Quotes by British Authors - Page 494

When you're young you can't work out the age of an adult - they're just quite old, old, or very old.
Michael Morpurgo
Where does one go in a tremendous city like Calcutta to find insider information? I recalled India's golden rule: do the opposite of what would be normal anywhere else.
Tahir Shah
And they had no idea that they and many others were automatically pronounced deadly dull solely on that account. Only by the young of course, but then, they would have thought indulgently, young people knew nothing about life. Poor dears, they were always worrying about examinations, or their sex life, or buying some extraordinary clothes, or doing some extraordinary things to their hair to make them more noticeable.
Agatha Christie
If we could simply live in the light of our bodies being temples of the Holy Spirit, our daily life would be transformed.
Elizabeth George
We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because they are what help us grow. With out them we grow weak like the Eloi in comfort and security. We need to constantly be challenging ourselves in order to strengthen our character and increase our intelligence.
H.G.Wells
I like him, sweetheart, and I’ll still give him hell. It’s my total right.
Sam Crescent
One ought never to turn one's back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!
Winston Churchill
The four most expensive word in the English language are 'This time it's different.
John Templeton
I mean, you may cause others a spot of bother by your weaknesses, perhaps, but coping with you may possibly increase their strength and sympathy. But if you sin deliberately, even if it seems only against yourself--well--you won't be the only one to suffer. You may even be the one who suffers least.
Elizabeth Goudge
She walks in beauty, like the nightOf cloudless climes and starry skies;And all that's best of dark and brightMeet in her aspect and her eyes...
George Gordon Byron
You humans live in shallow waters
Dani J. Caile
The depression we find ourselves in here, and which is causing havoc in America, is allowing people to give weight to that which divides them, rather than to the shared experiences and elements of connection they see mirrored in their fellow man.
Jacqueline Winspear
What else is there to do?
William Golding
When you're writing, you're creating something out of nothing ... A successful piece of writing is like doing a successful piece of m
Susanna Clarke
There is a large gap between being an activist out of the idealism that comes from books, conversations, the fire of youth and being one because you have lived through the depredations that life has thrown at you.
Neel Mukherjee
Waiting and hoping is a hard thing to do when you've already been waiting and hoping for almost as long as you can bear it.
Jenny Nimmo
It would be very difficult to draw a line between holy wonder and real worship; for when the soul is overwhelmed with the majesty of God's glory, though it may not express itself in song, or even utter its voice with bowed head in humble prayer, yet it silently adores.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Well, that's it." I said after we had waited for another five minutes and found ourselves still in a state of pleasantly welcome existence. "The ChronoGuard has shut itself down and time travel is as it should be: technically, logically, and theoretically...impossible." "Good thing, too," reply Landon. "It always made my head ache. In fact, I was thinking of doing self help book for science-fiction novelists eager to write about time travel. It would consist of a single word: Don't.
Jasper Fforde
It wouldn't happen... There hasn't been one publication by a monkey
Karl Pilkington
Open your eyes to what wonder exists in the world. You have within your the power to create the life you want.
Steven Redhead
Where does the family start? It starts with a young man falling in love with a girl - no superior alternative has yet been found.
Winston Churchill
We made love, and then she threw up.
Sarah Kane
Faith is not a blind thing; for faith begins with knowledge. It is not a speculative thing; for faith believes facts of which it is sure. It is not an unpractical, dreamy thing; for faith trusts, and stakes its destiny upon the truth of revelation.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Swish and flick.
J.K. Rowling
Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I've met people who don't want to try for fear of failing.
J.K. Rowling
The Bird of Paradise, it seemed, had beckoned us on and led us in, to stand here in this place high in the land of volcanoes. It was here in Bali, after returning from the Toraja Star Children, that I first recognized what they meant by us all being born half of heaven and half of earth. And after the mounted warsports of Sumba it was in Balinese ritual that I saw with new eyes the battle for balance between light and darkness. And after Borneo, returning to the sacred Banyan tree and its simian custodians, I had felt that all great trees, what’s left of them, do indeed link heaven and earth in a single forest of life.
Lawrence Blair
It’s as if our bodies know the secret that we don’t wish to admit yet.
Nicky Fox
When speculation has done its worst two and two still make four.
Samuel Johnson
It's daft, locking us up," said Nanny. "I'd have had us killed.""That's because you're basically good," said Magrat. "The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.
Terry Pratchett
There is nothing will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.
George Eliot
Just as there are none good but God, and nothing good but goodness, so there are no loves but love its self, the very love; and that what I call the other unnatural loves, are not loves at all in their own right but become so only so far as they participate in the very love.
C.S. Lewis
When pointing out the flaws in others, people always end up talking about themselves.
Claire Chilton
There is no way to clearly capture or sum up life...when fully lived.
Jill Telford
Never lose a chance of saying a kind word.
William Makepeace Thackeray
I'm always looking for meaningful one-night stands
Dudley Moore
We girls aren't supposed to fall for the good boys.We are supposed to like a bit of grit in our oyster.That's how you get a pearl, after all.
James Lovegrove
Hating anything in the way of ill-natured gossip ourselves we are always grateful to those who do it for us and do it well.
Saki
We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
T.S Eliot
That is what the past was, that which you could not get rid of. The past did not resemble the crumbs spilled over a rug. You could not shake them out from open windows.
Elif Shafak
A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.
Angela Carter
To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally by Mind at Large-- this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.
Aldous Huxley
When people run in circles it's a very very... mad world.
Tears For Fears
The world won't end with a bang or a whimper. It'll end with the death screams of a thousand demons and a defiant, carefree, savage, wolfen howl.
Darren Shan
It’s one thing to go into a fight knowing you’ll probably lose. Quite another to be told that to win, you must offer up your throat to be slit.
Darren Shan
Bursar?""Yes, Archchancellor?""You ain't a member of some secret society or somethin', are you?""Me? No, Archchancellor.""Then it'd be a damn good idea to take your underpants off your head.
Terry Pratchett
Faith is an act of self-consecration in which the will the intellect and the affections all have their place.
William Ralph Inge
To criticize a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous, but to criticize their religion, that is a right. That is a freedom. The freedom to criticize ideas, any ideas - even if they are sincerely held beliefs - is one of the fundamental freedoms of society. A law which attempts to say you can criticize and ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed.It all points to the promotion of the idea that there should be a right not to be offended. But in my view the right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended. The right to ridicule is far more important to society than any right not to be ridiculed because one in my view represents openness - and the other represents oppression
Rowan Atkinson
Christ asks for a home in your soul, where he can be at rest with you, where he can talk easily to you, where you and he, alone together, can laugh and be silent and be delighted with one another.
Caryll Houselander
The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Much as a teacher may wince at the thought, he is also an entertainer—for unless he can hold his audience, he cannot really instruct or edify them.
Sydney J. Harris
Smith. [Turning eagerly to the Doctor.] But this is rather splendid. The Duke's given £50 to the new public-house.Hastings. The Duke is very liberal.[Collects papers.Doctor. [Examining his cheque.] Very. But this is rather curious. He has also given £50 to the league for opposing the new public-house.Hastings. The Duke is very liberal-minded.
G.K. Chesterton
[…] nobody grows up. Everyone carries around all the selves that they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments of pain, of fear, of danger. Everything is retrievable, every shock, every hurt. But perhaps it becomes a duty to abandon the stock of time that one carries within oneself, to discard it in favour of the present, so that one’s embrace may be turned outwards to the world in which one has made one’s home.
Anita Brookner
We read of preaching the Word out of season but we do not read of praying out of season for that is never out of season.
Matthew Henry
Closed head trauma is about as much fun as nude paintballing.
D.C. Farmer
Gentlemen, when the enemy is committed to a mistake we must not interrupt him too soon.
Horatio Nelson
Loyalty is what matters, and that exists now, not in the past. Loyalty has to be proved every day, in every piece of fresh-kill brought back for the Clan, every claw mark on our enemies, every patrol, every training session.
Erin Hunter
I AM ALWAYS ALONE. BUT JUST NOW I WANT TO BE ALONE BY MYSELF.
Terry Pratchett
Did anyone ever have a boring dream?
Ralph Hodgson
Just as Christian came up to the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, fell from off his back, and began to tumble down the hill, and so it continued to do till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre. There it fell in, and I saw it no more!
John Bunyan
By perseverance the snail reached the ark.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon