Quotes by British Authors - Page 574

Marriage is called all sorts of things, a haven, and a refuge, and a crowning glory, and a state of bondage, and lots more. But do you know what I think it is?''What?''A sport!''And a damned good sport too,' said Tommy.
Agatha Christie
William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was: "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.
Bertrand Russell
Autumn is the time of balance and ofsacrifice, a time when the light is defeated by darkness, a timewhen night takes over and brings the coming winter. Theancient wisdom says that those who long for light must facetheir inner darkness and overcome it.
Tony Riches
The human heartIs unknowable.But in my birthplaceThe flowers still smellThe same as always.
Rumer Godden
I have really sinned. I am going to pause now, and sit here on the mound repenting in deepest shame...
Dodie Smith
Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens,When I have no engagements written on my block,When no one comes to disturb my inward peace,When no one comes to take me away from myselfAnd turn me into a patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle,A broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection,Being so contrived that it takes too long a timeTo get myself back to myself when they have gone.
Vita Sackville-West
God bless us every one.
Charles Dickens
As I went through all these experiences, I began to compile a list that wasn't written down in any book, only inscribed in my soul. To me these were as universal, dependable, and invariable as the laws of nature. Together they constituted The Forty Rules of the Religion of Love, which could be attained through love and love only.
Elif Shafak
Wonder begets culture, which begets yet more wonder, and the end of wonder is wisdom, which is the state of perpetual wonder.
Neel Burton
...there ain't no journey what don't change you some.
David Mitchell
Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.
George Orwell
Honor is kind of what you get when you weaponize manners ...
Jasper Fforde
You're mind is working at its best when you're being paranoid.You explore every avenue and possibility of your situationat high speed with total clarity.
Banksy
I have this dream that secretly all teenage girls feel exactly like me. And maybe one day, when we all realize that we all feel the same, we can all stop pretending to be something we're not.
Zoe Sugg
If you would be powerful pretend to be powerful.
Home Tooke
My personal theory is that he has a very firm grasp upon reality, it's simply not a reality the rest of us have ever met before.
Terry Pratchett
We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet,
Stephen Hawking
When they have something to hide, they put it in the F.O.I. cabinet.
Anthony T.Hincks
The past is the best prophet of the future.
Lord Byron
Were I to fall in love, indeed, it would be a different thing! but I have never been in love; it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall. And, without love, I am sure I should be a fool to change such a situation as mine.
Jane Austen
But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned. There was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not. Obviously the existence or otherwise of a future life must be of the very first importance to somebody who is going to live her present one, because her manner of living it must hinge on the problem. There was a time when Free Love versus Catholic Morality was a question of as much importance to our hot bodies as if a pistol had been clapped to our heads.Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves.
T.H. White
How do you...? What is it you're doing?" he said to Vardy as the man took a breath, mid-insight. What do you call that? Billy thought. That reconstitutitive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothings first patterns, then correspondence, then causality and dissident sense.Vardy even smiled. "Paranoid," he said. "Theology.
China Miéville
Did you really cease to love a person because you had been treated cruelly?
W Somerset Maugham
They made for his noise far quicker than he had expected. They were frightfully angry. Quite apart from the stones no spider has ever like being called Attercop, and Tomnoddy of course, is insulting to anybody.
J.R.R. Tolkien
One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it’s left behind.
Charles Dickens
Walk straight aheadListen to no oneTrust not in the walls or doorwaysFor they will misleadAnd close behind youAs you walk through The forest, not knowingWhere you’ve come fromOr where you’re going …If anywhere at all.
Renée Paule
Connie felt again the tightness, niggardliness of the men of her generation. They were so tight, so scared of life!
D.H. Lawrence
Tolkien, who created this marvellous vehicle, doesn't go anywhere in it. He just sits where he is. What I mean by that is that he always seems to be looking backwards, to a greater and more golden past; and what's more he doesn't allow girls or women any important part in the story at all. Life is bigger and more interesting than The Lord of the Rings thinks it is.
Philip Pullman
It is hard to be angry when one has seen the sun rise,' she said.It seems to be true,' he admitted. 'I wonder why.'Because it makes one feel so small and insignificant. It has been rising forever and will rise forever no matter what we do or do not do. All our problems are as nothing to the sun.
David Gemmell
Just be you. That's the best advice I can give. There are seven billion people in this world and there is no one like you.
Ed Sheeran
Like many men who experience fatherhood relatively late in life, Martin Luther was a devoted parent. Luther wrote his children letters of touching intensity, patiently converting the joys of the Christian life into a language of storytelling fit for the very young. A home with children brought out the best in Luther in a way that theological disputation patently did not.
Andrew Pettegree
He really just wanted to blurt out, ‘My Grandma’s dead’, but he knew that when it came to it, the words would stick like pebbles in his throat.
Helen Laycock
Time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.
Sir William Blackstone
The more choices we have, the greater the need for focus.
Tom Butler-Bowdon
Answering the question 'How would you like to smell?' by saying 'I'd rather I didn't' is also no longer acceptable. It's not playing the game. Men are expected to put some cash into the cosmetic pot too - it's seen as almost un-feminist not to. What a uniquely capitalist response to that gender inequality: women have been forced by convention for generations - millennia - to spend money on expensive clothes and agonising shoes, to daub themselves with reality-concealing slap, to smell expensively inhuman, to self-mutilate in pursuit of eternal youth; and this, quite rightly, has come to be deemed unfair. But how do we end this hell? We make men do it too. Well done everyone.
David Mitchell
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the land question in Zimbabwe is the single most decisive one.
Christopher Hitchens
And Yarvi realized that Death does not bow to each person who passes her, does not sweep out her arm respectfully to show the way, speaks no profound words, unlocks no bolts. The key upon her chest is never needed, for the Last Door stands always open. She herds the dead through impatiently, needles of rank or fame or quality. She has an ever-lengthening queue to get through. A blind procession, inexhaustible.
Joe Abercrombie
There is, of course, this to be said for the Omnibus Book in general and this one in particular. When you buy it, you have got something. The bulk of this volume makes it almost the ideal paper-weight. The number of its pages assures its posessor of plenty of shaving paper on his vacation. Place upon the waistline and jerked up and down each morning, it will reduce embonpoint and strengthen the abdominal muscles. And those still at their public school will find that between, say, Caesar's Commentaries in limp cloth and this Jeeves book there is no comparison as a missile in an inter-study brawl.
P.G. Wodehouse
Politics unfortunately abounds in shams that must be treated reverentially for every politician who would succeed. If you are the sort of man whose stomach revolts against treating shams reverentially, you will be well advised to stay out of politics altogether and set up as a prophet; your prophecies may perhaps sow good seed for some future harvest. But as a politician you would be impotent. For at any given time the bulk of your countrymen believe firmly and devoutly, not only in various things that are worthy of belief, but also in illusions of one kind and another; and they will never submit to have their affairs managed for them by one who appears not to share in their credulity.
F. S. Oliver
I do not expect old heads on young shoulders.
C.S. Lewis
For one crazy moment he had the notion of a vanished tribe of librarians, lost in the deep underground caverns of the Bodleian, a wild and savage tribe that fed on unwary travellers.
Lavie Tidhar
Earth is crammed with heaven, and every bush is aflame with the glory of God. But only those who see take of their shoes; the rest just pick the berries.
Elizabeth Browning
I don’t want to see landscapes, i.e. scenic paintings of them, because I don’t want to see the original realities – as optical effects that is. I want to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the expression of what are sometimes called abstract imaginings. The ‘simply natural’ is interesting no longer.
Thomas Hardy
One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Doughlas Adams
Harry was left to ponder in silence the depths to which girls would sink to get revenge.
J.K. Rowling
Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.
George Orwell
It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.
D.H. Lawrence
We want to change from featureless caterpillars to become beautiful butterflies, and the change takes place wrapped up in our own little cocoons.
Roy Smoothe
I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.
Thomas Henry Huxley
In the quantum multiverse all eventualities are possible. Which means, paradoxically, that all eventualities are inevitable. They have also quite possibly already happened. Make of that what you will, not that your will has much to do with it. Because here's the thing. If you believe that consciousness is an accumulation of memory; if you believe that you often know what's going to occur either through some animal instict or a human subscription to fate, then you are a walking and talking embodiment of everything happening all at once.
Emma Jane Unsworth
See," he said, "the arrow struck against this. It is the kiss I gave her. It has saved her life.
J.M. Barrie
Men were foolish and were made only so that they should die, while mountains and rivers went on for ever and did not notice the passing of time.
Roald Dahl
The truth can be very sharp. But it makes a cleaner wound than lies. It will not fester
Anne Perry
Of all the skills necessary for her work, what she was perhaps worst at was being polite to inanimate things.
China Miéville
You shouldn't be wasting your time worrying about what's going to happen after you die. It's pointless. Think about what's happening now. In your life. That's what's important. So change the subject, will you?
Clare Furniss
If you are going to walk with Jesus Christ, you are going to be opposed.... In our days, to be a true Christian is really to become a scandal.
George Whitefield
She’s wonderful. Tell her I’ve never seen such beautiful hands. I wonder what she sees in you.”Waddington, smiling, translated the question.“She says I’m good.”“As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue,” Kitty mocked.
W Somerset Maugham
HC: You think I shall differently tomorrow? [about suicide]J: People do.HC: Yes, perhaps. If you're doing things in a mood of hot despair. But when it's cold despair, it's different. I've nothing to live for, you see.~Hilary Craven; Jessop
Agatha Christie
My journey was not over, it was just beginning.
Aubrey Moore
A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.
Will Self