Quotes by British Authors - Page 562

At this time of year it's easy to forget the true meaning of Christianity - the lies, the corruption, the abuse.
Banksy
Believe, and what was impossible becomes possible what at first was hidden becomes visible.
Tahir Shah
It wasn't normal, it was quite far from normal, but they were hers and she loved everything about them.
Vicky Pattison
My one and only goal is to unite the world.
Anthony T.Hincks
I've never seen anyone get so excited by breakfast before.""Are you serious? It's the most important meal of the day. Sometimes, at bedtime, I plan what I'm going to make for breakfast and then get so excited I can't sleep.
Holly Bourne
...I’m insane, Jorie thought. She saw herself lying in a hospital bed, her wallet and valuables gone. When asked why she got into a car with a woman she didn’t know, her reply would land her in the psych ward. Well, you see, I have this fantasy lover because, frankly, they’re so much easier to deal with. She never makes a mess, loves my demonic cat, always says the right thing at the right time. I saw this woman, and she was my dream come to life, so I just had to get into the car with her because I’m an idiot...
Robin Alexander
Perception through emptiness is existential, as the transience of all phenomena affirms the indivisibility of existence itself, before, within and behind all manifestation.
Georgi Y. Johnson
Why be crying, fearful, lonely, when you have the whole universe? Be still, listen to your heart, breathe, and know you need nothing.
Jay Woodman
I live for those who love me, for those who know me true; for the heaven that smiles above me and awaits my spirit too. For the cause that lacks assistance, for the wrong that needs resistance, for the future in the distance, and the good that I can do.
George Linnaeus Banks
After all this time?""Always...
J.K. Rowling
The true America is the Middle West and Columbus discovered nothing at all except another Europe.
W. L. George
I am no nihilist. I am not even a cynic. I am, actually, rather romantic. And here’s my idea of romance: You will soon be dead. Life will sometimes seem long and tough and, god, it’s tiring. And you will sometimes be happy and sometimes sad. And then you’ll beold. And then you’ll be dead.
Tim Minchin
Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.
John le Carré
But nothing will persuade me that the mere fact of being in a place is enough in itself to justify the effort of getting out of bed to become a tourist, or even a traveller. I don't have the slightest wish to be intrepid. I don't want to prove myself to myself or anyone else. I don't care if no one thinks me brave or hardy. I have no concern at all that I did not have whatever it is I should have had to take a dive out of a plane or off a building. None of that matters to me in the least.
Jenny Diski
I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and children play their make-believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams.
Diane Setterfield
Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, because only extroverts cry twice; I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.
John Fowles
It's a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you're ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well as do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.
Hugh Laurie
Of course for professional traders on the stock exchange, money had always been imaginary - just as notional, just as easy come and easy go, as the points in a video game. Wage earners like Willing's mother thought money was real. Because the work was real, and the time was real, it seemed inconceivable that what the work and the time had converted into would be gossamer.
Lionel Shriver
I honour the clarity of the present moment, and the stillness at the centre of being (mine & others), even in the midst of so much doing.
Jay Woodman
Stay out of jail.
Alfred Hitchcock
If music can shine, Sophie thought, this music shone... 'It's like eight thousand birds, Charles!'When the music closed, she clapped until the rest of the audience had stopped and until her hands were hot and blotched with red... There was something in the music that felt familiar to Sophie. 'It feels,' she said to Charles, 'like home.
Katherine Rundell
They served to remind Cabal - should a reminder ever be necessary - why his social skills were so poor: people were loathsome and not worth the practise.
Jonathan L. Howard
...Once again confirms that there is no such thing as genetically pure classification into different races.
Bryan Sykes
Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?
Graham Greene
A mediocre response often is what achieves mediocre results.
Steven Redhead
Miss Abbott, don't worry over me. Some people are born not to do things. I'm one of them.
E.M. Forster
This is a tale of woe. This is a tale of sorrow. A love denied, a love restored, to live beyond tomorrow. Lest we think silence is the place to hide a heavy heart, remember, to love and be loved is life itself without which we are nought.
Abi Morgan
I realized that what matters with any innovation is that it actually creates more value for people.
Stuart Crainer
Look at a coin from your pocket. On one side is "heads" - the symbol of the political authority which minted the coin; on the other side is "tails" - the precise specification of the amount the coin is worth as payment in exchange. One side reminds us that states underwrite currencies and the money is originally a relation between persons in society, a token perhaps. The other reveals the coin as a thing, capable of entering into definite relations with other things.
Keith Hart
What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!
George Eliot
How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.
Virginia Woolf
When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.
Lewis Carroll
Do your own thing on your own terms and get what you came here for
Oliver James
The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.
Horace Walpole
Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful
George E.P. Box
I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.
Christopher Hitchens
Sexual abuse of children now presents society with the ultimate crisis of patriarchy, when children refuse to protect their fathers by keeping secrets.
Beatrix Campbell
You have 62 people worth the amount the bottom three and a half billion people are worth. Sixty-two people! You could put them all in one bloody bus… then crash it!
Brian Eno
She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care.
China Miéville
Always blow your own trumpet, blowing someone else’s is unhygienic
Benny Bellamacina
When I was a boy, Ray Bradbury picked stories from his books of short stories he thought younger readers might like and published them as R Is for Rocket and S Is for Space. Now I was doing the same sort of thing, and I asked Ray if he'd mind if I called this book M Is for Magic. (He didn't.)M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises...
Neil Gaiman
Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.
Francis Spufford
If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children 'There are no fairies'; he can omit to teach them the word 'fairy'.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Instead of becoming a woman of the world, become a woman of the Word.
Elizabeth George
Poverty, for me, is synonymous with degradation.
Charlotte Brontë
Each day we live is a glass roomUntil we break it with the thrustingOf the spirit and pass throughThe splintered walls to the green pasturesWhere the birds and buds are breakingInto fabulous song and hueBy the still w
Mervyn Peake
Lewis at his best is about trying on ways of looking at the world.
Alister E. McGrath
A relationship needs constant attention. It’s a living thing, not just a habit. You’ve got to keep on top of it.
Matt Dunn
Human life and human labour were near. I must struggle on: strive to live and bend to toil like the rest.
Charlotte Brontë
Not being impressed by anyone or anything is one of the surest paths to a life of mediocrity.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
You speak of destiny as if it was fixed.
Philip Pullman
This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might not exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo’s sincerely godless generation, the question hasn’t come up. No one in his bright, plate-glass, forward-looking school ever asked him to pray, or sing an impenetrable cheery hymn. There’s no entity for him to doubt. His initiation, in front of the TV, before the dissolving towers, was intense but he adapted quickly. These days he scans the papers for fresh developments the way he might a listings magazine. As long as there’s nothing new, his mind is free. International terror, security cordons, preparations for war — these represent the steady state, the weather. Emerging into adult consciousness, this is the world he finds.
Ian McEwan
We have teeth and we have tailsWe have tails we have eyesWe were here before you fellWe will be here when you rise.
Neil Gaiman
Sometimes it's hard not to let other people's misery seep into your own bones.
Gilly Macmillan
Calamity with us, is made an excuse for doing wrong. With them, it is erected into a reason for their doing right. This is really the justice of rich to poor, and I protest against it because it is so.
Charles Dickens
Grief is a peculiar emotion.
Sebastian Faulks
Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
J.M. Barrie
The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
W.H. Auden
...this was as if an actual steamroller driven by a crazy grinning idiot had trundled through the door and flattened my entire life into a sad pancake of nothingness.
Ruby Elliot
He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.
G.K. Chesterton