Quotes by British Authors - Page 522

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
Quentin Crisp
It has been my personal experience that the government engages in a wide range of frauds with the common people.
Steven Magee
The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.
G.K. Chesterton
I have liv'd long enough for others, like the Dog in the Wheel, and it is now the Season to begin for myself: I cannot change that Thing call'd Time, but I can alter its Posture and, as Boys do turn a looking-glass against the Sunne, so I will dazzle you all.
Peter Ackroyd
When I look in the glass I see that every line in my face means pessimism but in spite of my face - that is my experience - I remain an optimist.
Richard Jeffries
Nonsense. Young boys should never be sent to bed. They always wake up a day older, and then before you know it, they're grown.
J.M. Barrie
if you can’t acquaint an opponent with reason, you must acquaint his head with the sidewalk.
Lee Child
The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.
Margaret Thatcher
Exaggeration misleads the credulous and offends the perceptive.
Eliza Cook
By this means the government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.
John Maynard Keynes
Join us. Play the game. It will bring you an untold number of rewards and you will finally have some direction and purpose in your lives. Take control of yourselves and those around you. Bend them to your will and all worldly pleasures will be yours...
Martin Hopkins
To her fair works did Nature link The human soul that through me ran And much it grieved my heart to think What Man has made of Man.
William Wordsworth
A mystery is so much more exciting than a wrapped up answer...A mystery carries on but an answer just ends.
Jonathan Renshaw
It’s all biology. If it weren’t for two thousand years of the Christian tradition we wouldn’t think of pretending otherwise…Romance is the true opiate of the masses.
Amanda Craig
Language itself is a major resource in the naming of what cannot be named
David Simpson
In life we struggle to make sense of it all.When we should just except the way life is and make it better for all concerned.
Anthony T.Hincks
Come friends, it's not too late to seek a newer world.
Alfred Tennyson
These mental and physical components of self­ belief are closely interlinked. They are used to slowly interweave the per­sonal narratives that very effectively create a powerful sense of identity.
David Amerland
We can all participate in the heritage of man. We all can help to preserve it. And we can all make our own modest contribution to it.We must not as for more.
Karl R. Popper
I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?
C.S. Lewis
If he had stayed in Slovenia, and Slovenia had stayed Communist, Zizek would not have been the nuisance he has since become. Indeed, if there were no greater reason to regret the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the release of Zizek on to the world of Western scholarship would perhaps already be a sufficient one.
Roger Scruton
Some folk want their luck buttered.
Thomas Hardy
This was the simple happiness of complete harmony with her surroundings, the happiness that asks for nothing, that just accepts, just breathes, just is.
Elizabeth von Arnim
If ever you want a rainbow in your home, go to Sandwich Glass Museum, and let them put one in your heart too.
Anthony T.Hincks
There are three difficulties in authorship: – to write anything worth publishing - to find honest men to publish it - and to get sensible men to read it. — Caleb C. Colton [1780-1832]
Caleb C. Colton
In its report issued that year, 1991, Amnesty International recorded protests against human rights abuses in over fifty countries, the protest to thirteen countries making specific reference to torture. These are the kinds of thing many of us have a vague background awareness of, without there being much publicity unless the perpetrators are some currently loathed regime, or unless some highly visible Westerner is among the victims.
Jonathan Glover
Grasp the opportunity to make each day exceptional.
Steven Redhead
For the last century, almost all top political appointments [on the planet Earth] had been made by random computer selection from the pool of individuals who had the necessary qualifications. It had taken the human race several thousand years to realize that there were some jobs that should never be given to the people who volunteered for them, especially if they showed too much enthusiasm. As one shrewed political commentator had remarked: “We want a President who has to be carried screaming and kicking into the White House — but will then do the best job he possibly can, so that he’ll get time off for good behavior.
Arthur C. Clarke
Misery, after all, loves company.
Bella Forrest
Sometimes gentle sometimes capricious sometimes awful never the same for two moments together almost human in its passions almost spiritual in its tenderness almost Divine in its infinity.
John Ruskin
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness," O'Brien had said to him. He knew what it meant, or thought he knew. The place where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one would never see, but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in.
George Orwell
With the help of fanzines and close attention to the text of the game you can actually learn to speak Tsolyanu while wondering why the school still makes you learn French–it's not like you're going to use it.
Mark Barrowcliffe
The knowledge that life is finite was always in the back of my mind.
A.V. Roe
Books are really places, make no mistake about that.
Neil Gaiman
All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman, and a pretty girl.
Charlie Chaplin
Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.
Neil Gaiman
Talk of "witch-hunts" conceals an inconvenient fact: men charged with rape stand a better chance of walking free than other defendants. The conviction rate in rape trials – 63 per cent in 2012/13 – is quite a lot lower. Prosecutors are taking a bigger risk when they bring rape cases to court, especially when the alleged offences happened decades ago, leaving no forensic evidence.The Independent, 9 February 2014
Joan Smith
In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.
Bill Bryson
But suppose it was truth double strong, it were no truth to me if I couldna take it in. I daresay there's truth in yon Latin book on your shelves; but it's gibberish and no truth to me, unless I know the meaning o' the words.
Elizabeth Gaskell
For you, my darlings, freedom to do what you like is the discovery of how unlikable what you like to do makes you. Not that that stops you doing what you like, since you like doing what you like more than you like liking what you do...[Lucifer]
Glen Duncan
dJack be nimble,Jack be quick,Jack forgot to check if the ice was thick.Emma was still,Emma was late,Emma’s brother is now part of the lake.Time has passed,Time has gone,Time brought Jack back wrong.He was solemn,He was brave,He left his coat on Emma’s grave.Emma was sad,Emma was scared,But she knew inside that Jack really cared.Jack was lost,Jack had forgot,That he had a story before the plot.Jack had wondered,Jack had fought,Jack had remembered what he had forgot.I hope you dream.I hope you wonder.I hope you have fun because this is done.Keep believing everyone.Jack be fearless,Jack be bold,Jack drowned when he was 17 years old.
William Joyce
It was his subconscious which told him this---that infuriating part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.
Douglas Adams
This pure little drop from a pure little source was too sweet: it penetrated deep, and subdued the heart
Charlotte Brontë
Children are infinitely credulous. My Lisa was a dull child, but even so she came up with things that pleased and startled me. 'Are there dragons?' she asked. I said that there were not. 'Have there ever been?' I said all the evidence was to the contrary. 'But if there is a word dragon,' she said, 'then once there must have been dragons.
Penelope Lively
A lady that I know just came from Colombia. She laughed because I did not understand. She held out some marijuana uh-huh, said it was the finest in the land. I said, no-no-no-no, i dont smoke it no more. It only makes me fall on the floor.No thank you please, it only makes me sneeze, and then it makes it hard to find the door. A lady that i know just came from Morrocco, Spain. She laughed because i did not understand. She held out a ten-pound bag of cocaine, said it was the finest in the land. I said no-no-no-no, i don't *sniff* no more, it only makes me fall on the floor. No thank you please, it only makes me sneeze, and then it makes it hard to find the door.A lady that i know just came from Tennesee. She laughed because i did not understand. She held out a jug of moonshine, uh-huh, said it was the finest in the land. I said no-no-no-no, i don't drink it no more, it only makes me fall on the floor. No thank you please, it only makes me sneeze, and then it makes it hard to find the door.Ringo Starr's No-No Song
Ringo Starr
It's just odd being a guest at the wedding. When you dreamed about it for so long, even if you we're a different person, and it was years ago. Sounds so stupid. I was stupid.
Harriet Evans
Not ignorance but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.
Alfred North Whitehead
Give with a free hand, but give only of your own.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.
Virginia Woolf
The colour of the magpie, her father was saying, was symbolic of creation. The void, the mystery of that which had not yet taken form. Black and white, he said. Presence and absence.
Kate Mosse
I’m with the fool in the psalm. You thought we could get on without you; no – you didn’t care whether we got on without you or not. You just got up and left. So that’s what we’re doing, we’re getting on.
Philip Pullman
There are few couples as unhappy as those who are too proud to admit their unhappiness.
P.D. James
To many, "The Bible is a form of verbal wallpaper, pleasant enough in the background, but he stop thinking about it after you have lived in the house for a few weeks.
N.T. Wright
Look into your heart- and go after what you really want.
Sophie Kinsella
There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.
Charles Dickens
Many are poets, but without the name;For what is Poesy but to createFrom overfeeling Good or Ill; and aimAt an external life beyond our fate,And be the new Prometheus of new men,Bestowing fire from Heaven, and then, too late,Finding the pleasure given repaid with pain
George Gordon Byron
You can only fight what you are for so long. Eventually the hand that nature has dealt you will make you become what you were meant to be. You have no control over it.
Lindsay J. Pryor
He's a real nowhere man,Sitting in his Nowhere Land,Making all his nowhere plansfor nobody.Doesn't have a point of view,Knows not where he's going to,Isn't he a bit like you and me?
The Beatles
When I find myself in times of trouble, mother Mary comes to me,speaking words of wisdom, let it be.And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me,speaking words of wisdom, let it be.Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be.Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.And when the broken hearted people living in the world agree,there will be an answer, let it be.For though they may be parted there is still a chance that they will see,there will be an answer. let it be.Let it be, let it be, .....And when the night is cloudy, there is still a light, that shines on me,shine until tomorrow, let it be.I wake up to the sound of music, mother Mary comes to me,speaking words of wisdom, let it be.Let it be, let it be, .....
Paul McCartney
. . . the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, praised most, while the crank, misfits and malcontents praised least.
C.S. Lewis