Quotes by British Authors - Page 517

I am perfectly convinced that I have both seen, and heard in a manner which should make unbelief impossible, things called spiritual which cannot be taken by a rational being to be capable of explanation by imposture, coincidence, or mistake.
Augustus De Morgan
To me he seemed one of those persons destined to failure of whom you wonder what purpose it can ever serve that they should have ben born.
W Somerset Maugham
Then, when I've got a degree in maths, or physics, or maths and physics, I will be able to get a job and earn lots of money and I will be able to pay someone who can look after me and cook my meals and wash my clothes, or I will get a lady to marry me and be my wife and she can look after me so I can have company and not be on my own.
Mark Haddon
Women have one great advantage over men. It is commonly thought that if they marry they have done enough and need career no further. If a man marries on the other hand public opinion is all against him if he takes this view.
Rose Macaulay
I should have known he’d be trouble as soon as he walked into my workshop, but I couldn’t have known he’d be the death of me.
Pippa DaCosta
The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penelogical theories. Cram criminals together and see what happens, You get concentrated criminality, crime in the midst of punishment.
Anthony Burgess
I regard teaching religion as purveying lies.
Peter Atkins
You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve," said Aslan. "And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.
C.S. Lewis
We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.
Neil Gaiman
When you change your dress,you want to look your best.But when you change your lover,it's simply for another.
Anthony T.Hincks
Against the rules. She's on it, like a hound on a fox.'Her name is Annie.
Ali Land
Now love doesn't stop at death - or if it does, it's a pretty poor sort of love! In fact, grief could almost be defined as the form love takes when the object of love has been removed; it is love embracing an empty space, love kissing thin air and feeling the pain of nothingness. But there is no reason at all why love should discontinue the practice of holding the beloved in prayer before God.
N.T. Wright
Liberty will not descend to a people. A people must raisethemselves to liberty. It is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.
Charles Caleb Colton
Defeat should never be a source of discouragement but rather a fresh stimulus.
Robert South
Up and up they went, still a cable's length apart; but slowly, for the ape was footsore and despondent. As for Stephen, by the sixth-hundred step his calves and thighs were ready to burst, and at each rise now they forced themselves upon his attention. Up and up, up and up until the ridge was no great way off at last. But before they reached it, the path took another turn; and when he too came round the corner he was on top of the ape. She was sitting on a stone, resting her feet. He scarcely knew what to do; it seemed an intrusion. 'God be with you, ape.' he said in Irish, which in his confusion seemed more appropriate.
Patrick O'Brian
I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.
Jeanette Winterson
You have to choose your future regrets.
Christopher Hitchens
When you come to any passage you don't understand, read it again: if you still don't understand it, read it again: if you fail, even after three readings, very likely your brain is getting a little tired. In that case, put the book away, and take to other occupations, and next day, when you come to it fresh, you will very likely find that it is quite easy.
Lewis Carroll
Enjoy being you. Have fun. And be different.
Fennel Hudson
It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what.
John Galsworthy
Purify our minds that we may be "first pure, then peaceable," and fortify our souls, that our peaceableness may not lead us into cowardice and despair, when for Thy sake we are persecuted.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
It would be unfair to say that I prefer the back of a book to its contents, but it is true that the sight of a lot of books gives me the hope that I may some day read them, which sometimes develops into the belief that I have read them.
Kenneth Clark
One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is to have a happy childhood.
Agatha Christie
Hold on to your periwigs, I'm going to start you off with a whirlwind tour of the history of Stuart Britain; a time that encompassed the vast majority of the seventeenth century and the first fourteen years of the eighteenth.
Andrea Zuvich
She lashed herself with every failing she could think of, then every regret, and fell to the ground, sobbing.
Suzie Wilde
The last thing we wanted was for the Machiguenga to be sad again. Sadness appeared to bring out their violence.
Tahir Shah
Oysters are more beautiful than any religion . . . there's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.
Saki
Worthless as wither'd weeds.
Emily Brontë
Human beings were so full of emotion. That was the problem. They could kill for a reason that to them felt like the only reason and to the rest of the rational thinking population felt like no reason at all.
Paula Daly
STAR: My dad always told me that life will keep on kicking you if you let it. You’ve got to keep moving, and you’ve got to not look back.
Sam Crescent
I have a habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am now leading a posthumous existence.
John Keats
With enough information, it is almost impossible "not" to predict people's action.
Idries Shah
I take it you know my companion?"Oh,yes!" said Savage, his smile disappearing. "We know all about Ruby Journey. Please don't let her kill anyone important. Or set fire to anything."Your reputation precedes you," Random said dryly to Ruby.
Simon R. Green
That's the first rule of survival in enemy waters: volunteer nothing.
James Clavell
He sat down on a grassy bank and looked at the city that surrounded him, and thought, one day he would have to go home. And one day he would have to make a home to go back to. He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough. He pulled out his book.
Neil Gaiman
As he had once said to someone in England, though he did not care to remember whom, he had liked the sight of the sea because it represented his escape from England. And he had escaped.But she had said that perhaps it was from himself he wished to escape and that it could not be done. For wherever he went, he must inevitably take himself along too.
Mary Balogh
I am one whose faith is, that love and friendship, with ardent natures, are like those trees of the torrid zone which yield fruit but once, and then die.
Edward John Trelawny
The two greatest warriors are Truth and Time. Be sure to march behind, and not against, them.
Neel Burton
Some girls are full of heartache and poetry and those are the kind of girls who try to save wolves instead of running away from them.
Nikita Gill
If the war had a noble purpose, it was this - to end the inhumanity those photographs showed. While India rarely spoke about its imperative as the moral one, and few people steeped in realpolitik can shed their cynicism when a politician speaks in moral terms, and the intervention certainly suited India's strategic interests, the fact remains that in the annals of humanitarian interventions, few were as swift, successful, purpose-driven and with humanitarian goals as the Indian intervention to liberate Bangladesh. India went in when it was attacked, and left before its troops became unpopular.
Salil Tripathi
If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies — Tolkien didn’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology. Go and read outside of your comfort zone, go and learn stuff.
Neil Gaiman
A moral dilemma is equally absorbing whether the stakes are the destiny of nations or the happiness of one or two people - at the most.
Alexander McCall Smith
Religion is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you to total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life, before you're born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you're dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? I've been to North Korea. It has a dead man as its president, Kim Jong-Il is only head of the party and head of the army. He's not head of the state. That office belongs to his deceased father, Kim Il-Sung. It's a necrocracy, a thanatocracy. It's one short of a trinity I might add. The son is the reincarnation of the father. It is the most revolting and utter and absolute and heartless tyranny the human species has ever evolved. But at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea!
Christopher Hitchens
Few other griefs amid the ill chances of this world have more bitterness and shame for a man's heart than to behold the love of a lady so fair and brave that cannot be returned.
J.R.R. Tolkien
When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarely, in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science.
William Thomson
No one rules if no one obeys
David Icke
Order and reason, beauty and benevolence, are characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated with the mind of man.
Karl Pearson
A black shadow dropped down into the circle. It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk. Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path, for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down.
Rudyard Kipling
I had never been interested in boys and had no notion that I ever would, seeing being in love and loving as a great tangle in which you could lose your head as well as your heart. Yet standing there that afternoon looking at the young man. I could well see how such knots in life were made.
Sally Gardner
In a sense, the first (if not necessarily the prime) function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain. If the poem, painting, play or novel does not immediately engage one's surface interest then it has failed. Whatever else it may or may not be, art is also entertainment. Bad art fails to entertain. Good art does something in addition.
Brigid Brophy
Don't you see? The catastrophe is me. My very existence is an affront to everything that is natural and good.
K.J. Wignall
It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.
W Somerset Maugham
Look up, greet sparks of fire with salted eyes,For he’s a burning atmospheric sigh:One blaze of liquid flame on midnight sky,Soft orbital decay, and last goodbye.
Alan James Roll
A hug is worth a thousand words. A friend is worth more."True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it be lost.
Charles Caleb Colton
It was probably my mother's screaming that frightened the cat. It's just a guess. No one knows for sure why a cat fell from a ten-storey building onto my head.
J.E. Fison
I'm so glad I didn't die on the various occasions I have earnestly wished I might, for I would have missed a lot of lovely weather.
Elizabeth von Arnim
Be confident enough to show your true self to the world.
Fennel Hudson
It's disquieting to reflect that one's dreams never symbolize one's real wishes, but always something Much Worse... If I really wanted to be passionately embraced by Peter, I should dream of dentists or gardening. I wonder what unspeakable depths of awfulness can only be expressed by the polite symbol of Peter's embraces?
Dorothy L. Sayers
What I used to say to people, when I was much more engagé myself, is that you can't be apolitical. It will come and get you. It's not that you shouldn't be neutral. It's that you won't be able to stay neutral.
Christopher Hitchens
With a true masterpiece, there are no words required. Discourse is rendered redundant. That's why the work of a master transcends all notions of education, of class. It rises above the onlooker's understanding of what is considered good or bad, or right or wrong in the world of art. With the artist who has achieved mastery, skill, experience and knowledge are transparent, leaving only the message for all to see.
Jacqueline Winspear