Quotes by British Authors - Page 559

Doing nothing was as honourable as any available course of action. Think of Hamlet, think of Job, think of Jesus before Pilate.
Johnny Rich
There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find
William Blake
He is the completed Man who, from his completeness, performs, with his Mastership, the work of a slave.
Idries Shah
Would you approach a crazy person with a loaded gun? Well, that is exactly what you are doing with some police officers when you approach them.
Steven Magee
I thought it was a novel.”“It is.”“What’s it about??”“You’ll have to buy it to find out, but it’s got everything: love, death and an amusing dog.”“This one’s got a recipe for apple crumble,” I said.“Don’t you love that about the novel? The capaciousness?” he said.
Marcel Theroux
And then ... perhaps someone will write a book about making a film about a story that is taken from this book which is taken from a real-life story that was copied from a story in a book. You know?
Richard House
A man should not glory in what he already knows but in what he has yet to learn.
Robert Stephen Parry
A great man is one who seizes the vital issue in a complex question what we might call the jugular vein of the whole organism and spends his energies upon that.
Joseph Rickaby
He had always thought that hell would be hot. But here they were, right inside the mouth of it, and it was freezing.
Alexander Gordon Smith
The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.
Helen Macdonald
Because no one needs to live for ever. I think that sometimes you can outstay your welcome.
Gemma Malley
It is not expected of critics that they should help us to make sense of our lives they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.
Frank Kermode
I told myself that some families we get without asking, while others we choose. And I chose those two. I think that’s what you’d call a silver lining.
Jenny Valentine
Our brain is a circuit board with neurons and terminals ready to be wired. We are born free, then programmed to obey our parents, to tell the truth, pass exams, pursue and achieve, love and propagate, age and fade unfulfilled and uncertain what it has all been for. We swallow the operating system with our mother's milk and sleepwalk into the forest of consumer illusion craving shoes, houses, cars, magazines, experiences that endorse our preconceived dreams and opinions. We grow into our parents. We becomes clones, robots, matchstick men thinking and saying the same, feeling the same, behaving the same, appreciating in books and films and art shows those things we already recognize and understand.
Chloe Thurlow
He didn't look anything like the blokes on that gay porn channel Rory had clicked on by mistake when he'd been trying to find out how to make a daisy chain for Leo.
J.L. Merrow
Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!
Hilaire Belloc
The most powerful creative state to bring your desires into reality is by bring the conscious and subconscious into unison then keeping your heart and mind in perfect sync.
Steven Redhead
The disdain of profit is due to ignorance, and to an attitude that we may if we wish admire in the ascetic who has chosen to be content with a small share of the riches of this world, but which, when actualised in the form of restrictions on profits of others, is selfish to the extent that it imposes asceticism, and indeed deprivations of all sorts, on others.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Don’t be sorry for the truth. A harsh truth is less damaging than a tender lie, and the worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves.
Dianna Hardy
Shall each man," cried he, "find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone? I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn. Man! You may hate, but beware! Your hours will pass in dread and misery, and soon the bolt will fall which must ravish from you your happiness forever. Are you to be happy while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness? You can blast my other passions, but revenge remains—revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food! I may die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery. Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. Man, you shall repent of the injuries you inflict.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
A man would die tonight of lying out on the marshes, I thought. And then I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pitty in all the glittering multitude.
Charles Dickens
Do you think I will suffer myself to be baffled?
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Evil in general does not sleep, and therefore doesn't see why anyone else should.
Terry Pratchett
If school results were the key to power girls would be running the world.
Sarah Boseley
How is it possible to know so much about a person and yet know nothing at all?
Adele Parks
If you can grasp those two truths—you are made in His image and dependent on Him—you will discover a great dignity and at the same time a profound humility.
Colin S. Smith
I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
J.B.S. Haldane
When I am lonely for boys what I miss is their bodies. The smell of their skin, its saltiness. The rough whisper of stubble against my cheek. The strong firm hands, the way they rest on the curve of my back.
A.M. Harte
I'd believed mine was the greatest of all the arts, the noblest of all the lies, the creation of hope. I thought hope could overcome everything, but I was wrong. Hope cannot overcome truth. Hope and truth cannot co-exist. Truth destroys hope. The most savage cruelties man inflicts on man are committed in the pursuit of truth. My last lie had been the most honest, the most honorable of them all, for there is an art greater even than the creation of hope. The greatest art of all is the destruction of truth.
Karen Maitland
The literary man re-reads, other men simply read.
C.S. Lewis
Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition that really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be their last, inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another.
Samuel Butler
I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
Charlotte Brontë
I have to wonder if you're not being slightly naive here. I mean, are you saying that you want nothing for people? You have no motives? Everybody has motives. Name the person, the circumstances, I'll name the motive. Even saints have motives -- to feel like saints, probably. ... But still, the point of any relationship is obtaining something from another person.
Tom Rachman
[while dancing] The man who was supposed to be her new partner had taken the caller’s final instruction to extremes. From the way Adam’s mouth was locked against Kitty’s he seemed to be anticipating not a temporary split but a lengthy separation. More of a French Fancy than a farmer’s fancy, thought Coralie.
Christine Stovell
Time is how you spend your love.
Zadie Smith
She was a coquette; he was sure she had a spirit of her own; but in her bright, sweet, superficial little visage there was no mockery, no irony. Before long it became obvious that she was much disposed towards conversation.
Henry James
Women, oh, women! They'll find the baddest meanin' in your words an' hold it up, sayin', Look what you attacked me with!
David Mitchell
nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get in the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge, and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows where it hurts is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialized character.
Winston S. Churchill
If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.
T.S Eliot
If you wake up tired, you’ve been chasing dreams. If you go to bed tired, your making your dreams happen.
Benny Bellamacina
She knew them by their thick woven cloaks, their hanging hair and beards, and their Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples spilt over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Like her father’s words, and her mother’s, and her sister’s. Utterly unlike Onnen’s otter-swift British or the dark liquid gleam of Irish. Hild spoke each to each. Apples to apples, otter to otter, gleam to gleam, though only when her mother wasn’t there.
Nicola Griffith
Anna woke with the wonderful feeling bad sleepers have when they know they have slept well. As if they have stolen something and got away with it. At these times the memories of what led up to such deep sleep keep their distance for a few seconds and those few seconds are perhaps the only time the world can ever be said to show mercy.
James Meek
Marketing effectively, in a semantic web, revolves around those three ‘little’ requirements: Trust, Authority, Reputation.
David Amerland
You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies -which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world -what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose.
Joseph Conrad
Can I quote myself...? Oh wait, I think I just did.
Scarlett Finn
We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are.” ― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenixtags: black, choices, harry-potter, inside-us, light, sirius, sirius-black
J.K. Rowling
A law of nature is not a formula drawn up by a legislator, but a mere summary of the observed facts — a 'bundle of facts.' Things do not act in a particular way because there is a law, but we state the 'law' because they act in that way.
Joseph McCabe
Major Chhetri's pronouncement when we'd first arrived in Nepal came echoing back: "Things that start in the rain end well.
Jane Wilson-Howarth
Open spaces sing to my heartof the art of nature and the nature of art.
Jay Woodman
Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that [they]... make, the more often [they] will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered.
C.S. Lewis
Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.
P.D. James
You’re supposed to be the big boss.”Sam said nothing. The crowd hushed, ready to watch this one-on-one confrontation.“You’re the big boss of the freaks,” Zil yelled. “But you can’t do anything. You can shoot laser beams out of your hands, but you can’t get enough food, and you can’t keep the power on, and you won’t do anything about that murderer Hunter, who killed my best friend.” He paused to fill his lungs for a final, furious cry. “You shouldn’t be in charge.”“You want to be in charge, Zil? Last night you were running around trying to get a lynch mob together. And let’s not even pretend that wasn’t you responsible for graffiti I saw driving into town just now.”“So what?” Zil demanded. “So what? So I said what everyone who isn’t a freak is thinking.”He spit the word “freak,” making it an insult, making it an accusation.“You really think what we need right now is to divide up between freaks and normals?” Sam asked. “You figure that will get the lights turned back on? That will put food on people’s tables?
Michael Grant
The Emperor, you see, protects... He protects mankind, through the Legions, through the Martial corps, through the war machines of the Mechanicum. He understands the dangers. The inconsistencies. He uses you, and all the instruments like you, to protect us from harm. To protect our physical bodies from murder and damage, to protect our minds from madness, to protect our souls... There are insane dangers in the cosmos, dangers that mankind is fundamentally unable to comprehend, let alone survive. So he protects us. There are truths out there that would drive us mad by one fleeting glimpse of them. So he chooses not to share them with us. That's why he made you... Remember, Garviel. The Emperor is our truth and out light. If we trust in him, he will protect.
Dan Abnett
We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out.
Iris Murdoch
Milena's eyes seemed to go hot and heavy. Praise made her heartsick; she was so unused to it, and needed it so badly.
Geoff Ryman
I'm going to bed, where I may die.
Diana Wynne Jones
For some, the left testicle is larger than the right one. For Chuck Norris, each testicle is larger than the other one.
Oliver Oliver Reed
All the lot. Their spunk is gone dead. Motor-cars and cinemas and aeroplanes suck that last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation breeds a more rabbity generation, with India rubber tubing for guts and tin legs and tin faces. Tin people! It’s all a steady sort of bolshevism just killing off the human thing, and worshipping the mechanical thing. Money, money, money! All the modern lot get their real kick out of killing the old human feeling out of man, making mincemeat of the old Adam and the old Eve. They’re all alike. The world is all alike: kill off the human reality, a quid for every foreskin, two quid for each pair of balls. What is cunt but machine-fucking! — It’s all alike. Pay ’em money to cut off the world’s cock. Pay money, money, money to them that will take spunk out of mankind, and leave ’em all little twiddling machines.
D.H. Lawrence
Deeds of endurance, which seem ordinary in philosophy, are rare in conduct.
Thomas Hardy
I paid for two seats at the back of the car to give my thighs breathing space. The gangly man sitting next to me used the extra space to spread his legs as widely as possible, leaving me squeezed once again against the window. I was livid. Months of travelling cheek-by-jowl in cars had instilled in me a new-found loathing of men’s legs, which, like air, seem constantly to expand to fill the space available. I’m amazed they’re not all buried in Y-shaped coffins.
Noo Saro-Wiwa