Quotes by British Authors - Page 569

This has serveral consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms--translation: all your bank account are belong to us--
Charles Stross
... I since cricket match do long to talk with one of my arms around you, then place both arms round you and share with you, the above now seems sweeter to me than words can say.
E.M. Forster
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself
D.H. Lawrence
By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very well. He has done it. Perhaps he can ride. But there is a way of looking at a halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a kick.
Joseph Conrad
Maisie bit her lip. She had learned that sometimes it was best to let words die of their own accord, rather than fight them.
Jacqueline Winspear
Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, halfway down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waves swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.
Virginia Woolf
For the dead, who seem to take away so much, really take with them nothing that is ours.
E.M. Forster
My friends are always conscious of what people think of them. As though life is something that has an audience.
Caroline Green
A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination.
Caitlin Moran
The three great apostles of practical atheism that make converts without persecuting and retain them without preaching are Wealth Health and Power.
Charles Caleb Colton
Breathe deeply, focus your thoughts, and say out loud, “The quest begins here.
Fennel Hudson
Love puts itself first, and makes its own plans. It maps you out instead. Maybe that's what makes it perfect
Holly Smale
I wish I knew the good of wishing.
Henry S. Leigh
She looked at the empty page, which remained blank, apart from the small wet dots from her tears, for hours. Her mind was a turmoil of sadness, rage, fear and all those emotions that gave her inspiration. However her heart lacked the will as the empty words enclosed her soul pulling it down towards the frenzied ravenous imps that stalked hells pantry....
Virginia Alison
Lucy buried her head in his mane to hide from his face. But there must have been magic in his mane. She could feel lion-strength going into her. Quite suddenly she sat up. "I'm sorry, Aslan," she said. "I'm ready now.""Now you are a lioness," said Aslan. "And now all Narnia will be renewed. But come. We have no time to lose.
C.S. Lewis
We feel that in the future, groups are going to have to offer much more than just a pop show. They'll have to offer a well-presented theatre show.
Syd Barrett
I have wrought my simple planIf I give one hour of joyTo the boy who’s half a man,Or the man who’s half a boy.
Arthur Conan Doyle
O my mistress, do not by any means destroy yourself, for if you live you may yet have good fortune but all the dead are dead alike!
C.S. Lewis
Harry, you wonderful boy, you brave, brave man.
J.K. Rowling
Self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she always needed the most.
David Nicholls
It's an illness," she said, although she made the words sound like "it's uh nillness." Nillness, thought Strike, for a second distracted. Sometimes illness turned slowly to nillness, as was happening to Bristow's mother... sometimes nillness rose to meet you out of nowhere, like a concrete road slamming your skull apart.
Robert Galbraith
The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible.
T.S Eliot
How I should despise such a thing if I were a man. What a nose she has! what a chin! what a neck! Then her eyes--and the worst kissing lips in the universe.
John Vanbrugh
She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking.
Angela Carter
One of the disadvantages of wine is that is makes a man mistake words for thoughts.
Samuel Johnson
Nowhere can I think so happily as in a train. I am not inspired; nothing so uncomfortable as that. I am never seized with a sudden idea for a masterpiece, nor form a sudden plan for some new enterprise. My thoughts are just pleasantly reflective. I think of all the good deeds I have done, and (when these give out) of all the good deeds I am going to do. I look out of the window and say lazily to myself, “How jolly to live there”; and a little farther on, “How jolly not to live there.” I see a cow, and I wonder what it is like to be a cow, and I wonder whether the cow wonders what it is to be like me; and perhaps, by this time, we have passed on to a sheep, and I wonder if it is more fun being a sheep. My mind wanders on in a way which would annoy Pelman a good deal, but it wanders on quite happily, and the “clankety-clank” of the train adds a very soothing accompaniment. So soothing, indeed, that at any moment I can close my eyes and pass into a pleasant state of sleep.
A.A. Milne
I was going to become a human sand burger.
Adele Rose
Trains are relentless things, aren't they, Monsieur Poirot? People are murdered and die, but they go on just the same. I am talking nonsense, but you know what I mean.""Yes, yes, I know. Life is like a train, Mademoiselle. It goes on. And it is a good thing that that is so.""Why?""Because the train gets to its journey's end at last, and there is a proverb about that in your language, Mademoiselle.""'Journey's end in lovers meeting.'" Lenox laughed. "That is not going to be true for me.""Yes--yes, it is true. You are young, younger than you yourself know. Trust the train, Mademoiselle, for it is le bon Dieu who drives it."The whistle of the engine came again."Trust the train, Mademoiselle," murmured Poirot again. "And trust Hercule Poirot. He knows.
Agatha Christie
There were times when I would forget her, though they were rare, and it would be for a time as though she had never existed; and then some passing girl's inadvertent gesture, or an accidental profile, or a hat like hers, would restore her, and restore the suffering too, and I would long again, somehow, to encounter or to see her.
Alfred Hayes
Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?''That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.'I don't much care where -' said Alice.'Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.'- so long as I get SOMEWHERE,' Alice added as an explanation.'Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, 'if you only walk long enough.
Lewis Carroll
In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call 'photographs of people talking.' When we tell a story in cinema we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise. I always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.
Alfred Hitchcock
I let the happy times slip through my fingers and gripped on to the sad times as if they were my heart's desire
Charles Stross
My job takes up many daylight hours, it wakes me in the still of night and fills my head with ghosts and monsters but I love it, telling stories is what I was born to do.
Ken Scott
My mother had not acted for ten years. Not since a reviewer wrote that her portrayal of Lady Macbeth put him in mind of an exasperated society hostess burdened with unmannerly guests who had lost the new tennis balls, left the bathrooms in a mess, and finished the gin.
Victoria Clayton
In life we don't always get what we want; hopes and dreams get washed away so easily, hearts are broken, chances are missed, and we always seem to end up right back where we started.
Rebecah McManus
she is the only woman I've ever known who could make a man call.Ever
Sophie Kinsella
I held a brief debate with myself as to whether I should change my ordinary attire for something smarter. At last I concluded it would be a waste of labour. "Doubtless," though I, "she is some stiff old maid ; for though the daughter of Madame Reuter, she may well number upwards of forty winters; besides, if it were otherwise, if she be both young and pretty, I am not handsome, and no dressing can make me so, therefore I'll go as I am." And off I started, cursorily glancing sideways as I passed the toilet-table, surmounted by a looking-glass: a thin irregular face I saw, with sunk, dark eyes under a large, square forehead, complexion destitute of bloom or attraction; something young, but not youthful, no object to win a lady's love, no butt for the shafts of Cupid.
Charlotte Brontë
It pleased Aliena that they were all together: she and Jack and their children, and Jack's mother, and Aliena's brother, and Martha. It was quite like an ordinary family, and Aliena could almost forget that her father had died in a dungeon, and she was legally married to Jack's stepbrother, and Ellen was an outlaw, and—She shook her head. It was no use pretending this was a normal family.
Ken Follett
Now comes the hour to choose between being acceptable to others or being acceptable to one's own self, for we must kill our true selves off in order to survive.
Morrissey
And as for the vague something --- was it a sinister or a sorrowful, a designing or a desponding expression? --- that opened upon a careful observer, now and then, in his eye, and closed again before one could fathom the strange depth partially disclosed; that something which used to make me fear and shrink, as if I had been wandering amongst volcanic-looking hills, and had suddenly felt the ground quiver, and seen it gape: that something, I, at intervals, beheld still; and with throbbing heart, but not with palsied nerves. Instead of wishing to shun, I longed only to dare --- to divine it; and I thought Miss Ingram happy, because one day she might look into the abyss at her leisure, explore its secrets and analyse their nature.
Charlotte Brontë
It's alright to die cause death is the only thing you haven't tried
Ed Sheeran
For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? --some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did.
Virginia Woolf
She believes in love and romance. She believes her life is one day going to be transformed into something wonderful and exciting. She has hopes and fears and worries, just like anyone else. Sometimes she feels frightened." He pauses, and adds in a softer voice, "Sometimes she feels unloved. Sometimes she feels she will never gain approval from those people who are most important to her."s
Sophie Kinsella
I know how to use a fellytone now.
J.K. Rowling
For as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it’s true or not.
Neil Gaiman
Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.
Northcote Parkinson
For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.
George Eliot
The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.
Neil Gaiman
You can keep going on much less attention than you crave.
Idries Shah
Religion allows people to ignore the needs of real beings in favour of the supposed wishes ofa being that does not exist.
Alom Shaha
For forms of Government let fools contest. Whate'er is best administered is best.
Alexander Pope
Divorce is a game played by lawyers.
Cary Grant
I didn't wait to see her ship go off, because partings are stupid things and best got over quickly
Nevil Shute
Sometimes it is hard not to say, 'God forgive God.' Sometimes it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn't. He crucified Him.
C.S. Lewis
If the caged birds think whoever scattering grains for them that person is their deity,what should we Kurds call the person who will grantee us an independence.
Davan Yahya Khalil
[Alexander von Humboldt was the] greatest scientific traveller who ever lived.
Charles Darwin
If you didn't divide it up, carve things into categories, it was all one in the same anyway - waves and oceans, dawns and sunsets, noise and silence. Life was a single connected river that ran through mechanicals, people, animals, planets. Everything that ever was or would be, all mixed together in a soup of being; of shouting and jumping, moving and bumping. Echoes of the great creation.
Peter Bunzl
I am less interested in ghosts than in people who see ghosts.
Graham Joyce
How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years gotten enough to eat and escaped being eaten?
Logan Pearsall Smith
One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
Jane Austen