Quotes by British Authors - Page 496

So this, Harriet thought, gazing at her black-clad reflection, was what bearing up looked like. The eyes in the mirror stared at her, somehow, while fixing themselves far
Jude Morgan
You see what you expect to see, Severus.
J.K. Rowling
Decades of corporate government deregulation and reduced funding of important government departments has the country well along the path to a lawless society.
Steven Magee
Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to a mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on a rock." - Frankenstein p115
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
On with the dance! let joy be unconfin'd
George Gordon Byron
It's too late to change the world, but, hopefully it's not too late to change ourselves.
Anthony T.Hincks
Yesterday I smiled, tomorrow never came and today is what I'm living.
Jill Telford
The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.
Elizabeth Taylor
At the back of my mind I wanted to be a journalist when I grew up since I didn’t seem to be getting any better at goalkeeping.
Ian Colquhoun
You need three things in the theatre - the play the actors and the audience and each must give something.
Kenneth Haigh
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but paranoia was what tied it up in a sack and buried it in wet concrete.
Kate Griffin
No external advantages can supply self-reliance. The force of one's being ... must come from within.
R. W. Clark
Real life is to most men ... a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.
Bertrand Russell
People who expect too much are always disappointed. You would do well to remember that, my boy.
Charmian Hussey
Ask , and it shall be given until you. That is no vain or untried promise, Ruth!
Elizabeth Gaskell
I think we have different value systems." —Arthur"Well mine's better." —Ford
Douglas Adams
The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does.
J.M. Barrie
Hatreds are the cinders of affection.
Walter Raleigh
He was presumably a lover. They did things like commanding battalions. And worse!
Ford Madox Ford
Well, it's a good life and a good world, all said and done, if you don't weaken.
Alan Sillitoe
I married beneath me. All women do.
Nancy Astor
Politics will always mean more to the poor. Always. That's why we strike and march, and despair when our young say they won't vote. That's why the poor are seen as more vital, and animalistic. No classical music for us - no walking around National Trust properties or buying reclaimed flooring. We don't have nostalgia. We don't do yesterday. We can't bear it. We don't want to be reminded of our past, because it was awful: dying in mines and slums without literacy or the vote. Without dignity. It was all so desperate then. That's why the present and the future is for the poor - that's the place in time for us: surviving now, hoping for better later. We live now - for our own instant hot, fast treats, to pep us up: sugar, a cigarette, a new fast song on the radio.
Caitlin Moran
At least two important conservative thinkers, Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss, were unbelievers or nonbelievers and in any case contemptuous of Christianity. I have my own differences with both of these savants, but is the Republican Party really prepared to disown such modern intellectuals as it can claim, in favor of a shallow, demagogic and above all sectarian religiosity?Perhaps one could phrase the same question in two further ways. At the last election, the GOP succeeded in increasing its vote among American Jews by an estimated five percentage points. Does it propose to welcome these new adherents or sympathizers by yelling in the tones of that great Democrat bigmouth William Jennings Bryan? By insisting that evolution is 'only a theory'? By demanding biblical literalism and by proclaiming that the Messiah has already shown himself? If so, it will deserve the punishment for hubris that is already coming its way. (The punishment, in other words, that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson believed had struck America on Sept. 11, 2001. How can it be that such grotesque characters, calling down divine revenge on the workers in the World Trade Center, are allowed a respectful hearing, or a hearing at all, among patriotic Republic
Christopher Hitchens
silence was never lost, she just had to stop screaming long enough to hear it:.
Kathryn Dyche Dechairo
What is courage without risk... It wouldn’t really be courage, would it?
Jocelyn Murray
Faith is as precious to die by as it is to live by.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Art is sanctioned pornography
Stewart Home
Desire is naughty and doesn't conform to our ideals, which is why we have such a need of them. Desire mocks all human endeavour and makes it worthwhile. Desire is the original anarchist and undercover agent – no wonder people want it arrested and kept in a safe place. And just when we think we've got desire under control it lets us down or fills us with hope. Desire makes me laugh because it makes fools of us all.
Hanif Kureishi
There’s a point on a runway during take-o that a plane reaches V1 speed. Once it passes V1, it has reached the point of no return. The point where take-o cannot be aborted. It has to take o . Or crash. In order to determine its V1 speed every plane will factor in its weight, wind-speed, weather conditions, slope, length of runway etc. So although there’s not a physical line drawn on each runway, it’s there.
David Hieatt
We all of us need to be toppled off the throne of self, my dear," he said. "Perched up there the tears of others are never upon our own cheek.
Elizabeth Goudge
A very beautiful woman hardly ever leaves a clear-cut impression of features and shape in the memory: usually there remains only an aura of living colour.
William Bolitho
If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.
Charlotte Brontë
Implementing best practice is copying yesterday, innovation is inventing tomorrow.
Paul Sloane
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.
Samuel Johnson
Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration.
Jasper Fforde
When was it exactly that I became... this? By small degrees, I suppose. One act presses hard upon another, on a path we have no choice but to follow, and each time there are reasons. We do what we must, we do what we are told, we do what is easiest. What else can we do but solve one sordid problem at a time? Then one day we look up and fine we are... this.
Joe Abercrombie
No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary
Mark Haddon
Needing kindness myself, I am kinder now, and we get on amazingly well. [p. 110]
Lionel Shriver
Mr. Craig was not above talking politics occasionally, though he piqued himself rather on a wise insight than on specific information.
George Eliot
I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight—that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.
George Eliot
He was always seeking for a meaning in life, and here it seemed to him that a meaning was offered; but it was obscure and vague . . . He saw what looked like the truth as by flashes of lightening on a dark, stormy night you might see a mountain range. He seemed to see that a man need not leave his life to chance, but that his will was powerful; he seemed to see that self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion; he seemed to see that the inward life might be as manifold, as varied, as rich with experience, as the life of one who conquered realms and explored unknown lands.
W Somerset Maugham
Sometimes I wished I could cut away old memories and let the wind take them. If a sharp knife could pare away the weakness of those days, I would slice until nothing but the hard lessons remained.
Mark Lawrence
As we embrace our passions and delve into the mystery of life, we unite with the majestic complexity of nature; and if we follow the signs, this can help us understand who we really are.
Sebastian Pole
During, he looked away from all the strain, all the scratchiness, all the fights that never got going, he closed his eyes and waited until her smile came back. He allowed himself to believe in that smile, that brilliant counterfeit of joy
Salman Rushdie
I wish I loved the Human Race;I wish I loved its silly face;I wish I liked the way it walks;I wish I liked the way it talks;And when I’m introduced to one,I wish I thought “What Jolly Fun!
Walter Alexander Raleigh
Hey, metaphysics seminar is on the roof. Just take the elevator up and keep walking until you hit the sidewalk. Anything is true if enough people believe it.
David Mitchell
Always ask yourself what will make you happy over the long term.
Steven Redhead
Young mothers are the most vicious tribe in the world if you don't fit in.
David Mitchell
We shouldn't live as if [other worlds] mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.
Philip Pullman
Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth! Immortal though no more though fallen great!
Lord Byron
If you want romance, fuck a journalist.
W.H. Auden
But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.
Benjamin Disraeli
You'll be back! If you're not, then I'll come and find you. Now, do as I say and go have some fun. I want those eyes to have light in them next time I see you." He turned me around, smacked my arse and sent me on my way.
Lesley Jones
My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me
Winston S. Churchill
Of all the consumer products, chewing gum is perhaps the most ridiculous: it literally has no nourishment – you just chew it to give yourself something to do with your stupid idiot Western mouth.Half the world is starving, and the other’s going, ‘I don’t actually need any nutrition, but it would be good to masticate, just to keep my mind off things.
Russell Brand
Political prisoners describe:- extreme physical and emotional torture- distortion of language, truth, meaning and reality- sham killings- begin repeatedly taken to the point of death or threatened with death- being forced to witness abusive acts on others- being forced to make impossible "choices"- boundaries smashed i.e. by the use of forced nakedness, shame, embarrassment- hoaxes, 'set ups', testing and tricks- being forced to hurt othersRitual abuse survivors often describe much the same things.
Laurie Matthew
A sprawling North London parkland, composed of oaks, willows and chestnuts, yews and sycamores, the beech and the birch; that encompasses the city’s highest point and spreads far beyond it; that is so well planted it feels unplanned; that is not the country but is no more a garden than Yellowstone; that has a shade of green for every possible felicitation of light; that paints itself in russets and ambers in autumn, canary-yellow in the splashy spring; with tickling bush grass to hide teenage lovers and joint smokers, broad oaks for brave men to kiss against, mown meadows for summer ball games, hills for kites, ponds for hippies, an icy lido for old men with strong constitutions, mean llamas for mean children and, for the tourists, a country house, its façade painted white enough for any Hollywood close-up, complete with a tea room, although anything you buy there should be eaten outside with the grass beneath your toes, sitting under the magnolia tree, letting the white blossoms, blush-pink at their tips, fall all around you. Hampstead Heath! Glory of London! Where Keats walked and Jarman fucked, where Orwell exercised his weakened lungs and Constable never failed to find something holy.
Zadie Smith
You'll get into dreadful trouble and it won't be my fault. You are bad people.
Terry Pratchett
Always, God’s timing is the right time. Things happen when they have to happen and you only realise it later.” – Ernesto.
Paul Alkazraji
Days, weeks, months, years," said the boy. "Minutes and hours and seconds. I don't know about any of those things.
Tim Bowler