Quotes by British Authors - Page 530

That orbed maiden with white fire laden Whom mortals call the moon.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Society is now one polished horde Formed of two mighty tribes the Bores and Bored.
Lord Byron
If it means my death, I don't care, because even death will be a sort of freedom.
Catherine Fisher
When you love someone, you can’t help but pray for them.
Elizabeth George
When you feel that creeping self-doubt, acknowledge it. Write down your feelings in your journal in your journal... and then continue with your writing.
Joanna Penn
I walked down the empty Broad to breakfast, as I often did on Sundays, at a tea-shop opposite Balliol. The air was full of bells from the surrounding spires and the sun, casting long shadows across the open spaces, dispelled the fears of night. The tea-shop was hushed as a library; a few solitary men in bedroom slippers from Balliol and Trinity looked up as I entered, then turned back to their Sunday newspapers. I ate my scrambled eggs and bitter marmalade with the zest which in youth follows a restless night. I lit a cigarette and sat on, while one by one the Balliol and Trinity men paid their bills and shuffled away, slip-slop, across the street to their colleges. It was nearly eleven when I left, and during my walk I heard the change-ringing cease and, all over the town, give place to the single chime which warned the city that service was about to start.
Evelyn Waugh
If naturalists go to heaven (about which there is considerable ecclesiastical doubt), I hope that I will be furnished with a troop of kakapo to amuse me in the evening instead of television.
Gerald Durrell
The tragedy of life is that sometimes we get what we want.
W Somerset Maugham
Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.
Henry Fowler
But in life you have to take lots of deductions and if you don't take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do.So it is good to have a reason why you hate some things and why you like others.
Mark Haddon
I like working among ‘creative clutter’. It gives me a sense of activity and achievement.
Fennel Hudson
The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
W Somerset Maugham
Open the doors of your heart and they will come…And for every cruel arrow,Sweet caresses of delirium alsoTo nourish your soul.
Scott Hastie
Q: I want to be an author when I grow up. Am I insane?"Neil Gaiman: "Yes. Growing up is highly overrated. Just be an au
Neil Gaiman
Worth makes the man and want of it the fellow The rest is all but leather and prunello.
Alexander Pope
Great, tell me when you've defeated Voldemort for me, will you?
J.K. Rowling
A little of this caviar finds its way to the fish restaurants around Istanbul's Taksim Square, but the bulk is sent on to the United Arab Emirates to be enjoyed by wealthy Westerners and Arabs in the preposterous hotels that have set new standards in unnecessary opulence.
Misha Glenny
By the time that adorable steak and I had become one flesh I could have taken on the whole Valmy clan singlehanded.
Mary Stewart
And even if fairies built a nest in the bottom of my garden and it should turn out that I have to live for a thousand years, there's not one of them when I'll be of a mind to trust you.
Michael Dobbs
The Wanderlust has got me... by the belly-aching fire
Robert W. Service
If you want to feel youthful...pink's your color.If you want to feel old...then it's blue rinse for you.If you want to feel sad...try a dark blue.If you want to say something cheerful...then it's yellow.If you want to say something racey...then it's red for sure.If you've lost your temper...then it's black as your heart.And if you want to be normal...well the only color which will show all of you is rainbow.
Anthony T.Hincks
It was the end of the October term of my sophomore year, and everything was petty normal, except for Social Studies, which was no big surprise. Mr. Dimas, who taught the class, had a reputation for unconventional teaching methods. For midterms he had blindfolded us, then had us each stick a pin in a map of the world and we got to write essays on wherever the pin stuck. I got Decatur, Illinois. Some of the guys complained because they drew places like Ulan Bator or Zimbabwe. They were lucky. YOU try writing ten thousand words on Decatur, Illinois.
Neil Gaiman
The two creatures were sexless. But he of Malacandra was masculine (not male); she of Perelandra was feminine (not female). Malacandra seemed to him to have the look of one standing armed, at the ramparts of his own remote archaic world, in ceaseless vigilance, his eyes ever roaming the earth-ward horizon whence his danger came long ago. "A sailor's look," Ransom once said to me; "you know... eyes that are impregnated with distance." But the eyes of Perelandra opened, as it were, inward, as if they were the curtained gateway to a world of waves and murmurings and wandering airs, of life that rocked in winds and splashed on mossy stones and descended as the dew and arose sunward in thin-spun delicacy of mist. On Mars the very forests are of stone; in Venus the lands swim. For now he thought of them no more as Malacandra and Perelandra. He called them by their Tellurian names. With deep wonder he thought to himself, "My eyes have seen Mars and Venus. I have seen Ares and Aphrodite.
C.S. Lewis
In a society where the rights and potential of women are constrained no man can be truly free. He may have power but he will not have freedom.
Mary F. Robinson
Martin Luther was a thoroughly educated man but he wore this lightly. His sermons were littered with only examples and improving tales, drawing equally from the fables of Aesop and the follies of life he observed all around him.
Andrew Pettegree
If I've learned one lesson from all that's happened to me, it's that there is no such thing as the biggest mistake of your existence. There's no such thing as ruining your life. Life's a pretty resilient thing, it turns out.
Sophie Kinsella
They say there are three kinds of people in the world: those who listen to stories, those who tell them, and those who make them.
Claire Fayers
At night we cry sometimes, and if you think that just applies to the females then you have never been in combat, because everyone cries sooner or later. Everyone cries.
Michael Grant
You don't get to a place by constantly moving, even if your journey is only one of sitting still and waiting. Every once in a while you have to stop in your tracks and admire the view, a small cloud and a tree outside your window. You have to see what you did not see before. And then you have to sleep.
Rachel Joyce
You rich people are all the same. You couldn't care less about the other half of the world. They can all starve to death for all you care!
Sally Wentworth
Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.
Ian McEwan
While there may not be a book in every one of us, there is so often a damned good short story.
Jeffrey Archer
In the Blue Room, Cora Cash was trying to concentrate on her book. Cora found most novels hard to sympathise with -- all those plain governesses -- but this one had much to recommend it. The heroine was 'handsome, clever, and rich', rather like Cora herself. Cora knew she was handsome -- wasn't she always referred to in the papers as 'the divine Miss Cash'? She was clever -- she could speak three languages and could handle calculus. And as to rich, well, she was undoubtedly that. Emma Woodhouse was not rich in the way that she, Cora Cash, was rich. Emma Woodhouse did not lie on a lit à la polonaise once owned by Madame du Barry in a room which was, but for the lingering smell of paint, an exact replica of Marie Antoinette's bedchamber at le petit Trianon. Emma Woodhouse went to dances at the Assembly Rooms, not fancy dress spectaculars in specially built ballrooms. But Emma Woodhouse was motherless which meant, thought Cora, that she was handsome, clever, rich and free.
Daisy Goodwin
You can't be me and I can't be you, so I guess that means we'll have to be ourselves.
Anthony T.Hincks
It is almost as thoughsomething else is breathingquite close by, invisibly.The mystery of the names…Albizzia. Gleditsia.Aucuba japonica. AndI am listening, seeing. Seeing,like someone twice alive.
John Allison
Every joy that life gives must be earned ere it be secured; and how hardly earned, those only know who have wrestled for great prizes. The heart’s blood must gem with red beads the brow of the combatant, before the wreath of victory rustles over it.
Charlotte Brontë
The [Israelis] believed - they were possessed of an absolute certainty and conviction - that 'terrorists' were in Chatila. How could I explain to them that the terrorists had left, that the terrorists had worn Israeli uniforms, that the terrorists had been sent into Chatila by Israeli officers, that the victims of the terrorists were not Israelis but Palestinians and Lebanese?
Robert Fisk
A belief is nothing more than a repeated thought which you have chosen to embrace and implement in your life.
Stephen Lovegrove
You cannot do good work if you take your mind off the work to see how the community is taking it.
Dorothy L. Sayers
As the wireless radiation industry continues to drastically increase the number of transmitters, electromagnetic researchers are documenting the range of new adverse health conditions that are emerging in the masses.
Steven Magee
Focus your intuitive thoughts to identify what is truly worth pursuing.
Steven Redhead
...it has always been my temperament to prefer a tiny amount of the excellent to a plenitude of the mediocre...
Robert Harris
Knowledge. How curious that a man who closes his hand upon air so often thinks that he has a ruby within his grasp.
Idries Shah
To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
Joseph Conrad
I should have looked into my own heart, and found this new growth springing up there, and plucked it out while it was young.
Wilkie Collins
The modern State, whether in a totalitarian or a democratic country, has far too much power, and we are probably right to fear it.
Anthony Burgess
That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all
Nick Hornby
The IPL, involving the socialist principle of a salary cap and the protectionist mechanism of quotas, is not perhaps the best example of a market left flourishingly to its own devices and dynamics.
Gideon Haigh
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is very important.
Bertrand Russell
The twinkle that softens the review; the martyr's super-logic and the child's intuition; the fact that a fragment of moss can pull back into the memory a whole forest – these are proofs that there is reality in the imponderable, and not only notation but connotation is a part of the proper study of mankind.
Beatrice Warde
Of course, to be fair, that was a parent's job. The world was so full of sharp bends that if they didn't put a few twists in you, you wouldn't stand a chance of fitting in.
Terry Pratchett
The past is a foreign country they do things differently there.
Leslie Poles Hartley
The radical implication of the expansion of higher education has been disguised by a myth which dubs all educated working class people as middle class. By definition working class people are not intelligent, so if you've got a degree you must be middle class. This nonsense is reinforced by the fact that acedemic traditions are laden with class assumptions and are presented in upper class styles even in the Polytechnics.
Stefan Szczelkun
Dear Me, Talk about getting the wind knocked out of your sails when your best friend tells you you’re turning into a grumpy hermit. She told me that at breakfast today, and I was in denial until I talked to Chase, that little fucker. I made myself happy by soaking his ass five times before lunch. I did some soul searching, and I don’t think I’m depressed, but I do think I’m becoming too comfortable with being by myself. I’m really beginning to enjoy the company of cats more than people, and that’s probably not a good thing. Sprout and Ginger are so cute right now. Ginger’s cleaning Sprout’s head, and he’s smiling. Sometimes he’ll…yeah, I really need to get out more. I think life would be simpler if people acted more like cats. Like if someone is prattling on about something I don’t care about and I pop them in the forehead, they’d understand to walk away just like a cat does. A simple hiss conveys so much. I will attempt to gradually release myself back into a social environment. Me
Robin Alexander
I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong. I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day, and I believe in miracles
Audrey Hepburn
It was Matthews, of course, for whom the verdict was the greatest disaster. Not only had he failed to escape from Bedlam, but the anomalies of the case made it highly unlikely that he would have the chance to appeal again. His family and friends had assembled an impeccable case, most of which had been ignored.
Mike Jay
I love not man the less, but nature more
George Gordon Byron
If you ask a conservative for a statement of his political convictions, he may well say that he has none, and that the greatest heresy of modernity is precisely to see politics as a matter of convictions as though one could recuperate, at the level of political purpose, the consoling certainty which once was granted by religious faith. In another sense, however, conservatism does rest in a system of belief, and is opposed as much to the theory as to the practice of socialist and liberal politics.
Roger Scruton
There was no safety. There was no pride. All there was, was money. Everything became money, and money became everything. Money treated us as if we were things, and we died.
Terry Pratchett
She soars with eagles and navigates by rainbows.
Lesley Hazleton