Quotes by British Authors - Page 573

The stars are far brighterThan gems without measure,The moon is far whiterThan silver in treasure;The fire is more shiningOn hearth in the gloamingThan gold won by mining,So why go a-roaming?
J.R.R. Tolkien
Think of the future, she whispers. Jumbled images in primary colours. White and red swastika flags waving in the wind; gleaming rockets flying into the air; skyscrapers rise above the Danube, the Thames, the Volga and the Rhine, blond children play under a bright African sun, their uniforms ironed to perfection by their servant-slaves nearby, modern women work at factories assembling Volkswagens, in the mountains in a wood cabin Maria and Erich and their three children go on a skiing holiday, laughing, holding hands…
Lavie Tidhar
There was a hell for blasphemers. There was a hell for disputers of rightful authority. There were a number of hells for liars. There was probably a hell for little boys who wished their grandmothers were dead. There were more than enough hells to go around.
Terry Pratchett
People always kill Caesar. Don't trust anyone.
Dick Francis
Is then no nook of English ground secureFrom rash assault?
William Wordsworth
I am no novel-reader -- I seldom look into novels -- Do not imagine that I often read novels -- It is really very well for a novel." Such is the common cant. "And what are you reading, Miss -- ?" "Oh! It is only a novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
Jane Austen
Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life and to do it rightly is an art like any other.
Freya Stark
Everyone living is doomed
Taylor Caldwell
He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan-a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society.
Thomas Hardy
The key is putting into practice what God has taught you through His Word.
Elizabeth George
There are orphanages," he exclaimed to himself, "for children who have lost their parents--oh! why, why, why, are there no harbours of refuge for grown men who have not yet lost them?
Samuel Butler
I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.
Aldous Huxley
It’s not really my fault. The problem is that my mouth just comes out with these things. And you can’t blame me for what my mouth does, can you? Curse this mouth. Do you think it might be possessed?'The Pirate Captain looked in the mirror and made his mouth into a series of shapes he thought looked demonic.
Gideon Defoe
I'm a strong opponent of all religious belief.(Conversations pg 96)
J.G. Ballard
Yes, you're right. It's part of growing up, I suppose. You always have to leave something behind you.
Neil Gaiman
We were all serious readers, sitting on wooden chairs at rows of lecterns, turning the pages, united in mutual love of isolation.
Michael Moorcock
The whole point about corruption in politics is that it can't be done, or done properly, without a bipartisan consensus.
Christopher Hitchens
Most people have some appreciation of mathematics, just as most people can enjoy a pleasant tune; and there are probably more people really interested in mathematics than in music. Appearances suggest the contrary, but there are easy explanations. Music can be used to stimulate mass emotion, while mathematics cannot; and musical incapacity is recognized (no doubt rightly) as mildly discreditable, whereas most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity
G H Hardy
Waiting from heaven for the spark to fall.
Matthew Arnold
You must promise me. You can't desire the end without desiring the means.'Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.
Graham Greene
In fact,' said Poirot, 'she stabbed him in the dark, not realising that he was dead already, but somehow deduced that he had a watch in his pyjama pocket, took it out, put back the hands blindly and gave it the requisite dent.
Agatha Christie
Hey Jude, don't make it bad, take a sad song and make it better.
The Beatles
Nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas.
J.K. Rowling
All the rest is silenceOn the other side of the wall;And the silence ripeness,And the ripeness all.
W.H. Auden
He loved words, and he would admit that he was playing with them all the time. He was obsessive about the rhythm of the sentence, and would add a word, subtract a word. [about Truman Capote]
Deborah Kerr
It has been known for many years that a subset of the population cannot tolerate the radiation emitted by transmitting utility meters and sickness results in these people.
Steven Magee
If you want to be lied to, all you have to do is believe everything that the government tells you.
Steven Magee
So many come to the sickroom thinking of themselves as men of science fighting disease and not as healers with a little knowledge helping nature to get a sick man well.
Sir Auckland Geddes
Writing is a team sport.
Chris White
Oh, once you’ve been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn’t want you back.” Veronica settled herself in a rattan chair and adjusted her hat just so. “We—by whom I mean anyone over sixty—commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman’s memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight.
David Mitchell
Intensely selfish people are always very decided as to what they wish. They do not waste their energies in considering the good of others.
Ouida
Reality is symbolic. We build it using only the 26 symbols of the alphabet alongside images that speak to us on a linguistic level built from the 26 symbols of the alphabet.
Dean Cavanagh
Seen from that future time, when every commodity the human mind could imagine would flow from the industrial horn of plenty in dizzy abundance, this would seem a scanty, shoddy, cramped moment indeed, choked with shadows, redeemed only by what it caused to be created.Seen from plenty, now would be hard to imagine. It would seem not quite real, an absurd time when, for no apparent reason, human beings went without things easily within the power of humanity to supply and lives did not flower as it was obvious they could.
Francis Spufford
Since he died some of the colours have disappeared. I have lost the violet of seeing him, the indigo of touching him, the blue of talking to him and the green of smelling him. But I can still see some of his colours. I still have the red of the feelings in my heart, the orange of his possessions, and the yellow of our memories.Which is why it feels so confusing. He is gone, but not entirely. The white light is no longer with me, but a few of his colours remain; vibrant, illuminating. Sometimes I lose sight even of these colours. I search in the shadows, hungry for another glimpse, desperate that I may have lost them forever. This is my darkness.
Thomas Harding
People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.
Neil Gaiman
Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies. And they say that love is greatest thing, they persist in saying this, the foul liars, and just look at what they do (...It's a lie to say that love is greatest, what people want is hate - hate, and nothing but hate. And in the name of righteousness and love they get it...If we want hate, let us have it - death, murder, torture, violent destruction- let us have it: but not in the name of love.
D.H. Lawrence
It's not a case of the glass being half full or half empty; more that we tipped a whole half-pint into an empty pint pot. I had to see how much was there, though, and now I know.
Nick Hornby
Each time I see a beautiful sunset or sunrise, I have to pinch myself because I can't believe that I'm awake and not dreaming.
Anthony T.Hincks
When I have been unhappy I have heard an opera ... and it seemed the shrieking of winds when I am happy a sparrow's chirp is delicious to me. But it is not the chirp that makes me happy but I that make it sweet.
John Ruskin
Be strong within ones self, but never forget where ones true strength comes from.
Jean Williams
No doubt the female self and the male self can be as useful as any other social identity in the right circumstances. But flexible, context-sensitive, and useful is not the same as “hardwired”.
Cordelia Fine
Among the values of meditation is that it carries consciousness down to a deeper level, thus letting man live from his centre, not his surface alone. The result is that the physical sense-reactions do not dominate his outlook wholly, as they do an animal's. Mind begins to rule them. This leads more and more to self-control, self-knowledge, and self-pacification.
Paul Brunton
I had come down here, not to serve God as a craftsman should, but to show my people how great a craftsman I was. They cared not.
Rudyard Kipling
Am I about to discover where you, Ron, and Hermione disappeared to while you were supposed to be in the back room of Fred and George's shop?''How did you...?''Harry, please. You're talking to the man who raised Fred and George.
J.K. Rowling
The fact that ‘attention seeking’ is still considered a slur says much about the role of women in public life, on every scale.
Laurie Penny
Some men you stick to right off. But it's those that take time to stick that stick longest.
Joe Abercrombie
Art is the expression of appreciation of beauty real or imagined. It's also an examination of what it means to be alive with all its varied things, emotions, and experiences. We are forever trying to explain ourselves to the world or the world to ourselves.
Jay Woodman
Surrender to your fear so you may triumph over it.Choose me,open you soul to me, and embrace the Devouring.
Simon Holt
There are three reasons why men of genius have long hair. One is, that they forget it is growing. The second is, that they like it. The third is, that it comes cheaper; they wear it long for the same reason they wear their hats long.
Israel Zangwill
The trouble with forgiveness is that some people don't want to be forgiven.
Graham Joyce
Two things form the bedrock of any open society — freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free cou
Salman Rushdie
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?
Tom Stoppard
James gave the huffle of a snail in danger. And nobody heard him at all.
A.A. Milne
If you were an atheist, Birbal," the Emperor challenged his first minister, "what would you say to the true believers of all the great religions of the world?" Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Trivikrampur, but he answered unhesitatingly, "I would say to them that in my opinion they were all atheists as well; I merely believe in one god less than each of them." "How so?" the Emperor asked. "All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own," said Birbal. "And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in
Salman Rushdie
She wondered how she would feel to be a married woman. It would be the end of her life, she decided, if life was a time of choices.
Neil Gaiman
In [the] early days, Muslims did not see Islam as a new, exclusive religion but as a continuation of the primordial faith of the ‘People of the Book’, the Jews and Christians. In one remarkable passage, God insists that Muslims must accept indiscriminately the revelations of every single one of God’s messengers: Abraham, Isaac, Ishamel, Jacob, Moses, Jesus and all the other prophets. The Qur’an is simply a ‘confirmation’ of the previous scriptures. Nobody must be forced to accept Islam, because each of the revealed traditions had its own din; it was not God’s will that all human beings should belong to the same faith community. God was not the exclusive property of any one tradition; the divine light could not be confined to a single lamp, belonged neither to the East or to the West, but enlightened all human beings. Muslims must speak courteously to the People of the Book, debate with them only in ‘the most kindly manner’, remember that they worshipped the same God, and not engage in pointless, aggressive disputes.
Karen Armstrong
The beautiful illusion of fiction is that everything makes sense and that there was a purpose, that there was a point to it all. And that's the best possible lie because it may even be true.
Neil Gaiman
The world is too much with us; late and soon,Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;Little we see in Nature that is ours;We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,The winds that will be howling at all hours,And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,For this, for everything, we are out of tune;It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather beA Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
William Wordsworth
The drama's laws the drama's patrons give. For we that live to please must please to live.
Samuel Johnson
Books to read. Bitches to push out of the door.
Barbara Elsborg