Quotes by British Authors - Page 505

Where my soul went during that swoon I cannot tell. Whatever she saw, or wherever she travelled in her trance on that strange night she kept her own secret; never whispering a word to Memory, and baffling imagination by an indissoluble silence. She may have gone upward, and come in sight of her eternal home, hoping for leave to rest now, and deeming that her painful union with matter was at last dissolved. While she so deemed, an angel may have warned her away from heaven's threshold, and, guiding her weeping down, have bound her, once more, all shuddering and unwilling, to that poor frame, cold and wasted, of whose companionship she was grown more than weary.I know she re-entered her prison with pain, with reluctance, with a moan and a long shiver. The divorced mates, Spirit and Substance, were hard to re-unite: they greeted each other, not in an embrace, but a racking sort of struggle.
Charlotte Brontë
They spoke of small things at first, since it was best, when reattaching threads, to begin with the easiest knots.
Chris Cleave
Look at your eyes. You've got bigger bags than Louis Vuitton.
Matt Dunn
Muggles have garden gnomes, too, you know," Harry told Ron as they crossed the lawn."Yeah, I've seen those things they think are gnomes," said Ron, bent double with his head in a peony bush, "like fat little Santa Clauses with fishing rods...
J.K. Rowling
Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative—an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary... That day I had learned that it was much more. It was something which could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary and play tricks with the mind. Something which lurked inimically all around, stretching the nerves and twanging them with alarms, never letting one forget that there was no one to help, no one to care. It showed one as an atom adrift in vastness, and it waited all the time its chance to frighten and frighten horribly—that was what loneliness was really trying to do; and that was what one must never let it do...
John Wyndham
If you are unaware of what's within, you will be shown in the mirror of your near future life experience. Wiser to keep a step ahead.
Jay Woodman
The church exists for the sake of those outside it.
William Temple
Teach us to pray often that we may pray oftener.
Jeremy Taylor
the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is.
C.S. Lewis
I got both hands on her throat and there was nothing inside me but the black madness of that desire to kill her, to close my hands until she turned purple and lay still and there’d be an end to her forever. Let them send me to the chair. Let ’em burn me. All they could do was kill me.
Charles Williams
[about suicide] And why is it the biggest sin of all? All your life you're told that you'll be going to this marvellous place when you pass on. And the one thing you can do to get you there a bit quicker is something that stops you getting there at all. Oh, I can see that it's a kind of queue­jumping. But if someone jumps the queue at the Post Office, people tut. Or sometimes they say, “Excuse me, I was here first.” They don't say, “You will be consumed by hellfire for all eternity.” That would be a bit strong.
Nick Hornby
Life is a dance more than it is an assertion and there is more health in dynamism or fluidity than there is rigidity and stasis.
Oli Anderson
Sorry I painted the word 'twat' on your garage door.
David Shrigley
Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life...
Elizabeth Goudge
One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests.
Peter Marshall
I am Become Text Message. Destroyer Of Words.
Dean Cavanagh
In other words, The­ol­ogy is prac­ti­cal: espe­cially now. In the old days, when there was less edu­ca­tion and dis­cus­sion, per­haps it was pos­si­ble to get on with a very few sim­ple ideas about God. But it is not so now. Every­one reads, every­one hears things dis­cussed. Con­se­quently, if you do not lis­ten to The­ol­ogy, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones — bad, mud­dled, out-of-date ideas. For a great many of the ideas about God which are trot­ted out as novel­ties to-day are simply the ones which real The­olo­gians tried cen­turies ago and rejected.
C.S. Lewis
Over the years of the Cultural Revolution, I was to witness people being attacked for saying "thank you" too often, which was branded as "bourgeois hypocrisy"; courtesy was on the brink of extinction.
Jung Chang
My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.
Virginia Woolf
Love me!Hate me!I don't care which because either way,you're still talking about me!
Anthony T.Hincks
Parents are the last people on Earth who ought to have children.
Samuel Butler
The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.
George Eliot
They say that the eyes of some paintings can follow you around the room, a fact that I doubt, but I am wondering whether some music can follow you for ever.
Terry Pratchett
The power of positive thinking will overcome so many things
Malcolm Gladwell
The rage for railroads is so great that many will be laid in parts where they will not pay.
George Stephenson
As soon as reality breaks, as soon as we're separated from the phsical world, the cracks begin to appear in our minds. And through them seeps the madness that has always been there, flowing into your skull like a liquid nightmare ..
Alexander Gordon Smith
You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.
Alexandra Fuller
Until we can navigate in time, I'm not sure that we can prove that what happened is real.
Sebastian Faulks
She(Joan of Arc) put her dreams and her sentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put her practicality into her practice. In modern Imperial wars, the case is reversed. Our dreams, our aims are always, we insist, quite practical. It is our practice that is dreamy.
G.K. Chesterton
Life always refused simplicity.
Julian Barnes
The sickening pang of hope deferr'd.
Walter Scott
SAYING OF SHEIKH ZIAUDIN:Self-justification is worse than the original offence.
Idries Shah
I want to touch you.''And if you did touch me, what then?''I would find a language of beginning.
Jeanette Winterson
I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends!
Charlotte Brontë
As the Spanish proverb says 'He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.' So it is with traveling. A man must carry knowledge with him if he would bring home knowledge.
Samuel Johnson
Courage is found in unlikely places.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Enjoy the contented silence.
Fennel Hudson
Some people go through the heavy stuff. They fight in wars. They're in jail. They start a business and it gets shut down by gangsters. They end up hustling their ass in a foreign country. It's one long list of setbacks and humiliations. But it doesn't touch them, not really. They're having an adventure. It's like: What's next? And then there's other people who are just trying to live quietly, they stay out of trouble, they're maybe ten years old, or fourteen, and one Friday morning at 9:35 something happens to them, something private, something that breaks their heart. Forever.
Michel Faber
When a man's pride is injured, death is a small price to repay the insult.
James Clavell
Reading off a page is like looking down at a landscape from a balloon – your eye "sees" the story as well as reads it, its layout, its paragraphs and structure, and "remembers" what it just read because it's still there, on the page, simultaneously. If you want to, you can reread any line instantly; or linger; or speed up; or optically "flinch." Reading a series of tweets is more like looking through a narrow window from a train speeding through a landscape full of tunnels and bands of light and dark. Each tweet erases its predecessor.
David Mitchell
The power of reason is thought small in these days, but I remain an unrepentant rationalist. Reason may be a small force, but it is constant, and works always in one direction, while the forces of unreason destroy one another in futile strife. Therefore every orgy of unreason in the end strengthens the friends of reason, and shows afresh that they are the only true friends of humanity.
Bertrand Russell
Only in war does the madman become sane.
Anthony Ryan
My own attitude to the innumerable injustices of life has always been a philosophical one, especially when they have tended to operate in my favour.
Auberon Waugh
All tastes are expressions of belief.
Zadie Smith
Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpiresAt every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Andrew Marvell
So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.
Thomas Hardy
In the struggle to remain a complete person and to love from her fullness instead of her inadequacy a woman may appear hard. She may feel her early conditioning tugging her in the direction of surrender, but she ought to remember that she was originally loved for herself; she ought to hang on to herself and not find herself nagging, helpless, irritable and trapped. Perhaps I am not old enough yet to promise that the self-reliant woman is always loved, but she cannot be lonely as long as there are people in the world who need her joy and her strength, but certainly in my experience it has always been so. Lovers who are free to go when they are restless always come back; lovers who are free to change remain interesting. The bitter animosity and obscenity of divorce is unknown where individuals have not become Siamese twins. A lover who comes to your bed of his own accord is more likely to sleep with his arms around you all night than a lover who has nowhere else to sleep.
Germaine Greer
The plan is to start performing smaller venues and work my way up from there, this anxiety isn't going to get the better of me.
Zayn Malik
Sometimes being overwhelmed by emotions can leave you speechless but even then it is important to identify the correct emotion.
Sam Owen
By swap news do you mean drink?" "I do, and that excessively.
Joe Abercrombie
The idea that I might not-- in an earlier era, or a different country-- have a choice in the matter seems both emotionally and physically barbaric.
Caitlin Moran
Perhaps you have been looking in the wrong places.
J.K. Rowling
Look! Why want anything more marvellous than what is.
Diana Athill
Books , like landscapes, leave their marks in us. (...) Certain books, though, like certain landscapes, stay with us even when we left them, changing not just our weathers but our climates.
Robert Macfarlane
Any man's a fool who lets himself be a wage-earning slave, today.
D.H. Lawrence
...the more widely we extend the range of education, the more necessary it is to provide some principle of cohesion to counterbalance the centrifugal tendencies of specialization and utilitarianism.
Christopher Henry Dawson
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the myriad of other services resonate with the basic human urge to be social. The tools have changed, but human behaviour remains consistent.
Alfred Hermida
The basic Irrational Act which is renewed every moment of life, is not to commit suicide.
Nanamoli Thera
Xavier, you have given me more grey hairs than all my sons put together.’ Saul frowned, then corrected himself. ‘To be fair, you and Zed. Just try not to add to them tonight.
Joss Stirling
Saul is as different from Simon Wakefield as it's possible to get, I find myself thinking. And Edward Monkford is utterly different from both of them. It seems incredible that Emma could have had relationships with all three men. Where Simon's eager to please, but also touchy and insecure, and Edward's calm and super-confident, Saul is pushy and brash and loud. He also has a habit of saying 'Yeah?' aggressively at the end of his sentences, as if trying to force me to agree with him.
J.P. Delaney