Quotes by British Authors - Page 548

Law enforcement are the facilitators of corporate fraud.
Steven Magee
You're letting me go?"He curled his upper lip, his expression painfully bitter as he took a step back from me. "Apparently... I never had a hold of you." He turned sharply, and without another word striding down the street into the dark.Braden never once looked back and that was a good thing.If he had, he'd have seen Jocelyn Butler crying real tears for the first time in a long time, and he would have known that I'd lied. And lied big. For anyone who saw me, knew they were watching a heart in the process of it breaking.
Samantha Young
Those with the least always lose the most in war.
Joe Abercrombie
He was my North, my South, my East and West,My working week and my Sunday rest,My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
W.H. Auden
He is beginning to master wisdom when he tries to learn how not to try.
Paul Brunton
Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm and behave as outrageously as the world will let them.
Logan Pearsall Smith
The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.
John Stuart Mill
That wish - that prayer - both men and women would have scorned me for - "But, Father, Thou wilt not despise!" I said, and felt that it was true.
Anne Brontë
Knowledge, like air, is vital to life. Like air, no one should be denied it.
Alan Moore
Without Thomas Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence, there would have been no American revolution that announced universal principles of liberty. Without his participation by the side of the unforgettable Marquis de Lafayette, there would have been no French proclamation of The Rights of Man. Without his brilliant negotiation of the Louisiana treaty, there would be no United States of America. Without Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, there would have been no Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, and no basis for the most precious clause of our most prized element of our imperishable Bill of Rights - the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Christopher Hitchens
The dead know only one thing, it is better to be alive
Stanley Kubrick
I've been lucky. Opportunities don't often come along. So, when they do, you have to grab them.
Audrey Hepburn
Wise sayings often fall on barren ground but a kind word is never thrown away.
Sir Arthur Helps
These are the advantages of travel, that one meets so many men whom one would otherwise never meet, and that one feeds as it were upon the complexity of mankind
Hilaire Belloc
If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.
Anita Roddick
I see myself as an instrument of justice, not a dispenser of it."-Detective Thanet.
Dorothy Simpson
Role models are only of limited use. For no-one is as important, potentially powerful and as key in your life and world as you.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Never argue at the dinner table for the one who is not hungry always gets the best of the argument.
Richard Whately
Name the different kinds of people,’ said Miss Lupescu. ‘Now.’Bod thought for a moment. ‘The living,’ he said. ‘Er. The dead.’ He stopped. Then, ‘... Cats?’ he offered, uncertainly.
Neil Gaiman
Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.
John Keats
The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
Walter Bagehot
...But I know as well as the next werewolf who’s fallen that you don’t get to choose who trips you. Once your soul recognises its other half, what follows is no longer within your control..."~ Connor Larsen
J.A. Belfield
I have found by experience that they who have spent all their lives in cities improve their talents but impair their virtues and strengthen their minds but weaken their morals.
Charles Caleb Colton
Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.
John Lennon
Priests might divide the world into good and bad. In battle there was strong and weak and nothing else.
A.J. Hartley
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
Alan W. Watts
You just don't know writers. They'll use anything, anybody. They'll eat their young.
Dennis Potter
Why is it," she asked, snuggling closer, "that I so often imagine myself running away and running free?
Mary Balogh
Little deer, I've stuffed all the world's diseases inside you. / Your veins are thorns // and the good cells are lost in the deep dark woods / of your organs.
Pascale Petit
Champagne and Benzedrine! Never again.
Ian Fleming
A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
Doris Lessing
Isn't it obvious in in today's world from people's preoccupation with self-medication, drug and alcohol use, rationalization and avoidance distraction that the truth doesn't just hurt, it's extremely painful.
James Turner
This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time.
Douglas Adams
Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything.
Aldous Huxley
One definition occurred to both of them—that he had come out into the light of that lucid and radiant ignorance in which all beliefs had begun. The sky above them was full of mythology. Heaven seemed deep enough to hold all the gods.
G.K. Chesterton
The most self confident aces began to wonder when their turn would come.. Faced by the empty chairs of men you had laughed and joked with at lunch. And, miraculously, you were still there. Until tomorrow..
Cecil Lewis
Does life teach us anything more, I wondered, than not to cry over all there is to cry about?
Howard Spring
All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.
Neil Gaiman
The Sunlight on the GardenThe sunlight on the gardenHardens and grows cold,We cannot cage the minuteWithin its nets of gold,When all is toldWe cannot beg for pardon.Our freedom as free lancesAdvances towards its end;The earth compels, upon itSonnets and birds descend;And soon, my friend,We shall have no time for dances.The sky was good for flyingDefying the church bellsAnd every evil ironSiren and what it tells:The earth compels,We are dying, Egypt, dyingAnd not expecting pardon,Hardened in heart anew,But glad to have sat underThunder and rain with you,And grateful tooFor sunlight on the garden.
Louis MacNeice
People seem to think that if a man is a Member of Parliament he may do what he pleases. ... Being in Parliament used to be something when I was young, but it won't make a make a gentleman now-a-days. It seems to me that none but brewers, and tallow-chandlers, and lawyers go into Parliament now.
Anthony Trollope
Why should their pain produce such marvelous beauty? he wonders. Or is all beauty created through pain? Is that the secret of great art, both human and Melnibonen?
Michael Moorcock
It's always nice being fancied. It's always nice being wanted. Even it it's by the wrong person.
Tabitha Suzuma
It was curious how some people had a highly developed sense of guilt, she thought, while others had none.
Alexander McCall Smith
Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.
Mary Wollstonecraft
You, sir, are the most phantom-like of all; you are a mere dream
Charlotte Brontë
No queen has had to fight an insurrection in half a millennium. And she takes it personally. But it was her fate to be a good queen that followed four poor ones
Paul W.S. Bowler
A cool white, wintry light glazed the buildings on the highest hill: Will’s memorial, the unsightly chimney from the hospital, the modernist cathedral in Clifton. The jumble of styles and eras lent the city the semblance of a medieval Roman town. Laura drove the long way round, up past the Clifton Suspension Bridge, strung like an a engineer’s dream over a river sinking into the mud. Leigh Woods was on the far side, the trees dark, bereft of leaves, clawing at the sky.
Sanjida Kay
But for the overcrowded, for those who have little or nothing except, sometimes, courage and love, hope works differently. Hope is then something to bite on, to put between the teeth. Don't forget this. Be a realist. With hope between the teeth comes the strength to carry on even when fatigue never lets up, comes strength, when necessary, to choose not to shout at the wrong moment, comes the strength above all not to howl. A person, with hope between her or his teeth, is a brother or sister who commands respect.
John Berger
We chose younger and younger politicians to lead us because they looked good on television and were sharp. But really we should be looking for wisdom, and choosing people who had acquired it; and such people, in general, looked bad on television - gray, lined, thoughtful.
Alexander McCall Smith
I only hope, for the sake of the rising male sex generally, that you may be found in as vulnerable and soft-hearted a mood by the first eligible young fellow who appeals to your compassion.
Charles Dickens
My cousin Georgia says that boys are like gazelles. She says the get alarmed when they get close to girls. And they have to leap off into the woods like gazelles in trousers. Or have I just made that up?
Louise Rennison
Albert had created a currency based on gold bullets and McDonald’s game pieces. He’d wanted to call the currency something else, but no one remembered what. So, ’Bertos they were, a play on “Albert,” coined by Howard, of course, who had also come up with “the FAYZ” to describe their weird little world.Sam had thought Albert was nuts with his obsession with creating money. But the evidence was in: Albert’s system was producing just enough food for kids to survive. And a lot more kids were working. Far fewer were just hanging out. It was no longer impossible to get kids to go into the fields and do the backbreaking work of picking crops. They worked for ’Bertos and spent ’Bertos, and for now at least starvation was just a bad memory.
Michael Grant
We have calcium in our bones, iron in our veins, carbon in our souls, and nitrogen in our brains. 93 percent stardust, with souls made of flames, we are all just stars that have people names.
Nikita Gill
I gave myself permission to care, because there are a lot of people in this world who are afraid of caring, who are afraid of showing they care because it’s uncool. It’s uncool to have passion. It’s so much easier to lose when you’ve shown everyone how much you don’t care if you win or lose. It’s much harder to lose when you show that you care, but you’ll never win unless you also stand to lose. I’ve said it before. Don’t be afraid of your passion, give it free reign, and be honest and work hard and it will all turn out just fine.
Tom Hiddleston
[Amy] pulled a face. 'Honestly, when you grow up you'll learn you may as well try herding cats as keeping men in one place,' she told me solemnly, which I vowed to remember.
James Goss
...It expands; it only destroys because it broadens; even so, thought only destroys because it broadens. A man's brain is a bomb," he cried out, loosening suddenly his strange passion and striking his own skull with violence. "My brain feels like a bomb, night and day. It must expand! It must expand! A man's brain must expand, if it breaks up the universe.
G.K. Chesterton
I want the evening upon which we lose our collective virginities to be special. I'm no parthenologist but I suspect that Jordana's virginity is still intact. Her biological knowledge is minimal. She thinks that a perineum is to do with glacial moraine.
Joe Dunthorne
I have woken up inside one of my own memories. I am really here, yet I know I am not.
Emily Barr
You mean you live down here?' Matilda asked.'I do', Miss Honey replied, but she said no more.Matilda had never once stopped to think about where Miss Honey might be living. She had always regarded her purely as a teacher, a person who turned up out of nowhere and taught at school and then went away again.
Roald Dahl
You have half our gifts. I the other. Together we make a whole. Together we are much more powerful.
Joss Stirling