Quotes by British Authors - Page 568

Mrs. Sussex said Byron’s loss would grow more bearable. But here was the nub: he didn’t want to lose his loss. Loss was all he had left of his mother. If time healed the gap, it would be as if she’d never been there.
Rachel Joyce
The corrupt begat corruption.
Steven Magee
All you could do was hope for silence, for still air.
Peter Akinti
When everything is available, nothing is ever enough.
Emma Woolf
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
Douglas Adams
Money and material things may well sustain you physically. But it is only living life from/with love & compassion - and the hearts and lives that you touch - that will truly nourish you emotionally and in spirit.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
It is not 'Have I got a chance?' It is more often: 'Have I seen my chance?
Idries Shah
I hate it when everyone is so noble and good in a story that you can't imagine it being true at all.
Patricia Finney
Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer.
Humphry Davy
Propriety of manners and consideration for others are the two main characteristics of a gentleman.
Benjamin Disraeli
Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.
Kate Atkinson
He leant his two elbows on his knees, and his chin on his hands and remained rapt in dumb meditation. On my inquiring the subject of his thoughts, he answered gravely 'I'm trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back. I don't care how long I wait, if I can only do it at last. I hope he will not die before I do!''For shame, Heathcliff!' said I. 'It is for God to punish wicked people; we should learn to forgive.''No, God won’t have the satisfaction that I shall,' he returned. 'I only wish I knew the best way! Let me alone, and I'll plan it out: while I'm thinking of that I don't feel pain.
Emily Brontë
It's strange when you think about it. There are hundreds and hundreds of murders in books and television. It would be hard for narrative fiction to survive without them. And yet there are almost none in real life, unless you happen to live in the wrong area. Why is it that we have such a need for murder mystery? And what is it that attracts us? The crime, or the solution? Do we have some primal need of bloodshed because our own lives are so safe, so comfortable?
Anthony Horowitz
the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water
Virginia Woolf
But these are sad times, the 'prentices wanting to be masters, and every little tradesman wanting to be a Senator, and every dirty little urchin thinking he can giveimpudence to his betters!
Hope Mirrlees
What I learned in Rwanda was that God is not absent when great evil is unleashed. Whether that evil is man-made or helped along by darker forces, God is right there, saving those who respond to His urgings and trying to heal the rest.
James Riordan
...I couldn't see him anymore, and I couldn't see anybody, and I knew what the loneliness of the long-distance runner running across country felt like, realizing that as far as I was concerned this feeling was the only honesty and realness there was in the world and I knowing it would be no different ever, no matter what I felt at odd times, and no matter what anybody else tried to tell me
Alan Sillitoe
Sex is the most important sort of adult play. If you can't relax here you never will
Alex Comfort
If this is freedom, do I want it?
Kerry Drewery
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us but for ours to amuse them.
Evelyn Waugh
You were already in a prison. You've been in a prison all your life. Happiness is a prison, Evey. Happiness is the most insidious prison of all. Your lover lived in the penitentiary that we are all born into, and was forced to rake the dregs of that world for his living. He knew affection and tenderness but only briefly. Eventually, one of the other inmates stabbed him with a cutlass and he drowned upon his own blood. Is that it, Evey? Is that the happiness worth more than freedom? It's not an uncommon story, Evey. Many convicts meet with miserable ends. Your mother. Your father. Your lover. One by one, taken out behind the chemical sheds... and shot. All convicts, hunched and deformed by the smallness of their cells, the weight of their chains, the unfairness of their sentences. I didn't put you in a prison, Evey. I just showed you the bars.''You're wrong! It's just life, that's all! It's just how life is. It's what we've got to put up with. It's all we've got. What gives you the right to decide it's not good enough?''You're in a prison, Evey. You were born in a prison. You've been in a prison so long, you no longer believe there's a world outside. That's because you're afraid, Evey. You're afraid because you can feel freedom closing in upon you. You're afraid because freedom is terrifying. Don't back away from it, Evey. Part of you understands the truth even as part pretends not to. You were in a cell, Evey. They offered you a choice between the death of your principles and the death of your body. You said you'd rather die. You faced the fear of your own death and you were calm and still. The door of the cage is open, Evey. All that you feel is the wind from outside.
Alan Moore
When she finally pulled away from him—much to Aley’s stuttering forward reluctance—he wanted only to echo Aley’s words: “Oh! Do it again.
Charlotte Stein
You must be the best judge of your own happiness.
Jane Austen
For some it is harder to wake up to the truth of life than it is to fall into the sleep of death
Dean Cavanagh
Can Flo come? She has so many clothes I really want her to get rid of.' I laugh. Flo's clothes are so funny. She buys one top and wears it every time we go out for six months, then buys another one and does the same. And the kinds of things she buys for school are boring. She gets things that look as close to school uniform as possible because she finds having to wear our own clothes every day so hard.
Dawn O'Porter
Change what is into the wonder it can be.
Steven Redhead
I had walked all over the fragile bloom of his heart like a Boadicea in Blahniks
Tyne O'Connell
Under the penitential gatesSustained by staring SeraphimWhere the souls of the devoutBurn invisible and dim.
T.S Eliot
One of the few advantages of reaching my age is that I've seen it all. Learned not to judge anyone until I've walked in their shoes. That's why we all need friends, isn't it, to help us out with the weak spots? And sometimes the weak spots nobody can see are the ones that hurt the most.
Debbie Johnson
We are all Clapping Monkeys, but while some of us smile, others look around to see if anyone has noticed.
Fennel Hudson
Sometimes life is intensely interesting and meaningful, and this meaning seems to be an objective fact, like sunlight. At other times it's as meaningless and futile as the wind. We accept this eclipse of meaning as we accept changes in the weather. If I wake up with a bad cold or a headache, I seem to be deaf to meaning. Now if I woke up physically deaf or half-blind, I'd feel there was something wrong and consult a doctor. But when I'm deaf to meaning, I accept it as something natural. Esmond didn't accept it as natural. And he also noticed that every time we're sexually stimulated, meaning returns. We can hear again. So he pursued sex as a way of recovering meaning.
Colin Wilson
I realized that the legal system was corrupt when I went to court and the judge imposed a very short time limit on my evidence submission before removing my legal rights to free speech.
Steven Magee
Preachers love only their own voices.
John Berger
Men of power have not time to read, yet men who do not read are not fit for power.
Michael Foot
Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide—one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave—of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.
Christopher Hitchens
George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her.Before she could speak, almost before she could feel, a voice called 'Lucy! Lucy! Lucy!' The silence of life had been broken by Miss Bartlett, who stood brown against the view.
E.M. Forster
If you will look about you (which most people won't do)," says Sergeant Cuff, "you will see that the nature of a man's tastes is, most times, as opposite as possible to the nature of a man's business.
Wilkie Collins
Windows 10 on both an old 2011 upgraded computer and a new 2016 computer was an excruciating experience
Steven Magee
Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.
G.K. Chesterton
There was nothing you could be sure about, it was all lies, and it was all done to mess with minds because the control and the power trip was so important to them, as well as it being necessary in terms of screwing up anything you might remember from an evidential perspective.They would also build up your hopes, in terms of any tiny thing you did like or were less scared of, so I'd be told that it would be a nice night because Uncle Andrew would be coming, but then it wouldn't be him. There would be someone else There would be someone else who I was told was my Uncle Andrew as he was raping me. Sometimes, this other person would have a mask on but I would know that it wasn't really him. They would be the wrong height or the wrong weight or, sometimes, even obviously a woman. There were occasions when I would be told to call the person Uncle Andrew and then when I did, they would ask me why I was doing that. Sometimes he would be there, too, but that was rare.Was it Satanic? I don't know. Personally I don't believe in God or Satan or any of those things, but abusers use whatever they can to silence children because if you go to the police and say something about Satan, you are so much less likely to be believed. I personally think they were just a group of likeminded people who had no beliefs other than that they wanted to get satisfaction out of abusing children and it's as simple and horrible as that. My uncle certainly doesn't have any satanic beliefs — he just thinks that he loves children and is allowed to get sexual satisfaction from them. Why is there sex involved if it is just about Satan? Why does it always come down to them getting off? No matter what they do that's all it is, whether masturbation or penetration or humiliation, that's what it's about. I encountered people who just liked to humiliate — they wouldn't allow you to go to the bathroom, you would be given drink after drink, fizzy drinks, whatever, so you ended up absolutely desperate and that's where they got off — that's when they started to masturbate themselves, as you stood there peeing yourself. That was just awful, so humiliating. Where is God or Satan in that?(her Uncle was convicted for abusing her and jailed)
Laurie Matthew
It takes ten good decisions to make up for one disastrous one. This is why it is better not to make nine good decisions than to make one bad one—which is what happens most of the time.
Neel Burton
Nanny's philosophy of life was to do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as possible. It had never let her down.
Terry Pratchett
To write simply is as difficult as to be good.
W Somerset Maugham
Is this another fantasy?” she asked.His gaze lifted to her face. His expression was serious, his usual amusement absent. “No. This is real. This is you and me. Just once, and afterwards I’ll leave you alone. I promise I won’t hold you back. Now, I’m going to make love to you, slowly and completely, and you’ll never forget the feel of me inside you.
Nina Croft
I, a miserable wretch, haunted by a curse that shut up every avenue to enjoyment.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
A child's a plaything for an hour.
Mary Lamb
He had read Shakespeare and found him weak in chemistry.
H.G.Wells
I make a rule never to remember anything before last week. It makes life more interesting
Jude Morgan
Remember that not to be happy is not to be grateful.
Elizabeth Carter
If you want more people to come to the theatre, don't put the prices at £50. You have to make theatre inclusive, and at the moment the prices are exclusive. Putting TV stars in plays just to get people in is wrong. You have to have the right people in the right parts. Stunt casting and being gimmicky does the theatre a great disservice. You have to lure people by getting them excited about a theatrical experience.
Catherine Tate
But I was born in the image of God, a man, a creator, with power of life and death, a father, blessed with the gift of the seed of Adam, a sower of seed, to bring forth generations of new life.This I was, and envying a kettle.
Richard Llewellyn
Instead of writing backwards over what had happened, giving structure and meaning to his story, he wrote forwards, slipping into troubling futures.
Alan McCluskey
A permanent pathThat, once illuminated,Goes ever onward – a way home…
Scott Hastie
Love is like the wild rose-briar; Friendship like the holly-tree. The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms, but which will bloom most constantly?
Emily Brontë
Death has this much to be said for it:You don't have to get out of bed for it.Wherever you happen to beThey bring it to you—free.
Kingsley Amis
Cats don’t have names,” it said.“No?” said Coraline.“No,” said the cat. “Now, you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.”There was something irritatingly self-centered about the cat, Coraline decided. As if it were, in its opinion, the only thing in any world or place that could possibly be of any importance.Half of her wanted to be very rude to it; the other half of her wanted to be polite and deferential. The polite half won.
Neil Gaiman
In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.
Aldous Huxley
It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.
Joseph Conrad
He is a Londoner, too, in his writings. In his familiar letters he displays a rambling urban vivacity, a tendency to to veer off the point and to muddle his syntax. He had a brilliantly eclectic mind, picking up words and images while at the same time forging them in new and unexpected combinations. He conceived several ideas all at once, and sometimes forgot to separate them into their component parts. This was true of his lectures, too, in which brilliant perceptions were scattered in a wilderness of words. As he wrote on another occasion, "The lake babbled not less, and the wind murmured not, nor the little fishes leaped for joy that their tormentor was not." This strangely contorted and convoluted style also characterizes his verses, most of which were appended as commentaries upon his paintings. Like Blake, whose prophetic books bring words and images in exalted combination, Turner wished to make a complete statement. Like Blake, he seemed to consider the poet's role as being in part prophetic. His was a voice calling in the wilderness, and, perhaps secretly, he had an elevated sense of his status and his vocation. And like Blake, too, he was often considered to be mad. He lacked, however, the poetic genius of Blake - compensated perhaps by the fact that by general agreement he is the greater artist.
Peter Ackroyd
The Doctor: I've seen bigger.Clara: Really?The Doctor: Are you joking? It's massive!
Steven Moffat