Quotes by British Authors - Page 551

It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden.
Muriel Spark
Let’s remind ourselves that to be compassionate and forgiving doesn’t mean we are endorsing dysfunctional behaviour. On the contrary, it’s essential the harm that was inflicted upon us is properly validated and grieved. Forgiveness isn’t an intellectual concept or an airy-fairy idea. It’s a painstaking process. To be compassionate and to forgive mean we are gradually letting go of poisonous, toxic feelings that are trapped in our minds and bodies.
Christopher Dines
Religion poisons everything
Christopher Hitchens
Do not covet your ideas. Give away everything you know and more will come back to you.
Paul Arden
Jane, I never meant to wound you thus...Will you ever forgive me?"Reader, I forgave him at the moment and on the spot.
Charlotte Brontë
The writings of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.
Walter Savage Landor
Your better life is as close and as easy as making the choice to pick up your Bible each day, open it up, and let God speak to you.
Elizabeth George
Half the things that people do not succeed in are through fear of making the attempt.
James Northcote
It is generally the trustful and optimistic people who can afford to retreat. The loveless and faithless ones are compelled by their pessimism to attack.
T.H. White
Why use long words when short ones will do? Not all readers have been to college or university.
Ken Scott
Train your brain to gain.
Peter Rogers
A writer who can't follow submission guidelines is like a pilot without a plane... ain't gonna get very far!
Jo Linsdell
I know I should be reassuring him that everything's all right, that he needn't worry, but I can't. Instead I'm talking to someone I don't know who isn't even there. Thank you, I'm saying. Thank you for Lucy, thank you for Claire and for Daniel, thank you for this cold and this blood and this pain. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Michael Dibdin
When you read,' the man whispered, 'you discover who you really are. You find traces of yourself, little pieces you didn't know were there.
Malcolm McNeill
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
George Orwell
Secrets had the power to kill a marriage,she said. Nonsense, Sylvie said,it was secrets that could save a marriage.
Kate Atkinson
When he heard there was nothing to eat, he sat down and wept… “Why did I ever wake up!” he cried.
J.R.R. Tolkien
You don't ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It's all about survival; it's all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in, in the hope that you might be lucky, and the knife has actually been staunching the blood. You want to know the conventional medical wisdom? The conventional medical wisdom is that you keep the knife in. Really.
Nick Hornby
You do not mean there is danger of peace?", cried Jack.
Patrick O'Brian
He is the Creator and the sustainer of all things. He is the unchanging, self-existent God, and that means that He depends on nobody. He is neither helped by our faith nor hindered by our unbelief.
Colin S. Smith
This is the way in which he (poet) did his work. He used to go out with a pencil and a tablet and note what struck him...and make a picture out of it...But Nature does not allow an inventory to be made of her charms! He should have left his pencil behind, and gone forth in a meditative spirit; and, on a later day, he should have embodied in verse not all that he had noted but what he best remembered of the scene; and he would have then presented us with its soul, and not with the mere visual aspect of it.
William Wordsworth
I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.
Sebastian Faulks
... To be in time means to change.
C.S. Lewis
One day you'll discover that the opinions of worthless people are worthless.
Piers Anthony
For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.
Virginia Woolf
No, the frigid, cold, empty thing that lives inside me showed up the day after my mother died. It told me it was pointless to care about people. It told me it was useless to consider what they think or feel or desire out of life.
Callie Hart
Parenting is a partnership. Loving each other has a big impact on your children.
Elizabeth George
Over-the-counter ‪‎drug‬ ‪‎abuse‬ or addiction was a problem that I observed at Mauna Kea
Steven Magee
Theirs not to make reply Theirs not to reason why Theirs but to do and die.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
Or yet in wise old Ravenclaw, if you've a ready mind, Where those of wit and learning, Will always find their kind.
J.K. Rowling
All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, ‘Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!’ This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.
J.M. Barrie
Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.
Graham Greene
Be confident to make your magic.
Jay Woodman
Potter, you can skin Malfoy's shrivelfig...
J.K. Rowling
I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.
C.S. Lewis
What, indeed, is a New Yorker? Is he Jew or Irish? Is he English or German? Is he Russian or Polish? He may be something of all these, and yet he is wholly none of them. Something has been added to him which he had not had before. he is endowed with a briskness and an invention often alien to his blood. He is quicker in his movement, less trammeled in his judgement...The change he undergoes is unmistakeable, New York, indeed, resembles a magic cauldron. Those who are cast into it are born again.
Charles Whibley
Honestly, woman, you call yourself our mother?
J.K. Rowling
But he couldn't feel self-pity in the face of the memorial. He hadn't lost nearly enough as these children, who'd lost their homeland and, in many cases,their whole families. Perhaps they had gained something, too, though. They had at least escaped the concentration camps, been taken in by good, caring families, and had grown up to live their lives in relative freedom.
Peter Robinson
When I can't ride anymore, I shall keep horses as long as I can hobble around with a bucket and a wheelbarrow. When I can't hobble, I shall roll my wheelchair out to the fence of the field where my horses graze and watch them. Whether by wheelbarrow or wheelchair, I will do likewise to keep alive-as long as I can do as best I can-my connection with horses.
Monica Dickens
Happiness isn't a thing. You can't go out and get it like a cup of tea. It's the way you feel about things.
Diana Wynne Jones
To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head - and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself.
Alan Moore
Sometimes what you’re most afraid of doing is the very thing that will set you free.
Robert Tew
Having lost and regained her freedom in the most extraordinary circumstances over the course of her remarkable lifetime, few could have set a higher price on the value of liberty. And yet, as she was well aware, it was only through the fundamental principles of justice that her liberty had finally been secured.
Wendy Moore
Maybe, as Mizuko said, we won't even really die, just carry on in the feedback loop we are stuck in. Instead of connecting with new things, widening our worlds, algorithms have shrunk it to a narrow chamber with mirrored walls.
Olivia Sudjic
Your problem is that you’re more like an empty book and you’re waiting on someone else to write your pages for you. For someone who doesn’t believe in fate, destiny and all that shit, you seem to spend an awful lot of time waiting for something to happen to you.
Garry Crystal
When human men hold an object that makes a powerful noise, or has moving parts, or spins around fast, or has a button they can push (which either screws or nails something) they become Gods in their own heads.They can do anything: they can eat through walls and bring buildings together to form mighty empires.They can build floating cities and flying tin cans.But they still can’t make their own beds.
Craig Stone
A large proportion of mankind, like pigeons and partridges, on reaching maturity, having passed through a period of playfulness or promiscuity, establish what they hope and expect will be a permanent and fertile mating relationship. This we call marriage.
C.D. Darlington
But given that depression happened to me, and I did have support, I found it was possible after a time, to achieve a kind of joy totally disconnected from the world. I wanted to be unavailable and in that place without the pain. I still want it. It is coloured white and filled with a singing silence. It is an endless ice-rink. It is Antarctica.
Jenny Diski
Scattered trees, never thick enough to be a forest, were everywhere. Shasta, who had lived all his life in an almost tree-less grassland, had never seen so many or so many kinds. If you had been there you would probably have known (he didn't) that he was seeing oaks, beeches, silver birches, rowans, and sweet chestnuts. Rabbits scurried away in every direction as they advanced, and presently they saw a whole herd of fallow deer making off among the trees.
C.S. Lewis
By all means. Swords have ever been the best servants of crazy men.
Piers Anthony
...much theological discussion is wasted, not because the words used have no possible meaning, but because the people who use them don't mean anything by them.
Rosemary Haughton
When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?
Quentin Crisp
Just for a moment there was an unusual feeling of bliss. Strange word, he thought. It's one of those words that describe something that does not make a noise but, if it did make a noise, would sound just like that. Bliss. It's like the sound of a soft meringue melting gently on a warm plate.
Terry Pratchett
Life is short and precious and we never know what is around the corner. So you live for now, seize every moment that comes your way and if you're going to look back on your life with regret, it's easier to regret the things that you did do, rather than the things you didn't
Holly Martin
When she started to play, Steinway came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano.
Bob Hope
An acre of performance is worth the whole world of promise.
James Howell
People like us were born to change the world. It’s filled with shit. It’s filled with people who did the things they did to you. It’s filled with stupid pointlessness and ignorance and so much mundanity, it makes me want to scream. Don’t you feel it too?
Laure Eve
Disgust at idols strengthened his love for idolaters, and the man who once held Gentile neighbors at a distance now listened to their problems, fears, and temptations.
John Charles Pollock
The whitest robes, unless their purity be preserved by divine grace, will be defiled by the blackest spots.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
We talk on principle but we act on interest.
Walter Savage Landor