Quotes by British Authors - Page 56

One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it's prepared to put up with living.
Douglas Adams
[Walking] is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things. It is the one way of freedom. If you go to a place on anything but your own feet you are taken there too fast, and miss a thousand delicate joys that were waiting for you by the wayside.
Elizabeth von Arnim
Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages.
Neil Gaiman
I always thought it was disgusting and ugly, how the weak live their lives depending on each other shamefully licking each other's wounds. A way of life that no one could truly want. I was certain that no greatness could ever come from that. That's what I thought until I met you.
Mark Haddon
I have never understood why it should be considered derogatory to the Creator to suppose that He has a sense of humor.
William Ralph Inge
He had the hypocrisy to represent a mourner: and previous to following with Hareton, he lifted the unfortunate child on to the table and muttered, with peculiar gusto, 'Now, my bonny lad, you are mine! And we'll see if one tree won't grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!
Emily Brontë
Gil has put his book down and is gazing at something inside his head.
Meg Rosoff
To me, the meaning of a human life is to be happy. It's to achieve happiness right now, it's to make sure you're happy in the future. And if some people on YouTube try to have a message to give people, I guess that mine is: do whatever you have to do to be happy.
Dan Howell
We do not serve spirits to the ladies.''As you have probably guessed, I am not a lady
M.R.C. Kasasian
Take me on a journey to the place of souls,” she whispered as he moved closer. “I want to close my eyes and feel a little piece of heaven…with you.
Tracey-anne McCartney
I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago.
Bill Bryson
O, thou art fairer than the evening air     Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;     Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter     When he appear'd to hapless Semele;     More lovely than the monarch of the sky     In wanton Arethusa's azur'd armsExcerpt From: Christopher Marlowe. “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
Christopher Marlowe
When you hear the echoes of my mind, you'll know that I wasn't listening to what you said.
Anthony T.Hincks
Choas errupted amoung the watchers. They didn't think it was over at all. "He cheated! He used fire!""No, he won fairly enough!"
Michelle Paver
There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less
G.K. Chesterton
No, but still it is very unpleasant to live with such unimpressible, incomprehensible creatures. You cannot love them; and if you could, your love would be utterly thrown away: they could neither return it, nor value, nor understand it.
Anne Brontë
On my first day in London I made an early start. Reaching the Public Record Office not much after ten, I soon secured the papers I needed for my research and settled in my place. I became, as is the way of the scholar, so deeply absorbed as to lose all consciousness of my surroundings or of the passage of time. When at last I came to myself, it was almost eleven and I was quite exhausted: I knew I could not prudently continue without refreshment.
Sarah Caudwell
Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.
Samuel Johnson
Your eyes were too intense to stare into for long.
Lucy Christopher
Endurance over-goaded, stretched the hand of fraternity to sedition.
Charlotte Brontë
These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river; most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger that he will plunge through. Now he hears the ice creak beneath him, and so intense and panicking is the sensation that he has to stand for a moment, press his hands to his face and catch his breath.
David Nicholls
You didn't wake up, your dreams just changed gear.
Ben Elton
So fine a medicine is the will to action.
Hope Mirrlees
The process of elimination, combined with a modicum of common sense, will always assist us to arrive at the correct conclusion with the maximum of possible accuracy and the minimum of hard labor. Which being translated means: I guessed it.
Margery Allingham
The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water and breeds reptiles of the mind.
William Blake
In BANKSY we trust.
Colin Tegerdine
My mind cannot grasp forever," she told him. "There must surely be an end somewhere. But the big question is-what it beyond the end?
Mary Balogh
What did we know? This was early days. We had no idea what was out there. How dangerous it might be. It was just a school maths problem. They never asked that in the exams, did they? Like, “If John walks at three miles an hour from London to Brighton, and he's attacked by rabid grown-ups four times, and they bite his right leg off, how long will it take him to bleed to death?
Charlie Higson
Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could be explained.
G.K. Chesterton
Shadow crawled across the floor to the yellow foam-rubber pad and climbed onto it, pulling the thin blanket over himself, and closed his eyes, and he held onto nothing, and he held onto dreams.
Neil Gaiman
...And although thus short, we shorten many ways,Living so little while we are alive;In eating, drinking, sleeping, vain delightSo unawares comes on perpetual night,And puts all pleasures vain unto eternal flight.
Anne Bradstreet
American houses...' she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. 'They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean?
Zadie Smith
We are a rather big-headed little species in a vast cosmos which can do without us very well.
Rev. George Carey
I know why logs spit. I know what it is to be consumed
Winston S. Churchill
Why Dont You?' wasn't totally absurd to me," Diana said later. "Of course, the columns had a certain absurdity that tickled people -- just to think that anyone would thin of writing anything so absurd. But it wasn't even writing. To me writing--Edith Wharton, Henry James...Proust, for God's sake...is a think of beauty and sustainment. 'Why Don't You?' was a think of fashion and fantasy, on the wing...It wasn't writing, it was just ideas. It was me, insistent on people using their imaginations, insisting on a certain idea of luxury.
Amanda Mackenzie Stuart
Was he, after all, really a bad man doing a brilliant impersonation of an idiot? It was hard to tell. The connections between stupidity and malice were so tangled and so dense.
Edward St. Aubyn
Loving isn't about selecting only the good parts. It's about taking the whole and loving the lot.
Santa Montefiore
The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveller with his patient.
R.D. Laing
Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life.
George Orwell
One did not drink sherry before the evening, just as one did not read a novel in the morning.
Barbara Pym
I want to know how good at life I can be in a place where there are no distractions.
Nell Stevens
Stew's so comforting on a rainy day.
Dodie Smith
Andrew Davies has said he prefers his authors dead, and I can see there is only a limited usefulness in a live one when it comes to adaptation.
Alan Hollinghurst
The real gift of love is self disclosure.
John Powell
Have you got any soul?" a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I've got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can't seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn't be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues.
Nick Hornby
The heresy of an age of reason. I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.
Anthony Burgess
The things that make me different are the things that make me ME. -Piglet
A.A. Milne
The true measure of all our actions is how long the good in them lasts.
Elizabeth II
'I thought you were an atheist,' Sjurd commented to hide the clench of his gut. He couldn't be stuck here while his country burned. 'Nobody's an atheist in a storm,' Celyn said absently, still frowning at the sky.
Amy Rae Durreson
A page of a book is like a human face. Look at a page by Hemingway and compare it with Sterne and Marcel Proust. They are different typographical beings. But force upon them those ragged edges, and the influence of the author’s style on the physical aspect of the page, their typographical physiognomy will disappear. No, unjustified setting is a sort of gleichschaltung [enforced conformity] through diversity, a very phoney diversity. Produced methodically by chance. For the comfort of the keyboard, and not for the comfort of the eye.
Stefan Themerson
Don't be afraid of silly ideas.
Paul Arden
Take it from me, Fate doesn't care most of the time.
Diana Wynne Jones
Love is born from disagreeing over something we believe in. Hate is born from disagreeing over something we fear.
Craig Stone
Tolerance is the essential starting point for compassion. That’s why it is so emphasized in our society right now. In a world full of discrimination, prejudice, and marginalization, people need to be taught to tolerate people who are different. Tolerance, at the political, social, and cultural level, will prevent us from choosing speech or actions that harms other people groups, which is a definite win.
Stephen Lovegrove
To wake the soul by tender strokes of art,To raise the genius, and to mend the heart
Alexander Pope
The fire alarm went off. Fire engines came racing; we all rushed out on the gravel drive, everyone thinking it was us. In fact, one of the elderly residents of Saltram had left a pan on the oven in her flat. Apparently this happens all the time. The tenant in question is appearing as an extra -- playing one of the cooks.
Emma Thompson
Once upon a time, my government turned my city into a police state, kidnapped me, and tortured me. When I got free, I decided that the problem wasn’t the system, but who was running it. Bad guys had gotten into places of high office. We needed good apples. I worked my butt off to get people to vote for good apples. We had elections. We installed the kind of apples everyone agreed would be the kind of apples we could be proud of. They said good things. A few real dirtbags like Carrie Johnstone lost their jobs.tAnd then, well, the good apples turned out to act pretty much exactly like the bad apples. Oh, they had reasons. There were emergencies. Circumstances. It was all really regrettable. tBut there were always emergencies, weren’t there?
Cory Doctorow
To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.
J.K. Rowling
I am a wizard, not a baboon brandishing a stick.
J.K. Rowling
Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable sins in the eyes of most people is for a man to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog.
Thomas Huxley