Quotes by British Authors - Page 488

I'm bored," she said."Learn how to tap-dance," he suggested, without turning around.
Neil Gaiman
Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.
Virginia Woolf
Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions. It is the resistance offered to definite ideas by that vague bulk of people whose ideas are indefinite to excess. Bigotry may be called the appalling frenzy of the indifferent. This frenzy of the indifferent is in truth a terrible thing; it has made all monstrous and widely pervading persecutions. In this degree it was not the people who cared who ever persecuted; the people who cared were not sufficiently numerous. It was the people who did not care who filled the world with fire and oppression. It was the hands of the indifferent that lit the faggots; it was the hands of the indifferent that turned the rack. There have come some persecutions out of the pain of a passionate certainty; but these produced, not bigotry, but fanaticism--a very different and a somewhat admirable thing. Bigotry in the main has always been the pervading omnipotence of those who do not care crushing out those who care in darkness and blood.
G.K. Chesterton
In Malta, the Wars of Religion reached their climax. If both sides believed that they saw Paradise in the bright sky above them, they had a close and very intimate knowledge of Hell.
Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford
It is possible to be happy and successful by living on one’s own terms.
Fennel Hudson
People with Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) are known to put their computer equipment several feet away from them with a large monitor on a big font and they use a wired USB keyboard and mouse to control it.
Steven Magee
For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await others. I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.
C.S. Lewis
A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.
Samuel Johnson
It has an unhappy effect upon the human understanding and temper, for a man to be compelled in his gravest investigation of an argument, to consider, not what is true, but what is convenient.
William Godwin
I know that you're selfish, selfish beyond words, and I know that you haven't the nerve of a rabbit, I know you're a liar and a humbug, I know that you're utterly contemptible. And the tragic part is'--her face was on a sudden distraught with pain--'the tragic part is that notwithstanding I love you with all my heart.
W Somerset Maugham
I was yours once till death if you cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now--I can't hang about whining for ever--and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked and attend to your own happiness?
E.M. Forster
The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.
George Orwell
Many [Tudor-era religious radicals] believed then, exactly as Christian fundamentalists do today, that they lived in the 'last days' before Armageddon and, again just as now, saw signs all around in the world that they took as certain proof that the Apocalypse was imminent. Again like fundamentalists today, they looked on the prospect of the violent destruction of mankind without turning a hair. The remarkable similarity between the first Tudor Puritans and the fanatics among today's Christian fundamentalists extends to their selective reading of the Bible, their emphasis on the Book of Revelation, their certainty of their rightness, even to their phraseology. Where the Book of Revelation is concerned, I share the view of Guy, that the early church fathers released something very dangerous on the world when, after much deliberation, they decided to include it in the Christian c
C.J. Sansom
Once when I had remarked on the affection quite often found between cat and dog, my friend replied, "Yes. But I bet no dog would ever confess it to the other dogs.
C.S. Lewis
I knew revenge like the ghost of an old friend." ~ #1001
Pippa DaCosta
I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.
Jeanette Winterson
All human behaviour, language, thoughts, feelings, actions, and consciousness emerge from this massively interconnected network of neurons. Each neuron is pretty dumb; it either fires in a certain situation or it doesn’t, but out of this mass dumbness comes great cleverness.
Trevor Harley
If you're going to have a complicated story, you must work to a map; otherwise you can never make a map of it afterwards.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I gave my heart to a man who loved me, who wanted to be with me. Who ultimately was afraid of all I offered.I didn’t understand why he sabotaged our future at the time – cheating on me, again, as we were making final plans to move in together. By the time he came over to smooth talk his way out of it, I was done. No more crying. Even my tears had given up on him. I’d already moved on, his cheating was simply the key left in the mailbox.
Rachel Thompson
You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they’re not living, breathing people any more.It’s not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you, and makes you want to cry in the wrong places, and get irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead.It’s just something you learn to accommodate.Like adapting around a hole. I don’t know. It’s like you become … a doughnut instead of a bun
Jojo Moyes
As we were about to cross the road, Davin suddenly grabbed my wrist and held me back a moment; a car peeled out of the driveway and roared past us. “Geez,” I gasped, and then, glancing at him curiously, I added, “Thanks.” He didn’t say anything, but slowly released my wrist. Before he completely withdrew, I took his hand and interlaced my fingers through his. He looked at me, his lips parted in surprise, but then he smiled shyly and gave my hand a squeeze as we kept walking. It gave me a feeling of nervous flutters in the best way. As we walked up to the doors, Jill and Laurel came bursting out the exit.
J.M. Richards
Finally, in 1888, Cixi approved the Western-style Navy Regulations. It was in endorsing these Regulations that she effectively unveiled China’s first national flag. The country had had no national ensign, until its engagement with the West at the beginning of her reign necessitated a triangular-shaped golden yellow flag for the nascent navy. Now she endorsed its change into the internationally standard quadrangular shape. On the flag, named the Yellow Dragon, was a vividly blue, animated dragon, raising its head towards a bright-red globe, the sun. With the birth of this national flag, remarked contemporary Western commentators, ‘China proudly took her proper place among the nations.
Jung Chang
No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.
Lewis Carroll
I wanted her body and soul, but body first.
Philip Sington
And then that mouth was speaking Russian, rough, sexy, sweet nothings that drove her wild. Forced out all common sense. His mouth trailed her jaw, delivering little nips and hot licks to her neck.“Bella”—something in Russian—“Bella”—more Russian—“Bella.” As if one language was inadequate to express how she affected him.
Kate Meader
He draws a line under his conclusions. Says, 'Gregory, what should I do about the great worm?' 'Send a commission against it, sir,' the boy says. 'It must be put down.' He gives his son a long look. 'You do know it's Arthur Cobbler's tales?' Gregory gives him a long look back. 'Yes, I do know.' He sounds regretful. 'But it makes people so happy when I believe them.
Hilary Mantel
Marriage isn't a love affair. It isn't even a honeymoon. It's a job. A long hard job, at which both partners have to work, harder than they've worked at anything in their lives before. If it's a good marriage, it changes, it evolves, but it does on getting better. I've seen it with my own mother and father. But a bad marriage can dissolve in a welter of resentment and acrimony. I've seen that, too, in my own miserable and disastrous attempt at making another person happy. And it's never one person's fault. It's the sum total of a thousand little irritations, disagreements, idiotic details that in a sound alliance would simply be disregarded, or forgotten in the healing act of making love. Divorce isn't a cure, it's a surgical operation, even if there are no children to consider.
Rosamunde Pilcher
I felt stifled. Everything I looked at reminded me of myself.
Ian McEwan
when you're going through hell, keep going.
Winston S. Churchill
Alas! another instance of the triumph of hope over experience.
Samuel Johnson
Like a carpenter with two broken legs at the bottom of a beautiful staircase. Maybe I can't climb the stairs, ma'am, but at least let me admire the workmanship.
James Anderson
When it happened I was terrified. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. I was a cliche. I looked at myself in the mirror and in my eyes was a look I had never seen before: confusion, mystery and, yes, happiness. I had fallen in love.
Chloe Thurlow
I drift through forests in my dreams, I swim the lake I imagine for myself when I’m sad. It’s so blue and clear. I scoop some water into my hands as I tread water and I can see right through it, almost as if it’s air. Tiny, luminescent fish live at the bottom of the pool and wink at me as I swim naked and free above them, my hair spilling out around me.
Sarah Michelle Lynch
Fancourt can't write women,' said Nina dismissively. 'He tries but he can't do it. His women are all temper, tits and tampons.
Robert Galbraith
Some women’s love of being loved is insatiable ; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can’t give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop’s licence to receive it.
Thomas Hardy
Now that little problem of yours, this business of not knowing good men from bad men and villains from heroes and so forth...There's still plenty for you to do. And you'll do it. And when you fall in love and have a mistress or a wife and children to look after, it will all seem easier." He opened the door but stopped on the threshold. "Surround yourself with human beings, my dear. They are easier to fight for than principles." He laughed. "But don't let me down and become human yourself. We would lose such a wonderful machine." With a wave of his hand he shut the door.
Ian Fleming
A friend’s 14-year-old niece was asked by her teacher what she wanted to be when she finished school. The teacher asked her to think hard about it and then get back to him with an answer. She didn’t know what to say to her teacher. A friend, on hearing the girl’s predicament, said: ‘Tell your teacher that, perhaps, the thing you want to be when you leave school hasn’t been invented yet.
Ian Sanders
The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost maidenlike, guest in a hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. The man who combines both characters – the knight – is not a work of nature but of art; of that art which has human beings, instead of canvas or marble, for its medium.
C.S. Lewis
Nothing can come of nothingness, the granthi had said. So to know joy, compassion, sympathy - to feel love - means also to have in the world their opposites.
Sunjeev Sahota
Most of all I remember that what begins with drums and fife, flags and bunting, becomes too swiftly a long and grey winter of the spirit.
Helen Simonson
To make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
T.S Eliot
The more you overthink the less you will understand.
Habeeb Akande
No one in the world needs a Rhino horn but a Rhino.
Paul Oxton
Why couldn't two unhappy people refresh each other on their way through this dusty business of life by a little talk - real, natural talk, about what they felt, what they would have liked, what they still tried to hope for?
Elizabeth von Arnim
Tourists went on holidays while travellers did something else. They travelled.
Alex Garland
Percy, you are dismissed from my service.""Me? Why, my lord?""Why? Because, Percy, far from being a fit consort for a prince of the realm, you would bore the leggings off a village idiot. You ride a horse rather less well than another horse would. Your brain would make a grain of sand look large and ungainly, and the part of you that can't be mentioned, I am reliably informed by women around the court, wouldn't be worth mentioning even if it could be. If you put on a floppy hat and a funny codpiece, you might just get by as a fool, but since you wouldn't know a joke if it got up and gave you a haircut, I doubt it. That's why you're dismissed." "Oh, I see." "And as for you, Baldrick..." "Yes." "You're out, too.
Richard Curtis
Things, since you left, have not gone well with me: they have taken me from a place where there was gin to a place where there is no gin[.]
Sarah Caudwell
If he can’t handle it, then you aren’t very good friends, are you?
J.M. Richards
Believers are each other's mirrors.
Elif Shafak
The man who most vividly realizes a difficulty is the man most likely to overcome it.
Joseph Farrell
Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and abusrd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.
John Fowles
Newspapers are the Bibles of worldlings.How diligently they read them!Here they find their law and profits,their judges and chronicles,their epistles and revelations.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.
Tom Stoppard
But neither Europe nor Africa can show any such desolation as America. The proudest, stubbornest, bitterest peasant of deserted Spain, the most primitive and superstitious Arab of the remotest oases, are a little more than kin and never less than kind at their worst; whereas in the United States one is almost always conscious of an instinctive lack of sympathy and understanding with even the most charming and cultured people.
Aleister Crowley
Suiffy, have you ever felt a sort of strange emptiness in the heart? A sort of aching void of the soul?''Oh, rather!''What do you do about it?''I generally take a couple of cocktails.
P.G. Wodehouse
Good for Christmas-time is the ruddy colour of the cloak in which--the tree making a forest of itself for her to trip through, with her basket--Little Red Riding-Hood comes to me one Christmas Eve to give me information of the cruelty and treachery of that dissembling Wolf who ate her grandmother, without making any impression on his appetite, and then ate her, after making that ferocious joke about his teeth. She was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding-Hood, I should have known perfect bliss. But, it was not to be; and there was nothing for it but to look out the Wolf in the Noah's Ark there, and put him late in the procession on the table, as a monster who was to be degraded.
Charles Dickens
When a person is down in the world an ounce of help is better than a pound of preaching.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
And I think a long time ago there were big stories. Stories so big you could live your whole life in them. The Powerful Hands of the Gods and Fate. The Journey to Enlightenment. The March of Socialism. But they all died or the world grew up or grew senile or forgot them, so now we're making up our own stories. Little stories. But we've each got one.
Mark Ravenhill
If you don't know where you're going, any road'll take you there
George Harrison
You build your reality from the desires and thoughts that you focused upon.
Steven Redhead