Quotes by British Authors - Page 547

When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later... later there is uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches. It's a bit like the black box airplanes carry to record what happens in a crash. If nothing goes wrong, the tape erases itself. So if you do crash, it's obvious why you did; if you don't, then the log of your journey is much less clear.
Julian Barnes
She is off the heart's map and her compass is spinning.
Mark Haddon
Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe, or what you think could have beneficent social effects if it were believed; but look only and solely at what are the facts.
Bertrand Russell
Money. The dark obsession of the human race.
Samantha Shannon
Forget the soul. No such ghost in the machine. What happens to our mind befalls our body also. The condition of the body is also the state of the mind.
Salman Rushdie
Whatever happened next, good or bad, it would be wonderful finding out.
Kate Griffin
She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude.
Bill Bryson
Talents too many, not enough of any.
Naomi Wood
Where does the story end? That's what it's all about. It's what we all want to know.
Sarah Dalton
Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.
Margaret Thatcher
Nor is it the spirit of those Christians - alas, they are many - whose ambition in life seems limited to building a nice middle-class Christian home, and making nice middle-class Christian friends, and bringing up their children in nice middle-class Christian ways, and who leave the sub-middle-class sections of the community, Christian and non-Christian, to get on by themselves. The Christmas spirit does not shine out in the Christian snob. For the Christmas spirit is the spirit of those who, like their Master, live their whole lives on the principle of making themselves poor - spending and being spent - to enrich their fellowmen, giving time, trouble, care and concern to do good to others - and not just their own friends - in whatever way there seems need.
J.I. Packer
Time is the very lens through which ye see—small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope—something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope. It is a picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might have been otherwise.
C.S. Lewis
Grief is love turned into an eternal missing
Rosamund Lupton
Over the road there was a church: a modern gray building, which constantly played a recording of church bells. Strange it was. Why no proper bells? I never went in but I bet it was a robot church for androids, where the Bible was in binary and their Jesus had laser eyes and metal claws.
Russell Brand
Having a ‘taste for life’ is about knowing its various flavours and awaiting the next meal.
Fennel Hudson
As night goes round the Earth always there are hundreds of thousands of people who should be sleeping, lying awake, fearing a bully, fearing a cruel competition, dreading lest they cannot make good, ill of some illness they cannot comprehend, distressed by some irrational quarrel, maddened by some thwarted instinct or some suppressed perverted desire.
H.G.Wells
A man must carry knowledge with him if he would bring home knowledge.
Samuel Johnson
A police officer should legally be able to refuse body mounted electronic devices, based on the extensive range of evidence that biological toxicity is known to occur from long term exposure to their electromagnetic interference (EMI) emissions.
Steven Magee
That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face - that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem.
G.K. Chesterton
He’s gone, Harry told himself. He’s gone. He had to keep thinking it as he washed and dressed, as though repetition would dull the shock of it. He’s gone and he’s not coming back. And that was the simple truth of it, Harry knew, because their protective enchantments meant that it would be impossible, once they vacated this spot, for Ron to find them again.
J.K. Rowling
I'm far from perfect- maybe beautifully flawed- but I don't lie
Jayde Scott
I do to miss my childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in simple things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not away from things, or people or moments that hurt, but I found joy in the things that made me happy.
Neil Gaiman
Attitude is 100% under your control – (yours to choose, use or lose, as they say)Happiness, fulfillment and satisfaction in a life ALWAYS and ONLY come as a consequence of some other activity. That is you don’t just create ‘happy’ or ‘satisfied’ – you have to be doing something with your life that as a byproduct creates these states.That’s it.Told you it was simple.Alright, I admit, writing about how to create a ‘successful life’ is easy – because to create something out of your life is 99.9% Mental Focus and 50% ( as Yogi Berra would say and .01% for those of you who are paying attention) -knowing how to get the result and doing it.Writing about it is easy; it’s the doing that’s hard.
Martin Gover
So this is it. You are scored on my heart, Clark.
Jojo Moyes
It is only in sorrow bad weather masters us in joy we face the storm and defy it.
Amelia Barr
There are good ways and bad ways to get my attention. Whacking on my ego with a crowbar will get my attention, sure, but it's not going to leave me well disposed to the messenger.
Charles Stross
A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood.
Joanne Harris
We must consider what Miss. Fairfax quits, before we condemn her taste for what she goes to.
Jane Austen
ask yourself how many people you have met who grumbled at a thing as incurable, and how many who attacked it as curable? How many people we have heard abuse the British elementary schools, as they would abuse the British climate? How few have we met who realized that British education can be altered, but British weather cannot?...For a thousand that regret compulsory education, where is the hundred, or the ten, or the one, who would repeal compulsory education? …At the beginning of our epoch men talked with equal ease about Reform and Repeal. Now everybody talks about reform; nobody talks about repeal.
G.K. Chesterton
The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
Cyril Connolly
Shock doesn't hit all at once. I have learned.
Jane Green
Talent is an accident of genes, and a responsibility.
Alan Rickman
Douglas, you have an incredible capacity for missing the point. Will you listen to me, just for once? The debate does not matter. It's not about the issues. Albie might have been naive or ridiculous or pompous or all of those things, but you apologized. You said you were embarassed by him. You took the side of a bunch of arms-dealers! Bloddy bastard arms-dealers against your son - our son - and that was wrong, it was the wrong thing to do, because in a fight you side with the people you love. That's just how it is.
David Nicholls
It is not a case of finding the meaning for the moments, but giving the moments meaning.
Steven Redhead
She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world.
Jeanette Winterson
It was a hot, moist armpit of a night...
Mike Carey
For it's Tommy this an' Tommy that and "Chuck 'im out the brute." But it's "Savior of 'is country " when the guns begin to shoot.
Rudyard Kipling
In this Music [the singing of the angels in harmony] the World was begun; for Iluvatar made visible the song of the Ainur,and they beheld it as a light in the darkness.
J.R.R. Tolkien
WILDE: Oh — Bosie! (He weeps.) I have to go back to him, you know. Robbie will be furious but it can't be helped. The betrayal of one's friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betrayal of oneself is a lifelong regret. Bosie is what became of me. He is spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented, but these are merely the facts. The truth is he was Hyacinth when Apollo loved him, he is ivory and gold, from his red rose-leaf lips comes music that fills me with joy, he is the only one who understands me. 'Even as a teething child throbs with ferment, so does the soul of him who gazes upon the boy's beauty; he can neither sleep at night nor keep still by day,' and a lot more besides, but before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself. Then we saw what we had made — the piece of ice in the fist you cannot hold or let go. (He weeps.)
Tom Stoppard
We must let God be Himself in us. This means that we must let Him be Himself in others too. We ought not to judge the style of another person’s worship.But worship that is elitist or is reduced to the level of popular entertainment, worship that is emotional or aesthetic is worship in name only. It has the external form without the reality. What we long for is living worship. But how does this come about?Our churches should not be places where the unregenerate come on Sundays because they “like the worship.” Our churches ought to be places where the unregenerate feel uncomfortable because it is the Spirit who is important and who comes first. Our controlling principle must be obedience to the Spirit—no matter where He leads us.Psalm 37:4 is true for all of us, whomever we are or whatever we want. But when we delight ourselves in the Lord, some of our desires may wither away and be replaced by new ambitions. So it will not do to envisage a definite goal concerning the form our worship must take. We must first of all be sure that we are delighting ourselves in the Lord and then see what God does.
R.T. Kendall
There was a deep silence, only scraped on its surfaces by the faint quiver of empty seed-plumes, and broken grass-blades trembling in small air-movements they could not feel.'Not a bird!' said Sam mournfully.'No, no birds,' said Gollum. 'Nice birds!' He licked his teeth. 'No birds here. There are snakeses, wormses, things in the pools. Lots of things, lots of nasty things. No birds,' he ended sadly. Sam looked at him with distaste.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef.
Samuel Johnson
The highest value in life is found in the stewardship of time.
Robert M. Fine
My romantic history since arriving on Novo has been non-existent, but I don't know what, if anything, came before; thanks to the government's cerebral pilfering.
Siobhan Davis
And suddenly, lying in bed, I became aware of every inch of my body and I apologised to it, quietly. I apologised for bring so ungrateful for so long. Then I thanked my arms, hands and fingers for always trying so hard. I thanked my legs and feet for holding me up all the time. I thanked my brain for working so amazingly well and conjuring up thoughts and dreams and sentences and images and crazy poems. And I thanked all my organs for working together and giving me life. It had taken four and a half billion years for me to be here. Right now. In this universe. And in that moment, I felt totally overwhelmed at being alive. There could be nothing but there was everything. I didn't want to waste a single second more worrying about trivialities. Worrying that I'd never match up to an ideal that didn't even exist. Nobody is normal. We are all different. I had to make sure that every moment I had left on this planet counted.
Francesca Martínez
Of the twelve companions of Thorin, ten remained. Fili and Kili had fallen defending him with shield and body, for he was their mother’s elder brother.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.
Sebastian Faulks
I sit beside my lonely fire and pray for wisdom yet: for calmness to remember or courage to forget.
Charles Hamilton Aide
Bellgrove, eminently lovable, because of his individual weakness, his incompetence, his failure as a man, a scholar, a leader or even as a companion, was neverless utterly alone. For the weak, above all, have their friends. Yet his gentleness, his pretence at authority, his palpable humanity were unable, for some reason or other, to function. He was demonstrably the type of venerable and absent-minded professor about whom all the sharp-beaked boys of the world should swarm.
Mervyn Peake
Morse stared morosely at the blotting paper. "It's just not my sort of case, Lewis. I know it's not a very nice thing to say, but I just get on better when we've got a body - a body that died from unnatural causes. That's all I ask. And we haven't got a body.
Colin Dexter
The only prophecy the artist can make with confidence is that he and his message will be misunderstood by a world that values all the wrong things.
Chloe Thurlow
In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one's legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.
J.G. Ballard
For there's sweeter restOn a truelove's breastThan any other where.
Susan Price
It’s braver to stay. It takes courage to stay. I am sure I speak for all the single people here when I say that I don’t want to ever lack that courage. I don’t want to lose my best friend and my true love, just because I wanted tostay in control and not take a risk. Even if they walked away, even ifthey ran to the other side of the world, even if I thought that I didn't have a chance in hell, I still want to know that I did everything I couldto make it happen.
Gemma Burgess
In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.
Rose Tremain
As the great botanist Bichat long ago said, if everyone were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty. If all our women were to become as beautiful as the Venus de’ Medici, we should for a time be charmed; but we should soon wish for variety; and as soon as we had obtained variety, we should wish to see certain characteristics in our women a little exaggerated beyond the then existing common standard.
Charles Darwin
When you write it, don't write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don't try to give an explanation. Just say that I don't know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind.
David Mitchell
Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance.
William Paley (paraphrase)
A piano might fall on your head, he said, but it also might not. And in the meantime you never know. Something nice might happen.
Meg Rosoff
Seldom can the heart be lonely If it seeks a lonelier still Self-forgetting seeking only Emptier cups of love to fill.
Frances Ridley Havergal