Quotes by British Authors - Page 490

He is intelligent enough to get a job that would earn him good money, but too clever to want one.
Helen Smith
Hobbits always so polite, yes! O nice hobbits! Smeagol brings them up secret ways that nobody else could find. Tired he is, thirsty he is, yes thirsty; and he guides them and he searches for paths, and they saw sneak, sneak. Very nice friends, O yes my precious, very nice." Sam felt a little remorseful, but not yet trustful."Sorry," he said. "I'm sorry, but you startled me out of my sleep. And I shouldn't have been sleeping, and that made me sharp. But Mr. Frodo, he's that tired, I asked him to have a wink; and well, that's how it is. Sorry. But where HAVE you been to?" "Sneaking," said Gollum, and the green glint did not leave his eyes...."Hullo, Smeagol!" Frodo said. "Found any food? Have you had any rest?" "No food, no rest, nothing for Smeagol," said Gollum. "He's a sneak." "Don't take names to yourself, Smeagol," Frodo said. "It's unwise, whether they are true or false." "Smeagol has to take what's given to him," answered Gollum. "He was given that name by kind Master Samwise, the hobbit that knows so much.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I have met with women who I really think would like to be married to a poem and to be given away by a novel.
John Keats
Prayer is a salve for every sore, even the sorest, a remedy for every malady, even the most grievous.
Matthew Henry
If you're jealous of someone else it simply means you have not come to a true acceptance and appreciation of yourself.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Evil exists in us all, Torak. Some fight it. Some feed it. That's how it's always been.
Michelle Paver
The donkey which brought you to this door must be dismissed if you want to get through it’.
Idries Shah
One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.' To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: 'This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
Alan Bennett
You get work however you get work, but people keep working in a freelance world (and more and more of todays world is freelance), because their work is good, because they are easy to get along with and because they deliver the work on time. And you don’t even need all three! Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. People will forgive the lateness of your work if it is good and they like you. And you don’t have to be as good as everyone else if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you.
Neil Gaiman
Love may be on the horizon, but beware something wicked this way comes.
Wilkie Martin
Everyone does not know the secrets of TruthThe States of Truth are not evidential.
Idries Shah
I’ve brought you some things from home,’ I said, gesturing at the bag on the floor. ‘Some clothes and books – things like that.’‘Books – great! That’ll make things easier. You know I can’t read worth a damn right now!’‘There’s also some music. Schubert’s fifth, Mendelssohn’s third, Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, Mahler’s fourth—’‘I would have preferred his sixth.’‘You’re not well enough for his sixth'.
Gavin Extence
Do you wish to speak in Provençal, French, or Latin? They are all I can manage, I'm afraid.""Any will do," the rabbi replied in Provençal."Splendid. Latin it is," said Pope Clement.
Iain Pears
Start with an honest analysis of why you are in opposition, not in government.
Philip Gould
There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.
Beryl Markham
Yes, she'd made a mistake... but she wasn't going to be bullied. You couldn't let boys go around raining on your lava and ogling other people's watercolors.
Terry Pratchett
Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong - these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.
Winston S. Churchill
We stand hand-clasped, our faces quite blank, as if this were not a nightmare that tells me, as clearly as if it were written in letters of fire, what ending a girl may expect if she defies the rules of men and thinks she can make her own destiny. I am here not only to witness what happens to a heretic. I am here to witness what happens to a woman who thinks she knows more than men.
Philippa Gregory
If we were less of what seems like ease in our lives they would tell more for Christ and souls...We profess to be strangers and pilgrims, seeking after a country of our own, yet we settle down in the most un-stranger-like fashion, exactly as if we were quite at home and meant to stay as long as we could. I don't wonder apostolic miracles have died. Apostolic living certainly has.
Amy Carmichael
The course of nature is the art of God.
Edward Young
The Art Magicke has rules. It means I have to teach you all my tricks. All the substitutions, the replications, the illusions. How to read minds and palms and leaves. How to disappear and reappear."How to saw people in half?""That too.""Nice.
Catherine Fisher
Sorry Johnny." "Sorry for what " "For shouting at you. It's just that when I think about the future I keep panicking. It's like falling from the top of the stairs in the dark not knowing where I'll end up." He put his arm around my shoulders. "I understand. Life is precarious for most of us but more so for you. What you forget is what most of your friends see in you." "What's that " "The ability to beat the odds..." "And fall on my feet " He nodded. "I just hope that lasts." "It will Catkin it will. It wouldn't dare fail you.
Julia Golding
Typical St Mary’s. When the chips are down we don’t whine and we don’t run – we do some damage.
Jodi Taylor
I love the night. Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep. It's dark and silent in the house, but if I listen close, I hear the beat beat beat of my heart. I hear the creak and crack of the house. I hear my mum breathing gently in her sleep in the room next door.
David Almond
Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers, and no doubt this applies to certain of the recollections I have gathered here. 
Kazuo Ishiguro
But Rosa soon made the discovery that Miss Twinkleton didn't read fairly. She cut the love-scenes, interpolated passages in praise of female celibacy, and was guilty of other glaring pious frauds.
Charles Dickens
All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.
Friedrich A. Hayek
The time is short and the hills is dark and I's got miles to go before I sleeps. Is is no easy road.
Ian McDonald
It's easier to surrender to confinement.
Jhumpa Lahiri
George III ought never to have occurred. One can only wonder At so grotesque a blunder.
Edmund C. Bentley
Strange how reluctant I was to acknowledge that control of my fate lay beyond my own conscious will. Habit of a lifetime, I suppose.
Patrick McGrath
The sun shines, snow falls, mountains rise and valleys sink, night deepens and pales into day, but it is only very seldom that we attend to such things. . . . When we are grasping the inexpressible meaning of these things, this is life, this is living. To do this twenty-four hours a day is the Way of Haiku. It is having life more abundantly.
R.H. Blyth
And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.
Christopher Hitchens
The most important brands in the world make you feel something. They do that because they have something they want to change. And as customers, we want to be part of that change. These companies have a reason to exist over and above just to make a profit: They have a purpose. Yes, we admire the product they make. But the thing we love the most about them is the change they are making.
David Hieatt
I refuse to admit that I am more than fifty-two even if that does make my sons illegitimate.
Nancy Astor
George, I know you’re tired. But President Lincoln, he didn’t free us to be lazy and no good. He freed us to work hard and improve ourselves.”-George’s Grandmother.
George Dawson
Passion and prejudice govern the world only under the name of reason.
John Wesley
It may be that writers in my position,exiles, or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutilated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must do in the knowledge - which gives rise to profound uncertainties- that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost, that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.
Salman Rushdie
And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan.And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hidIts bruises in the earth, but crawled no further,Showed me its feet, the feet of many men,And the fresh-severed head of it, my head.
Wilfred Owen
Twas now the very witching time of night,When churchyards groan, and graves give up their dead,And many a mischievous, enfranchised spriteHad long since burst his bonds of stone or lead,And hurried off, with schoolboy-like delight,To play his pranks near some poor wretch's bed,Sleeping, perhaps serenely as a porpoise,Nor dreaming of this fiendish Habeas Corpus.
Thomas Ingoldsby
Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.
Philip Larkin
It's not that you should never love something so much that it can control you.It's that you need to love something that much so you can never be controlled.It's not a weakness.It's your best strength.
Patrick Ness
Electricians that like good health avoid the known biologically toxic very high powered electrical utility jobs.
Steven Magee
I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.""Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.
Jane Austen
You weren't there.
Hammond Innes
Day and NightThe night is long: do not shorten it by sleep. The day is fair: do not darken it with wrongdoing.
Idries Shah
The strange word nymphomation, used to denote a complex mathematical procedure where numbers, rather than being added together or multiplied or whatever, were actually allowed to breed with each other to produce new numbers.
Jeff Noon
Good choice, Polly,” she soothes, caressing my long, dark hair.“You may not have been fucked by a woman before but, if you’re a good girl now, then you soon will be…
Felicity Brandon
To see more than a reflection requires us to filter what we see, to view the world with honest eyes.
Fennel Hudson
The true function of sex is to bring more love into the world.
Diana Richardson
So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their endings.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.
Alain de Botton
And the beauty of a woman, with passing years only grows!
Audrey Hepburn
And suddenly, as if her head had cleared, she was quite sure that wonderful things did indeed exist. Even if they’re only in my own mind, she thought, they’re there and worth fighting for. I mustn’t give in.
Diana Wynne Jones
It seems to be almost a law of human nature, that it is easier for people to agree on a negative programme, on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off, than on any positive task. The contrast between the “we” and the “they,” the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action. It is consequently always employed by those who seek, not merely support of a policy, but the unreserved allegiance of huge masses. From their point of view it has the great advantage of leaving them greater freedom of action than almost any positive programme.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Everything is emotional because hope is… When I talk to people I no longer see rational beings engaged in rational discourse, I see objects, emoting. It has made me such a deep materialist that I see everything as objects, people, dogs, trees, rocks- objects that burn with the animation of hope, each engaged in their own private miracle of being. And the things that people make, the buildings and machines, the paintings and the poems, are artificial miracles, which glow from the light borrowed from their makers.
Paul Shepheard
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.
Richard Dawkins
Without triers they would never be any successors
Thomas Wright
To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as "Thank God its Friday" (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive "its" (no apostrophe) with the contractive "it's" (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a Pavlovian "kill" response in the average stickler.
Lynne Truss
I fell in love the moment I saw her in her grandfather's kitchen, her dark curls crashing over her Portuguese shoulders. 'Would you like to drink coffee?' she smiled.'I'm really not that thirsty.''What? What you say?' Her English wasn't too good. Now I'm seventy-three and she's just turned seventy. 'Would you like to drink coffee?' she asked me today, smiling. 'I'm really not that thirsty.''What? What you say?' Neither of us has the gift of language acquisition. After fifty years of marriage we have never really spoken, but we love each other more than words can say.
Dan Rhodes