Quotes by British Authors - Page 51

My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air.
Derek Parfit
Poetry is the way that we transcend language through language. And thus our freedom lies in the poetry of all things
Ilyas Kassam
It is important to distinguish 'pure chance' from 'chance' or 'accident.' Things may happen by chance or accident in a purely deterministic universe...Now there is perhaps a sense of 'could not have done otherwise' in which whether or not a person could or could not have done otherwise depends on whether or not the universe is deterministic.
J.J.C. Smart
I have stared into the light and you are all my shadows.
Mike Carey
I'm one of the few persons I ever met who are able to learn from experience.
W Somerset Maugham
Having the thought of you being with someone else is like a knife twisting in my dark soul
E.L. James
It’s lovely when writers I like like each other.
Jo Walton
He had no notion of meeting danger half-way. When it came upon him, he confronted it, but it must come before he troubled himself.
Charles Dickens
Life in the wild, as I’m observing, is about survival as much as pleasure.
Fennel Hudson
But, as I understand it, your God is a universal God; He is God on all suns and all planets. Surely, then, He must have universal form? Would it not be a staggering vanity to imagine that He can manifest Himself only in the form that is appropriate to this particular, not very important planet?
John Wyndham
Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.
Bill Bryson
One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.
Virginia Woolf
Earth is ancient now, but all knowledge is stored up in her. She keeps a record of everything that has happened since time began. Of time before time, she says little, and in a language that no one has yet understood. Through time, her secret codes have gradually been broken. Her mud and lava is a message from the past.Of time to come, she says much, but who listens?
Jeanette Winterson
All things are true. God's an Astronaut. Oz is Over the Rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters live." - Peloquin
Clive Barker
It was the usual struggle between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to be one.
Helen Oyeyemi
Professor Moody!" said a shocked voice.Professor McGonagall was coming down the marble staircase with her arms full of books."Hello, Professor McGonagall," said Moody calmly, bouncing the ferret still higher."What - what are you doing?" said Professor McGonagall, her eyes following the bouncing ferret's progress through the air."Teaching," said
J.K. Rowling
The foundation of morality to have done, once and for all, with lying.
Thomas H. Huxley
A modern woman sees a piece of linen, but the mediaeval woman saw through it to the flax fields, she smelt the reek of the retting ponds, she felt the hard rasp of the hackling, and she saw the soft sheen of the glossy flax. Man did not see 'just leather', he saw the beast - perhaps one of his own - and knew the effort of slaughtering, liming and curing.Communities were smaller and whether our man lived on the outskirts of some feudal system, had escaped from it, or was entirely isolated, he would work alone, or daily with the same fellow-workers - conversation would soon languish.But THINK he must.
Dorothy Hartley
There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.
Stephen Hawking
He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.
William Blake
Mass production keeps the world divided between consumer and producer. Demassification of production may hasten the speed towards an era of prosumers.
Michael Petch
One thing seems certain. Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life—a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin.It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the sombre hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of colour and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in the trillions.They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.
Arthur C. Clarke
She didn't say anything, just a long, quiet "shhhh," as if she had learned that the troubles of the world could be absorbed and deafened by slow, steady wistfulness, and I suddenly understood that she'd been silencing the noise for the past twenty years.
Jennifer Ryan
Life has no remote....get up and change it yourself!
Mark A. Cooper
[I]f you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous thing in the world, that means you don't think the Islamic Republic of Iran or North Korea or the Taliban is as bad.
Christopher Hitchens
Light quirks of music broken and uneven make the soul dance upon a jig of heaven.
Alexander Pope
To be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, ans that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impoitently happy.
Edwin A. Abbott
Those who understand the true nature of humanity are always loners
Dean Cavanagh
Spend sixteen weeks in the jungle and you being to question your own sanity, especially when you are the one goading everyone else ahead.
Tahir Shah
Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war. If it is held that the instinct for preserving the species should always be obeyed at the expense of other instincts, whence do we derive this rule of precedence? To listen to that instinct speaking in its own case and deciding in its own favour would be rather simple minded. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest. By the very act of listening to one rather than to others we have already prejudged the case. If we did not bring to the examination of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them. And that knowledge cannot itself be instinctive: the judge cannot be one of the parties judged: or, if he is, the decision is worthless and there is no ground for placing preservation of the species above self-preservation or sexual appetite.
C.S. Lewis
Nothing, not even the best and noblest, can go on as it now is. Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. Flesh and blood cannot come to the Mountains [heaven]. Not because they are too rank, but because they are too weak. What is a Lizard compared with a stallion? Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed.
C.S. Lewis
As J. B. S. Haldane said when asked what evidence might contradict evolution, 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.
Richard Dawkins
I give no sources, because it is indifferent to mewhether what I have thought has already beenthought before me by another.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The male sex still constitute in many ways the most obstinate vested interest one can find.
Lord Longford
Alas! he is cold, he cannot answer me.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Before innovation - or practical creativity - there is insight. You must see the world differently.
Max McKeown
Nothing can penetrate the loneliness of the human heart except the highest intensity of the sort of love the religious teachers have preached.
Bertrand Russell
Something came out from my heart into my throat and then into my eyes.
Jean Rhys
I look up at the ceiling, at all the hardcover fiction. So very few people want it. It is operating as insulation rather than stock. The argument rages on about whether it is better to have books or ebooks, but while everyone gets heated about the choices, the hardcover fiction molders quietly away.
Deborah Meyler
If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had only if they persevere.
P.D. James
Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions. Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired. So she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when Donald had been her undeclared lover, and wondered what unwished-for thing Heaven might send her in place of him.
Thomas Hardy
No one wants to go through life alone, fighting battles single-handedly their whole life. Not even the hardiest of heroes. That’s just a miserable existence. Everyone needs someone in their corner, right?...Even if you could,” I wrinkled my brow, “would you really want to? By all accounts, it gets lonely being your own hero.
J.M. Richards
Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
Alain de Botton
Keep violence in the mind Where it belongs.
Brian Aldiss
Perhaps it is better not to tell what you wish. if you cannot have it.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Explore me,' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I’m free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon’s wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.
Jeanette Winterson
Take up the white man's burden - Send forth the best ye breed - Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need.
Rudyard Kipling
Pet,’ Brutus repeated. ‘Bitch.’ ‘Don’t be offended,’ I said. ‘He calls everyone that.’ I winked at Brutus
Helen Harper
Hasn't your experience with the Time-Turner taught you anything, Harry? The consequences of our actions are always so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed...
J.K. Rowling
It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe.
Robert Service
I prize the soul that slumbers in a quiet eye.
Eliza Cook
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and what it saw in a plain way. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion--all in one.
John Ruskin
Patrick opens his arms about three feet wide and, with one finger pointing up on each hand, tries to show the scope of this thing. I notice that he doesn’t look at his hands as he does this, but at the wall behind me. It suddenly occurs to me that when people describe size this way, they’re relying on perspective to help them. He’s not saying ‘It’s this big.’ He’s saying ‘It would look this big from here if it was over there.
Scarlett Thomas
The connectivity of the heart and mind is wonderful solution to many of life's challenges.
Steven Redhead
You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin – to the bitter end. And you can trust us to keep any secret of yours – closer than you yourself keep it. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word. We are your friends, Frodo. Anyway: there it is. We know most of what Gandalf has told you. We know a good deal about the ring. We are horribly afraid–but we are coming with you; or following you like hounds.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Hatred may last a lifetime, but love is ever lasting.
Anthony T.Hincks
Of course, I quiet agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable discomfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the dismay and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is one thing you cannot get looking for it. If you look for the truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth-only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and the in the end, despair.
C.S. Lewis
All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
C.S. Lewis
Insanity is catching.
Terry Pratchett
[Being in love] is something like poetry. Certainly you can analyze it and expound its various senses and intentions but there is always something left over mysteriously hovering between music and meaning.
Muriel Spark