Quotes by British Authors - Page 508

Courage cannot be left like bones in a bag. It must be brought out and shown the light again and again, growing stronger each time. If you think it will keep for the times you need it, you are wrong. It is like any other part of your strength. If you ignore it, the bag will be empty when you need it most.
Conn Iggulden
baby you light up my world like nobody else
One Direction
But as men grow more industrialised and regimented, the kind of delight that is common in children becomes impossible to adults because they are always thinking of the next thing and cannot let themselves be absorbed in the moment. This habit of thinking of the ‘next thing’ is more fatal to any kind of aesthetic excellence than any other habit of mind that can be imagined, and if art, in any important sense, is to survive it will not be by the foundation of solemn academies, but by recapturing the capacity for wholehearted joys and sorrows which prudence and foresight have all but destroyed.
Bertrand Russell
Lorsen shook his head in amazement. 'You truly are disgusting.''I would be the last to disagree, but you fail to see that you are worse. No man capable of greater evil than the one who thinks himself in the right. No purpose more evil than the higher purpose. I freely admit I am a villain. That's why you hired me. But I am no hypocrite.
Joe Abercrombie
She was crushed by society like a mosquito fending for its unborn young
Owen Jones
I have never taken sides, never leaped wholeheartedly into one scale or the other; nor do I realize disappointments, provided they are severe, until the occasion is long past. Yet I am ruled by my emotions, though I murder them at birth.
Geoffrey Household
You will choose your path, or perhaps it will choose you.
Gemma Malley
People don’t mind Christianity until you show any sign of actually believing in it
Tim Farron
God gave us our memories so that we might have roses in December.
J.M. Barrie
Yo Mama’s so ugly that your father takes her to work with him so that he doesn't have to kiss her goodbye.
Oliver Oliver Reed
We’re all going to keep fighting, Harry. You know that?
J.K. Rowling
In our family histories, the frontier between fact and fiction is vague, especially in the record of events that took place before we were born, or when we were too young to record them accurately; there are few maps to these remote regions, and only the occasional sign to guide the explorer.
Adam Sisman
Gwynned lies two days westwards; still further south, the weregeld calls. Mayhap with All-Father Woden's favour, my deeds may yet inspire the skalds.
George Gordon Byron
For I prophecy that men will learn the use of their knees.For every thing that can be done in that posture (upon the knees) is better so done than otherwise.For I prophecy that they will understand the blessing and virtue of the rain.For rain is exceedingly good for the human body.
Christopher Smart
He was one of those people who completely changes when they smile. Like the sun had come out.
Caroline Green
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse
T.S Eliot
The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated.
Wilfred Trotter
Those who speak of man's "free will," and insist upon his inherent power to either accept or reject the Saviour, do but voice their ignorance of the real condition of Adam's fallen children.
Arthur W. Pink
In a story on the U.S.-brokered security pact between the government of Sudan and southern rebel groups, the New York Times referred to the war in Sudan as "a pet cause of many American religious conservatives." It is hard to imagine the Times describing the plight of Soviet Jewry as a "pet cause" of American Jews, or opposition to apartheid as a "pet cause" of African-Americans.
Paul Marshall
Time, it transpires, is not so good at telling after all.
Claire North
Our self-conceit sustains and always must sustain us.
Samuel Butler
Events in life mean nothing if you do not reflect on them in a deep way, and ideas from books are pointless if they have no application to life as you live it.
Robert Greene
the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.
John Stuart Mill
We forget very easily what gives us pain.
Graham Greene
... as we travel again between life and death, Waking and dream, blinking, while layers within layers,None better, none worse, unravel and knit up before us . . .
Jay Woodman
Brambleclaw turned to Squirrelflight first. “Will you fight beside me?”Their eyes met for a long moment. “Always,” she meowed.
Erin Hunter
I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go .
John Stuart Mill
There is a patent conflict between the need to reverse or at least to control the impact of our economy on the biosphere and the imperatives of a capitalist market: maximum continuing growth in the search for profit.
Eric Hobsbawm
Ginny!" said Mr. Weasley, flabbergasted. "Haven't I taught you anything? What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain?
J.K. Rowling
Seriousness is the very thing wherein consisteth our sincerity. If thou art not serious, thou art not a Christian (279).
Richard Baxter
Paradise is no whim.It takes time and trust,You see.
Scott Hastie
Shyness is just egotism out of its depth.
Penelope Keith
…Mrs. Warren allowed her book to fall closed upon her lap, and her attractive face awakened to an expression of agreeable expectation, in itself denoting the existence of interesting and desirable qualities in the husband at the moment inserting his latch-key in the front door preparatory to mounting the stairs and joining her. The man who, after twenty-five years of marriage, can call, by his return to her side, this expression to the countenance of an intelligent woman is, without question or argument, an individual whose life and occupations are as interesting as his character and points of view.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Letting go is not getting rid of. Letting go is letting be.
Sally Brampton
The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
Alain de Botton
Ruta Skadi was four hundred and sixteen years old, with all the pride and knowledge of an adult witch queen. She was wiser by far than any short-lived human, but she had not the slightest idea of how like a child she seemed beside these ancient beings. Nor did she know how far their awareness spread out beyond her like filamentary tentacles to the remotest corners of universes she had never dreamed of; nor that she saw them as human-formed only because her eyes expected to. If she were to perceive their true form, they would seem more like architecture than organism, like huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling.But they expected nothing else: she was very young.
Philip Pullman
We have just begun to navigate a strange region; we must expect to encounter strange adventures, strange perils.
Arthur Machen
The reason that so many fail to find happiness is that they fail to find gratitude.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
I don’t care what people think. I don’t care how many dislikes I get on Youtube. I don’t care how many people compare to every single female artist in the industry, because we’re both white and sing. I do this because I love it, and I do it because this is what I feel like I was born to do, I feel like I was born to write music to heal the world.
Jessie J.
Mr. Jamrach led me through the lobby and into the menagerie. The first was a parrot room, a fearsome screaming place of mad round eyes, crimson breasts that beat against bars, wings that flapped against their neighbours, blood red, royal blue, gypsy yellow, grass green. The birds were crammed along perches. Macaws hung upside down here and there, batting their white eyes, and small green parrots flittered above our heads in drifts. A hot of cockatoos looked down from on high over the shrill madness, high crested, creamy breasted. The screeching was like laughter in hell.
Carol Birch
The Hamians!'The centurion‟s voice was little better than a squeak. Julius snorted his disdain.'What about the Hamians? Useless bow-waving women. All they‟re good for is hunting game. There‟s a war on, in case you hadn‟t noticed. We need infantrymen, big lads withspears and shields to strengthen our line. Archers are no bloody use in an infantry cohort.'He raised his meaty fist. 'No, mate, you‟re going to get what‟s coming your way.'The other man gabbled desperately, staring helplessly at the poised fist.'There‟s two centuries of them, two centuries. Take them and the Tungrians and that‟s two hundred and fifty men.'Marcus spoke, having stood quietly in the background so far.'So we could make a century of the best of them, dump the rest on the Second Cohort when we catch up with them and take back the century he sold them in return.'Julius turned his head to look at the younger man, keeping the transit officer clamped inplace with seemingly effortless strength.'Are you mad? There won‟t be a decent man among them. They‟ll be arse-poking,make-up-wearing faggots, the lot of them. All those easterners are, it‟s in the blood. They‟ll mince round the camp holding hands and tossing each other off in the bathhouse.
Anthony Riches
It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reality of life. It was like expecting to be able to write a symphony because you had once read a handbook of composition.
Julian Barnes
A penny for your thought.
John Lyly
I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.
Arthur C. Clarke
It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.
China Miéville
Accursed be he that first invented war.
Christopher Marlowe
Have you ever or are you now involved in espionage or sabotage, or in terrorist activities, or genocide? I think we can put a big yes down for all of the above.
Claire North
... People were never quite what you thought they were.
William Golding
The Church is going to have to recognise that secularisation is not the cause of their decline, it is the result of it.
Keith Porteous Wood
It's a crime, when you think about how little time we get, that a man should ever be bored. When you are lying on your death bead, I expect you regret those weeks wasted more than your worst mistakes.
Joe Abercrombie
I closed my eyes, adding dark to dark, and the wanting unfurled like the sails of a phantom ship. This could be my universe. This nowhere world, circumscribed by skin and breath, where nothing mattered but two bodies moving together. The past and the future rendered irrelevant by the beauty of the now, the sum of the self transmuted into a moment. Oh, was there ever a more seductive definition of madness?
Alexis Hall
Eat bread at pleasure drink wine by measure.
Randle Cotgrave
I think modern education over-emphasizes the intellect. I suppose that comes from the scientific trend of the times. You cannot obtain a useful citizen if you only develop his intellect. We take children from their parents because these cannot give them an intellectual training. So far, good. But we fail to give them that training in character which parents alone can give. Home influence, as Grace Aguilar conceived it " where has it gone? It strikes me that this is a grave danger for the future. We are rearing up a brood of crafty egoists, a generation whose earliest recollections are those of getting something for nothing from the State.I am inclined to trace our present social unrest to this over-valuation of the intellect. It hardens the heart and blights all generous impulses. What is going to replace the home, Mr. Keith?
Norman Douglas
Albus Severus," Harry said quietly, so that nobody but Ginny could hear, and she was tactful enough to pretend to be waving to Rose, who was now on the train, "you were named for two headmasters of Hogwarts. One of them was a Slytherin and he was probably the bravest man I ever knew.
J.K. Rowling
The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are never lazy. They don’t know what it is to be quiet. They are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joan of Arcs, Queen Elizabeths, and Catharine the Seconds, and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamour, and desperation. If they can’t agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they’ll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of domestic molehills; and social storms in household teacups. Forbid them to hold forth upon the freedom of nations and the wrongs of mankind, and they’ll quarrel with Mrs Jones about the shape of a mantle or the character of a small maid-servant. To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the nosier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.
Geoff Dyer
It is reasonable to think that if you spend your days indoors under artificial lights, staring at a screen, sitting in computer electromagnetic interference (EMI) fields and exposed to radio waves, that you may eventually develop a strange form of radiation sickness.
Steven Magee
The red tongues that went licking up my heap of wood were an altogether new and strange thing to Weena.
H.G.Wells
She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me, and I am in no humor at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men.
Jane Austen
Larry: She doesn't want to be happy.Dan: Everybody wants to be happy.Larry: Depressives don't. They want to be unhappy to confirm they're depressed. If they were happy they couldn't be depressed anymore. They'd have to go out into the world and live. Which can be depressing.
Patrick Marber