Quotes by British Authors - Page 480

Those who support such survivors of abuse often find it difficult to hear the reality of those survivors' lives and experience and are often unsupported themselves. Rather than being supported, workers are often ridiculed, castigated or accused of being gullible or of giving the survivor false memories. Many workers work in isolation and a climate of hostility and are unable to talk about the work they do.Yes, despite all the odds, survivors of ritual abuse are beginning to speak out about their experiences, and some people, mainly in voluntary organisations, are beginning to listen to them and support them.[Published 2001]
Laurie Matthew
There are so many of you, and you are still just the way I thought I'd grow up, with all that was enviably grown-up about you: the lace tops with modesty inserts, and the spangles as if for nights out, the stiff hair, the cardigans grown over with a fungus of secondary sexual characteristics--bristling with embroidery and drooping with labial frills.
Joanna Walsh
All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shriveled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.
Anne Brontë
I must confess, I have always wondered what lay beyond life, my dear.Yeah, everybody wonders. And sooner or later everybody gets to find out.
Neil Gaiman
Humanity's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.
Terry Pratchett
Lady Moon rose an' gazed o'er my busted'n'beautsome Valleys with silv'ry'n'sorryin' eyes, an' the dingos mourned for the died uns.
David Mitchell
That is what War is, I thought: two ships pass each other, and nobody waves his hand.
Christopher Isherwood
Like, like, like. My confidence grew with each click.
Keren David
Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what George Orwell called the 'official truth'. They simply cipher and transmit lies. It really grieves me that so many of my fellow journalists can be so manipulated that they become really what the French describe as 'functionaires', functionaries, not journalists. Many journalists become very defensive when you suggest to them that they are anything but impartial and objective. The problem with those words 'impartiality' and 'objectivity' is that they have lost their dictionary meaning. They've been taken over... [they] now mean the establishment point of view... Journalists don't sit down and think, 'I'm now going to speak for the establishment.' Of course not. But they internalise a whole set of assumptions, and one of the most potent assumptions is that the world should be seen in terms of its usefulness to the West, not humanity.
John Pilger
And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.
Philip Pullman
When it rains like that, dark in the afternoon, you feel like you've been taken into the past.
Jackie Kay
But there were certain early days in Casterbridge- days of firmamental exhaustion which followed angry south-westerly tempests-when, if the sun shone, the air was like velvet.
Thomas Hardy
But [Coca-Cola] was also genuinely welcomed by the servicemen in far-flung military bases: Coca-Cola reminded them of home and helped to maintain morale.
Tom Standage
You don't have books?!' Rose almost sat up and banged her head on the roof rafters. That made the rats jump. 'How can you live without reading?''Pretty well so far.' I laughed. 'Stories are just made-up stuff anyway.''Says who? I think they're a different way of telling the truth.' Then, 'Seriously - no books? Oh, Ella, you have no idea what you've been missing! Stories are food and drink and life...I mean, haven't you heard the story about a girl who made a gown out of starlight?''A gown out of starlight? How could you even do that...?''Well,' said Rose. 'Once upon a time...'And that was that. No sleep for me till Rose wrapped up with a triumphant The End.
Lucy Adlington
How can you love those who have stolen from you, assaulted or abused you, or tried to blow you up and completely destroy you? How can you forgive those who have kidnapped, tortured and killed someone you love? Yet this is where reconciliation has to begin.
Andrew White
Are you going to go down on your knees and beg for your life, old one?"tAbbot Mortimer stared calmly into Cluny's savage eye. "I will never bend my knee on my own behalf. However, if I thought I could save the life of one of my friends I would gladly fall down on both knees. But I know you, Cluny, better than you know yourself. There is not a scrap of pity or mercy in your heart, only a burning desire for vengeance. Therefore, I will not kneel to one who is consumed by evil.
Brian Jacques
Yeah no shit, try asking random people about a bird owned by someone you don't know!” Javal countered “Well still you got it!” Javal acknowledged this with a small grin “Now what?” Javal asked Ingra scratched his head “Yeah...Well Dilmore suggested the idea....Not me.
Charon Lloyd-Roberts
Bloomberg does not support the measure to silence the useless and maddening car alarm: he would rather impose himself on people than on mechanical devices.
Christopher Hitchens
...and yet, though desirous to be gone, she could not quit the mansion-house, or look an adieu to the cottage, with its black, dripping and comfortless veranda, or even notice through the misty glasses the last humble tenements of the village, without a saddened heart. Scenes had passed in Uppercross which made it precious. It stood the record of many sensations of pain, once severe, but now softened; and of some instances of relenting feeling, some breathings of friendship and reconciliation, which could never be looked for again, and which could never cease to be dear. She left it all behind her, all but the recollection that such things had been.
Jane Austen
Every man has his price.
Sir Robert Walpole
The way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.
Beryl Markham
Och, they suit you, Queenie! Promise me you'll wear them.
Elizabeth Wein
I actually remember feeling delight at two o'clock in the morning when the baby woke for his feed because I so longed to have another look at him.
Margaret Drabble
He then, with great presence of mind, put a stop to any further recriminations by kissing her; and his indignant betrothed, apparently feeling that he was too deeply sunk in depravity to be reclaimable, abandoned (for the time being, at all events) any further attempt to bring him to a sense of his iniquity.
Georgette Heyer
Every new discovery about the genome is consistent with evolution having happened. Whether we find it appealing or not is another question, but personally I like being fourth cousin to a mushroom and having a bonobo as my closest living relative. It makes me feel a real part of the world.
Richard Fortey
Willfully polluting the ground with AC electricity is just another aspect of how the electrical utility companies will be remembered by the next generation.
Steven Magee
The wizards were civilized men of considerable education and culture. When faced with being inadvertently marooned on a desert island they understood immediately that the first thing to do was place the blame
Terry Pratchett
Girls do go for the finely-chiselled. And apart from his looks, he's and artist, and there's something about artists that seems to act on the other sex like catnip on cats.
P.G. Wodehouse
People don't like to talk about alcohol. They don't like to think about it, except in the most superficial of ways. They don't like to examine the damage it does and I don't blame them. I don't like it either. I know that desire for denial with every bone in my body: clavicle, sternum, femur and phalanx.
Olivia Laing
Most of us tend to belittle all suffering except our own," said Mary. "I think it's fear. We don't want to come too near in case we're sucked in and have to share it.
Elizabeth Goudge
Religion is trust, and that trust arose in the beginning from the impressions made on the mind and heart of man by the order and wisdom of nature, and more particularly, by those regularly recurring events, the return of the sun, the revival of the moon, the order of the seasons, the law of cause and effect, gradually discovered in all things, and traced back in the end to a cause of all causes, by whatever name we choose to call it.
Friedrich Max Müller
I have clungtTo nothing, lov’d a nothing, nothing seentOr felt but a great dream!
John Keats
I enjoy books. No room is fit for occupation without a lining of books.
Martin Booth
Every friend we have represents a new world, a world that may not have existed had they not come into our life.
Steven Aitchison
The lovely Hazard girls', they used to call them. Huh. Lovely is as lovely does; if they looked like what they behave like, they'd frighten little children.
Angela Carter
Playing the martyr doesn’t suit you, Leila.’‘Maybe not, but playing the complete and utter bastard clearly suits you.
Lindsay J. Pryor
I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love.
Jane Austen
The boulevard was awash with the curious and the shocked as wave after wave of tourist crashed into the unmoving masses of families who had just witnessed a brawl between The Incredible Hulk and SpongeBob Squarepants over territory, boundaries and the age old issue of ownership.
David Louden
Get in touch with your inner most desire and aspirations, then utilise the power of your heart to create a life of bliss.
Steven Redhead
Sherard Blaw the dramatist who had discovered himself and who had given so unstintingly of his discovery to the world.
Saki
Is cruelty still cruel if it is necessary? Is cruelty still cruel if it is part of a lie?
Johnny Rich
If I sing along a little fucking louder to a happy song I'll be alright.
Oli Sykes
Harry — I think I've just understood something! I've got to go to the library!”And she sprinted away, up the stairs. does she understand?” said Harry distractedly, still looking around, trying to tell where the voice had come from.“Loads more than I do,” said Ron, shaking his head.“But why’s she got to go to the library?”“Because that’s what Hermione does,” said Ron, shrugging. “When in doubt, go to the library.
J.K. Rowling
As universities have turned into businesses, so students have turned into consumers.
Kenan Malik
We judge one another by our outward actions, but in the motive underlying those actions our judgment may be widely at fault. Preoccupied by our own private interpretation of the matter, we can see only the one possible motive behind the action, so that our solution may be quite plausible, quite coherent, and quite wrong. - Dorothy L. Sayers, Introduction, Pg. 4
The Detection Club
It's hard to maintain a reputation for being grim and mysterious when you're accompanied by a brightly clad young thing, skipping merrily along at your side, holding your hand, and smiling sweetly on one and all.
Simon R. Green
If you have been sunned through and through like an apricot on a wall from your earliest days you are oversensitive to any withdrawal of heat.
Margot Asquith
Many are the friendships that have found an unforseeen and sudden end on a journey, and few are those that survive it.
Elizabeth von Arnim
Blessed is the man who having nothing to say abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
George Eliot
It looked as though you did not act in a certain way because you thought in a certain way, but rather that you thought in a certain way because you were made in a certain way. Truth had nothing to do with it. There was no such thing as truth. Each man was his own philosopher (...). "The thing then was to discover what one was and one's system of philosophy would devise itself. It seems to Philip that there were three things to find out: man's relation to the world he lives in, man's relation to the men among whom he lives, and finally man's relation to himself.
W Somerset Maugham
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on where you were sitting) Libby let off the smelliest, loudest fart known to humanity. It came out of her bum-oley with such force that she lifted off my knee - like a hovercraft. Even she looked surprised by what had come out of her.
Louise Rennison
Your future self is watching you right now through your memories.
Aubrey de Grey
It’s a good thing that the sheep are all so law abiding
Aaronovitch Ben
I can speak of our baby like this to no one else. Who but his father would linger over the exact width of his gummy little smile or the blueness of his eyes, or the sweetness of his little lick of tawny hair on his forehead?
Philippa Gregory
This pain, this terrible seeing-through that is in me now. It wasn't necessary. It is all pain, and it buys nothing. Gives birth to nothing.All in vain. All wasted.The older the world becomes, the more obvious it is. The bomb and the tortures in Algeria and the starving babies in the Congo. It gets bigger and darker.More and more suffering for more and more. And more and more in vain.
John Fowles
I know at least what I am,' he simply went on; 'the other side of the medal's clear enough. I've not been edifying--I believe I'm thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent. I've followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods; it must have come to you again and again--in fact you've admitted to me as much--that I was leading, at any time these thirty years, a selfish frivolous scandalous life. And you see what it has made of me.
Henry James
But, Henry, this is wicked!' But, Adam, the world is wicked. Maoris prey on Moriori, Whites prey on darker-hued cousins, fleas prey on mice, cats prey on rats, Christians on infidels, first mates on cabin boys, Death on the Living. 'The weak are meat, the strong do eat.
David Mitchell
You cannot go poking skeletons in the closet without making maggots wriggle." - Springfield Road
Salena Godden
To lead a human life, a man must have a notion of himself as having a past and a future.
Mary Warnock
The mystery of the MAGIC BATHROOM will be revealed unto thee...The table next to the sink is for flashcards. I say a Monty Python skit called, "Every sperm is sacred," and it gave me the idea that, "every piss is sacred." Meaning, why not look at flashcards while voiding.Mozart liked to write letters while on the loo. He wrote, "I think it only fitting to write while shitting." This gave me the idea to read while....If knowledge is money, and money is gold, then this is modern day alchemy.Feces (wasted time) is turned into gold (knowledge)...People often ask, "where do you find so much time to read? How can you remember so well?"Well, there's your answer, the Magic Bathroom.
Peter Rogers