Quotes by British Authors - Page 57

Sometimes the anger directed at another is actually anger toward the self.
Sam Owen
Great ideas often have no reference points.We have nothing to compare them to. They are original, and awkward. And so they are the most vulnerable to people trying to kill them. They do not conform to what exists, so they challenge us.
David Hieatt
He remembered having said to his uncle (with a solemn dogmatism better befitting a much younger man): "Surely it is possible to love with the head as well as the heart." Mr. Delagardie had replied, somewhat drily: "No doubt; so long as you do not end by thinking with your entrails instead of your brain.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Public opinion a vulgar impertinent anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to be the average man.
Dean William R. Inge
Time travel is a terrifying weapon, far more powerful than anything ever before conceived,' he said grimly.'Mankind just isn't ready for that kind of knowledge. We're like children casually playing with an atom bomb.
Alex Scarrow
That kiss was amazing. Our lips were meant to meet and do wicked things to each other.
Nicky Fox
Calm sailing doesn't come from calm waters, it comes from having a good navigator; a good crew and a good vessel.
Anthony T.Hincks
I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.
Diane Setterfield
Harry witnessed Professor McGonagall walking right past Peeves who was determinedly loosening a crystal chandelier and could have sworn he heard her tell the poltergeist out of the corner of her mouth, 'It unscrews the other way.
J.K. Rowling
When we were alive, they told us that when we died we'd go to heaven. And they said that heaven was a place of joy and glory and we would spend eternity in the company of saints and angels praising the Almighty, in a state of bliss. That's what they said. And that's what led some of us to give our lives, and others to spend years in solitary prayer, while all the joy of life was going to waste around us and we never knew. Because the land of the dead isn't a place of reward or a place of punishment, it is a place of nothing. The good come here as well as the wicked, and all of us languish in this gloom forever, with no hope of freedom, or joy, or sleep, or rest, or peace. But now this child has come offering us a way out and I'm going to follow her. Even if it means oblivion, friends, I'll welcome it, because it won't be nothing. We'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glistening in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.
Philip Pullman
You think too much.''I suppose I do; but I can’t help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches--a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown.
Henry James
Personal truth differs from one person to the next, so how can truth itself be a constant? At least we can listen to each other in truth.
Jay Woodman
The English may not like music but they absolutely love the noise it makes.
Thomas Beecham
Elvish singing is not a thing to miss, in June under the stars, not if you care for such things.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Mum, your heart is the same size as your fist,’ she told me once in delight, and we both made our hands into fists and held them against our chests and bumped them together: hands as hearts.
Sanjida Kay
Do short people reach their full potential quicker?
Benny Bellamacina
Grown ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets.
Roald Dahl
Charlotte views her younger selves with a certain detachment. They are herself, but other incarnations, innocents going about half-forgotten business.
Penelope Lively
The IdealThis is where I came from.I passed this way.This should not be shameful Or hard to say.A self is a self. It is not a screen. A person should respectWhat he has been. This is my past Which I shall not discard. This is the ideal.This is hard.
James Fenton
I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
C.S. Lewis
The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.
Mike Russell
They say "doubt everything," but I disagree. Doubt is useful in small amounts, but too much of it leads to apathy and confusion. No, don't doubt everything. QUESTION everything. That's the real trick. Doubt is just a lack of certainty. If you doubt everything, you'll doubt evolution, science, faith, morality, even reality itself - and you'll end up with nothing, because doubt doesn't give anything back. But questions have answers, you see. If you question everything, you'll find that a lot of what we believe is untrue...but you might also discover that some things ARE true. You might discover what your own beliefs are. And then you'll question them again, and again, eliminating flaws, discovering lies, until you get as close to the truth as you can.Questioning is a lifelong process. That's precisely what makes it so unlike doubt. Questioning engages with reality, interrogating all it sees. Questioning leads to a constant assault on the intellectual status quo, where doubt is far more likely to lead to resigned acceptance. After all, when the possibility of truth is doubtful (excuse the pun), why not simply play along with the most convenient lie?Questioning is progress, but doubt is stagnation.
Tom Jubert / Jonas Kyratzes
Oh, Lizzy! do anything rather than marry without affection.
Jane Austen
Jack was too absorbed in his work to hear the bell. He was mesmerized by the challenge of making soft, round shapes of hard rock. The stone had a will of its own, and if he tried to make it do something it did not want to do, it would fight him, and his chisel would slip, or dig in too deeply, spoiling the shapes. But once he had got to know the lump of rock in front of him he could transform it. The more difficult the task, the more fascinated he was. He was beginning to feel that the decorative carving demanded by Tom was too easy. Zigzags, lozenges, dogtooth, spirals and plain roll moldings bored him, and even these leaves were rather stiff and repetitive. He wanted to curve natural-looking foliage, pliable and irregular, and copy the different shapes of real leaves, oak and ash and birch.
Ken Follett
Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
Alain de Botton
Beauty is seeing a flower bloom in a garden or in nature.Artificial is seeing that same flower try and grow in a vase of water.
Anthony T.Hincks
The kiss was so soft she couldn’t believe this was the same bad boy who’d said such things to her with that mouth.
Rebecca Brooks
Goals are the source of misery. An unattained goal causes pain, but actually achieving it brings only a brief satisfaction.
Matt Haig
My preferences range from the gutter-like to the idyllically sublime, ideally with you roaming the range beside me...
Virginia Alison
He was Caesar and Pope in one; but he was Pope without Pope's pretensions, Caesar without the legions of Caesar: without a standing army, without a bodyguard, without a palace, without a fixed revenue; if ever any man had the right to say that he ruled by the right divine, it was Mohammed, for he had all the power without its instruments and without its supports. He cared not for the dressings of power. The simplicity of his private life was in keeping with his public life."
R. Bosworth Smith
Depression isn't just being a bit sad. It's feeling nothing. It's not wanting to be alive anymore.
J.K. Rowling
We are in the process of finding out what filling the sky with hundreds of thousands of satellites does to all life on Earth.
Steven Magee
It has not been a successful life.''No -- it has only been a beautiful one.
Henry James
She waited with Billy Slick while Carrot went on the errand, and for something to say, she said, ‘Billy Slick doesn’t sound much like a goblin name?’ Billy made a face. ‘Too right! Granny calls me Of the Wind Regretfully Blown. What kind of name is that, I ask you? Who’s going to take you seriously with a name like that? This is modern times, right?’ He looked at her defiantly, and she thought: and so one at a time we all become human – human werewolves, human dwarfs, human trolls... the melting pot melts in one direction only, and so we make progress.
Terry Pratchett
If there is no fate and our interactions depend on such a complex system of chance encounters, what potentially important connections do we fail to make? What life changing relationships or passionate and lasting love affairs are lost to chance?
Simon Pegg
It is better to believe in men too rashly, and regret, than believe too meanly. Men could be more than they are, if they would try for it. He has shown them that.
Mary Renault
Thus education forms the common mind Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.
Alexander Pope
Writers should be read - but neither seen nor heard.
Daphne du Maurier
You know there is a thin line between love and hate. Maybe you loved me and didn't realise
Kirsty Moseley
The readiest way which God takes to draw a man to himself is, to afflict him in that he loves most, and with good reason; and to cause this affliction to arise from some good action done with a single eye; because nothing can more clearly show him the emptiness of what is most lovely and desirable in all the world.
John Wesley
Like my girlfriend Denisha is always saying (she’s an Episcopalian), some of Jesus’ best friends were sex workers.
Sarah Lotz
I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.
Richard Dawkins
Hey, look — Harry’s got a Weasley sweater, too!”Fred and George were wearing blue sweaters, one with a large yellow F on it, the other a G.“Harry’s is better than ours, though,” said Fred, holding up Harry’s sweater. “She obviously makes more of an effort if you’re not family.
J.K. Rowling
Goals are only ever a guide; a winding, changing path. It's your heart that will really keep you on tack... and nourished along the way.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Earlier fundamental work of Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Whorf, etc., as well as my own attempt to use this earlier thinking as an epistemological base for psychiatric theory, led to a series of generalizations: That human verbal communication can operate and always does operate at many contrasting levels of abstraction. These range in two directions from the seemingly simple denotative level (“The cat is on the mat”). One range or set of these more abstract levels includes those explicit or implicit messages where the subject of discourse is the language. We will call these metalinguistic (for example, “The verbal sound ‘cat’ stands for any member of such and such class of objects”, or “The word, ‘cat’ has no fur and cannot scratch”). The other set of levels of abstraction we will call metacommunicative (e.g., “My telling you where to find the cat was friendly”, or “This is play”). In these, the subject of discourse is the relationship between the speakers. It will be noted that the vast majority of both metalinguistic and metacommunicative messages remain implicit; and also that, especially in the psychiatric interview, there occurs a further class of implicit messages about how metacommunicative messages of friendship and hostility are to be interpreted.
Gregory Bateson
Plato's proposals in this matter are abhorrent to all true Christians. His intentions were, of course, excellent, for he desired the greatest possible improvement of the human race; but his good intentions led him to the proposal of measures which are necessarily unacceptable and repugnant to all those who adhere to Christian principles concerning the value of the human personality and the sanctity of human life. Moreover, it by no means follows that what has been found successful in the breeding of animals, will also prove successful when applied to the human race, for man has a rational soul which is not intrinsically dependent on matter but is directly created by Almighty God. Does a beautiful soul always go with a beautiful body or a good character with a strong body? Again, if such measures were successful — and what does "successful" mean in this connection? — in the case of the human race, it does not follow that the Government has the right to apply such measures. Those who to-day follow, or would like to follow, in the footsteps of Plato, advocating, e.g. compulsory sterilisation of the unfit, have not, be it remembered, Plato's excuse, that he lied at a period anterior to the presentation of the Christian ideals and principles. — 230
Frederick Charles Copleston
The ugliest of trades have their moments of pleasure. Now if I was a grave digger or even a hangman there are some people I could work for with a great deal of enjoyment.
Douglas Jerrold
What you intuitively desire that is possible to you.
D.H. Lawrence
And they held on tight to that beautiful silent moment before words transported them to the realm of the ordinary, to the realm of the inarticulate and mundane.
Sarah Winman
The longer I don't write, the more I hurt.
Naomi Wood
However benevolent men may be in their intentions, they cannot know what women want and what suits the necessities of women's lives as well as women know these things themselves.
Millicent Garrett Fawcett
Death is, in fact, oddly pleasant, and certainly an improvement on what comes immediately before it.
E.A.A. Wilson
The sun moon and stars would have disappeared long ago had they been within the reach of predatory human hands.
Havelock Ellis
Pamela produced placid babies. "They don't tend to turn feral until they're two," she said.
Kate Atkinson
For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.
Diane Setterfield
Particularly nauseous were the blank expressionless faces of people in trains and omnibuses; they seemed no more my fellow-creatures than dead bodies would be, so that I did not dare to travel unless I was assured of being alone.
H.G.Wells
History has rewritten itself so many times I'm not really sure how it was to begin with -- it's a bit like trying to guess the original color of a wall when it's been repainted eight times.
Jasper Fforde
He was a shadow of the man that once intimidated us out of our home, a shell of a human being, a fragment of a father.
David Louden
We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face. London is religions opportunity--not the decorous religion of theologians, but an anthropomorphic, crude. Yes, the continuous flow would be tolerable if a man of our own sort--not anyone pompous or tearful--were caring for us up in the sky.
E.M. Forster
Most kids grow up leaving something out for Santa at Christmas time when he comes down the chimney. I used to make presents for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Jeanette Winterson