stitching babies and stray cats into a Perfect New Human? Did you ever stand naked surrounded by people who want your gleaming sperm, squirting frankincense, soma and testosterone from every pore? If so, then you're the bastard who stole my drugs Friday night. And I'll find you. Oh, yes.
Warren Ellis
There comes a time in one’s life, perhaps in middle age, when we stop and assess who we are, and the life we have.
Fennel Hudson
I dislike this whole business of experimentation on animals, unless there's some very good and altogether exceptional reason to this very case. The thing that gets me is that it's not possible for the animals to understand why they are being called upon to suffer. They don't suffer for their own good or benefit at all, and I often wonder how far it's for anyone's. They're given no choice, and there is no central authority responsible for deciding whether what's done is morally justifiable. These experiment animals are just sentient objects; they're useful because they are able to react; sometimes precisely because they're able to feel fear and pain. And they're used as if they were electric light bulbs or boots. What it comes to is that whereas there used to be human and animal slaves, now there are just animal slaves. They have no legal rights or choices in the matter.
Richard Adams
Of all the great world religions, Christianity should value the body most. After all, it taught that God had in some sense taken a human body and used it to redeem the world; everything about the physical should have been sacred and sacramental. But that had not happened. instead, the churches had found it almost impossible to integrate the sexual with the divine and had developed a Platonic aversion to the body - particularly the bodies of women.
Karen Armstrong
Progress in human affairs, whether in science or in history or in society, has come mainly through the bold readiness of human beings not to confine themselves to seeking piecemeal improvements in the way things are done, but to present fundamental challenges in the name of reason to the current way of doing things and to the avowed or hidden assumptions on which it rests
Edward Hallett Carr
Before big bridges, deep tunnels and the advent of health and safety regulations, there were many ways to cross rivers. They would use rowing boats, rickety rafts or in the absence of a vessel, swim or wade. Everyone knew what a stepping-stone was. They all understood that it was not something that you would want to stand on for any length of time. It was a means to an end, an important point and a route from A to B.
Johnathan Cainer
If you knew how many hidden depths I had your pretty eyes would pop right out of your winsome face. Not literally of course - that would be disgusting. I wouldn’t envy the man who had to clean up a pair of popped eyes, especially given the state of this deck. I’m not sure we even have any cleaning products that work for popped eyes, although I suppose a general viscera cleaner would do the trick.
Gideon Defoe
If there are any persons who contest a received opinion,or who will do so if law or opinion will let them, let us thankthem for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoicethat there is some one to do for us what we otherwise ought,if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality ofour convictions, to do with much greater labor for ourselves.
John Stuart Mill
The piper never knew we were watchers.....Sounds echoed - sounds of a Scottish love song. They echoed through the silence, soft and melancholy, as he kept time with his foot, and the metal of the bagpipes glinted, through faint moonshine, and lifting fog
Suzy Davies
Everyday ... life confronts us with new problems to be solved which force us to adjust our old programs accordingly.
Dr. Ann Faraday
Do no drown me with mediocrity, give me passion, desire, make me inhale breaths of lust and love in the dark hours that tingle down my spine...
Virginia Alison
History is about the past. Yet it exists only in the present – the moment of its creation as history provides us with a narrative constructed after the events with which it is concerned. The narrative must then relate to the moment of its creation as much as its historical subject. History presents an historian with the task of producing a dialogue between the past and the present. But as these temporal co-ordinates cannot be fixed, history becomes a continuous interaction between the historian and the past. As such, history can be seen as a process of evaluation whereby the past is always coloured by the intellectual fashions and philosophical concerns of the present. This shifting perspective on the past is matched by the fluid status of the past itself.
Dana Arnold
Music is like a psychiatrist. You can tell your guitar things that you can't tell people. And it will answer you with things people can't tell you.
Paul McCartney
The fact that you can act with love even when you don’t feel love is very empowering. Why? Because whereas the feelings of love are fleeting and largely out of your control, you can take the actions of love anytime and anyplace for the whole rest of your life.
Russ Harris
Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you.
Karl R. Popper
You are hatching from the past.
Simon Van Booy
Women do not find it difficult nowadays to behave like men but they often find it extremely difficult to behave like gentlemen.
Compton Mackenzie
Judith Rey watches the young woman. Once upon a time, I had a baby daughter. I dressed her in frilly frocks, enrolled her for ballet classes, and sent her to horse-riding camp five summers in a row. But look at her. She turned into Lester anyway. She kisses Luisa’s forehead. Luisa frowns, suspiciously, like a teenager. “What?
David Mitchell
Much though we like these panties," he says, tugging at the small material covering my pulsating sex, "they're only going to be in the way...
Felicity Brandon
The best men are not consistent in good—why should the worst men be consistent in evil?
Wilkie Collins
Don't become a puppet to other peoples desires, live and create your life as you intend it to be.
Steven Redhead
Nothing in the world delights a truly religious people so much as consigning them to eternal damnation.
James Hogg
It is the function of creative people to perceive relations between thoughts, or things, or forms of expressions that seem utterly different, and to be able to Connect the seemingly Unconnected".
William Plomer
This is one of the disadvantages of wine, it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.
Samuel Johnson
No daydreaming. No music, film, art, creative thinking or business.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
I grow old … I grow old …t I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.tShall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?tI shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.tI have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.tI do not think that they will sing to me.t I have seen them riding seaward on the wavestCombing the white hair of the waves blown backtWhen the wind blows the water white and black.tWe have lingered in the chambers of the seatBy sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brownt Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
T.S Eliot
You need to relax and be yourself, not whoever it is you’re trying to be in your mad little head. I bloody don’t, though. I’m me and I’m good at it.
Nick Harkaway
If we can only speak to slander our betters, let us hold our tongues.
Anne Brontë
What greater gift than the love of a cat.
Charles Dickens
The kind of teacher who never learned anything herself. Or taught anything, except sarcasm or fear.
Tanith Lee
At some point the body offers only disappointment.
Richard House
The most important thing is to enjoy your life—to be happy—it's all that matters.
Audrey Hepburn
The Son symbolizes the hope of humanity, bringing light to the darkness of our material existence, and reuniting us with the divinity of our own higher nature.
Belsebuub
We didn't need light & shade, irony or humor. An iconic Daltrey bellow could convey an extrodinary range of human emotion; withering sadness, self pity, loneliness, abandonment, spiritual desperation, the loss of childhood, as well as the more obvious rage & frustration, joy & triumph.
Pete Townshend
Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.
Samuel Johnson
You should just keep your mouth shout! It gets very tedious having you make a snarky comment about everything that someone says in this group.
Jojo Moyes
For me, Mama's cabinet had been full of mysteries and secrets to be puzzled out, like an adventure. For them it had been full of memories. And I had broken all of them.
Stephanie Burgis
Blobfish, the guy who snapped a hamsters neck, myself, the homeless guy who has never thrown a punch (but has killed a fox) and Dickface, the man obsessed with trees and touching himself in public, follow an arrogant midget into the home of a pale creature I am certain will kill us all, to save the life of an ungrateful bastard parrot called Madness.The temperature drops further.A cold night for heroes.
Craig Stone
Science is a river with two sources, the practical source and the theoretical source.
Alfred North Whitehead
The circus had been unlike anything I could ever imagine and I could not walk away. I wanted to be a part of the magic, create it and wield it with such skill that it looked effortless. I wanted to fly.
Laura Lam
Of course, the abolition of Hell meant that such thoughts were now the merest fantasy. Isobel was agnostic as to what, if anything, lay in store for us after this life; that there was a world of spirit seemed to her to be a possibility that we should not exclude. Consciousness was an elusive entity about which we knew very little, other than that it came into existence when certain conditions were present- a sufficient mass of brain cells operating in a particular way. But could we really say much more than that about where it was located & whether it could survive in other conditions? The fact that a plant grew in one place did not mean that it could not grow in another. And if something lay behind this consciousness, orchestrated it & and the conditions that produced it, then why should we not call this something God?
Alexander McCall Smith
Psychiatric institutions are filled with lots of normal people.
Anthony T.Hincks
All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes — a fact which is recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.
George Orwell