Quotes by British Authors - Page 552

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.
C.S. Lewis
Taking your language into my soul, feeling it separate from sentences to words burning with flight, ‘til all I have left are meaningless letters pushing fire through my veins. Words can draw blood if you’re very, very careful. - Broken Places
Rachel Thompson
She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing.
George Orwell
I need to backtrack. I need to reboot.Do not save changes
Sophie Kinsella
I also believe in cigarettes, cholesterol, alcohol, carbon monoxide, masturbation, the Arts Council, nuclear weapons, the Daily Telegraph, and not properly labeling fatal poisons, but above all else, most of all, I believe in the one thing that can come out of people's mouths: vomit.
Dennis Potter
Being present, whether with children, with friends, or even with oneself, is hard work. But isn't this attentiveness -- the feeling that someone is trying to think about us -- something we want more than praise?
Stephen Grosz
You'll notice that pain isn't solid or constant but rather a series of sensations, sometimes hard, sometimes light, and even sometimes gone altogether
Ruby Wax
The shelves were supposed to be loaded with books—but they were, of course, really doors: each book-lid opened as exciting as Alice putting her gold key in the lock. I spent days running in and out of other worlds like a time bandit, or a spy. I was as excited as I’ve ever been in my life, in that library: scoring new books the minute they came in; ordering books I’d heard of—then waiting, fevered, for them to arrive, like they were the word Christmas.
Caitlin Moran
Aside from infrequent comments ("Cheer up, love," or "It's not Hallo'ween"), no one wondered why a teenager was dressed up as a chic governess. Sylvie approved of Miri, even at the same time as she was confused by her. "It's a style at least," she said, and took off her rope of pearls and looped them around Miri's neck.
Helen Oyeyemi
The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true by the philosopher as equally false and by the magistrate as equally useful.
Edward Gibbon
For spiritual change, we need to see and understand ourselves. What sees is consciousness, it is what perceives, and is essentially what we are. To understand ourselves we need to look within and study how we think and feel, and doing that is called self-observation.
Belsebuub
You pull a book from the shelf and there was an invention... Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat transforming the ingredients, there's pure invention, the spark, the hidden element. What resulted was more than the sum of parts... At one level it was obvious enough how these separarte parts were tipped in and deployed. The mystery was in how they were blended into somthing cohesive and plausible, how the ingredients were cooked into something so delicious. As my thought scattered and I drifted toward the borders of oblivion, I thought I almost understood how it was done.
Ian McEwan
Evil angels make the best boyfriends.
Felicity Heaton
His Majesty has done absolutely nothing but waste his time darling around eating sweets, contributing to the boy's adolescent chubiness, and to the sense of the country's political drift. Rather than being encouraged to govern, the Shah's courtiers preferred to encourage him in his idleness.
Charles Emmerson
Understanding one's purpose is the key to success.
Steven Redhead
The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated he forgets truths which are too simple.
Dame Rebecca West
Think of exercise as medicine and take your daily prescription.
Steven Magee
Believe, my child. Faith is the food of survival.
Tobsha Learner
He realized that, despite the dangers and alarms of the day, waiting was perhaps the worst thing of all.
Dan Abnett
My chest tightens: seeing him so upset breaks my own heart. 'Don't you ever wish you could make that bit go away?" I say, feeling angry at the past. 'That you could erase those painful memories, forget they every happened, just remember the happy times you had together?''You must never say that,' he reprimands sternly.'But why not?' I look at him in surprise.'Because it's the bad memories that makes you appreciate the good ones. Don't ever wish them away. it's like your nan always used to say, "You need both the sun and the rain to make a rainbow".
Alexandra Potter
A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.
Benny Green
She'd stolen my car.She'd stolen my dog.She'd stolen all my money.But if she had only asked, I would have given her it all, because when I first met her, she'd stolen my heart.
Anthony T.Hincks
Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress...Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first to go. And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words--entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers--treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind!
Nick Hornby
[The devil] always sends errors into the world in pairs--pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one.
C.S. Lewis
One of the greatest advantages of singleness is the potential for greater focus on Christ and accomplishing work for Him.
Elizabeth George
I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.
Bill Bryson
You ever had the feeling the future’s become the past while you were busy being scared?
Benjamin Johncock
Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The light was only just visible - except of course that there was no one to see, no witnesses, not this time, but it was nevertheless a light.
Douglas Adams
For people who are depressed, and especially for those who do not receive enough benefit from medication of for whom the side effects of antidepressants are troubling, the fact that placebos can duplicate much of the effects of antidepressants should be taken as good news. It means that there are other ways of alleviating depression. As we have seen, treatments like psychotherapy and physical exercise are at least as effective as antidepressant drugs and more effective than placebos. In particular, CBT has been shown to lower the risk of relapsing into depression for years after treatment has ended, making it particularly cost effective.
Irving Kirsch
And out floated Eeyore. "Eeyore!" cried everybody. Looking very calm, very dignified, with his legs in the air, came Eeyore from beneath the bridge. "It's Eeyore!" cried Roo, terribly excited. "Is that so?" said Eeyore, getting caught up by a little eddy, and turning slowly round three times. "I wondered." "I didn't know you were playing," said Roo. "I'm not," said Eeyore. "Eeyore, what are you doing there?" said Rabbit. "I'll give you three guesses, Rabbit. Digging holes in the ground? Wrong. Leaping from branch to branch of a young oak-tree? Wrong. Waiting for somebody to help me out of the river? Right. Give Rabbit time, and he'll always get the answer." "But, Eeyore," said Pooh in distress, "what can we--I mean, how shall we--do you think if we--" "Yes," said Eeyore. "One of those would be just the thing. Thank you, Pooh.
A.A. Milne
War is like a monster," he says, almost to himself. "War is the devil. It starts and it consumes and it grows and grows and grows." He's looking at me now. "And otherwise normal men become monsters, too.
Patrick Ness
It’s a bizarre act of self-mutilation to say that ‘I don’t get on with science fiction and fantasy, therefore I’m never going to read any’. What a shame. All those great books that you’re cutting yourself off from.
David Mitchell
Where you are is merely a point along the path to where you are going.
Tony Cleaver
Nobody is going to save you but yourself and the ‘best’ and only way to do so isthrough action.
Oli Anderson
File under "Hard Truths": the creative muse is fiction. If you sit around waiting for the right moment to create, you will die waiting.
Antony Johnston
Foreword: Life is tension or the result of tension: without tension the creative impulse cannot exist. If human life be taken as the result of tension between the two polarities night and day, night, the negative pole, must share equal importance with the positive day. At night, under the influence of cosmic radiations quite different from those of the day, human affairs are apt to come to a crisis. At night most human beings die and are
Anna Kavan
You, Jane, I must have you for my own--entirely my own.
Charlotte Brontë
You want Paradise, you gotta build it on war, on blood, on envy and naked greed.
Michel Faber
The need to find out what will happen if I don't relent or moderate my actions has been a constant source of difficulty and discomfort in my life.
Russell Brand
H.I.V.E. will not tolerate unauthorized violence between students, especially students that have only been here for a matter of hours.""I was just introducing myself," Otto replied innocently. "I'm afraid I appear to have inadvertently offended them somehow.
Mark Walden
Surely once in a life God will grant the earnest entreaty of a loving heart.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Your man may be untroubled about the Future, not because he is concerned with the Present, but because he has persuaded himself that the Future is going to be agreeable. As long as that is the real course of his tranquillity, his tranquillity will do us good, because it is only piling up more disappointment, and therefore more impatience, for him when his false hopes are dashed. If, on the other hand, he is aware that horrors may be in store for him and is praying for the virtues, wherewith to meet them, and meanwhile concerning himself with the Present because there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell, his state is very undesirable and should be attacked at once.
C.S. Lewis
True contentment depends not upon what we have a tub was large enough for Diogenes but a world was too little for Alexander.
Charles Caleb Colton
Poetry makes nothing happen.
W.H. Auden
Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.
H. Rider Haggard
Bod shrugged. "So?" he said. "It's only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead.
Neil Gaiman
Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter.
Joe Abercrombie
Do not lose hope — what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story. (from 'Instructions')
Neil Gaiman
We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.
Aneurin Bevan
Yuh cyah vex when soca playin
Wayne Gerard Trotman
He’s going to kill everyone on this planet, reduce the human race to dust. There will be no one to stop him. You are the only one who can. - Aiden Deverill
Alexandra May
My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.
Neil Gaiman
The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
Walter Bagehot
For my part, I prefer the ontological argument, the cosmological argument and the rest of the old stock-in-trade, to the sentimental illogicality that has sprung from Rousseau.
Bertrand Russell
Understanding’s not enough. Understanding’s from outside; merely a function of the mind. [. . .] To enter, that’s the secret. To become the bridge, to crawl into its sap, to sway with it, to rot over centuries as its heartwood rots. When you are the bridge you will know what the bridge knows. It takes time. A lifetime. And skill.
Catherine Fisher
«A book can't take the place of a man!»«I disagree. A book can give you most things a relationship can. It can make you laugh, it can make you cry, it can transport you to different worlds and teach you things. You can even take it out to dinner. And if bores you, you can move on. Which is pretty much what happens in real life.»
Sarah Morgan
Hope is a vigorous principle ... it sets the head and heart to work and animates a man to do his utmost.
Jeremy Collier
That night I dreamt about the roses laid at the wrong feet—the feet of the nurse. Each bit of the dream was like a hyperlink. I pressed on one, wanting answers, and it took me to another. I could never get to the meaning at the bottom of any of the bits. When I reached for the petals of the roses, I was touching a metal seatbelt buckle in a coach, driving by night through a remote place, with a band of mist running parallel to the glass I leant against.
Olivia Sudjic
Lo!" cried the demon. "I am here! What dost thou seek of me? Why dost thou disturb my repose? Smite me no more with that dread rod!" He looked at Cabal. "Where's your dread rod?""I left it at home," replied Cabal. "Didn't think I really needed it.""You can't summon me without a dread rod!" said Lucifuge, appalled."You're here, aren't you?""Well, yes, but under false pretences. You haven't got a goatskin or two vervain crowns or two candles of virgin wax made by a virgin girl and duly blessed. Have you got the stone called Ematille?""I don't even know what Ematille is."Neither did the demon. He dropped the subject and moved on. "Four nails from the coffin of a dead child?""Don't be fatuous.""Half a bottle of brandy?""I don't drink brandy.""It's not for you.""I have a hip flask," said Cabal, and threw it to him. The demon caught it and took a dram."Cheers," said Lucifuge, and threw it back. They regarded each other for a long moment. "This really is a shambles," the demon added finally. "What did you summon me for, anyway?
Jonathan L. Howard