Quotes by British Authors - Page 487

It’s me, you fool. Who do you think it is? I’m coming in.” He was already naked. She turned away from him as he slipped in by her side but he caught her in his arms and felt her body thaw his belly and thighs. That was all, just to lie there listening to the breathing and the silence and feel the warmth colour his belly and thighs and head. She never wore clothes in bed. They were naked and the warmth run out of her. He wanted to laugh, because it was such a marvelous discovery to make, this warmth. She was hissing like a snake.“No, it’s wrong.” She went on hissing. She brought an elbow back smartly and struck him in the paunch. She seemed all elbows, shoulder blades and heels. It was like trying to make love to a dough-mixing machine. She wanted it, didn’t she, otherwise why all this hissing and moaning?
P.H. Newby
This is no time for drinking a mug of water - which you would do nowhere else in the world. A mug of water! You just don't drink water from mugs, do ya? Except on the telly. Water out of a mug! Should be a hot drink... mug of water.
Russell Brand
People hate to see their vices depicted, but vice is terrible and it should be depicted.
Aubrey Beardsley
One minute the teacher was talking about the Civil War. And the next minute he was gone. There. Gone. No 'poof.' No flash of light. No explosion.
Michael Grant
A whole Gothic world had come to grief...there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled...
Evelyn Waugh
Morning, noon & bloody night,Seven sodding days a week,I slave at filthy WORK, that mightBe done by any book-drunk freak.This goes on until I kick the bucket.FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT
Philip Larkin
The preachers preach and the sinners sin sincerely.
Morrissey
That's what's so stupid about the whole magic thing, you know. You spend twenty years learning the spell that makes nude virgins appear in your bedroom, and then you're so poisoned by quicksilver fumes and half-blind from reading old grimoires that you can't remember what happens next.
Terry Pratchett
Al: Now, remind me, who's walking who down the aisle again?
Lindsey Kelk
God is just a name for our wonder.
Nadeem Aslam
Most women still need a room of their own and the only way to find it may be outside their own home.
Germaine Greer
Not at all. It's why people come. They say it's about looking smart, or beautiful, or professional, but it's not. Gray-haired ladies try to recapture their former brunette. Brunettes want to go blond. Other women go for colors that don't arise innature. Each group thinks it's completely different than the others, but I don't see it that way. I've watched them looking at themselves in the mirror, and they're not interested in conforming or rebelling, they just want to walk out of here feeling like themselves again.
Antony John
My darling I still love you,no matter that you're gone.You'll always be with me,forever and ever more.
Anthony T.Hincks
The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared.
Wilkie Collins
There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.
G.K. Chesterton
The presence of Knowledge Based Trust in organizations gives rise to a high level of interpersonal trust amongst their members and creates cohesive units out of a loose bunch of people.
David Amerland
I've come to the conclusion that liking a person we are required to have dealings with is not of paramount importance. But respect is crucial, on both sides, as is tolerance, and a depth of understanding of those influences that sculpt a character.
Jacqueline Winspear
When Man realizes his littleness, his greatness can appear. But not before.
H.G.Wells
If I can’t garden in it, then I won’t wear it.
Fennel Hudson
It would be superfluous todrive us mad, my dear Watson
Arthur Conan Doyle
In a sense, [Christianity] creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and loving.
C.S. Lewis
[B]y reinterpreting Freudianism in terms of language, a pre-eminently social activity, Lacan permits us to explore the relations between the unconscious and human society. One way of describing his work is to say that he makes us recognize that the unconscious is not some kind of seething, tumultuous, private region ‘inside’ us, but an effect of our relations with one another. The unconscious is, so to speak, ‘outside’ rather than ‘within’ us — or rather it exists ‘between’ us, as our relationships do.
Terry Eagleton
Morning drew on apace. The air became more sharp and piercing, as its first dull hue: the death of night, rather than the birth of day: glimmered faintly in the sky. The objects which had looked dim and terrible in the darkness, grew more and more defined, and gradually resolved into their familiar shapes. The rain came down, thick and fast; and pattered, noisily, among the leafless bushes.
Charles Dickens
Education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water but, rather, assisting a flower to grow in its own way
Bertrand Russell
Persistence is always rewarded with success.
Steven Redhead
The forgiving state of mind is a magnetic power for attracting good.
Catherine Porter
The days were longer then (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.
George Eliot
Why were you lurking under our window?""Yes - yes, good point, Petunia! What were you doing under our windows, boy?""Listening to the news," said Harry in a resigned voice.His aunt and uncle exchanged looks of outrage."Listening to the news! Again?""Well, it changes every day, you see," said Harry.
J.K. Rowling
It is not his body which makes a man strong, but his spirit. Nothing on the outside, but only that which comes from within.
Jocelyn Murray
When a cat flatters ... he is not insincere: you may safely take it for real kindness.
Walter Savage Landor
It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher.
Alain de Botton
A library at night is full of sounds: the unread books can't stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious.
Helen Oyeyemi
And now let us love and take that which is given us, and be happy; for in the grave there is no love and no warmth, nor any touching of the lips. Nothing perchance, or perchance but bitter memories of what might have been.
H. Rider Haggard
By gaming we lose both our time and treasure - two things most precious to the life of man.
Owen Felltham
Only what you willingly accept can continue to be part of your life.
Steven Redhead
If you still persist in writing, "Good food at it's best", you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.
Lynne Truss
He moves suddenly so that his hand is cupping my sex, and one of his fingers sinks slowly into me. His other arm holds me firmly in place around my waist. “This is mine,” he whispers aggressively. “All mine. Do you understand?” He eases his finger in and out as he gazes down at me, gauging my reaction, his eyes burning.“Yes, yours…”Abruptly, he moves, doing several things at once: Withdrawing his fingers, leaving me wanting, unzipping his fly, and pushing me down onto the couch so he’s lying on top of me.“Hands on your head,” he commands through gritted teeth as he kneels up, forcing my legs wider…“We don’t have long. This will be quick, and it’s for me, not you. Do you understand?Don’t come, or I will spank you,” he says through clenched teeth.
E.L. James
To a man and woman, all of her elderly patients had been surprised to be old - which Avery privately regarded as a serious failure to pay attention.
Lionel Shriver
Don't forget to speak scornfully of the Victorian Age; there will be time for meekness when you try to better it. Very soon you will be Victorian or that sort of thing yourselves; next session probably, when the freshman come up.
J.M. Barrie
One of these days some simple soul will pick up the book of God, read it, and believe it. Then the rest of us will be embarrassed.
Leonard Ravenhill
Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don't agree at all. They are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ
C.S. Lewis
The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite, and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.
William Blake
He had hoped to spot the flickering shadow of a murderer as he turned the file's pages, but instead it was the ghost of Lula herself who emerged, gazing up at him, as victims of violent crimes sometimes did, through the detritus of their interrupted lives.
Robert Galbraith
The Wild Wood is pretty well populated by now; with all the usual lot, good, bad, and indifferent - I name no names. It takes all sorts to make a world
Kenneth Grahame
After another long silence, bit by bit, realisation dawned upon Edmund and he became even paler than Hecate herself which was, in itself, a fantastic achievement. Adele Rose, Awakening.
Adele Rose
It was a stark choice: shoes or food; beauty or sustenance; the sensible or the self-indulgent. "I'll take the shoes," she said firmly.
Alexander McCall Smith
Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a lawn, which was the stage, and the lawn went back towards the lake in the grounds of the college, and the play began in natural light. But as it developed, and as it became time for Ariel to say his farewell to the world of The Tempest, the evening had started to close in and there was some artificial lighting coming on. And as Ariel uttered his last speech, he turned and he ran across the grass, and he got to the edge of the lake and he just kept running across the top of the water — the producer having thoughtfully provided a kind of walkway an inch beneath the water. And you could see and you could hear the plish, plash as he ran away from you across the top of the lake, until the gloom enveloped him and he disappeared from your view.And as he did so, from the further shore, a firework rocket was ignited, and it went whoosh into the air, and high up there it burst into lots of sparks, and all the sparks went out, and he had gone.When you look up the stage directions, it says, ‘Exit Ariel.
Tom Stoppard
Many a man who thinks to found a home discovers that he has merely opened a tavern for his friends.
George Norman Douglas
You can't become a decent horseman until you fall off and get up again, a good number of times. There's life in a nutshell.
Bear Grylls
There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to attribute to feelings of guilt allied to feelings of impotence. Not an attractive combination, because it results in self-hatred.
Christopher Hitchens
I sometimes refer to economics as a woman. To me the subject was always a she. People would ask me why. Easy. She's obviously a woman: all the men are trying to do her, and mostly they're failing.
Frances Weetman
I'd wasted so much of my life. So many of my days, and all of my promise, all of my dreams, lost to hospitals, to depression, to wanting to die. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. This is not who I am.Except, of course, it was. It was all there was left to be.
Alexis Hall
The artistic life is a long and lovely suicide precisely because it involves the negation of self; as Highsmith imagined herself as her characters, so Ripley takes on the personae of others and in doing so metamorphoses himself into a 'living' work of art. A return to the 'real life' after a period of creativity resulted in a fall in spirits, an agony Highsmith felt acutely. She voiced this pain in the novel via Bernard's quotation of an excerpt from Derwatt's notebook: 'There is no depression for the artist except that caused by a return to the self'.
Andrew Wilson
We too often forget that not only is there 'a soul of goodness in things evil,' but very generally also, a soul of truth in things erroneous.
Herbert Spencer
It was hard to disappear completely in Botswana, where there were fewer than two million people and where people had a healthy curiosity as to who was who and where people had come from. It was very difficult to be anonymous, even in Gaborone, as there would always be neighbours who would want to know exactly what one was doing and who one’s people had been.
Alexander McCall Smith
I know who you are. My father told me stories about you. He talked about your hands- hands that created the world surrendered to cruel nails
G.P. Taylor
Familiarity makes the lion more dangerous.
Jocelyn Murray
On with the dance! Let joy be unconfin'd No sleep till morn when Youth and Pleasure meet.
Lord Byron
What’s this war called again?”“The Hundred Years War.”“Hmmmm, got a bad feeling about this one.
Karl Wiggins
A lot of excellent illustrators are working at the moment--especially in fantasy and children's books. It is exciting also to see graphic artists such as Dave McKean, in his film Mirrormask, moving between different media. I also greatly admire the more traditional work of Gennady Spirin and Roberto Innocenti. Kinuko Craft, John Jude Palencar, John Howe, Charles Vess, Brian Froud ... I'll stop there, as the list would get too long. But--in a fit of pride and justified nepotism--I'll add my daughter, Virginia Lee, to the list. Her first illustrated children's book, The Frog Bride [coming out in the U.K. in September, 2007], will be lovely.
Alan Lee