Quotes by British Authors - Page 519

getting angry and harbouring bitterness doesn’t help anybody, least of all the angry bitter person.
Jane Wilson-Howarth
Believe it or not, I'm stronger than any belief, stereotype, profile, or idea you have of me. I'm driven and self-made with a perception unique to my own. You'll hate that and say I'm not special. I'll allow you to believe it because deep down, you already know I am. My name's Charles Lee. Bound for greatness. Destined to soar.
Charles Lee
A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.
George Orwell
Authority allows two roles: the torturer and the tortured. Twists people into joyless mannequins that fear and hate, while culture plunges into the abyss.
Alan Moore
They sang that song which distills all the suffering and the hope of Africa; that song which had inspired and comforted so many, “Nkosi Sikeleli Afrika,” God Bless Africa, give her life, watch over her children.
Alexander McCall Smith
Why, I wondered, do people who at one time or another have all been young themselves, who ought therefore to know better, generalize so suavely and so mendaciously about the golden hours of youth--that period of life when every sorrow seems permanent and every setback insuperable?
Vera Brittain
Those who actually dropped the bombs were less responsible than the people who took the decisions higher up the chain of command. In modern technological war, psychological responses are poorly correlated with degrees of responsibility. In people further back up the chain, this casual distance reduces the psychological resistance they have to overcome.
Jonathan Glover
I make music for ears, not eyes
Adele
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about what could have been. It’s too unbearable.
Sophie Kinsella
And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with?
Jeanette Winterson
In reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is "good". Nor is there any way of definitely proving that--for instance--Warwick Beeping is "bad". Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.
George Orwell
Each day you’re given 86,400 seconds from the ‘Time Bank’. Everyone is given the same. There are no exceptions. Once you make your withdrawal, you’re free to spend it as you want. The ‘Time Bank’ won’t tell you how to spend it. Time poorly spent will not be replaced with more time. Time doesn’t do refunds.
David Hieatt
A true joy in life should be knowing that you have touched the heart of another human being
Steven Aitchison
A man who dares to waste one hour of life has not discovered the value of life.
Charles Darwin
Remember when only a few people had mobile phones. Generally regarded as an object of derision, you would occasionally see business types clutching those ridiculous grey bricks to their faces and mutter to yourself 'what a prick.' Nowadays, an eyebrow hardly even flutters when we see a ten-year-old child happily texting away. You probably wouldn't notice anyway; you'd be too busy downloading an app that could definitively pinpoint who it was that had just farted in your tube carriage.
Simon Pegg
He did nothing in particular And did it very well.
W.S. Gilbert
(One character on another:)"Don't you know that I passionately dote on every chin on his face?
Dorothy L. Sayers
It was still early, and the sun's lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet.
Thomas Hardy
God invented space so that not everything had to happen in Princeton.
Martin J. Rees
Attracting loyal customers based on price is like believing in the tooth fairy.
Colin Myles
And I am weary of the anguishIncreasing winters bear;Weary to watch the spirit languishThrough years of dead despair.So, if a tear, when thou art dying,Should haply fall from me,It is but that my soul is sighing,To go and rest with thee.
Emily Brontë
Who hears music, feels his solitudePeopled at once.
Robert Browning
A revolutionary war of freedom, he said” Hiawatha responded crisply, “and I agree… does Superman ever fly to Thailand and free the kids slaving in the sweat shops owned by the rich corporations? No, he doesn’t. Does Batman ever break into prison and free the wrongfully convicted and over sentenced black man whose rights were trampled on when he was incarcerated? No, he doesn’t. Does Spider man ever break into a house in suburbia and beat up the abusive and violent husband? No, he doesn’t.” “Do the Fantastic Four ever fly out to third world countries and defend the rights of the poor civilians against greedy American corporations? No, they don’t,” said the Pirate, not to be outdone. “They’re all just tools used by the state to maintain the status quo,” said Hiawatha.
Arun D. Ellis
Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.
A.A. Milne
My love has saved me. It wraps strong arms around me when I cry with despair;it gives me the routine of a working week to lend vicarious structure to my shapeless days. It brings me daily laughter, a reason to keep washing...and it slices me open with guilt.
Anna Lyndsey
Heroes in fact die with one's youth. They are pinned like butterflies to the setting board of early memories—the time when skies were always blue, the sun shone and the air was filled with the sounds and scents of grass being cut. I find myself still as desperate to read the Sussex score in the stop-press as ever I was; but I no longer worship heroes, beings for whom the ordinary scales of human values are inadequate. One learns that as one grows up, so do the gods grow down. It is in many ways a pity: for one had thought that heroes had no problems of their own. Now one knows different!
Alan Ross
The rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward. Did you not know?
J.R.R. Tolkien
When I was a child, to call someone 'black' was an insult, a curse word, something that made you fight.But to me it contains all of the history of oppression and resistance, of being close to the soil and the sky, of plain speaking. Of The Journey.
Bonnie Greer
They adore you beacause they think you offer up your friendship and ask for nothing in return. But that's not true-' He took a deep breath. 'You do ask for something. You ask that we never expect you to need us.
Kamila Shamsie
I think how hope may be the thing that pulls you forward, may be the thing that keeps you going, but that it's dangerous, too, that it's painful and risky, that it's making a dare to the world and when has the world ever let us win a dare?
Patrick Ness
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
Bertrand Russell
You are aware that what they do, they do for the world, and the results are, of course, magnificent. But when you . . . read Douglas Adams. . . you feel you are, perhaps, the only person in the world who really gets them. Just about everybody else admires them, of course, but no one really connects with them in the way you do . . . It’s like falling in love. When an especially peachy Adams’ turn of phrase or epithet enters the eye and penetrates the brain, you want to tap the shoulder of the nearest stranger and share it. The stranger might laugh and seem to enjoy the writing, but you hug to yourself the thought that they didn’t quite understand its force and quality the way you do, just as your friends, thank heavens, don’t also fall in love with the person you are going on and on about to them.
Stephen Fry
Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.
Jean Rhys
I don't live life to be different.I live life to be the same.
Anthony T.Hincks
The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.
John Fowles
Pass the parcel. That's sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it, and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys. That's the game I want you to learn. Pass it on.
Alan Bennett
I don't need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live. I can find it out for myself.
Henry James
When thought becomes excessively painful action is the finest remedy.
Salman Rushdie
Music sweeps by me as a messenger carrying a message that is not for me.
George Eliot
An educator should consider that he has failed in his job if he has not succeeded in instilling some trace of a divine dissatisfaction with our miserable social environment.
Anthony Standen
And this is the eternal law. For, Evil often stops short at istelf and dies with the doer of it! but Good, never.
Charles Dickens
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is an indispensable companion to all those who are keen to make sense of life in an infinitely complex and confusing Universe, for though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does at least make the reassuring claim, that where it is inaccurate it is at least definitively inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it's always reality that's got it wrong.This was the gist of the notice. It said "The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate."This has led to some interesting consequences. For instance, when the Editors of the Guide were sued by the families of those who had died as a result of taking the entry on the planet Tralal literally (it said "Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal for visiting tourists: instead of "Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal of visiting tourists"), they claimed that the first version of the sentence was the more aesthetically pleasing, summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty and hoped thereby to prove that the guilty party in this case was Life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true. The judges concurred, and in a moving speech held that Life itself was in contempt of court, and duly confiscated it from all those there present before going off to enjoy a pleasant evening's ultragolf.
Douglas Adams
Money is the fruit of evil as often as the root of it.
Henry Fielding
As long as it still hurts, it isn’t love yet.
Silvia Hartmann
I feel like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!
J.R.R. Tolkien
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
Iris Murdoch
That's it then. This is how it ends. I haven't even read Proust.
James Turner
Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.
Benjamin Disraeli
Stalin’s teachings about gradual, concealed, unnoticeable quantitative changes leading to rapid, radical, qualitative changes permitted Soviet biologists to discover in plants the realization of such qualitative transitions that one species could be transformed into another’… The slide away from truth-directed science had disastrous results in agriculture. It was also humanly disastrous. Biologists who disagreed were shot or imprisoned.
Jonathan Glover
To be haunted is to glimpse a truth that might best be hidden.
James Herbert
The longer a thing is to take doing, the more reason to begin at once
Ethel Lilian Voynich
The door of the visible church is incomparably wider than the door of heaven (522)[.]
Richard Baxter
Soul meets soul on lovers lips.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
To say "yes" to the Sufi way is to say "no" to imagined escapes.
Idries Shah
Some say their world's will end in fire, some say in ice From what I've tasted with desire I hold with those yu favor fire. My world may not be ending although it does feel like it. I do know this, whatever doesnt kill you only makes you stronger.
Genesis
If Christ has died for me, I cannot trifle with the evil that killed my best Friend.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.
John Stuart Mill
Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious.
P.G. Wodehouse
In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.
David Mitchell
Strange, what the heart can bear. It can carry grief beyond measure. It can bear a weight that is too great to speak of. But a heart can't bear the world. It has its limits...
Susan Fletcher