Quotes by British Authors - Page 540

Begin with the soft smelted upturned heart-shaped mouth made for smiling a smile kept for kindness, tenderness, incapable of malice. Am I going too fast for you?The almond eyes see out through their sleepy epicanthic fold. Trusting and calm, if a flicker from slowness, a further flicker from stupidity.Settled in slow-motion beauty, heart-breaking beauty.
Craig Raine
(...)we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don’t really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures.
Bill Bryson
Happiness can only be achieved through experiencing positive thoughts.
Steven Redhead
Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism or aggression but, at the rare moments one can imagine it, always love.
Alain de Botton
For the longest time my company is what got me up in the morning. It was what motivated me every second of every day. Since the moment you started working for me, you are what has gotten me up in the morning. You are what motivates me every second of every day. And still I want more from you. Tomorrow the day is all ours, because I want to talk to you about something.
Samantha Young
It seems to me absolutely true, that our world, which appears to us the surface of all things, is really the bottom of a deep ocean: all our trees are submarine growths, and we are weird, scaly-clad submarine fauna, feeding ourselves on offal like shrimps. Only occasionally the soul rises gasping through the fathomless fathoms under which we live, far up to the surface of the ether, where there is true air.
D.H. Lawrence
There is no man so friendless but what he can find a friend sincere enough to tell him disagreeable truths.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
There's an art in every labour.
Ellis Peters
Words are instruments, they are tools that, in their different ways, are as effective as any sharp edge or violate chemical. They are, like coins, items of great value, but they represent a currency that, well spent, returns ever greater riches.
Tim Radford
I don't want to be alone, I want to be left alone.
Audrey Hepburn
You wait and wait, you get used to waiting. But when your time comes, you must not miss it.
Chloe Thurlow
The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in.
Dennis Potter
Emotions don’t arrive intact. Shards injure you incrementally, so small at first you don’t notice them. Over time, the damage builds and one day you realise the nicks and cuts have become gaping wounds. Worse still, they’ve become the very thing that defines you.
Nigel Jay Cooper
The fig tree had dropped its fruit all over the ground. Ripe figs lay in the dust, exploded, bloody, as if the sky had rained organs.
Rupert Thomson
Only one life, ’twill soon be past,Only what’s done for Christ will last.
C.T. Studd
Maybe people do like wine. It's not as nice as just eating the grapes, but it's okay.
Ben Brooks
My words will be my legacy, etched in heartfelt honesty upon the pages of time.
Callum McLaughlin
Who can be astonished at anything, when he has once been astonished at the manger and the cross? What is there wonderful left after one has seen the Saviour?
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Guilt is a destructive and ultimately pointless emotion
Lynn Crilly
When the Romantic Novelists' Association was founded 35 years ago (in 1960) the image was of pink fluffy bimbos. Now, the view of life through rose-coloured spectacles has gone out of the window. A realistic background and certainly a more realistic relationship between a man and a woman are the important things.
Jean Chapman
I have the power to multiplyLike all women, I am more than one
Neil Mach
Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered.
W.H. Auden
To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children's characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence. It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite 'universes' presented by DC or Marvel Comics. I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.
Alan Moore
This process of professionalising the obvious fosters a sense of mystery around science, and health advice, which is unnecessary and destructive. More than anything, more than the unnecessary ownership of the obvious, it is disempowering.
Ben Goldacre
I am an atheist, but as far as blowing up the world in a nuclear war goes, I tell them not to worry.
Fred Hoyle
You know what my mum once said?’ said Rosie… ‘She said that if a just-married couple put a coin in a jar every time they make love in their first year, and take a coin out for every time that they make love in the years that follow, the jar will never be emptied.’And this means…?’Well’, she said. ‘It’s interesting, isn’t it?
Neil Gaiman
That's how it is with a thing like grief as well. It lies oil slick over everything you do. It will pour out through the gaps in the most ordinary afternoons.
Barney Norris
For me, I think the greatest achievements of science is to allow humanity to realize that our world is comprehensible. Through science, rational thinking, we can understand how the universe works.
Jim Al-Khalili
The real winners I've met in life weren't necessarily skilled or perfect. They just had the tenacity to never, ever give up.
Curtis Rivers
Enlightenment is not about cocooning one’s self, but about integrating more fully with both your self and life.
Jay Woodman
The thing about growing up with Fred and George," said Ginny thoughtfully, "is that you sort of start thinking anything's possible if you've got enough nerve.
J.K. Rowling
The Oracle pursued a logical course of confuting theism, and leaving 'a-theism' the negative result. It did not, in the absurd terms of common religious propaganda, 'deny the existence of God.' It affirmed that God was a term for an existence imagined by man in terms of his own personality and irreducible to any tenable definition. It did not even affirm that 'there are no Gods'; it insisted that the onus of proof as to any God lay with the theist, who could give none compatible with his definitions.
J.M. Robertson
In the sweep of its appeal, its ability to touch every corner of humanity, football is the only game that needed to be invented.
Bobby Charlton
When we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, and we were free to travel the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Thoughts, pictures of him would come to me just a second after waking, shocking me from the forgetfulness of sleep, striking blows that were almost physical. And even in sleep I was not completely free. So often sleep brought dreams of him.
Bernard Taylor
It is hard to draw any line between compassion and love.
Arthur C. Clarke
World is suddener than we fancy it.
Louis MacNeice
Walking purposefully, in the knowledge that no one with their sleeves rolled up who walks purposefully with a piece of paper held conspicuously in their hand is ever challenged, he set off across the wood and canvas wonderland of Interesting and Instructive Kinematography.
Terry Pratchett
I'm not very good at knowing what other people are thinking, but I do know that you can see tragedy, real tragedy, sitting just inside a person's gaze. You can almost always see where a person has been if you look hard enough.
Mo Hayder
The alternatives in my life went through my mind. Unemployed, alone, despairing, watching daytime TV. That couldn't end well.Or helping people, like genuinely making a difference. Imagine waking up and doing that every day?
Ruth Ahmed
As they sang the hobbit felt in love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and a jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves.
J.R.R. Tolkien
People were kind and friendly and amusing, but they thought that companionship and conversation were synonymous, and some of them had voices that jarred in your head. There was a lot to be said for dogs. They understood without telling you so, and they were always pleasing to look at, awake or asleep, like Bingo. He slept now, with little whistling snores, in his basket at the side of the fire, his stubby legs and one whiskery eyebrow twitching to the fitful tempo of his dreams.
Monica Dickens
It’s so peaceful. I could go to sleep in here.” His eyes flickered to me once more, and for a dizzying second I wasn’t thinking about sleep or storms but about pressing my lips to his. I gave my head a slight shake and tried to slow my pulse
J.M. Richards
It’s tough, but if you want to survive, sometimes you have to do the seemingly impossible.
Adele Rose
Books are the most important of all my possessions. They capture the thoughts, feelings, dreams and lives of their authors, welcoming us into their worlds and inspiring us to emulate their adventures.
Fennel Hudson
GRACE is a word we can keep in our minds when we walk, dance, swim, talk, sing, do anything at all - to enable us to get in 'the zone' where everything flows more easily - where everything feels lighter, and we are in a peak state. Grace allows us to follow our inner guidance - be true to who we are - and give our gifts lightly to the world. It's one of those magic words!
Jay Woodman
…We were born vampires.""I thought you became –""— vampires by being bitten? Dear me, no. Oh, we can turn people into vampires, it’s an easy technique, but what would be the point? When you eat… now what is it you eat? Oh yes, chocolate… you don’t want to turn it into another Agnes Nitt, do you? Less chocolate to go around."He sighed. "Oh dear, superstition, superstition everywhere we turn.
Terry Pratchett
My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a b
Stephen Hawking
Prayer time must be kept up as duly as meal-time.
Matthew Henry
Sometimes walking away has nothing do with weakness, and everything to do with strength. We walk away not because we want others to realize our worth and value, but because we finally realize our own.
Robert Tew
That sounds silly, doesn't it? Running away just because you don't want to hurt somebody's feelings? But did you ever think how much of our lives we spend,dodging and twisting and making things difficult for ourselves, to avoid hurting somebody's feelings. Even people with absolutely no claim on us?
Carter Dickson
I mean, it's one thing saying you've got the best god, but sayin' it's the only real one is a bit of a cheek, in my opinion. I know where I can find at least two any day of the week. And they say everyone starts out bad and only gets good by believin' in Om, which is frankly damn nonsense.
Terry Pratchett
The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place' and 'he wouldn't hurt a fly,' though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble.
C.S. Lewis
And when life's sweet fable ends,Soul and body part like friends;No quarrels, murmurs, no delay;A kiss, a sigh, and so away.
Richard Crashaw
A Rainmaker creates value for the benefit of all through commitment.
Jonas Caino
If you can talk brilliantly about a problem it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.
Stanley Kubrick
May I not safely credit her assertions? Will it not be easy for me to forget her sex, and still consider her as my Friend and my disciple? Surely her love is as pure as She describes. Had it been the offspring of mere licentiousness, would She so long have concealed it in her own bosom?
Matthew Lewis
And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that 'knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.
Hisham Matar
Everything in Tom's cathedral looked as if it was meant to be. Perhaps her life was like that, everything foreordained in a grand design, and she was like a foolish builder who wanted a waterfall in the chancel.
Ken Follett
Man (as he imagines himself to be), in general, is a possibility, not a fact.
Idries Shah