Quotes by British Authors - Page 539

He was a story at least, even if he never became anything else.
Nick Hornby
I had failed to make a gift of myself to God.
Karen Armstrong
It's an arbitrary thing if you're born with an XX or XY chromosome, but it can determine your experience of the world. It's about whether you are physically intimidating vs. being physically intimidated. It determines whether you are the one to take an active role in sex and society.
Abigail Tarttelin
Somebody is perfect.Somebody is true.Somebody is cuddly.That somebody is you.
Anthony T.Hincks
Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women, kitchen of love, bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy. Sometimes, the men, they come with keys, and sometimes the men, they come with hammers.
Warsan Shire
It's chemical, fancying him is purely chemical. It's intoxicating - the frisson, the attraction - it's intoxicating because it's purely chemical. But you'll just have to remember the wedding ring - divorcees don't wear wedding rings. This guy has his own Vita at home. You're his potential Suzie. Is that who you want to be? Do you want the next man in your life to have Tim's principles?
Freya North
Individuality is different than isolation. Isolation is trying to do everything on your own, living life by yourself. Isolation happens when you choose not to be involved in any communities, making sure you keep a safe distance from people in your life. I’m not recommending isolation. Science, psychology, and religion all suggest long term isolation is dangerous and unhealthy.
Stephen Lovegrove
Pausing on the threshold, he looked in, conscious not so much of the few familiar sticks of furniture - the trucklebed, the worn strip of Brussels carpet, the chipped blue-banded ewer and basin, the framed illuminated texts on the walls - as of a perfect hive of abhorrent memories.That high cupboard in the corner, from which certain bodiless shapes had been wont to issue and stoop at him cowering out of his dreams; the crab-patterned paper that came alive as you stared; the window cold with menacing stars; the mouseholes, the rusty grate - trumpet of every wind that blows - these objects at once lustily shouted at him in their own original tongues.("Out Of The Deep")
Walter de la Mare
For a man to write well, there are required three necessaries—to read the best authors, observe the best speakers, and much exercise of his own style.
Ben Jonson
Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.
Alfred Hitchcock
I am not even an atheist so much as an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful. Reviewing the false claims of religion I do not wish, as some sentimental materialists affect to wish, that they were true. I do not envy believers their faith. I am relieved to think that the whole story is a sinister fairy tale; life would be miserable if what the faithful affirmed was actually true.... There may be people who wish to live their lives under cradle-to-grave divine supervision, a permanent surveillance and monitoring. But I cannot imagine anything more horrible or grotesque.
Christopher Hitchens
You have to understand the sea, he said, to listen to her, to look out for her moods, to get to know her and respect her and love her. Only then can you build boats that feel at home on the sea.
Michael Morpurgo
For Death is the meaning of night;The eternal shadowInto which all lives must fall, All hopes expire.
Michael Cox
Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions.
Aldous Huxley
Strange to know nothing, never to be sureOf what is true or right or real,But forced to qualify or so I feel,Or Well, it does seem so:Someone must know.Strange to be ignorant of the way things work:Their skill at finding what they need,Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed,And willingness to change;Yes, it is strange,Even to wear such knowledge--for our fleshSurrounds us with its own decisions--and yet spend all our life on imprecisions,That when we start to dieHave no idea why.
Philip Larkin
Tuning must come first. Each recital begins with a careful tightening of the pegs on the cross-bar, twisting them in their socket of red threads as each string is plucked and tested. He uses his thumb for this, softer and subtler than the plectrum, his head bent to the vibrating string and his lips slightly open, breathing quickly, as over the body of a lover.
Ann Wroe
The organized domestic terrorism of the general public is why many people regard the police as corrupt.
Steven Magee
Being one’s true and honest self can often be dangerous; and poetry should always be a place where, if only between the pages, that danger and energy and fear and excitement and love can fizz and spark without ever threatening to burn something down.
Andrew McMillan
Come on! Think of Miandad hitting that six off Sharma. If he could do that, you can do this.
Kamila Shamsie
The treacherous are ever distrustful.
J.R.R. Tolkien
My doctrine is this that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop and do nothing we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.
Anna Sewell
Neat not gaudy.
Charles Lamb
I is a dreamblowing giant,” the BFG said. “(...) I is scuddling away to other places to blow dreams into the bedrooms of sleeping children. Nice dreams. Lovely golden dreams. Dreams that is giving the dreamers a happy time.
Roald Dahl
The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof.
John Stuart Mill
Benton had a strong interest in helping to ensure that Warren's home life wasn't greatly disturbed: his wife was Cornish, and that morning Warren had arrived with six Cornish pasties of remarkable flavour and succulence.
P.D. James
Some things have to be believed in to be seen.
Ralph Hodgson
You put your time where your priority is.
Sebastian Faulks
When I started to draw, most of my influences were from other painters and illustrators, so I was drawing landscape at second hand, really. The trees were Rackham trees, or trees that I had seen in paintings rather than from my own observation...and I started to feel this was a real lack in my work. Everything was too generalised, and not based on real experience. Then in 1975, after having worked for some years in London as a book cover illustrator mainly, I came down to Devon and stayed with some friends up on the moor. In the course of this one weekend, wandering around the moor, finding rivers and ancient woods, I realised that everything that I would ever want to draw was actually here. There was so much richness in the texture and forms of these fantastic trees...and I decided in the course of that weekend to come and live here. I looked at a couple of houses, found one, and made an offer on it, all in that one weekend!
Alan Lee
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book shown to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.
Virginia Woolf
...it is indeed a street of so impertinent a nature, so unfortunately connected with the great London and Oxford roads, and the principal inn of the city, that a day never passes in which parties of ladies, however important their business, whether in quest of pastry, millinery, or even (as in the present case) of young men, are not detained on one side or other by carriages, horsemen, or carts. This evil had been felt and lamented, at least three times a day, by Isabella since her residence in Bath...
Jane Austen
Once upon a time, before the boys were killed and when there were more horses than cars, before the male servants disappeared and they made do, at Upleigh and at Beechwood, with just a cook and a maid, the Sheringhams had owned not just four horses in their own stable, but what might be called a 'real horse', a racehorse, a thoroughbred. Its name was Fandango. It was stabled near Newbury. It had never won a damn thing. But is was the family's indulgence, their hope for fame and glory on the racecourses of southern England. The deal was that Pa and Ma - otherwise known in his strange language as 'the shower' - owned the head and body and he and Dick and Freddy had a leg each.'What about the fourth leg?''Oh the fourth leg. That was always the question.
Graham Swift
Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.
J.K. Rowling
The general public have a warped view of the speed at which an investigation proceeds. They like to imagine tense conversations going on behind the venetian blinds and unshaven, but ruggedly handsome, detectives working themselves with single-minded devotion into the bottle and marital breakdown. The truth is that at the end of the day, unless you've generated some sort of lead, you go home and get on with the important things in life - like drinking and sleeping, and if you're lucky, a relationship with the gender and sexual orientation of your choice.
Ben Aaronovitch
There was a ringing in his ears, like a dead phone line that he couldn’t hang up on.
Mark Capell
I just don't have a tremendously strong belief that relationships can work. I'm really quite convinced that they don't. And if they do, it's really quite terribly brief and sporadic.
Morrissey
It is a melancholy fact which exponents of democracy must face that, while all men may be on a level in the eyes of the State, they will continue in fact to be preposterously unequal.
John Buchan
The challenge to which these two groups responded was the interdependence of human kind, North and South, Rich and Pool, Industrialised and Rural, in the aftermath of the Second World War. To the United World College group it called for the establishment of a new kind of school where young people of all nations and backgrounds could live and learn together at the most formative period of their adolescence and so form those ties of friendship and understanding that would last them through their lives
Prince Charles HRH the Prince of Wales
During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trip was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out how to break free. But trying to escape would have been instant suicide.
Tahir Shah
The cost of freedom is being strong enough to find then implement your own desires.
Steven Redhead
The great cathedral space which was childhood.
Virginia Woolf
The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago now, and there has been no follow up.
Douglas Adams
Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful
Graham Greene
When demons call you the Mother of Destruction, sh*t gets real." Muse.
Pippa DaCosta
When Mother had told me that animals found quiet, unexposed places to die, I had always imagined they knew they were dying, and accepted it, almost gracefully. Now I saw that this wasn't so at all: they crept into corners in the hope of surviving, they only knew they were weakened and exposed, easy prey, and their instinct was to find a hidden place and try to outlive whatever it was they were suffering. It had been a mistake to imagine they wanted to be alone, to die in peace. Animals have no knowledge of death; for them, death is the unexpected end of life, something they resist by instinct, for no good reason. In that sense, their existence has an almost mechanical quality.
John Burnside
She rebuked herself for this thought. /she was, she saw, always having thoughts for which she rebuked herself. It then flashed across her mind that the thoughts for which she rebuked herself selfom turned out to be other than shrewd and fruitful thoughts nand she rebuked herself for this as well.
Patrick Hamilton
Life is limited, but by writing, and reading, we can live in different worlds, get inside the skins and minds of other people, and, in this way, push out the boundaries of our own lifes.
Joan Lingard
History is a madman's museum.
Jeanette Winterson
I used to give X-ray vision a lot of thought because I couldn’t see how it could work. I mean, if you could see through people’s clothing, then surely you would also see through their skin and right into their bodies. You would see blood vessels, pulsing organs, food being digested and pushed through coils of bowel, and much else of a gross and undesirable nature. Even if you could somehow confine your X-rays to rosy epidermis, any body you gazed at wouldn’t be in an appealing natural state, but would be compressed and distorted by unseen foundation garments. The breasts, for one thing, would be oddly constrained and hefted, basketed within an unseen bra, rather than relaxed and nicely jiggly. It wouldn’t be satisfactory at all—or at least not nearly satisfactory enough. Which is why it was necessary to perfect ThunderVision™, a laserlike gaze that allowed me to strip away undergarments without damaging skin or outer clothing. That ThunderVision, stepped up a grade and focused more intensely, could also be used as a powerful weapon to vaporize irritating people was a pleasing but entirely incidental benefit.
Bill Bryson
For a moment I think we were turned into information, and that in that instant we were linked to every other piece of information ever known; every thought ever thought, or at least ever captured by the light.
Alastair Reynolds
People hate as they love unreasonably.
William Thackeray
High creativity is responding to situations without critical thought.' - John Cleese
Paul Arden
The loss of liberty may imprison a person, but it does not confine their mind.
Anthony T.Hincks
He dropped his head and kissed her. He kisses her and it was a kiss of utter certainty, the kind of kiss during which monarchs die and whole continents fall without your even noticing.
Jojo Moyes
Say yes,’ he whispers. ‘Marry me.’I hesitate. I open my eyes. ‘You will get my fortune,’ I remark. ‘When I marry you, everything I have becomes yours. Just as George has everything that belongs to Isabel.’‘That’s why you can trust me to win it for you,’ he says simply. ‘When your interests and mine are the same, you can be certain that I will care for you as for myself. You will be my own. You will find that I care for my own.’‘You will be true to me?’‘Loyalty is my motto. When I give my word, you can trust me.
Philippa Gregory
In 1973, Jan Erik Olsson walked into a small bank in Stockholm, Sweden, brandishing a gun, wounding a police officer, and taking three women and one man hostage. During negotiations, Olsson demanded money, a getaway vehicle, and that his friend Clark Olofsson, a man with a long criminal history, be brought to the bank. The police allowed Olofsson to join his friend and together they held the four hostages captive in a bank vault for six days. During their captivity, the hostages at times were attached to snare traps around their necks, likely to kill them in the event that the police attempted to storm the bank. The hostages grew increasingly afraid and hostile toward the authorities trying to win their release and even actively resisted various rescue attempts. Afterward they refused to testify against their captors, and several continued to stay in contact with the hostage takers, who were sent to prison. Their resistance to outside help and their loyalty toward their captors was puzzling, and psychologists began to study the phenomenon in this and other hostage situations. The expression of positive feelings toward the captor and negative feelings toward those on the outside trying to win their release became known as Stockholm syndrome.
Rachel Lloyd
The value of money is subjective, depending on age. At the age of one, one multiplies the actual sum by 145,000, making one pound seem like 145,000 pounds to a one-year-old. At seven – Bertie’s age – the multiplier is 24, so that five pounds seems like 120 pounds. At the age of twenty four, five pounds is five pounds; at forty five it is divided by 5, so that it seems like one pound and one pound seems like twenty pence. (All figures courtesy of Scottish Government Advice Leaflet: Handling your Money.)
Alexander McCall Smith
I talk to myself, not because I'm lonely, but because sometimes I'm the only one who understands what I'm saying.
Anthony T.Hincks
Come to the edge.We might fall.Come to the edge.It's too high!COME TO THE EDGE!And they cameAnd he pushedAnd they flew.
Christopher Logue
Tell me, before you call us servants, who served whom? And who, I wonder, in your generations, will immortalize you?
Peter Shaffer
What we need and what we want is to moralize politics, not to politicize morals.
Karl R. Popper