Quotes by British Authors - Page 468

Unlimited power corrupts the possessor and this I know that where law ends there tyranny begins.
Lord Chatham
I'm not perfect. Never have been.Never will be.~ Louis Tomlinson
Louis Tomlinson
Fabre stood up. He placed his fingertips on d‘Anton’s temples. “Put your fingers here,” he said. “Feel the resonance. Put them here, and here.” He jabbed at d’Anton’s face: below the cheekbones, at the side of his jaw. “I’ll teach you like an actor,” he said. “This city is our stage.”Camille said: “Book of Ezekiel. ‘This city is the cauldron, and we the flesh’ ...”Fabre turned. “This stutter,” he said. “You don’t have to do it.” Camille put his hands over his eyes. “Leave me alone,” he said. “Even you.” Fabre’s face was incandescent. “Even you, I am going to teach.” He leapt forward, wrenched Camille upright in his chair. He took him by the shoulders and shook him. “You’re going to talk properly,” Fabre said. “Even if it kills one of us.” Camille put his hands protectively over his head. Fabre continued to perpetrate violence; d’Anton was too tired to intervene.
Hilary Mantel
Strategy is about shaping the future.
Max McKeown
The least I can do is speak out for the hundreds of chimpanzees who, right now, sit hunched, miserable and without hope, staring out with dead eyes from their metal prisons. They cannot speak for themselves.
Jane Goodall
No role brings greater joy or blessing than being a parent.
Elizabeth George
The promise of adventure is often more exciting than the adventure itself.
Fennel Hudson
It was days like this when I felt it more than ever: I wasn’t a real human.
Melanie Cusick-Jones
[W]hen trying to understand the character of the modern mind, it is impossible to separate the effects of genes and the developmental environment.
Steven Mithen
Andy was receptive, like a deep vessel into which life was poured. If this terrible particular thing hadn't been poured into her, she would have been happier--it goes without saying--but less of a person. She was filled out by her fate. I actually think that this is quite rare, the capacity to become the whole shape of the accidents that happen to you.
Tessa Hadley
To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.
George Eliot
The love of books is among the choicest gifts of the gods.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Cordelia glared at me. 'I expect if someone strapped you to table an swung an axe over your naked quivering flesh like The Pit and the Pendulum, you'd be correcting his grammar'.
Victoria Clayton
She stood lost in eternity... watching the immense sky...
Angela Carter
To deliver your own personal maximum, you’ll realise there are no shortcuts; if you want to be a champion it is all about rolling your sleeves up and getting stuck in.
Steve Backley
There are three types of student: The golden student pays and loans, the silver student pays but does not learn, the bronze student learns but does not pay.
J.C. McKeown
Reason is God's gift but so are the passions. Reason is as guilty as passion.
Cardinal Newman
The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation governments can confiscate secretly and unobserved an important part of the wealth of their citizens.
John Maynard Keynes
The enemy of my enemy may be my friend … of course the friend of my friend is often a jerk.
Mark Lawrence
It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters.
George Orwell
Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity and principals of uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, that can shape and alter who weimagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment. That each point of intersection, each encounter, suggest a new potential direction. Proposition, I have fallen in love with Luisa Rey. Is this possible? I just met her and yet, I feel like something important has happened to me.
David Mitchell
And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild struggling to push himself forwards! It was just insanity. And it was getting worse, really maniacal.Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at least, Clifford was shifting his grip from her on to Mrs Bolton. He did not know it. Like many insane people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was not aware of, the great desert tracts in his consciousness.
D.H. Lawrence
No m’lord. It wouldn’t be a secret army if we had seen it. My squire, who has not had the opportunity to be clearly informed about the presence of a secret army, has been ignorant of its existence.
Gary Edward Gedall
There's a good chance that you might be inspired by ideas that originate outside of yourself.
David Byrne
Religious toleration, to a certain extent, has been won, because people have ceased to consider religion so important as it was once thought to be. But in politics and economics, which have taken the place formerly occupied by religion, there is a growing tendency to persecution, which is not by any means confined to one party.
Bertrand Russell
I take the opportunity each day offers.
Andy Goldsworthy
Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.
Anthony Burgess
Parents drinking is the reason you came into the world, and if we didn't keep doing it then, by God, it would be the reason you went back out of it.
Caitlin Moran
He will make you happy, Fanny; I know he will make you happy; but you will make him everything.
Jane Austen
Bonnie saw ropes hanging loose, poles falling away, tree-tops sinking beneath her. As they rose, the sun rose with them. Its warmth turned the dark skin of the fiery balloon midnight blue. They flew straight up. Above them, the sweet, clear music of the lonely pipe called to them. Then the smooth sky puckered into cloth-of-blue and drew aside. They passed straight through...
Pauline Fisk
Shadows fell on them like predators as the light went out.
China Miéville
Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears.
Charles Dickens
[I]t is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible.
Jane Austen
Their world has changed overnight ...Even after the trial, after the verdict -- whatever it might be -- life would never be the same again.That was the truth of murder.
Marian Babson
I am a people watcher and I have a very good memory.
Brian Jacques
Feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up.
Anthony Burgess
I like a good hater.
Samuel Johnson
Ties are straightened and expressions banished.
Rana Dasgupta
Ford Prefect suppressed a little giggle of evil satisfaction, realized that he had no reason to suppress it, and laughed out loud, a wicked laugh.
Douglas Adams
Turn around.”Only two words, but they deliver such a sensual threat.I do as you ask without question. You are right behind me, breathing hard into the small of my neck, where I like to be kissed.
Felicity Brandon
The child (mis)recognizes itself as a whole entity for the first time. It sees an image of itself as a unified person, an image which promises for the child that it will soon achieve full co-ordination of its body. The incoherent ‘hommelette’ sees an image of itself as an independent being and learns to identify with this image. This is when the ego (the sense of yourself as an individual) is formed. Thus, your sense of self is fundamentally bound up with an ‘exterior’ image. Instead of simply coming from within, your identity is formed out of a situation in which you see yourself for the first time from the outside. For Lacan this means that alienation and division are built into your identity from the outset. The result in adult life is that you are in a constant but fruitless state of desire for some mythical inner unity and stability to match the unity and stability you thought you saw in your childhood reflection. We spend our lives trying (and failing) to make ourselves ‘whole’.
Glenn Ward
Sleepless nights, infinite random thoughts, Remembering those moments, he had much to say, an urge to talk to someone, to be cared, to be loved, to be understood !! She was gone by now, And he was lost !! There it was, A white paper note, a pen, and the dark clouds forcing him to spill out !! Yes Words did most of talking, the unsaid words took the paper form .. Strange it was, the way Love was lost somewhere in the Library stacks !!
Douglas Self
War, in its fairest form, implies a perpetual violation of humanity and justice.
Edward Gibbon
It's the sound of the sea that makes you believe in mermaids.
Anthony T.Hincks
You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.
C.S. Lewis
And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.
Angela Carter
Is your division of Understanding into Greater and Lesser common to all Sufis? Nothing which is put into words is common to all Sufis.
Idries Shah
One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the same day as we do ourselves.
Philip Larkin
A jaw like a mastiff's, a frame like a giant's, eyes like two daggers, a smile like a tiger's snarl,"Bernard murmured."Aye, he is all that!!" Master Herbert said."A murrain be on him! And when I came to him,what did I do? I did bow in all politeness, yet stiffly withal to show him I'd not brook his surliness.""I did hear ye did bow so low that your head came below your knees,"Bernard said.
Georgette Heyer
Beneath the eerie calm of these unfathomable waters were deadly whirlpools of ambition, anger and unhappiness.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
Aldous Huxley
And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.
J.R.R. Tolkien
He has neither what I call the outward vision (seeing details all around you what is called an observant person) nor the inner vision--concentration, the focusing of the mind on one object. He has a purposefully limited vision. He sees only what blends and harmonises with the bent of his mind.
Agatha Christie
She's no angel.He's no saint.
Elvis Costello
There's no seduction any more, diary. No subtlety. No tidy-yourself-up in this world. No need for personal pride. There's just the things you're prepared to do - for survival, for fulfillment, for whatever-the-hell-it-is you really need - and the things you're not.
Simon Spurrier
Well, I suggest you sleep on it," said Aunt Zelda sensibly. "Things always look better in the morning.
Angie Sage
Louise was an urbanite, she preferred the gut-thrilling sound of an emergency siren slicing through the night to the noise of country birds at dawn. Pub brawls, rackety roadworks, mugged tourists, the badlands on a Saturday night - they all made sense, they were all part of the huge, dirty, torn social fabric. There was a war raging out there in the city and she was part of the fight, but the countryside unsettled her because she didn't know who the enemy was. She had always preferred North and South to Wuthering Heights. All that demented running around the moors, identifying yourself with the scenery, not a good role model for a woman.
Kate Atkinson
You can't admit to someone else what you're too damn afraid to admit to yourself.
Beth Lewis
Joy being of God was a living thing, a fountain not a cistern, one of those divine things that are possessed only as they overflow and flow away, and not easily come by because it must break into human life through the hard crust of sin and contingency. Joy came now here, now there, was held and escaped.
Elizabeth Goudge
you're entirly bonkers but I'll tell you a secret all the best people are
Lewis Carroll