Quotes by British Authors - Page 531

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place, for where we are is hell, And where hell is must we ever be.
Christopher Marlowe
When Stephen talked about stalking chamois his whole expression changed. The features became more aquiline, the nose sharpened, the chin narrowed, and his eyes-steel blue - somehow took on the cold brilliance of a northern sky. I am being very frank about my husband. He attracted me at those times, and he repelled me too. This man, I told myself when I first met him, is a perfectionist. And he has no compassion. Gratified like all women who find themselves sought after and desired - a mutual love for Sibelius had been our common ground at our first encounter - after a few weeks in his company I shut my eyes to further judgment, because being with him gave me pleasure. It flattered my self-esteem. The perfectionist, admired by other women, now sought me. Marriage was in every sense a coup. It was only afterwards that I knew myself deceived. ("The Chamois")
Daphne du Maurier
…she had no resources for solitude…
Jane Austen
I do love that tune - but really, I must go home. I only meant to stay for a few minutes.
C.S. Lewis
It is the photographing of ordinary things, in extraordinary light, that produces extraordinary photographs.
David Young
She hoped that her baby was happy and would be waiting for her when she herself left Botswana and went to heaven. Would Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni get round to naming a wedding date before then? She hoped so, although he certainly seemed to be taking his time. Perhaps they could get married in heaven, if he left it too late. That would certainly be cheaper.
Alexander McCall Smith
Where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?
Charlotte Brontë
Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts.
Henry Sweet
Well, Watson, what do you make of it?'Holmes was sitting with his back to me, and I had given him no sign of my occupation.'How did you know what I was doing? I believe you have eyes in the back of your head.''I have, at least, a well-polished, silver-plated coffee-pot in front of me', said he.
Arthur Conan Doyle
The generality of mankind is lazy. What distinguishes men of genuine achievement from the rest of us is not so much their intellectual powers and aptitudes as their curiosity, their energy, their fullest use of their potentialities. Nobody really knows how smart or talented he is until he finds the incentives to use himself to the fullest. God has given us more than we know what to do with.
Sydney J. Harris
After a long time, I cleared my throat. “So anyway, when we get to Nevada...I think we should rethink yourdad’s rule.”Alex glanced down at me and smiled – the first real smile I’d seen on his face in a long time. “You knowwhat? It’s already been rethought and completely ditched,” he said. And he wrapped his arms around meand we stood looking up at the mountains, with the rising rays of the sun lighting them from the east.
l.a weatherly
The legal system is blatantly rigged against the common people.
Steven Magee
What should they know of England who only England know?
Rudyard Kipling
All night the earth and the heavens followed their usual arrangements. Stars passed: an immense tide hung over them. A silent sea raced back with the sun, its wave turn-over small, delicate and comfortless. The most glorious of all stars hung above the sun's threshold and went out. An hour later the sun governed the earth again, mist-chasing, flower-opening, bird-rousing, ghost-driving, spirit-shepherding back out the various gates of sleep.
Mary Butts
One of the most human things that you can do is reach out for the stars knowing that you might not ever touch them; we are all perfectly imperfect, but to live knowing so is to be a fulfilled human being.
Oli Anderson
The best way to think of the ageing process in relation to a human face is to imagine a map of an area of innocent land which slowly becomes a city with many long and winding routes.
Matt Haig
The moon went slowly down in loveliness; she departed into the depth of the horizon, and long veil-like shadows crept up the sky through which the stars appeared. Soon, however, they too began to pale before a splendour in the east, and the advent of the dawn declared itself in the newborn blue of heaven. Quieter and yet more quiet grew the sea, quiet as the soft mist that brooded on her bosom, and covered up her troubling, as in our tempestuous life the transitory wreaths of sleep brook upon a pain-racked soul, causing it to forget its sorrow. From the east to the west sped those angels of the Dawn, from sea to sea, from mountain-top to mountain-top, scattering light from breast and wing. On they sped out of the darkness, perfect, glorious; on, over the quiet sea, over the low coast-line, and the swamps beyond, and the mountains above them; over those who slept in peace and those who woke in sorrow; over the evil and the good; over the living and the dead; over the wide world and all that breathes or as breathed thereon.
H. Rider Haggard
The most important thing in life is to stop saying 'I wish' and start saying 'I will
Charles Dickens
Dorkdom isn't something you can choose. It's something you are. But instead of dividing the world up into dorkside and darkside, I've realised that we all have a little bit of dork inside us.
Sarra Manning
Paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly. Because he pays close attention, a Navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb. aircraft at 140 miles per hour on a pitching carrier deck, at night, more safely than the average teenager can cut a bagel.
Paul Graham
If something wants to be a story, it will be.
Scarlett Thomas
My friend lost his mother when we were at college. I spent a lot of nights talking with him. Lot of nights." He pauses. "I know what it's like. You don't just get over it. And it doesn't make any difference if you're supposedly a "grown-up". And it never goes away,
Sophie Kinsella
I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.
Anthony Powell
Those expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in the family.
Dr. Thomas Bowdler
Doubt is the ally of hope, not its enemy, and together they made all the blessing he had.
Barry Unsworth
I move we get more wine,' Alistair said. 'What does the panel think?'...It was obvious that the entire war could be solved in this way. The trick would be to reach for a corkscrew instead, every time some brass hat ordered artillery.
Chris Cleave
If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it.
Noël Coward
Small kindnesses small courtesies small considerations habitually practiced in our social intercourse give a greater charm to the character than the display of great talents and accomplishments.
Mary Ann Kelty
When we don’t care about what our government is doing, we are also saying to the next generation that we are not interested in the possible burdens that we are passing on to them.
Rob Parker
Tools were made and born were hands Every farmer understands.
William Blake
Two fears alternate in marriage, of loneliness and of bondage. The dread of loneliness being keener than the fear of bondage, we get married. For one person who fears being thus tied there are four who dread being set free. Yet the love of liberty is a noble passion and one to which most married people secretly aspire, -- in moments when they are not neurotically dependent -- but by then it is too late; the ox does not become a bull, not the hen a falcon.The fear of loneliness can be overcome, for it springs from weakness; human beings are intended to be free, and to be free is to be lonely, but the fear of bondage is the apprehension of a real danger, and so I find it all the more pathetic to watch young men and beautiful girls taking refuge in marriage from an imaginary danger, a sad loss to their friends ad a sore trial to each other. First love is the one most worth having, yet the best marriage is often the second, for we should marry only when the desire for freedom be spent; not till then does a man know whether he is the kind who can settle down. The most tragic breakings-up are of those couples who have married young and who have enjoyed seven years of happiness, after which the banked fires of passion and independence explode -- and without knowing why, for they still love each other, they set about accomplishing their common destruction.
Cyril Connolly
It is one of the excellences of that best of all books, that instructions and warnings and cautions and promises suited to all persons, of every age, from children to old men and women, are to be found in it. And another of its excellences is that any person who is desirous of being made better and wiser and happier by it, may open it at almost any part, and not be disappointed of finding what he seeks.
George E. Sargent
GUIL (quietly): Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current…
Tom Stoppard
It's strange how things seem to come full circle. You know what I mean? I'm sure you do. The way your life seems to drift along with no set path, then something good happens to you and you can trace the line that brought you there back to a specific disappointment or rejection you suffered in the past. It's nice that things can level out that way.
James Corden
Nobody gets praised for the right reasons.
Diana Wynne Jones
... It is possible to be a meta-physician without believing in a transcendent reality; for we shall see that many metaphysical utterances are due to the commission of logical errors, rather than to a conscious desire on the part of their authors to go beyond the limits of experience.
A.J. Ayer
Altogether he was one in whom no man would have seen anything to admire, and in whom no woman would have seen anything to dislike.
Thomas Hardy
Success is a trophy, a title, something gained, attained or retained. Fulfilment, true happiness, contentment.... bliss is the gift of the self-realised. That is the real prize.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
I cannot remember you when the rain flows down -I cannot remember youandmy heart begins to drown ...
Muse
Princess Diana talking to Prince William about the loss of her title Her Royal Highness: She turned to William in her distress. She (Princess Diana) told me how he had sat with her one night when she was upset over the loss of HRH, put his arms around her and said: Don't worry, Mummy. I will give it back to you one day when I am king.
Paul Burrell
It's nice sometimes to be the river rather than the rock.
Jo Beverley
Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
Doris Lessing
Power is always personal: any study of a Western democratic leader today reveals that, even in a transparent system with its short periods in office, personalities shape administrations. Democratic leaders often rule through trusted retainers instead of official ministers. In any court, power is as fluid as human personality.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Why should human females become sterile in their forties while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?
Aldous Huxley
Divination is turning out to be much more trouble than I could have foreseen, never having studied the subject myself.
J.K. Rowling
Here you are. Would you like some pickles?”“Pickles gives me the wind something awful.”“In that case—”“Oh, I wasn’t saying no,” Mistress Weatherwax said, taking two large pickled cucumbers.
Terry Pratchett
In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day.
Neil Gaiman
People will ask you the question 'how is life treating you?' But my question is 'how are you treating life?' On that your happiness rests
Rasheed Ogunlaru
To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
Douglas Adams
No journey out of grief was straightforward. There would be good days and bad days. Today was just a bad day, a kink in the road, to be traversed and survived.
Jojo Moyes
Prose Poems from my book SPANOBSERVATIONSo, we may not be able to explain the world. Not exactly. But we can accept it, and love it. We can turn our faces to the light and examine the minutest details simply for the sake of it. We can live lives of joy and purpose. We are all part of one whole. Take comfort in this. Almost every one of us is capable of holding a cup to another’s lips without our hands shaking.
Jay Woodman
Very..." She left the word hanging. Very unfinished, thought Isabel. The woman finished her sentence. "Very beautiful." Oh, really! thought Isabel. The verdict from others was much the same. Oh well, thought Isabel. Perhaps I'm not sufficiently used to the language he's using. Music is not an international language, she thought, no matter how frequently that claim is made; some words of the language may be the same, but not all, and one needs to know the rules to understand what is being said. Perhaps I just don't understand the conventions by which Nick Smart is communicating with his audience.
Alexander McCall Smith
Well, you have the right to make a sacrifice of yourself, but I'll be damned if I'll let you sacrifice me!
Georgette Heyer
The child is father to the man.
William Wordsworth
But just as my philosophy had ceased to interest me as soon as it was formulated into a set of principles so, when I saw myself being imitated, I realised at once what an incubus my aesthetic personality might become if I were to be trapped within it. Imitation changes, not the impersonator, but the impersonated.
Peter Ackroyd
For having been educated in a convent, she knew nothing of the customs or manners of the world; and found it difficult to understand that among a people piquing themselves on their liberty, it was the custom to shut a man up in perpetual confinement, to enable him to pay his debts.
Charlotte Turner Smith
What use, after all, is man, if not to teach God His lessons?
Peter Shaffer
Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
Alan Bennett
When you cut the cords on the safety net and walk out on the highwire, you become yourself and become all that you can be and all that you were meant to be. But first, you must cut the cords.
Chloe Thurlow
Oh Blimey O‘Reilly's pantyhose...what is the point of Shakespeare? I know he is a genius and so on, but he does rave on.It's the bloody moon, for God's sake, Will, get a grip!!
Louise Rennison