Quotes by British Authors - Page 534

It is more Important to be of pure intention than of perfect action.
Ilyas Kassam
It's better to be quotable than to be honest.
Tom Stoppard
I couldn't resist him, his eyes were like yours, his hair was exactly the shade of brown.He's just not as tall, but I couldn't tell, it was dark and I was lying down.
Amy Winehouse
Implementing good relationship habits consistently over time elicits good relationships which in turn feed our thoughts about our own self-worth and capabilities.
Sam Owen
On the way out, I hug Mum, holding her close. 'Thank you,' I whisper. 'For dinner - and for everything.'Mum smiles and strokes my cheek. 'There's nothing to thank me for.
Liz Kessler
Such is the condition of organic nature! whose first law might be expressed in the words 'Eat or be eaten!' and which would seem to be one great slaughter-house, one universal scene of rapacity and injustice!
Erasmus Darwin
Further, an excess of legislation defeats its own ends. It makes the whole population criminals, and turns them all into police and police spies. The moral health of such a people is ruined for ever; only revolution can save it.
Aleister Crowley
You don’t have to speak at all—I know what you’d say…- Laura
Wilkie Collins
If everyone wants to be somebody, I want to be somebody else
Benny Bellamacina
Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
and I had spent a few days debating whether or not Michael was actually gay or just English. With the advent of metrosexuals and Europeans running around Manhattan, one never knows.
Polly Courtney
Dynamite is loyal to the one who lights the fuse.
Dean F. Wilson
Mostly you are what they think you are.
Neil Gaiman
In this passionately social world, loneliness dogged the spirit. People were constantly “getting together,” but they never really got there. Everyone was terrified of being alone with himself; yet in company, in spite of the universal assumption of comradeship, these strange beings remained as remote from one another as the stars. For everyone searched his neighbour’s eyes for the image of himself, and never saw anything else. Or if he did, he was outraged and terrified.
Olaf Stapledon
What I have to tell you is this: I am resolved that dancing is to be my path. I know that to be a dancer is to be considered in our world little more than a prostitute. But you cannot imagine what is happening here in Berlin. It is different back home, but in Europe dance is being reborn as something more than cheap entertainment by loose women.
Wendy Buonaventura
Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.
Virginia Woolf
We sat in silence for a while. I gazed through the window at the night sky, wondering idly at all that space, all that blackness, all that nothing, and as I sat there looking up at the emptiness I began thinking about the creek, the hills, the woods, the water... how everything goes around and around and never really changes. How life recycles everything it uses. How the end product of one process becomes the starting point of another, how each generation of living things depends on the chemicals released by the generations that have proceeded it... I don't know why I was thinking about it. It just seemed to occur to me.
Kevin Brooks
The most frightening blazing anger was alive in her now. It was not only Elizabeth that she could have killed but Ross. She could have thrown every piece of crockery at him, and knives and forks too. Indeed she could have attacked him knife in hand. Fundamentally there was nothing meek or mild about her. She was a fighter, and it showed now.
Winston Graham
But, in truth, it had not exactly been gold, or even the promise of gold, but more like the fantasy of gold, the fairy dream that the gold is there, at the end of the rainbow, and will continue to be there forever - provided, naturally, that you don't go and look. This is known as finance.
Terry Pratchett
Solitary trees if they grow at all grow strong.
Winston Churchill
Other dancers weave through our lives, sometimes stirring our deep soul's fires.
Jay Woodman
True humility derives from a proper perspective of our human condition: one among billions on a small planet among billions, like a fungus on a tiny fragment of cheese. Of course, it is nearly impossible for human beings to remain this objective for very long, but truly humble people are nonetheless far more conscious of the insignificance of their true relations, an insignificance that verges on non-existence. A speck of dust does not think itself more superior or inferior than another, nor does it concern itself for what other specks of dust might or might not think. Enthralled by the miracle of existence, the truly humble person lives not for herself or her image, but for life itself, in a condition of pure peace and pleasure.
Neel Burton
Oliver, we’ve got something to tell you,” Dad says, dumping a cardboard box full of garden waste into a toad green mangler. Unlike the doctor, when Dad says we, he means we because Mum is omnipotent. “Who’s dead?” I ask, shot-putting a bottle of Richebourg. “No one’s dead.” “You’re getting a divorce?” “Oliver.” “Mum’s preggers?” “No, we—” “I’m adopted.” “Oliver! Please, shit up!
Joe Dunthorne
When the color goes out of your soul, you are left with an empty heart.
Anthony T.Hincks
You know, Watson, I don't mind confessing to you that I have always had an idea that I would have made a highly efficient criminal. --Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle
I have had as many names as there are years to time itself! roared the monster. I am Herne the Hunter! I am Cernunnos! I am the eternal Green Man!
Patrick Ness
Merry Christmas," said George. "Don't go downstairs for a bit.""Why not?" said Ron."Mum's crying again," said Fred heavily. "Percy sent back his Christmas jumper." [I guess that's a sweater, though my jury is still out on it until I get a future confirmation.]"Without a not," added George. "Hasn't asked how Dad is or visit him [in the hospital] or anything...""We tried to comfort her," said Fred, moving around the bed to look at Harry's portrait. "Told her Percy's nothing but a humongous pile of rat droppings--""--didn't work," said George, helping himself to a Chocolate Frog. "So Lupin took over. Best let him cheer her up before we go down for breakfast, I reckon.
J.K. Rowling
Imagine God and Man set down together to play that game of chess that we call life. The one player is a master, the other a bungling amateur, so the outcome of the game cannot be in question. The amateur has free will, he does what he pleases, for it was he who chose to set up his will against that of the master in the first place; he throws the whole board into confusion time and again and by his foolishness delays the orderly ending of it all for countless generations, but every stupid move of his is dealt with by a masterly counterstroke, and slowly but inexorably the game sweeps on to the master's victory. But, mind you, the game could not move on at all without the full complement of pieces; Kings, Queens, Bishops, Knights, Pawns; the master does not lose sight of a single one of them.
Elizabeth Goudge
But that's the thing about all of this," he says gently but urgently, "we survive. After each known down, each earth shattering blow, we get up again. Even though we walk through hell, and it feels like all we do is walk through hell, we do eventually make it to the otherside. Scarred. Mostly broken. But we survive. And then we start to rebuild ourselves. We're never the same, but we do rebuild ourselves. Because something like this is just another way in which we change. We all have to change.
Dorothy Koomson
Ode to the Chamber...linger here amidst the chamberin which we embrace our lovetalk to me of sonnetsand call me turtledove...
Muse
God doesn't punish us.We do that all by ourselves.
Anthony T.Hincks
Proper writing ink comes in a bottle, can be swirled like brandy in a glass, and smells like apple blossom after rain.
Fennel Hudson
A gentle, warm, sweet pain spreads through my chest at those words.
Aleksandr Voinov
Vision is the end of religion.
William Blake
On the wall of Amshad's office there was a poster that made me laugh: DO NOT GIVE ME A BANGLE, GIVE ME A PEN. Well-meaning charities often train illiterate slum women to make cheap trinkets.
Edward Luce
Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information.
Neil Gaiman
Wishes are held to be ominous; according to which belief the order of the world is so arranged that if you have an impious objection to a squint, your offspring is more likely to be born with one; also, that if you happen to desire a squint, you would not get it. This desponding view of probability the hopeful entirely reject, taking their wishes as good and sufficient security for all kinds of fulfilment.
George Eliot
No government can be long secure without a formidable opposition.
Benjamin Disraeli
What good is money if it can't buy happiness?
Agatha Christie
The gift blesses the giver.
Hilary Mantel
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.
C.S. Lewis
We have known for a long time that Prince Charles' empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant. He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post. He was bowled over by the charms of homeopathic medicine. He has been believably reported as saying that plants do better if you talk to them in a soothing and encouraging way.
Christopher Hitchens
I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an expla nation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc magic.
Richard Dawkins
History was more than just stories, he reminded himself as the men walked forward with their burdens. It taught lessons as well.
Conn Iggulden
If the students were taught about shuttle flights, plate tectonics and submarine volcanoes, they were also immersed in the traditional myths of their culture—the ancient story, for example, of how the island of Pohnpei had been built under the direction of a mystical octopus, Lidakika. (I was fascinated by this, for it was the only cephalopod creation myth I had ever heard.
Oliver Sacks
And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.
Terry Pratchett
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:Out of a misty dreamOur path emerges for awhile, then closesWithin a dream.
Ernest Dowson
Slender Youth. A tour companion who may be either a lost prince or a girl/princess in disguise. In the latter case it is tactful to pretend you think she is a boy. She/he will be ignorant, hasty and shy, and will need hauling out of trouble quite a lot. But she/he will grow up in the course of the Tour. In fact she/he will be the only Companion who will change in any way. Quite often, she/he will soon exhibit a very useful talent for magic and end up by hauling everyone else out of trouble. But this will not be until midway through your second brochure.
Diana Wynne Jones
Surprises are one of the secrets of a good relationship. Find someone who, out of the blue, will grab you, and a blanket, take you to a secluded spot and canoodle as the sun rises...
Virginia Alison
Ignorance of Scripture is the root of every error in religion, and the source of ever heresy. To be allowed to remove a few grains of ignorance, and to throw a few rays of light on God's precious word, is, in my opinion, the greatest honor that can be put on a Christian.
J.C. Ryle
There's light and joy, but there's also darkness all around and we can be lost in it.
David Almond
He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.
Graham Greene
At our age, surely there are better things to sustain us, to sustain a marriage, than the brief flame of passion?" ..."You are mistaken, Ernest," she said at last. "There is only the passionate spark. Without it, two people living together may be lonelier than if they lived quite alone.
Helen Simonson
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that can be given a name.
George Orwell
The difference between greed and ambition is a greedy person desires things he isn't prepared to work for.
Habeeb Akande
She bit me. She worried me like a tigress, when Rochester got the knife from her...She sucked the blood: she said she'd drain my heart." Richard mason
Charlotte Brontë
It is evident as a matter of logic that, since they (world religions) disagree, not more than one of them can be true.
Bertrand Russell
Let us have wine and woman, mirth and laughter,Sermons and soda water the day after.Man, being reasonable, must get drunk;The best of life is but intoxication:Glory, the grape, love, gold, in these are sunkThe hopes of all men, and of every nation;Without their sap, how branchless were the trunkOf life's strange tree, so fruitful on occasion:But to return--Get very drunk; and whenYou wake with head-ache, you shall see what then.
George Gordon Byron
Creators of literary fairy tales from the 17th-century onward include writers whose works are still widely read today: Charles Perrault (17th-century France), Hans Christian Andersen (19th-century Denmark), George Macdonald and Oscar Wilde (19th-century England). The Brothers Grimm (19th-century Germany) blurred the line between oral and literary tales by presenting their German "household tales" as though they came straight from the mouths of peasants, though in fact they revised these stories to better reflect their own Protestant ethics. It is interesting to note that these canonized writers are all men, since this is a reversal from the oral storytelling tradition, historically dominated by women. Indeed, Straparola, Basile, Perrault, and even the Brothers Grimm made no secret of the fact that their source material came largely or entirely from women storytellers. Yet we are left with the impression that women dropped out of the history of fairy tales once they became a literary form, existing only in the background as an anonymous old peasant called Mother Goose.
Terri Windling
Creativity takes courage. Not just once, but consistently. Without courage we cannot be creative. Without feeling fear at some point we will not reach our creative potential. From first putting paint on paper through to selling our work on a worldwide stage there is plenty to be scared of. But this is where creativity lives – on the edge of our comfort zones.
Lucy H. Pearce