Quotes by British Authors - Page 510

Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.
Malcolm Gladwell
No man was ever yet a great poet without at the same time being a profound philosopher.
Hartley Coleridge
Always the following wind of historyOf others' wisdom makes a buoyant airTill we come suddenly on pockets where Is nothing loud but us; where voices seemAbrupt, untrained, competing with no lieOur fathers shouted once.
W.H. Auden
Maybe all of us at Hailsam had little secrets like that -- little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone without fears and longing.
Kazuo Ishiguro
How do you ever hold on to anybody?
Elizabeth Wein
Our mothers were largely silent about what happened to them as they passed through this midlife change. But a new generation of women has already started to break the wall of silence.
Patricia Posner
So often we try to alter circumstances to suit ourselves instead of letting them alter us.
Mother Maribel
I guess a little bit hero is enough. A little bit hero is all anyone really needs to be.
Alexander Gordon Smith
Never elated while one man's oppress'd Never dejected while another's bless'd.
Alexander Pope
Faith never makes herself her own plea, she rests all her argument upon the blood of Christ.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Old age believe me is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.
Jane Harrison
She burned too bright for this world.
Emily Brontë
...[M]y inner self moved; my spirit shook its always-fettered wings half loose. I had a sudden feeling as if I, who never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste life.
Charlotte Brontë
He felt his heart pounding fiercely in his chest. How strange that in his dread of death, it pumped all the harder, valiantly keeping him alive. But it would have to stop, and soon. Its beats were numbered. How many would there be time for, as he rose and walked through the castle for the last time, out into the grounds and into the forest?
J.K. Rowling
Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.
Bertrand Russell
Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy.
Evelyn Waugh
Then they began saying, "Get hold of him. Put him in Mercury." Now as you know I have two sculptures by Brancusi and several pretty things and I did not want them to start getting rough, so I said, pacifically, "Dear sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you meaty boys. It would be an ecstasy of the very naughtiest kind. So if any of you wishes to be my partner in joy come and seize me. If, on the other hand, you simply wish to satisfy some obscure and less easily classified libido and see me bathe, come with me quietly, dear louts, to the fountain.
Evelyn Waugh
Hunger and a lack of blood-corpuscles take all the manhood from a man.
H.G.Wells
Though mortal Men have little life beside the span of the Elves, they would rather spend it in battle than fly or submit. The defiance of Húrin Thalion is a great deed; and though Morgoth slay the doer he cannot make the deed not to have been. Even the Lords of the West will honour it; and is it not written into the history of Arda, which neither Morgoth nor Manwë can unwrite?
J.R.R. Tolkien
A Sufi is one who is not bound by anything nor does he bind anything
Idries Shah
In ten years time I’ll be… (dead) sixty.
Neil Gaiman
Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer into a selflessness which links us with all humanity.
Nancy Astor the Viscountess Astor
Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen, not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Tempestuous as the sea, and stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me and despair!
J.R.R. Tolkien
He takes my face in his hands and presses his lips against mine – a tender, beautiful kiss – the kiss I’ve waited for forever. He quickly pulls his shirt over his head and my breath catches in my throat at the sight of his muscular body and smooth skin. He pushes Ordinary gently to the bottom of the bunk and climbs in next to me. Wrapping his arms around me, he lays his head next to mine. At last, we sleep.' ...from Notes on a Rebellion
Valentina Hepburn
No offense, doll, but that’s not something I’m willing to share. I’d prefer to live a long and happy life if it’s all the same to you.”“You can’t just throw out vague allegations and then say nothing else!”“See, that’s the good thing about being a fugitive like me. I can do what the hell I like, and I’m not answerable to anyone.” Stepping away from the bars, he stands with his legs stretched out wide. His stance matches his grin.“Sure looks like that’s working out well for you,” I say, piercing him with a scornful look.
Siobhan Davis
Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.
Charles Kingsley
Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces and which most men throw away.
Charles Caleb Colton
HIPPOLYTUS: I can't sin against a God I don't believe in.
Sarah Kane
Bowden Cable is the sort of honest and dependable operative that is the backbone of SpecOps. They never win commendations or medalsand the public has no knowledge of them at all. They are all worth ten of people like me.
Jasper Fforde
Troubles are God setting the stage for greater blessings in your life.
John Yates
Heads up lads!” someone shouted. “Here we go!”More missiles, this time not just bottles, but coins as well. And then from the other side of the cordon, a roar went up. Bellowing across the road toward them. Billy watched as the Manchester lads poured forward, desperately trying to force a way through the massed ranks of the police only to be driven back by batons and gloved fists. Another salvo of bottles came flying across, trying to provoke a reaction. But the West Ham lads merely stood and laughed. They didn’t need to respond. The point had been made, the result earned. Billy was happy. Very happy.
Dougie Brimson
I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)
Christopher Nolan
The Poison Maiden has conceived by him, and is plumb ready to enter the divine category of mother, only one last fiend clubs her to death. The final clinch of male romanticism is that each man kills the thing he loves; whether she be Catharine in A Farewell to Arms, or the Grecian Urn, the 'tension that she be perfect' means that she must die, leavinf the hero's status as a great lover unchallenged. The pattern is still commonplace: the hero cannot marry. The sexual exploit must be conquest, not cohabitation and mutual tolerance.
Germaine Greer
Heroes are people who face down their fears. It is that simple. A child afraid of the dark who one day blows out the candle; a women terrified of the pain of childbirth who says, 'It is time to become a mother'. Heroism does not always live on the battlefield.
David Gemmell
I used to feel like I was drowning. So I stopped trying to swim.
Oliver Sykes
I know not why any one but a schoolboy in his declamation should whine over the Commonwealth of Rome, which grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind. The Romans, like others, as soon as they grew rich, grew corrupt; and in their corruption sold the lives and freedoms of themselves, and of one another.
Samuel Johnson
It's no good saying one thing and doing another.
Catherine Cookson
An improper mind is a perpetual feast.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Affectation of candour is common enough—one meets with it everywhere. But to be candid without ostentation or design—to take the good of everybody's character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad—belongs to you alone.
Jane Austen
I thought she had a good heart, though not much respectability- or maybe it was because of that.
Mary Webb
The power of knowing, in that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves.
Malcolm Gladwell
Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has moved. You've already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time ago.
M.R. Carey
Whether our days trip along like the angels mounting on Jacob's ladder to heaven or grind along like the wagons that Joseph sent for Jacob, they are in each case ordered by God's mercy.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime.
Neil Gaiman
Cats ask plainly for what they want.
Walter Savage Landor
The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognised before.
Friedrich A. Hayek
The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest.
Arthur Conan Doyle
All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.
Joseph Conrad
There is always a city. There is always a civilisation. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilisation, but to become that city, that civilisation, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated was what you did not understand.
Jeanette Winterson
Insofar as it is true, the idea that our actions or beliefs are merely one link in a causal link that runs back to the beginning of the universe is making a trivial claim. Insofar as it is saying something profound, the claim is untrue.
Kenan Malik
For the space of half a year, the gunpowder lay as harmless as sand, because no fire came near to explode it.
Emily Brontë
Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.
John Fowles
No one can have a higher opinion of him than I have - and I think he's a dirty little beast.
W.S. Gilbert
..."SORRY."...Just doesn't cut it anymore!
Anthony T.Hincks
The only man I’ve ever been attracted to, and he comes with a bloody contract, a flogger, and a whole world of issues.
E.L. James
It does not come to me in quite so direct a line as that; it takes a bend or two, but nothing of consequence. The stream is as good as at first; the little rubbish it collects in the turnings is easily moved away.
Jane Austen
Almost every time I speak to teenagers, particularly young female students who want to talk to me about feminism, I find myself staggered by how much they have read, how creatively they think and how curiously bullshit-resistant they are. Because of the subjects I write about, I am often contacted by young people and I see it as a part of my job to reply to all of them - and doing so has confirmed a suspicions I’ve had for some time. I think that the generation about to hit adulthood is going to be rather brilliant.Young people getting older is not, in itself, a fascinating new cultural trend. Nonetheless the encroaching adulthood and the people who grew up in a world where expanding technological access collided with the collapse of the neoliberal economic consensus is worth paying attention to. Because these kids are smart, cynical and resilient, and I don’t mind saying that they scare me a little.
Laurie Penny
It’s almost like the better I do, the more my feeling of inadequacy actually increases, because I’m just going, ‘Any moment, someone’s going to find out I’m a total fraud, and that I don’t deserve any of what I’ve achieved.’ I can’t possibly live up to what everyone thinks I am and what everyone’s expectations of me are.
Emma Watson
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question. I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.—Jane EyreFrom Gradesaver.com
Charlotte Brontë
There are considerable mysteries surrounding the strange values that Nature's actual particles have for their mass and charge. For example, there is the unexplained 'fine structure constant' ... governing the strength of electromagnetic interactions, ....
Roger Penrose