Quotes by British Authors - Page 523

The audience knows the truth, the world is simple. It's miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you got to see something really special.
Christopher Nolan
Then this must be my answer: We know that the attributes of God are infinite and it has always seemed strange to me that men have never given Him credit for common sense. It is hard to believe that He would have created so beautiful a world if He had not decided men to enjoy it. Would He have given the stars their glory, the birds their sweet song, and the flowers, their fragrance if He had not wished us to delight in them? I shave sinned before men and men have condemned me. God made me a man with passions of a man, and did He give them to me only that I should suppress them? He gave me my adventurous spirit and my love of life. I have a humble hope that when I am face to face with my Maker He will condone my imperfections and I shall find mercy in His sight.
W Somerset Maugham
Now Darkstripe,' Graypaw hissed to Firepaw under his breath, 'is neither young, nor pretty.
Erin Hunter
Orthodoxy my Lord said Bishop Warburton in a whisper - "orthodoxy is my doxy - heterodoxy is another man's doxy."
Joseph Priestley
Some days drawing is a real struggle. Hopefully, using the exercises in this book, it will become easier and more and more relaxing. Until that happens you may have to just accept the difficulty and battle through it - that too is a useful process. Build up your determination to succeed!
Cliff Wright
To live fully, we must learn to use things and love people, and not love things and use people.
John Powell
Was I right?" she asked him. "Was I right to make a stand against what I believed to be wrong? Even though many ills have come from it? I have been asking myself this a lot lately. I must be quiet in my conscience.
Alison Weir
Why should we refuse the happiness this hour gives us because some other hour might take it away?
John Oliver Hobbes
We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.
Oliver Sacks
When we are down there, if we are parted, come and find me again," said Keedra.
Philip Dodd
Lonely' is a troubling word and not one to be tossed around lightly. It makes people uncomfortable, summoning up as it does all kinds of harsher adjectives, like 'sad' or 'strange'. I have always been well liked, I think, always well regarded and respected, but having few enemies is not the same as having many friends, and there was no denying that I was, if not 'lonely', more solitary than I'd hoped to be at that time.
David Nicholls
Beyond the late Fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the details of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then.
George Orwell
Find what you love to do, what you're good at and passionate about and then dedicate your entire life to working hard at it. I wil say it again. Work hard. I mean that. Even if you're not sure where that work will lead, even if it is underappreciated or undervalued. Do it because the satisfaction, pride, and sense of self that comes from a job well done; from being the very best at what you do; from knowing that you did this, will be your ulltimate weapon and our greatest shield in a life that will often test you. One day destiny may conspire to take everything away from you, but it can never take away the abilities you have cultivated. As I am sure your grandfather will tell you, your winning lottery ticket is your mind.
Amy Mowafi
There are no commitments, only bargains. And they have to be made again every day. You think making a commitment is it. Finish. You think it sets like a concrete platform and it'll take any strain you want to put on it. You're committed. You don't have to prove anything. In fact you can afford a little neglect, indulge in a little bit of sarcasm here and there, isolate yourself when you want to. Underneath it's concrete for life. I'm a cow in some ways, but you're an idiot.
Tom Stoppard
There is no armor against fate death lays his icy hands on kings.
James Shirley
...I hope that simple love and truth will be strong in the end. I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.
Charles Dickens
We should have stories in common, I found myself thinking. We should have stories, and jokes no one understands, and memories that we know will stay alive because neither of us will let the other forget.
Kamila Shamsie
A reform is a correction of abuses a revolution is a transfer of power.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
Our language now has become quick-moving (in syllables), and may be very supple and nimble, but is rather thin in sound and in sense too often diffuse and vague. the language of our forefathers, especially in verse, was slow, not very nimble, but very sonorous, and was intensely packed and concentrated - or could be in a good poet.
J.R.R. Tolkien
God gave us memories that we might have roses in December.
James M. Barrie
What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.
Jeanette Winterson
... I have always found that the Trough periods of the human undulation provide excellent opportunity for all sensual temptations, particularly those of sex. This may surprise you, because, of course, there is more physical energy, and therefore more potential appetite, at the Peak periods; but you must remember that the powers of resistance are then also at their highest. The health and spirits which you... use in producing lust can also... be very easily used for work or play or thought or innocuous merriment. The attack has a much better chance of success when the man's whole inner world is drab and cold and empty. And it is also to be noted that the Trough sexuality is subtly different in quality from that of the Peak - much less likely to lead to... "being in love," much more easily drawn into perversions, much less... generous and imaginative and even spiritual... It is the same with other desires of the flesh. You are much more likely to make [a] man a sound drunkard by pressing drink on him as an anodyne when he is dull and weary... than... when he is happy...
C.S. Lewis
Old habits never die. And when you've once been in the business of granting wishes, the impulse never quite leaves you
Joanne Harris
The firmest friendships have been formed in mutual adversity as iron is most strongly united by the fiercest flame.
Charles Caleb Colton
Dancing to the sounds of trees and stones and slow minutes ticking in our hearts and bones.
Jay Woodman
It's a pity. I don't know who he is to you... But you are disgusting. To claim you fight for his honor, when all you do is bring shame to his name.
Charles Lee
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
George Orwell
No man is considered just and virtuous who does not know whence he came and wither he is going. – Napoleon
Andrew Roberts
A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.
W Somerset Maugham
Talking of suicide, it is perhaps noteworthy that both of Dostoievsky's characters kill themselves: Stavrogin out of indifference and self disgust; Kirilov, after years of planning the gesture, in order to demonstrate to mankind that there is no God and that men are free to do as they please. My suicide will be less didactic.
Nanavira Thera
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sane employee in possession of his wits must be in want of a good manager.
Charles Stross
Shy and unready men are great betrayers of secrets for there are few wants more urgent for the moment than the want of something to say.
Henry Taylor
And they fear nothing, and they respect nothing, the young don't.
D.H. Lawrence
A little later, the Apollo mission was consummated and there were Americans on the moon. I remember distinctly looking up from the quad on what was quite a moon-flooded night, and thinking about it. They made it! The Stars and Stripes are finally flown on another orb! Also, English becomes the first and only language spoken on a neighboring rock! Who could forbear to cheer? Still, the experience was poisoned for me by having to watch Richard Nixon smirking as he babbled to the lunar-nauts by some closed-circuit link. Was even the silvery orb to be tainted by the base, earthbound reality of imperialism?
Christopher Hitchens
The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy but they were listening in gibberish.
Terry Pratchett
No man will love you, though you gave your life for him, unless you have a pretty face. So (might it not be?), the gods will not love you (however you try to pleasure them, and whatever you suffer) unless you have that beauty of soul. In either race. for the love of men or the love of a god, the winners and losers are marked out from birth. We bring our ugliness, in both kinds, with us into the world, with it our destiny.
C.S. Lewis
I can feel my face growing warm, and I hope I'm not flushing in my terror. The feeling of helplessness and fear hits me hard, and once my mind validates the emotion, the physical fear of being maimed and eaten hits my skin as goose bumps in the heat.
Lindsay Anderson
This last best luck of all: that earth should gape for me when my great deeds were ended.
E.R. Eddison
Orphan could no longer hear or see the shadows of the dead. He didn't think they had perished. Most likely they were hiding now, somewhere in this landscape of books.
Lavie Tidhar
Everything created has a beginning, Destiny of the Endless...as everything created has an end.
Neil Gaiman
She had her image… and anything added to that would be mere verse-making. Something might come of it some day. In the meanwhile she had got her mood on to paper—and this is the release that all writers, even the feeblest, seek for as men seek for love; and, having found it, they doze off happily into dreams and trouble their hearts no further.
Dorothy L. Sayers
They appeared to me like a thin veil of mist, translucent, almost- not quite there. But for all their misty peculiarity, they were as clear to me as the minnows in the shallows and the foxgloves on the riverbank and the butterflies fanning their wings. They flitted from flower to flower, as swift as dragonflies, sometimes glowing brightly like a candle flame suddenly catching, sometimes fading like a breath of warm air on glass, so that you would never know they had been there at all. Yet there they were. And there I was, watching them.
Hazel Gaynor
Jason smiled and took a sip of his coke before responding. “I’m not sure how to reply to that. I thought about just giving you a nasty look. But I see you already have one.
Mark A. Cooper
Listen To Then Follow The Whispers of Your Heart.
Steven Redhead
For her own breakfast she'll project a scheme,Nor take her tea without a strategem.
Edward Young
The abbot cleared his throat. "You are all very stupid people," he told them graciously, "and you do not know anything at all.
Neil Gaiman
Life is a pigsty.
Morrissey
A man must choose his own way of life, and…it is only by following out one’s own bent that there can be the really harmonious life.” [In an interview conducted by Bram Stoker]
Winston S. Churchill
She had the power to remove a child from an unkind parent and she sometimes did. But remove herself from an unkind husband? When she was weak and desolate? Where was her protective judge?
Ian McEwan
I am Envy, begotten of a chimney-sweeper and an oyster-wife. I cannot read, and therefore wish all books were burnt; I am lean with seeing others eat - O that there would come a famine through all the world, that all might die, and I live alone; then thou should'st see how fat I would be! But must thou sit and I stand? Come down, with a vengeance!
Christopher Marlowe
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
Aldous Huxley
Because you are alive and reading thisAnything is Possible
Steven Aitchison
When I was 14-15 There was nothing to my lifebut dancing and sexI'd go to night clubs and danceThen I'd meet someone and have sexit was Fine and easynothing to doBUT Think with my bodylike a birdI Thought I was FreeTrAcey Emin
Tracey Emin
It's like a memorial to Atlantis or Lyonesse: these are the stone buoys that mark a drowned world.
Christopher Hitchens
I wish that I had been born a man, then I wouldn't be the boy that I am.
Anthony T.Hincks
There's a kind of purity to a relationship unencumbered by convention, a sense of simplicity and freedom.
J.P. Delaney
This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it.
Neil Gaiman
To be able to use leisure intelligently will be the last product of an intelligent civilization.
Bertrand Russell
Anyone who has used that comforting phrase 'a nice cup of tea' invariably means Indian tea.
George Orwell
I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I'm sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual - we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see. I'm sure that is entirely wrong.
D.H. Lawrence