Quotes by British Authors - Page 54

Language most shows a man: speak that I may see thee.
Ben Jonson
By all means continue destroying my possessions. I daresay I have too many.
J.K. Rowling
We weren’t happy together but we lived in a state of easy, mild contentment. We shared everything except the stupid fucking secret hanging round your neck. I imagined tiny photographs: portraits in sepia of your parents, their faces partially obscured by goitres. Meanwhile, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next year, maybe not even in a decade from now but one day: the planet would fall apart.
Jon Gresham
Oh! what a potent instrument for Satan is a misguided conscience(93)!
Richard Baxter
Has anybody ever told you you’re a remarkably cynical person?”“I like to think of it as learning from experience.
Benedict Jacka
I saw my father as a man, and not, as a man who was my father.
Richard Llewellyn
I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
John Fowles
Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
Virginia Woolf
If your wish is to become really a man of science and not merely a petty experimentalist, I should advise you to apply to every branch of natural philosophy, including mathematics.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
...Come home, Bod.' ‘I think . . . I said things to Silas. He’ll be angry.’ ‘If he didn’t care about you, you couldn’t upset him,’ was all she said.
Neil Gaiman
Never pay attention to someone who has not earned your respect.
Habeeb Akande
Hobbies are for pleasure, but rituals keep you going.
David Mitchell
A God out there and values out there, if they existed, would be utterly useless and unintelligible to us. There is nothing to be gained by nostalgia for the old objectivism, which was in any case used only to justify arrogance, tyranny, and cruelty. People [forget] ... how utterly hateful the old pre-humanitarianism world was.
Don Cupitt
Old timidity has disappeared, and is replaced by silent, quaint fun, with which his face twinkles all over, as he listens.
Thomas Hughes
He knew by heart every last minute crack on its surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He made mathematical calculations of it and rediscovered his childhood; theorems, angles, and triangles. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it. He hated the sight of it.
Josephine Tey
There was a sort of gallery structure in the roof space which held a bed and also a bathroom which you could actually swing a cat in. But only if it was a reasonably patient cat and didn’t mind a few nasty cracks about the head.
Douglas Adams
I only want one thing of men, and that is, that they should leave me alone.
D.H. Lawrence
Love has not a value,though we treasure it dear,it's worth more than gold,that's why I keep you so near.
Anthony T.Hincks
What a situation!' cried Miss Squeers; '...What is the reason that men fall in love with me, whether I like it or not, and desert their chosen intendeds for my sake?' 'Because they can't help it, miss,' replied the girl; 'the reason's plain.' (If Miss Squeers were the reason, it was very plain.)
Charles Dickens
One cannot help feeling that some alternative occupation—lettuce farming, say—would offer somewhat less of a risk of being put to death by installments. Why do you persist in it?”Goldeneyes Dactylos shrugged.“I’m good at it,” he said.
Terry Pratchett
We make choices everyday, some of them good, some of them bad. And if we are strong enough - we live with the consequences. To be truthful I am not entirely sure what people mean when they talk of happiness. There are moments of joy and laughter, the comfort of friendship, but enduring happiness? If it exists I have not discovered it.
David Gemmell
Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
Cyril Connolly
I say to life, "You are very hard", and I also say: "We are blind, we prefer to be blind. It is easier...". Life has to be hard to have any affect on us; even now we hardly notice it. Beyond that can one go? I must. I add, "We are also blind to the miracles of good that come to us. We hardly heed them, we even protest against them". Then I am left where I was, appalled by the hardness of life, knowing we are forced to be unwilling heroes. Suddenly I wonder--is all hardness justified because we are so slow in realizing that life was meant to be heroic? Greatness is required of us. That is life's aim and justification, and we poor fools have for centuries been trying to make it convenient, manageable, pliant to our will. It is also peaceful and tender and funny and dull. Yes, all that.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
If, as I have reason to believe, I have disintegrated the nucleus of the atom, this is of greater significance than th
Ernest Rutherford
What are you doing with all those books anyway?" Ron asked. Just trying to decide which ones to take with us," said Hermione. When we're looking for the Horcruxes."Oh, of course," said Ron, clapping a hand to his forehead. "I forgot we'll be hunting down Voldemort in a mobile library.
J.K. Rowling
With ancient history writers most immediately in view, the author indicates "tendency to look to the virtues and vices of individuals when seeking causes.
Peter Heather
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy offers this definition ofthe word "Infinite".Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some.Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, atotally stunning size, "wow, that's big", time. Infinity is just sobig that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy.Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringlyhuge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here.
Douglas Adams
The Queen (Victoria) wrote generously to her mother, 'I quite understand your feelings on the occasion of Sir John Conroy's death. . . I will not speak of the past and the many sufferings he entailed on us by creating divisions between you and me which could never have existed otherwise, they are buried with him.. For his poor wife and children I am truly sorry." Thanking the Queen for her letter the Duchess of Kent wrote 'Yes, Sir John Conroy's death was a most painful shock. I shall not try and excuse the many errors that unfortunate man committed, but it would be very unjust if I allowed all the blame to be thrown on him. I am in justice bound to accuse myself. . . I erred in believing blindly, in acting with out refection. . . I allowed myself unintentionally to be led led to hurt you, my dearest child, for whom I would have given at every moment my life! Refection came always too late, but not the deserved punishment! My sufferings were great, very great. God be praised that those terrible times are gone by and that only death can separate me from you My beloved Victoria.
Cecil Woodham-Smith
A tragedy means always a man's struggle with that which is stronger than man.
G.K. Chesterton
I would always rather be happy than dignified.
Charlotte Brontë
Saying of the ProphetOppressionWhen oppression exists, even the bird dies in its nest.
Idries Shah
If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.
George Eliot
John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.
Anthony Burgess
Like every other good thing in thisworld, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however,it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay. Let us beduly thankful for that, my dear Denis--duly thankful.
Aldous Huxley
You can’t possibly be thinking of sending him home! He can barely walk.” Meg’s smile began to slip. Ambulance crews were queuing almost out the door, and all this lad needed was a stat dose of Man-the-Fuck-Up.
Cari Hunter
I think in terms of the day's resolutions not the year's.
Henry Moore
My days I devote to reading and experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope.
H.G.Wells
She, who was bored almost to agony, and who had nothing at all to do, she had not time to think even, seriously, of anything. Time being, after all, only the current of the soul in its flow.
D.H. Lawrence
All good leaders are optimists. They always see opportunity where others see hardship
Jocelyn Murray
In Astrology, the moon, among its other meanings, has that of "the common people," who submit (they know not why) to any independent will that can express itself with sufficient energy. The people who guillotined the mild Louis XVI died gladly for Napoleon. The impossibility of an actual democracy is due to this fact of mob-psychology. As soon as you group men, they lose their personalities. A parliament of the wisest and strongest men in the nation is liable to behave like a set of schoolboys, tearing up their desks and throwing their inkpots at each other. The only possibility of co-operation lies in discipline and autocracy, which men have sometimes established in the name of equal rights.
Aleister Crowley
If you don't have a rainbow to give. Give a smile. It works just the same.
Anthony T.Hincks
When people can afford necessities in life, an increase in income dones not result in a significantly happier life.
Richard Wiseman
Sam sent me to give you a message, Edilio. He said, ‘Tell Edilio I couldn’t kill the bugs.’”“The things that came out of Hunter?” Howard asked.Taylor closed her eyes. Tears squeezed out and rolled down her cheeks. “Yes. The things that came out of Hunter. Sam shot them, you know, with his light. But they’re like, reflective or whatever. Anyway, it didn’t kill them.
Michael Grant
But hey this was the FAYZ, where all you could really hope was to delay the pain.
Michael Grant
Think of that person you knew when you were a kid, who you always thought you could have loved completely and forever.Well, you could have. It’s the truth, and it’s the saddest and simplest thing. There isn’t just one person for each of us in the world. There aren’t many, but there are always a few people we could have made it with, that maybe we still want to make it with, that press themselves so close to our hearts they leave scars, and then slip through our fingers and disappear from our lives. And it doesn’t make a difference if you’re thirteen or ninety- eight because some things you feel are real, no matter when.
Abigail Tarttelin
That was the problem, wasn't it? You left home. But you never did become an adult. Not really. You just fucked up in different and more complicated ways.
Mark Haddon
In solitude when we are least alone.
Lord Byron
The truth is that wherever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured.
C.S. Lewis
No expectations mean there is no risk of disappointment.
Jude Morgan
My heart is like a singing bird.
Christina Georgina Tossetti
But pomp and power alone are woman's care,And where these are light Eros finds a feere;Maidens, like moths, are ever caught by glare,And Mammon wins his way where Seraphs might despair.
George Gordon Byron
4:15. Not 4 not 4:30 but 4:15. She thought to intimidate me with the use of quarter hours.
Muriel Spark
...when it comes to defining adulthood, nothing has made me feel more grown-up than knowing that one of the two people in the world who loved me the most, without condition, was no longer in the world.
Jean Hannah Edelstein
I thought that a fairer era of life was beginning for me, one that was to have its flowers and pleasures, as well as its thorns and toils. My faculties, roused by the change of scene, the new field offered to hope, seemed all astir. I cannot precisely define what they expected, but it was something pleasant: not perhaps that day or month, but at an indefinite future period.
Charlotte Brontë
Oh poor Octave, no luck at all, as usual," said Madame Rocher, "he is still with his regiment, still only a captain. Of course, if it hadn't been for this wretched war, he would be at least a colonel by now.
Nancy Mitford
But, astonishingly, I'm not broken. I'm not destroyed. Terrified witless, shaking, retching with fear, yes. But no longer insecure. Because during my search for how you died, I somehow found myself to be a different person. ... Living my life. And it wouldn't be my grief for you that toppled the mountain, but love.
Rosamund Lupton
No, he didn’t come to me for a gun. I only said that because of you, thought maybe you’d want one, with being shot and everything.’ ‘Why the fuck would I want a gun? Would you ask a man who’s just been bitten by a shark if he wants to buy a shark?
Jay Stringer
Customer conversion is dependent on the right customer conversation
Rasheed Ogunlaru
When I first saw you, you were like . . . ' He shakes his head, tugs gently on my hair. 'A rainbow. I always knew you came with a storm.
Emma Trevayne
Do you fancy catching a movie at the Sturbridge Theater tonight? That new Robert Pattinson movie is showing,” I ask her, the phone cradled against my chest.“Definitely sign me up for that!” Ari replies, chuckling as I mock scowl. Her easy laugh warms my soul. “We’re in,” I tell Gil, arranging to meet him and his date in the diner later. “So, who is it this time?” Ari asks, resting her chin in her hands. “Anyone we know?” Considering I can count the girls on one hand who have enjoyed more than one date with Gil, I doubt it’ll be someone familiar. “I didn’t ask; guess we’ll find out soon enough.”“Five bucks says it’s a blonde,” Ari quips. “That’s one bet I’m not taking,” I admit, twirling a lock of her hair around my finger. “Gil’s penchant for blondes is world-renowned.
Siobhan Davis