Quotes by British Authors - Page 466

Fresh from a costume fitting, where I had been posing in front of the mirror assuming what I thought was a strong position - arms folded, butch-looking...you know - I met with the woman in charge of Holloway police station. She gave me the most invaluable advice: never let them see you cry, and never cross your arms. When I asked why, she said 'because it is a defensive action and therefore weak.
Helen Mirren
Trust but check. Check on those we trust.
Tom Rob Smith
In account after account of exorcisms the demonic voices will propound nihilism of one variety or another.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Labor is a man crowning glory.""Not this man's.""I quote Marx"I raised my hands. The pickaxe handle had been rough."I quote blisters.
John Fowles
Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Andrew Marvell
I love new clothes. If everyone could just wear new clothes everyday, I reckon depression wouldn’t exist anymore.
Sophie Kinsella
True beauty cannot fail to move the beholder
Jocelyn Murray
It was a very special moment for John's spirit was awakening and he was opening up, I had touched andresonated with his soul. It was more than just cyber sex, more than making love with someone you loved, it was blending souls as soul mates do and it was an incredible moment for the two of us. We both cried beautiful happy tears
Astrid Brown
You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return. And the wound will take you there.
Jeanette Winterson
i dream nights and girls like tigers,claws and teeth on both.
Elisabeth Hewer
Big cities comforted me: the cover, the chaos, the hollow sympathy of the architecture, the Tube lines snaking underground. London could swallow you up, in a good way. There were times when I'd been broken and being subsumed into a city had made me feel part of a whole again.
Emma Jane Unsworth
In the marshes the buckbean has lifted its feathery mist of flower spikes above the bed of trefoil leaves. The fimbriated flowers are a miracle of workmanship and every blossom exhibits an exquisite disorder of ragged petals finer than lace. But one needs a lens to judge of their beauty: it lies hidden from the power of our eyes, and menyanthes must have bloomed and passed a million times before there came any to perceive and salute her loveliness. The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Eden Phillpotts
It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with "I," "me," "mine," that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's.
Aldous Huxley
Happyish. Well, happyish isn't so bad.''It's the most we can hope for.
David Nicholls
We cannot turn away,” Miss Woolf told her, “we must get on with our job and we must bear witness.” What did that mean, Ursula wondered. “It means,” Miss Woolf said, “that we must remember these people when we are safely in the futu
Kate Atkinson
Every new encounter provides a new mirror for me to view my own experiences through, and there is a level of selfishness during this period as I hunger to understand more about the girls' lives in order to understand mine. If I could figure out what had happened to them, perhaps I had a better chance of explaining it all to myself.
Rachel Lloyd
Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.
Richard Dawkins
You are young still. Naturally, one tries this, that and the other, but what one eventually settles down into is the life one prefers.
Agatha Christie
People shouldn't call for demons unless they really mean what they say.
C.S. Lewis
You can't see other's point of view when you have only one language.
Frank Smith
It comes from history. It comes from the record of the Inquisition, persecuting heretics and torturing Jews and all that sort of stuff; and it comes from the other side, too, from the Protestants burning the Catholics. It comes from the insensate pursuit of innocent and crazy old women, and from the Puritans in America burning and hanging the witches — and it comes not only from the Christian church but also from the Taliban. Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don't accept him. Wherever you look in history, you find that. It’s still going on.
Philip Pullman
The sky over Patusan was blood-red, immense, streaming like an open vein. An enormous sun nestled crimson amongst the treetops, and the forest below had a black and forbidding face.
Joseph Conrad
Love where there is no reason to love
Sangharakshita
Into my heart an air that killsFrom yon far country blows:What are those blue remembered hills,What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content,I see it shining plain,The happy highways where I wentAnd cannot come again.
A.E. Housman
Avoid letting outside influences have a chance to affect your thoughts.
Steven Redhead
When she's sweet.When she's petite.When she's pretty.She's my color pink!
Anthony T.Hincks
I had everything summed up in a nutshell unfortunately I lost the nut.
Benny Bellamacina
May it be written. May it be done.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Women who seek advice from single women about getting a man is like asking a homeless man how to be rich.
Habeeb Akande
Take from a man his freedom or his goods and you may have taken his innocence, almost his humanity, as well.
C.S. Lewis
I think they ought to know. You do them a disservice by not confiding something this important to them.”“I didn’t want —”“— to worry or frighten them?” said Dumbledore, surveying Harry over the top of his half-moon spectacles. “Or perhaps, to confess that you yourself are worried and frightened? You need your friends, Harry. As you so rightly said, Sirius would not have wanted you to shut yourself away.
J.K. Rowling
We live in that grave, in those clothes, in the pressure between nothing and everything, we live by perpetual movement from place to place but we want oh we so much want to escape to say it all to come home at last to the right place our rightful place our rightful space. As if that was possible.
Gabriel Josipovici
Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, “if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me?
Charles Stross
Your stomach isn't the boss of you,' Mel says evenly.'Oh,' Jared says, realizing. 'Sorry-'Mel shakes her head, brushing it off. 'Not what I meant. Your heart isn't the boss of you other. Thinks it is. Isn't. You can always choose. Always.''You can't choose not to feel,' Henna says.'But you can choose how to act.
Patrick Ness
Her eye fell everywhere on lawns and plantations of the freshest green; and the trees, though not fully clothed, were in that delightful state when farther beauty is known to be at hand, and when, while much is actually given to the sight, more yet remains for the imagination.
Jane Austen
People aren't often asked to make life or death decisions. There are no causes to die for. You can go through life never knowing which of your friends would really come through for you
Bella Pollen
This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.
Daphne du Maurier
There is no need to put your heart in a bottle, then you will die.- Ty from Stolen
Lucy Christopher
When you feel that others are lacking and failing ....first assess the skill, style, quality, results, mindset, support, professionalism and spirit with which you yourself play the game.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
It seemed that it was not only live magicians which Mr. Norrell despised. He had taken the measure of all the dead ones too and found them wanting.
Susanna Clarke
There is something mankind can never destroy in spite of an unreasoning will to destruction, and this is its own idealism, that integral part of its very being.
Radclyffe Hall
The vicar's handshake was warm and reassuring, but shaking hands with Mavis was like clutching a bunch of dead twigs.
Victoria Twead
Meadow's Waltz...the meadow had becomeher sanctuary of spiritoffering an escape from a painno child should ever endureforeboding clouds began...
Muse
I mean to say, we all sprang from humble origins. Goodness gracious, who would have thought that a species of monkey would take over the kingdom of the world. … I cannot help but feel that the monkey was not a good choice. Surely one of the cat family would have been much more satisfactory. They have a much less emotional approach to life. ("The Shadmock")
R. Chetwynd-Hayes
On the morning appointed for her departure Tess awoke before dawn — at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute save for one prophetic bird, who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence, as if equally convinced that he is mistaken.
Thomas Hardy
I don't wanna be the center of anything, just a part of something bigger.
Amber Run
Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.
Charles Lamb
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Eliot
Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone.
Gladys Browyn Stern
The linguistic system represented in the mind-brain gives some account of everything submitted to it: good sentences, bad sentences, sentences in other languages, ums and ahs, coughs; perhaps -Chomsky suggests- even to non-linguistic events like a squeaking door.
Neilson Voyne Smith
The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that I am sure is why he does it.
Roald Dahl
If we're all aggressive, obedient solders [sic], who's going to write the poems and play the blues and go on anti-war protest marches?
Ken Follett
Thought is born of failure.
Lancelot Law Whyte
Look too on this poor planet of ours,Torn by the storms of mysterious powers,Evil contending with good from its birth,Wrenching in battle the heartstrings of earth,—Ah! what infinities circle us here,Strangeness and wonderment swathing the sphere!
Martin Farquhar Tupper
And that will be on my medical records for ever.Everyone will always know I’m a nutter. Behavioural problems. I’m just a bloody label…A label written on a white board in a single room without a radio, in a place where everyone else was at least 20 years older than me. Can’t think about it. It’s anger that goes nowhere.
Rae Earl
Oh dire, dreadful death, you drag your heels.Why dawdle and draw back? You drown my heart.
Simon Armitage
Why, then,' answered the squire, 'I am very sorry you have given him so much learning; for, if he cannot get his living by that, it will rather spoil him for anything else; and your other son, who can hardly write his name, will do more at ploughing and sowing, and is in a better condition, than he.' And indeed so it proved; for the poor lad, not finding friends to maintain him in his learning, as he had expected, and being unwilling to work, fell to drinking, though he was a very sober lad before; and in a short time, partly with grief, and partly with good liquor, fell into a consumption, and died.
Henry Fielding
The world had seen so many Ages: the Age of Enlightenment; of Reformation; of Reason. Now, at last, the Age of Desire. And after this, an end to Ages; an end, perhaps, to everything.
Clive Barker
Music resembles poetry, in eachAre nameless graces which no methods teach,And which a master hand alone can reach.
Alexander Pope
It is important for a woman to have the duplicity to make good use of whatever gifts she might have, however valueless they might seem... You have to have the inner strength to pursue your goal, and not care how many enemies you make along the road. It is not easy.
Anne O'Brien