Quotes by British Authors - Page 549

I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair.
Alfred Tennyson
A terrible sadness threatened to overwhelm me as I wondered how two people capable of such love for each other had eventually felt so little for the child they had produced between them.
Toni Maguire
Some critics of trans people have told us that we shouldn’t feel this pain of being denied the legitimacy of our own selves; gender is, of course, just a social construct. I wonder if these people also tell widows not to bother grieving their husbands, because marriage is also just another social construct.
C. N. Lester
There was hardly a touch of earth in her love for Clare. To her sublime trustfulness he was all that goodness could be—knew all that a guide, philosopher, and friend should know. She thought every line in the contour of his person the perfection of masculine beauty, his soul the soul of a saint, his intellect that of a seer. The wisdom of her love for him, as love, sustained her dignity; she seemed to be wearing a crown. The compassion of his love for her, as she saw it, made her lift up her heart to him in devotion. He would sometimes catch her large, worshipful eyes, that had no bottom to them looking at him from their depths, as if she saw something immortal before her.
Thomas Hardy
Give your decision never your reasons your decisions may be right your reasons are sure to be wrong.
Lord Mansfield
One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.
G.K. Chesterton
She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative.
Neil Gaiman
Janx Spirit : Janx Spirit is a rather potent alcoholic beverage, and is used heavily in drinking games that are played in the hyperspace ports that serve the madranite mining belts in the star system of Orion Beta. The game is not unlike the Earth game called Indian Wrestling, and is played like this: Two contestants sit at either side of a table, with a glass in front of each of them. Between them would be placed a bottle of Janx Spirit — as immortalized in that ancient Orion mining song :“Oh don’t give me no more of that Old Janx SpiritNo, don’t you give me no more of that Old Janx SpiritFor my head will fly, my tongue will lie, my eyes will fry and I may dieWon’t you pour me one more of that sinful Old Janx Spirit”Each of the two contestants would then concentrate their will on the bottle and attempt to tip it and pour spirit into the glass of his opponent – who would then have to drink it. The bottle would then be refilled. The game would be played again. And again. Once you started to lose you would probably keep losing, because one of the effects of Janx spirit is to depress telepsychic power. As soon as a predetermined quantity had been consumed, the final loser would have to perform a forfeit, which was usually obscenely biological.
Douglas Adams
The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it’s about and why you’re doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising… and it’s magic and wonderful and strange.
Neil Gaiman
have i gone mad?im afraid so, but let me tell you something, the best people usualy are.
Lewis Carroll
True love is what makes life worth living.
D.F. Jones
I was afraid of the sea when I was a girl. Someone said it went on forever and that frightened me. I wondered why my parents had chosen to live at the beginning and the end of the world.
Simon Van Booy
Lewis had experienced more trauma than most of his modern readers ever will.
Alister E. McGrath
We cannot remain consistent with the world save by growing inconsistent with our past selves.
Havelock Ellis
I'm not a hero but I can end the war
Sally Green
Dead. Even in the silence of my mind I cannot think the word. I cannot acknowledge this most obvious and terrible of truths.
Melanie Cusick-Jones
It was wonderful flirting with him, all the razor-edged literary banter, like Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. A battle of wit, and a test, too.
Elizabeth Wein
The night before a biochemistry class, I read the last year's lecture notes. I look at the pictures in the book. Now, I've got the general concept. Sure...There's a couple of details to fill in and a a few things to memorize. But that's no big deal. I've got the big picture, and that's all I need.Bring it on professor, I'm ready.That's right.The next day, I'm a goalie sitting in the front row."Nothin gets past me."My ability to comprehend a biochemistry lecture just went from 30% to 95%. I went on to score 780 out of a possible 800 on the medical school boards exam in biochemistry. Given that the 99th percentile began around 690, this was one of the highest scores in the USA, perhaps the highest.
Peter Rogers
...vicinity to the sea is desirable, because it is easier to do nothing by the sea than anywhere else, and because bathing and basking on the shore cannot be considered an employment but only an apotheosis of loafing. ("Expiation")
E.F. Benson
He places the skull in the palm of my hand. There are four canines; the top two are so long and curved I can feel them pricking my skin. There’s a green tinge round the eye socket and in a fine line across the cranium. I’m not sure what animal it’s from. ‘Stoat,’ Harris says, as if I’ve spoken out loud. ‘They hunt grouse and partridge. I found it behind my house. I buried the body in the furze until it was just bone.’ His hand is still beneath mine, supporting it. I think of him seeing the small dead creature and digging a tiny grave for it. Planning ahead for all those months just so he’d see the skeleton. Or maybe he severed the animal’s head and that was the only part he buried. ‘It’s been waiting for you all this time. Like I have.
Sanjida Kay
In the realm of dream and imagination all men are equal.
John Christopher
See, some guys prefer assesSome prefer titsAnd I’m not saying that I don’t like those bitsBut what’s more importantWhat supersedesIs a girl a with passion, wit and dreamsSo I want a girl who reads.
Mark Grist
The emergence of Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity is where Autism was back in the 1970's and very few children had the condition. Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity must not be allowed to explode into the new epidemic that Autism has become.
Steven Magee
You don't need to put on make-up to make you look pretty. All you need to do is put on a smile and that will make you pretty in anyone's book.
Anthony T.Hincks
People talk about nightfall, or night falling, or dusk falling, and it’s never seemed right to me. Perhaps they once meant befalling. As in night befalls. As in night happens. Perhaps they, whoever they were, thought of a falling sun. That might be it, except that that ought to give us dayfall. Day fell on Rupert the Bear. And we know, if we’ve ever read a book, that day doesn’t fall or rise. It breaks. In books, day breaks, and night falls.In life, night rises from the ground. The day hangs on for as long as it can, bright and eager, absolutely and positively the last guest to leave the party, while the ground darkens, oozing night around your ankles, swallowing for ever that dropped contact lens, making you miss that low catch in the gully on the last ball of the last over.
Hugh Laurie
The fertilising conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of the personal life.
H.G.Wells
Persuading everyone to behave decently to each other because the society is so fragile is a worthy goal, but it may be more straightforward just to make the societies less fragile, which means developing their economies.
Paul Collier
Your narrative may fail to grip if you haven't taken any care to find out how well or badly your audience member is faring (or feeling).
Christopher Hitchens
Men are made by nature unequal. It is vain therefore to treat them as if they were equal.
J. A. Froude
Launching a turnaround takes courage. I cannot measure that and so it is not going to be included in my analysis, but behind the moments of change there are always a few people within these societies who have decided to try to make a difference.
Paul Collier
He is not a man wedded to action, Boleyn, but rather a man who stands by, smirking and stroking his beard; he thinks he looks enigmatic, but instead he looks as if he's pleasuring himself.
Hilary Mantel
The street is no longer measured by meters but by corpses ... Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those scorching howling bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure.
Max Hastings
It is true that the modern Christian is less robust, but that is not thanks to Christianity; it is thanks to the generations of freethinkers, who from the Renaissance to the present day, have made Christians ashamed of many of their traditional beliefs. It is amusing to hear the modern Christian telling you how mild and rationalistic Christianity really is and ignoring the fact that all its mildness and rationalism is due to the teaching of men who in their own day were persecuted by all orthodox Christians.
Bertrand Russell
Ah, those foolish days, those foolish days when we were unselfish and pure-minded; those foolish days when our simple hearts were full of truth, and faith, and reverence! Ah, those foolish days of noble longings and of noble strivings! And oh, these wise, clever days when we know that money is the only prize worth striving for, when we believe in nothing else but meanness and lies, when we care for no living creature but ourselves!
Jerome K. Jerome
It is only by being bold that you get anywhere. If you are a risk-taker, then the art is to protect the downside.
Richard Branson
It is always more easy to discover and proclaim general principles than to apply them.
Winston S. Churchill
Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering Emperors with their world-conquering designs. Not cackling demons plotting in the darkness beyond the world. It was small men with their small acts and their small reasons. It was selfishness and carelessness and waste. It was bad luck, incompetence, and stupidity. It was violence divorced from conscience or consequence. It was high ideals, even, and low methods.
Joe Abercrombie
Godshawk looked surprised, the way that people generally do when you ask them philosophical questions in shrubberies in the middle of the night.
Philip Reeve
It is singularity which often makes the worst part of our suffering, as it always does of our conduct.
Jane Austen
...this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.
G.K. Chesterton
When it comes to the pinch human beings are heroic.
George Orwell
Mr Martinek turned back to Jana. 'Thirty-eight per cent alcohol, sixty-two per cent fire - all the way from Karlovy Vary.
F.C. Malby
He let the curtain drop and the terrible light that had played on his features went off to play somewhere more healthy.
Douglas Adams
Even if they walked away, even if they 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 could to make it happen.
Gemma Burgess
What I don't get about "traditional publishing" is that an author creates a work that they think is good enough to be published. They then have to spend their valuable time begging others to exploit them to point where they end up with a 5% stake in THEIR business. What kind of a screwed of business model is that?
David Nicol
I'd missed this so much, this simple pleasure. The sensation of a heavy shaft sliding over my tongue, pushing deeper and deeper into me until my lips bumped against my hand.
Josephine Myles
There are many excuses for the person who made the mistake of confounding money and wealth. Like many others they mistook the sign for the thing signified.
Millicent Garrett Fawcett
Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements has been brought to order--that windows, doors and other details have been knitted into a scheme that manages to be at once regular and intricate. (p184)
Alain de Botton
Mind over matter represents the triumph of will over physical hindrance. Our thoughts are our weapon against the world.
David Adam
The world rides through space on the back of a turtle. This is one of the great ancient world myths, found wherever men and turtles were gathered together; the four elephants were an Indo-European sophistication. The idea has been lying in the lumber rooms of legend for centuries. All I had to do was grab it and run away before the alarms went off.There are no maps. You can't map a sense of humour. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know There Be Dragons Everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they Be Here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs.
Terry Pratchett
All those poor elves I haven’t set free yet, having to stay over during Christmas because there aren’t enough hats!
J.K. Rowling
The world changes and we change with it.
Jack Thorne
This is a strange situation, sir. Perhaps imagination is what we need.
Stephen Baxter
You can never be happy if you're trapped in the past and fearful of the future. Living in the present is the only way to be happy.
Robert Tew
We are all fools in love
Jane Austen
Cookery means…English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness.
John Ruskin
Obviously, a lot of people involved with Volkswagen's emissions were aware of the diesel car software cheat. One has to wonder how many of them tried to stop it and perhaps were demoted or lost their jobs over trying to prevent the secret Volkswagen car emissions fraud?
Steven Magee
I come to call down my destiny - and it is tall and dangerous!
Robin Jarvis
All love shifts and changes. I don't know if you can be wholeheartedly in love all the time.
Julie Andrews
Because there was no pre-existing patrician elite, those successful in the new book industry could write very swiftly to the top of the social hierarchy.
Andrew Pettegree