Quotes by British Authors - Page 498

Leaders succeed or fail depending on whether or not they clarify role expectations and keep their promises.
Bob Anderson
I'm an atheist, but I believe in art. I go to galleries like my mother went to church. It helps me understand the way I live.
Sarah Thornton
Not all those who wander are lost.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Fashion exists for women with no taste etiquette for people with no breeding.
Queen Marie of Rumania
This pervasive craving to be recognized as special amounted to an abdication of power, an outsourcing of your core responsibilities. I spurned the fawning of strangers, but I did feel special to myself. I had found that "feeling special" was a private experience, and no one else's projected fascination could substitute for quiet absorption in your own life.
Lionel Shriver
Everything changes, it all stays the same,Everyone guilty, no one to blame,Every way out, brings you back to the start,Everyone dies to break somebody's heart...
Motorhead
Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But there are a number of occasions when it suits him to pose as a sort of Candide: naive, and ill-prepared for and easily unhorsed by events. No doubt this pose costs him something in point of self-esteem. It is a pose, furthermore, which he often adopts at precisely the time when the record shows him to be knowledgeable, and when knowledge or foreknowledge would also confront him with charges of responsibility or complicity.
Christopher Hitchens
A man always finds it hard to realize that he may have finally lost a woman's love, however badly he may have treated her.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Mums are mums, lance-constable. They don't like to see men managing by themselves, in case that sort of thing catches on.
Terry Pratchett
I don't know what London's coming to — the higher the buildings the lower the morals.
Noël Coward
I can't solve any problems. All I can do is try to make sure people can't avoid noticing them.
Warren Ellis
according to the psychologist irving Janis, is that our sense of belonging (which makes us feel safe) blinds us to dangers and encourages greater risk-taking.
Margaret Heffernan
The world of those who are happy is different from the world of those who are not.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
She dried her tears, and they did smileTo see her cheeks’ returning glow;Nor did discern how all the whileThat full heart throbbed to overflow.With that sweet look and lively tone,And bright eye shining all the day,They could not guess, at midnight loneHow she would weep the time away.
Emily Brontë
It is better to listen to a crow that lives in trees than to a learned man who lives only in ideas.
Kate Horsley
Surely if Alternative Facts are untrue they should be called Ficts?
Alan Dapre
There's nothing so heavy as books, sir--unless it's bricks.
Graham Greene
A woman's weapon is her tongue.
Anthony Trollope
A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.
Douglas Adams
We live in a day of abounding vagueness and indistinctness on doctrinal subjects in religion. Now, if ever, it is the duty of all advocates of clear, well-defined, sharply-cut theology, to supply proof that their views are thoroughly borne out by Scripture.
J.C. Ryle
This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents--were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was about: Love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God.
Julian Barnes
I can’t do small talk really, and that’s fine. I've got old friends and family that love me, thank God. I’m grateful for what a city gives you access to, but I do feel that I’m only here until I figure out how to get out again.
Laura Marling
Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came fear.
H.G.Wells
When I think of normality I think of mediocrity
Gillian Anderson
It is often only when we have the occasion to taste, once again, that which we have lost, that the floodgates open and we are undefendably, confronted with the full experience of the loss."From The Island of Serenity, Book 1, Survival, new edition
Gary Edward Gedall
The most unknown, unused and unrecognised tool of the human mind, is the recognition that attitude is always a choice.
Mark Horton
In other words, it was a struggle with himself. And the product of that struggle: anger, bitterness, resentment, envy or transformation, aspiration, hope, decency..the product of that struggle is the quality of your life and the nature of your soul.
Emma Forrest
It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided.
Alain de Botton
If the world is a book, are you the hero, or just a walk-on part?
K.J. Parker
An artist is the magician put among men to gratify--capriciously--their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships--and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes--husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer...
Tom Stoppard
Flynn was kissing her again, not to help her forget but to force her to remember. Everything he had meant to her then. Everything he meant to her now. How he always had been, and forever would be, her world.
Kate Meader
It was [Hugh's] omnipresent fear that some woman might be foisted on him who would turn out to be an adventuress and would blackmail him. This preoccupation made it almost impossible for him to engage a secretary.
Anthony Powell
When you're little you believe whatever your mother tells you, so I assumed it must be true, that I must be inferior to the others in some way.
Joe Peters
Machines can't lie," I said, lying through my circuits.
Adam Christopher
No matter what we are or who created us, we’re all energy. And energy that becomes bound together by love cannot be torn apart. Not by time. Not by grief and pain. Not even the veil of death.
Callie Hart
The love of life is necessary to the vigorous prosecution of any undertaking.
Samuel Johnson
How clear, how lovely bright,How beautiful to sight Those beams of morning play;How heaven laughs out with gleeWhere, like a bird set free,Up from the eastern sea Soars the delightful day.To-day I shall be strong,No more shall yield to wrong, Shall squander life no more;Days lost, I know not how,I shall retrieve them now;Now I shall keep the vow I never kept before.Ensanguining the skiesHow heavily it dies Into the west away;Past touch and sight and soundNot further to be found,How hopeless under ground Falls the remorseful day.
A.E. Housman
Good is good in the final hour, in the deepest pit – without hope, without witness, without reward. Virtue is only virtue in extremis.
Steven Moffat
Nearly all rich an powerful people are not notably talented, educated, charming or good-looking. They become rich and powerful by wanting to be rich and powerful.
Paul Arden
Fire’s the sun, unwindin’ itself out o’ the wood.
David Mitchell
I could scream abuse at him all day long; he wouldn't mind at all. It's me he wants, my look, my outside; not my emotions or my mind or my soul or even my body. Not anything human.
John Fowles
I won't die. I won't give those ghouls the pleasure. I'll live and grow strong. I'll escape, then hunt them down and make them suffer.
Darren Shan
The Power of the Dogby Rudyard KiplingThere is sorrow enough in the natural way From men and women to fill our day; And when we are certain of sorrow in store, Why do we always arrange for more? Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware Of giving your heart to a dog to tear. Buy a pup and your money will buy Love unflinching that cannot lie-- Perfect passion and worship fed By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head. Nevertheless it is hardly fair To risk your heart for a dog to tear. When the fourteen years which Nature permits Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits, And the vet's unspoken prescription runs To lethal chambers or loaded guns, Then you will find--it's your own affair-- But ... you've given your heart to a dog to tear. When the body that lived at your single will, With its whimper of welcome, is stilled (how still!). When the spirit that answered your every mood Is gone--wherever it goes--for good, You will discover how much you care, And will give your heart to a dog to tear. We've sorrow enough in the natural way, When it comes to burying Christian clay. Our loves are not given, but only lent, At compound interest of cent per cent. Though it is not always the case, I believe, That the longer we've kept 'em, the more do we grieve: For, when debts are payable, right or wrong, A short-time loan is as bad as a long-- So why in--Heaven (before we are there) Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?
Rudyard Kipling
When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you.
Keith Richards
No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.
Virginia Woolf
I am his Highness' dog at Kew;Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
Alexander Pope
Everything not forbidden is compulsory
T.H. White
If that poem idea is in your head NOW, write it down. Right now. Or lose it. For when it's gone, it's gone forever...
Nick Armbrister
The beginning is always today.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them──by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents.
Jane Austen
And what exactly do you think this proves?" he spits. "You've got power, but you don't know what to do wit
Patrick Ness
Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the “physical pleasure of turning actual pages” and how ebook will “never replace the real thing”. Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They’re only happy looking in the rear-view mirror.
Charlie Brooker
Do have a mind of your own. This is not just a spiritual matter only, but one which concerns ordinary manliness. I would do many things to please my friends, but to go to hell to please them is more than I would venture.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Even the most powerful woman needs a place to unwind.
Barbara Taylor Bradford
The ‘coons had enjoyed a real party, and my trashcan had been the piñata! They’d obviously indulged in an evening of feasting on our wares and then staggered off the property loaded up with our birdseed as a little take-home gift!
Suzanne Kelman
And how will you afford to buy them in the first place?""I shall save up.""But that will take you years and years and years," said the twins."I've got years and years and years," said Sophie.
Dick King-Smith
Her cheeks were flushed. She caught hold of the Savage's arm and pressed it, limp, against her side. He looked down at her for a moment, pale, pained, desiring, and ashamed of his desire. He was not worthy, not... Their eyes for a moment met. What treasures hers promised! A queen's ransom of temperament. Hastily he looked away, disengaged his imprisoned arm. He was obscurely terrified lest she should cease to be something he could feel himself unworthy of.
Aldous Huxley
Helena, like many women who ruled their own lives, adored being told what to do when there was no obligation to follow the advice given.
Elizabeth Ironside
We ask only to be reassuredAbout the noises in the cellarAnd the window that should not have been open
T.S Eliot
Whatever people in general do not understand, they are always prepared to dislike; the incomprehensible is always the obnoxious.
Letitia Landon