Quotes by British Authors - Page 536

It was that culture of denial that allowed my abuse to take place to start with. Did you know that it wasn't until 1984 that the Department of Health added the category of "sexual abuse" to its list of harms that can befall children? When I was being raped and made pregnant at the age of 11, it wasn't just my own dissociative process that told me that it wasn't happening; it was society too. "We don't have a category for that. Computer says no."͏
Carolyn Spring
Shit down your computer, and restart.
Claire Chilton
Let no one 'til his death be called unhappy. Measure not the work Until the day's out and the labor done: Then bring your gauges.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time.
Neil Gaiman
Sadly, schools deal in the sale and exchange of knowledge, not wisdom." ~ "The Hole
Guy Burt
Never rely upon a time machine to fix your problems, as everyone knows, they're much too faulty.
Lily O'Brien
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
T.S Eliot
He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.
Mervyn Peake
One of the basic Sufi needs is to enable people to see themselves as they really are.
Idries Shah
What's life without a little risk?-Sirius Black
J.K. Rowling
Remember, light and shadow never stand still.
Benjamin West
Leopards don't change their spots
Anna Jacobs
...moderate your desire of producing perfection, temper your eagerness to produce faultless performance...and soften your manners towards those who are subordinate to you...
Cecil Woodham-Smith
Far as I know, Legal Aid was invented to help poor people fight wrongs; [the criminals] are abusing the system, and the damned lawyers help them do it. They’re all sticking two fingers up at them who pay their taxes. And I’ll tell you sommat for free, Sir George, them who pays the taxes are eventually going to get fed up of it.
Andrew Barrett
There will be time, there will be timeTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
T.S Eliot
Homeopathy pills are, after all, empty little sugar pills which seem to work, and so they embody [..] how we can be misled into thinking that any intervention is more effective than it really is.
Ben Goldacre
The astonishment soon passed off, the scales seemed to drop from his eyes, and the book became at once and for ever to him the great human and divine book, and the men and women, whom he had looked upon as something quite different from himself, became his friends and counsellors.
Thomas Hughes
How could I suddenly go from a person who had struggled to dissect an already dead mouse, to someone who was willing to murder a human being? There was no logic to it!
Adele Rose
You know, Professor, this stray kitten and you have one very important thing in common.''I can't imagine,' responded the professor coolly.'Your life is the most important thing in the world to you,' said His Holiness. 'Same for this kitten.
David Michie
Madness is a matter of perspective, little dreamer.
Samantha Shannon
We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes.How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right—in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable—given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearnt. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.
Alain de Botton
She sincerely wishes success, for her new life, and intends that no failure of effort, temper, or spirits on her part will jeopardise it.
Jude Morgan
My friend, you had horses, and deed of arms, and the free fields; but she, being born in the body of a maid, had a spirit and courage at least the match of yours. Yet she was doomed to wait upon an old man, whom she loved as a father, and watch him falling into a mean dishonoured dotage; and her part seemed to her more ignoble than that of the staff he leaned on.-Gandalf to Eomer, of Eowyn
J.R.R. Tolkien
This is what's so terrifying about being lonely: the instinctive sense that it is literally repulsive, inhibiting contact at just the moment contact is most required.
Olivia Laing
Death's got an Invisibility Cloak?" Harry interrupted again."So he can sneak up on people," said Ron. "Sometimes he gets bored of running at them, flapping his arms and shrieking...
J.K. Rowling
I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.
Virginia Woolf
When getting my nose in a bookCured most things short of school,It was worth ruining my eyesTo know I could still keep cool,And deal out the old right hookTo dirty dogs twice my size.Later, with inch-thick specs,Evil was just my lark:Me and my coat and fangsHad ripping times in the dark.The women I clubbed with sex!I broke them up like meringues.Don't read much now: the dudeWho lets the girl down beforeThe hero arrives, the chapWho's yellow and keeps the storeSeem far too familiar. Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.(A Study Of Reading Habits)
Philip Larkin
When a person is loved, they are granted the strength of all seas.
Simon Van Booy
The message of love or beauty or hope needs to be said by a hundred thousand different voices, written by a hundred thousand different pens, at a hundred thousand different times in history, different places in the world, different sectors of society, in different genres and registers, simply to be heard by the billions of ears and hearts that lie waiting for a truth which fires their soul, answers their question, speaks to their heart.
Lucy H. Pearce
The best way to get kids to read a book is to say: 'This book is not appropriate for your age, and it has all sorts of horrible things in it like sex and death and some really big and complicated ideas, and you’re better off not touching it until you’re all grown up. I’m going to put it on this shelf and leave the room for a while. Don’t open it.
Philip Pullman
Well, you may think you have all your ducks in a row, that your life is sorted. You might have the perfect house, the perfect job, the perfect life, nothing to worry about and then something can come along and end all of that in a second. It’s absolutely beyond your control. You can’t plan for unexpected things. And then people start saying, as a way of coping with this latest catastrophe, that it was meant to happen, it was fate. It’s not fate, it’s not some greater force out there. It’s just life and you cannot control life.
Garry Crystal
...anger is a waste of energy. Steam which is used to blow off a safety valve would be better used to drive an engine.
Winston S. Churchill
He had grown used to the idea that Dumbledore could solve anything.
J.K. Rowling
At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation.
George Orwell
A little curly-headed good-for-nothing And mischief-making monkey from his birth.
Lord Byron
The lowly have small ambitions, and are satisfied with small indulgences. They need not get fair treatment. They need only think that they do...
Joe Abercrombie
Clearly, this was another thing I needed to add to the: ‘repetitive cycle of things that were constantly happening in my life’ list, which currently contained fainting and my ability to find trouble.
Adele Rose
They fuck you up, your mum and dad', and if you're planning on writing that's probably a good thing. But if you are planning on writing and they haven't fucked you up, well, you've got nothing to go on, so then they've fucked you up good and proper.
Alan Bennett
Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.
Lawrence Durrell
[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.
Alain de Botton
Those were times when brave men who knew and loved their profession couldn't be overlooked.
Thomas Hughes
And wilt thou have me fashion into speechThe love I bear thee, finding words enough,And hold the torch out, while the winds are rough,Between our faces, to cast light on each? -I dropt it at thy feet. I cannot teachMy hand to hold my spirits so far offFrom myself--me--that I should bring thee proofIn words, of love hid in me out of reach.Nay, let the silence of my womanhoodCommend my woman-love to thy belief, -Seeing that I stand unwon, however wooed,And rend the garment of my life, in brief,By a most dauntless, voiceless fortitude,Lest one touch of this heart convey its grief.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
Terry Pratchett
That should give him time for another wank. It was a good job masturbating didn’t make you go blind.
Barbara Elsborg
I never thought I'd hear myself say it, but safety first!
J.K. Rowling
The dead can't hurt you, they're dead. Living things can hurt you, living people can hurt you but the dead can't.
Neil Gaiman
Life is more fun if you play games.
Roald Dahl
Love from its very nature must be transitory. To seek for a secret that would render it constant would be as wild a search as for the philosopher’s stone or the grand panacea: and the discovery would be equally useless, or rather pernicious to mankind. The most holy band of society is friendship.
Mary Wollstonecraft
That’s why we all hate ’em, he thought. Those expressionless eyes watch us, those big faces turn to follow us, and doesn’t it just look as if they’re making notes and taking names? If you heard that one had bashed in someone’s head over in Quirm or somewhere, wouldn’t you just love to believe it? A voice inside, a voice which generally came to him only in the quiet hours of the night or, in the old days, half-way down a whiskey bottle, added: Given how we use them, maybe we’re scared because we know we deserve it…
Terry Pratchett
Men know that women are an overmatch for them and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.
Samuel Johnson
You know, I preferred you as an evil monk. Would have made killing you a whole lot easier.
Chris d'Lacey
Devil-boy Jack: "A higher power than ours directs us against the wych-kin. There is no turning back."Thaniel Fox: "There is no higher power, Devil-boy! And I am no-one's pawn, neither man nor wych nor whatever entity you speak of."Devil-boy Jack: "I do not speak of entities. I speak of the force that created the physics of the universe, the force that makes time flow forward and not allow everything to happen at once, the force that sets the patterns to which the planets turn. Its weapons are coincidence, unlikelihood, happenstance. It is there when a man stops suddenly to pick up a coin dropped by another man ten days before, and the woman who is to be his wife bumps into him, and five hundred years hence their offspring rules half the world. It is there when a chance comment causes a scientist to think, What if...? and ten years later a great plague is cured. It is so vast that what we call chaos is simply another part of its order, with a shape too big to see. It has no name, nor will it ever have, though man may hint darkly at fate and destiny. It is what it is... the pattern. We may choose our own paths, but the pattern is always ahead of us. It is a way. It is the way.
Chris Wooding
Hands up if you’re ready to do something you’ll regret this weekend. Go forth! You have my blessing.
Florence Welch
You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.
W Somerset Maugham
Vanity Fair--Vanity Fair! Here was a man, who could not spell, and did not care to read--who had the habits and the cunning of a boor: whose aim in life was pettifogging: who never had a taste, or emotion, or enjoyment, but what was sordid and foul; and yet he had rank, and honours, and power, somehow: and was a dignitary of the land, and a pillar of the state. He was high sheriff, and rode in a golden coach. Great ministers and statesmen courted him; and in Vanity Fair he had a higher place than the most brilliant genius or spotless virtue.
William Makepeace Thackeray
It is actually okay to stop trying to solve the problem of feeling bad. In fact it is wise because our habitual ways of solving problems almost invariably wind up making things worse.
Mark Williams
I thought the world had actually ended. I thought nothing good could ever happen again. I thought anything might happen if I wasn't vigilant. I didn't eat. I didn't go out. I didn't want to see anyone. But I survived, Paul. Much to my own surprise, I got through it. And life...well, gradually became livable again.
Jojo Moyes
What’s the difference? Fill a hundred pits with dead Northmen, congratulations, have a parade! Kill one man in the same uniform as you? A crime. A murder. Worse than despicable. Are we not all men? All blood and bone and dreams?
Joe Abercrombie
Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen make me immortal with a kiss. - Her lips suck forth my soul see where it flies! -
Christopher Marlowe
Will you remember this day, Gogol?" his father had asked, turning back to look at him, his hands pressed like earmuffs to either side of his head. "How long do I have to remember it?" Over the rise and fall of the wind, he could hear his father's laughter. He was standing there, waiting for Gogol to catch up, putting out a hand as Gogol drew near. "Try to remember it always," he said once Gogol reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. "Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.
Jhumpa Lahiri