Quotes by British Authors - Page 575

Faith is the divine evidence whereby the spiritual man discerneth God and the things of God.
John Wesley
There are two kinds of writing the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.
Jeanette Winterson
I had him in my cab once.Who? Neville askedRupert Brooke. He was good, him. "There's some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England".That would be the bit with my nose under it; just fucking drive, will you?
Pat Barker
A student was given a mentoring opportunity, "in the hope that when you had somebody to lean on you, you would begin to stand a little steadier yourself, and get manliness and thoughtfulness.
Thomas Hughes
I wish we lived in a world where we'd be able to survive off our talents not money
Jill Telford
Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things—like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale. One night in Hiroshima it occurred to me that the moon behind a certain cloud formation looked very like a painkiller dissolving in a glass of water. I didn’t work toward that simile, it was simply there: I was mugged, as it were, by the similarity between these two very different things. Literary composition can be a similar process. The writer’s real world and the writer’s fictional world are compared, and these comparisons turned into text. But other times literary composition can be a plain old slog, and nothing to do with zones or inspiration. It’s world making and the peopling of those worlds, complete with time lines and heartache.
David Mitchell
Conflict makes people feel alive.
H.W. Vivian
It seems perverse that we can be more social than anyone would have thought possible when we are at our most anti-social, locked away from the world and silently staring at a computer screen, but that, as psychologists will tell you is the way we operate. When we are at the maximum of our disconnect we also are ready to connect and feel the need for interaction.
David Amerland
My heart was still beating, I was still breathing, but was living something more?
Molly Looby
Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain.
Thomas Henry Huxley
The graces are restless today. They pweet and muss, shuddering their wings so that the feathers stick out at defensive angles. I feel that restlessness too. When the sea is fractious like this – when it chutters and schwaks against the moorings, when it won't talk but only mumbles – it's difficult to think.
Kirsty Logan
Newspapers are the world's mirrors.
James Ellis
I tried always to do better: saw always a little further. I tried to stretch myself.
Audrey Hepburn
What is freedom? It consists in two things: to know each his own limitations and accept them – that is the same thing as to know oneself, and accept oneself as one is, without fear, or envy, or distaste; and to recognise and accept the conditions under which one lives, also without fear or envy, or distaste. When you do this, you shall be free.
Ann Bridge
The real difficulty about volcanism is not to see how it can start, but how it can stop.
Harold Jeffreys
Young people: They care. They know that this is the world that they're going to grow up in, that they're going to spend the rest of their lives in. But, I think it's more idealistic than that. They actually believe that humanity, human species, has no right to destroy and despoil regardless.
David Attenborough
Late-Flowering LustMy head is bald, my breath is bad,Unshaven is my chin,I have not now the joys I hadWhen I was young in sin.I run my fingers down your dressWith brandy-certain aimAnd you respond to my caressAnd maybe feel the same.But I've a picture of my ownOn this reunion night,Wherein two skeletons are shewnTo hold each other tight;Dark sockets look on emptinessWhich once was loving-eyed,The mouth that opens for a kissHas got no tongue inside.I cling to you inflamed with fearAs now you cling to me,I feel how frail you are my dearAnd wonder what will be--A week? or twenty years remain?And then--what kind of death?A losing fight with frightful painOr a gasping fight for breath?Too long we let our bodies cling,We cannot hide disgustAt all the thoughts that in us springFrom this late-flowering lust.
John Betjeman
Long ago the signalling had become no more than a meaningless ritual, now maintained by an animal which had forgotten to learn and a robot which had never known to forget.
Arthur C. Clarke
That’s the moon,’ I said.‘Gran likes it like that,’ said Lettie Hempstock.‘But it was a crescent moon yesterday. And now it’s full. And it was raining. It is raining. But now it’s not.’‘Gran likes the full moon to shine on this side of the house. She says it’s restful, and it reminds her of when she was a girl,’ said Lettie. ‘And you don’t trip on the stairs.
Neil Gaiman
At this period, too, Leningraders resorted to their most desperate food substitutes, scraping dried glue from the underside of wallpaper and boiling up shoes and belts. (Tannery processes had changed, they discovered, since the days of Amundsen and Nansen, and the leather remained tough and inedible.)
Anna Reid
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
Rudyard Kipling
What are we all chasing? Nella wonders. To live, of course. To be unbound from the invisible ropes that Johannes spoke of in his study. Or to be happy in them, at least.
Jessie Burton
I live in the crowds of jollity not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself.
Samuel Johnson
Joe is never sure whether they're mad or just alarmingly and uncompromisingly incapable of self-delusion.
Nick Harkaway
Careful evaluation of information that is portrayed as fact is critical.
Steven Redhead
Yes, it made sense, and was so absurdly simple that it would take a genius to think of it. And, perhaps, someone who did not expect to do it himself.
Arthur C. Clarke
We are all born for love ... It is the principle of existence and its only end.
Benjamin Disraeli
Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.
Lewis Carroll
History is the devil's scripture.
Lord Byron
Thy faith never looks so grand in summer weather as it does in winter?
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Ever hear of the phrase, Banging you're head on a brick wall?"Ah, but you forget, Darren, vampires can break brick walls with their heads.
Darren Shan
We are our own worst enemy.
Una McCormack
It has been raining here for ten years.I keep an accurate record of time and can state this with no fear of contradiction.
Alastair Bruce
We are all 'right' if we are being truly ourselves.... that is the best we can be in each moment, until we learn more...
Jay Woodman
The main character, Gene Moore, is shown how much of his identity is wrapped up in his career and potential in that career. When he comes home from war no longer able to see himself as a baseball prospect, he isn't sure who he is. This is thoroughly reinforced every time one of his acquaintances identifies him by baseball or inquires about his status. How much of our identity and worth is wrapped up in our job title or the one we are aspiring to?
Gary Moore
The beauty of artifacts is in how they reassure us we’renot the first to die.
Simon Van Booy
There's a great power of imagination about these little creatures, and a creative fancy and belief that is very curious to watch . . . I am sure that horrid matter-of-fact child-rearers . . . do away with the child's most beautiful privilege. I am determined that Anny shall have a very extensive and instructive store of learning in Tom Thumbs, Jack-the-Giant-Killers, etc.
William Makepeace Thackeray
I can discover within me no power of perception which is not glutted with its proper pleasure, yet I do not feel myself delighted. Man has surely some latent sense for which this place affords no gratification, or he has some desires distinct from sense which must be satisfied before he can be happy.
Samuel Johnson
Life has the habit of throwing curve balls to determine if you are paying attention.
Steven Redhead
Woman is the opposite, the ‘other’ of man: she is non-man, defective man, assigned a chiefly negative value in relation to the male first principle. But equally man is what he is only by virtue of ceaselessly shutting out this other or opposite, defining himself in antithesis to it, and his whole identity is therefore caught up and put at risk in the very gesture by which he seeks to assert his unique, autonomous existence. Woman is not just an other in the sense of something beyond his ken, but an other intimately related to him as the image of what he is not, and therefore as an essential reminder of what he is. Man therefore needs this other even as he spurns it, is constrained to give a positive identity to what he regards as no-thing. Not only is his own being parasitically dependent upon the woman, and upon the act of excluding and subordinating her, but one reason why such exclusion is necessary is because she may not be quite so other after all. Perhaps she stands as a sign of something in man himself which he needs to repress, expel beyond his own being, relegate to a securely alien region beyond his own definitive limits. Perhaps what is outside is also somehow inside, what is alien also intimate — so that man needs to police the absolute frontier between the two realms as vigilantly as he does just because it may always be transgressed, has always been transgressed already, and is much less absolute than it appears.
Terry Eagleton
It’s most unfair. Once people find out you’re a vampire they act as if you’re some kind of monster.
Terry Pratchett
Beyond all of those places, here they would be. He pressed tighter into Fen's embrace. This place had forever in it. Time couldn't end it, nor even the limits of life. Not distance—not even the wastes of the wild North Sea.
Harper Fox
If you're going through hell, keep going.
Winston S. Churchill
He could not put down a word without suspecting that it might be the wrong one and that if he held back for another day the intermediate experience would provide the right one. There was no end to that, and Moon fearfully glimpsed himself as a pure writer who after a lifetime of absolutely no output whatsoever, would prepare on his deathbed the single sentence which was the distillation of everything he had saved up, and die before he was able to utter it.
Tom Stoppard
It’s amazing to me that it’s still considered a notable, commendable trait –‘Oh, she’s a well-known feminist’ –in a woman, or a girl, or a man, or a boy. That that is the unusual thing. Really, it should be the reverse. Rather than what seems like a minority having to spend time, energy, brain and heart explaining why they’re ‘into’ equality, the majority should be explaining why they’re not. You put the time into explaining why –in a world where every concept of justice, wisdom, progress and rightness is a human invention –we still prefer the human concept of ‘some people being inferior to others’ over ‘this is a vast, inky, cold, empty universe, and in it, we are the only humans that exist, all sharing a tiny milky green/ blue world, and faced with a multitude of problems, and an infinite capacity for joy, and should therefore try and stick together and accord each other some respect’.
Caitlin Moran
The persons whom you cannot care for in a novel, because they are so bad, are the very same that you so dearly love in your life, because they are so good.
Anthony Trollope
In passing, also, I would like to say that the first time Adam had a chance he laid the blame on a woman.
Nancy Astor the Viscountess Astor
Time waits for no man"That is what they say.That is why our time spent together,is so special in so, so many ways.
Anthony T.Hincks
Humility is the only defence against vanity
Steven Aitchison
Black as night, sweet as sin.
Neil Gaiman
It would be better to be deceived a hundred times than to live a life of suspicion.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
Zadie Smith
The library refused many downloads, of course, but I succeeded with two Optimists translated from the Late English, Orwell and Huxley;
David Mitchell
No, the events which I am about to describe were simply too monstrous, too shocking to appear in print. They still are. It is no exaggeration to suggest that they would tear apart the entire fabric of society and, particularly at a time of war, this is something I cannot risk.
Anthony Horowitz
Ultimately, the purpose of magic is to free our potential, not bind us to ideas.
Philip Carr-Gomm
The truth is, it's not the act that I'm scared of, but giving myself so entirely to someone. As long as there are lines to draw and boundaries to cling to, I can pretend that I'm safe from the wanting that threatens to consume me. I'm separate, still all my own. But after...What then? What comes after, when he has that much of me, to do with as he chooses? When I have him. Will it ever be enough?
Abigail Haas
And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, in dimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.
Pico Iyer
If you don't want me to attend the patient I'll go.''But she can't see a doctor now.''Why not?''She isn't well.
P.G. Wodehouse
Economists often talk about the 80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the “work” will be done by 20 percent of the participants. In most societies, 20 percent of criminals commit 80 percent of crimes. Twenty percent of motorists cause 80 percent of all accidents. Twenty percent of beer drinkers drink 80 percent of all beer. When it comes to epidemics, though, this disproportionality becomes even more extreme: a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work.
Malcolm Gladwell
There is a neat economic explanation for the sexual division of labour in hunter-gatherers. In terms of nutrition, women generally collect dependable, staple carbohydrates whereas men fetch precious protein. Combine the two – predictable calories from women and occasional protein from men – and you get the best of both worlds. At the cost of some extra work, women get to eat some good protein without having to chase it; men get to know where the next meal is coming from if they fail to kill a deer. That very fact makes it easier for them to spend more time chasing deer and so makes it more likely they will catch one. Everybody gains – gains from trade. It is as if the species now has two brains and two stores of knowledge instead of one – a brain that learns about hunting and a brain that learns about gathering.
Matt Ridley