Quotes by British Authors - Page 576

As a runner, you have to face the truth about yourself on a regular basis, and it makes you more honest. You can't pretend to be faster than you are. You can't pretend that you are better prepared than you are. You cannot pretend to be a runner, you actually have to run.
John Bingham
Because, visible through the slashed covers, the bone-deep wounds that crisscross the couple’s bodies pump blood. Some of the flaps of skin resulting from glancing blows are like gills, breathing. Yet even as the cries die away, he carries on.
Mark Kirkbride
The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-book.", 3 October 1892)
A.E. Housman
It may be that the Chronicles of Narnia may outlive The Allegory of Love, and Perelandra outlive them both. Few works of learning and criticism survive a hundred years; what it was learned to know in 1950 will be expected of scholarship-candidates in 2000; new things will be discovered, old notions disproved, other critical values asserted; but a piece of genuine imagination in fiction may have a long life.
Jocelyn Gibb
Denys (Finch-Hatton) has been written about before and he will be written about again. If someone has not already said it, someone will say that he was a great man who never achieved greatness, and this will not only be trite, but wrong; he was a great man who never achieved arrogance.
Beryl Markham
Never look in the mirror when your stressed it’s contagious
Benny Bellamacina
One of them says, 'Why did they do it?'And the other answers, 'Because they could.'That is the only answer there ever is.
Naomi Alderman
And the wind shall say: 'Here were decent Godless people:Their only monument the asphalt roadAnd a thousand lost golf balls.
T.S Eliot
Life is indeed a storm and while there are times you can sit and watch from the safety of a window pane there are moments you need to grit your teeth and take on the wind and the rain.
Ken Scott
The good composer is slowly discovered the bad composer is slowly found out.
Ernest Newman
Knowing when to be silent makes you seem wiser beyond your years.
Anthony T.Hincks
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.", October 31, 1977]
John Osborne
Some ages are lukewarm and complacent, and then it is our business to soothe them yet faster asleep. Other ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them.
C.S. Lewis
It is in unity that we find strength, in unity we find hope, and in unity we can stand firm as the darkness approaches. Let us stand together – and stand firm – against the many faces of hate.
Nick Lowles
Strategy and culture should have breakfast together.
Max McKeown
In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.
Charles Dickens
We are humiliated by what is powerful and mean, but awed by what is powerful and noble.
Alain de Botton
One keeps looking out for innovation in IPL, but of late it hasn't been all that obvious. Lionel Richie as an opening act? Johnny Mathis must have been busy. Matthew Hayden's Mongoose? Looks a bit like Bob Willis' bat with the "flow-through holes"; Saint Peter batting mitts are surely overdue a revival. The only genuinely intriguing step this year, bringing the IPL to YouTube, was forced on Modi by the collapse of Setanta; otherwise what Modi presents as 'innovation' is merely expansion by another name, in the number of franchises and the number of games.
Gideon Haigh
Physicians of the Utmost Fame were called at once but when they came they answered as they took their fees 'There is no cure for this disease.'
Hilaire Belloc
See! the mountains kiss high heaven And the waves clasp one another No sister flower would be forgiven If it disdained its brother And the sunlight clasps the earth And the moonbeams kiss the sea: - What are all these kissings worth If thou kiss not me?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
With nature on your side, you don’t need numbers, you don’t need financing and you certainly don’t need to make friends with people you should be fightingagainst.
Christopher Rankin
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;All mimsy were the borogoves,And the mome raths outgrabe."Beware the Jabberwock, my son The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!"He took his vorpal sword in hand; Long time the manxome foe he sought—So rested he by the Tumtum tree, And stood awhile in thought.And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came!One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back."And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy!O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" He chortled in his joy.'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;All mimsy were the borogoves,And the mome raths outgrabe.
Lewis Carroll
Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well.
Lord Chesterfield
The Labour Party is going about the country stirring up apathy.
William White law
If a potato can produce vitamin C, why can't we? Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies. Why us and guinea pigs? No point asking. Nobody knows.
Bill Bryson
Lewis created a new kind of marriage between theological reflection and poetic imagination.
Alister E. McGrath
... throughout the ages, effective results in war have rarely been attained unless theapproach has had such indirectness as to ensure the opponent's unreadyness to meet it.The indirectness has usually been physical, and always psychological.
B.H. Liddell Hart
The problem of political theory is how to combine that degree of individual initiative which is necessary for progress, with the degree of social cohesion which is necessary for survival.
Bertrand Russell
I think are foolish to pretend they are equal to men,they are far superior and always have been. -William Golding
William Golding
Skills are common. Talent is rare.
Colin Clark
That's half of your trouble," muttered the crocodile. "You believe everything's true.""That's because everything is," replied Mr. Bacchus.
Clive Barker
Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to be hard on yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline.
Paul Graham
We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body—a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. "I came into this world." "You must face reality." "The conquest of nature." This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.
Alan W. Watts
While most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.
G.K. Chesterton
Has that obscenely rich fucker upset you again?
E.L. James
The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
Alain de Botton
Aw, come on, admit it—you feel like Cinderella, don’t you?” “No, Darren, I don’t. And do you know why?” “No, sugar, you tell me why.” “Because I’m a man. I’ve got a big fat one and I like to fuck other guys.” Darren was laughing over the phone now, and it made Reece grin. “And Ben isn’t a prince, he’s a cop. A big, sexy cop who fucks like a machine. He’s a man. I’m a man. We’re men.” He nodded sharply. “Now fuck off. I’m arranging flowers.
L.A. Gilbert
Because if it is to spite her,' Biddy pursued, 'I should think -but you know best- that might be better and more independently done by caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her over, I should think -but you know best- she was not worth gaining over.
Charles Dickens
You can't quell depression by making love. But we tried. But we tried, oh, we did.
Yrsa Daley-Ward
Night came on, the lamps were lighted, the tables near him found occupants, and Paris began to wear that peculiar evening look of hers which seems to say, in the flare of windows and theatre-doors, and the muffled rumble of swift-rolling carriages, that this is no world for you unless you have your pockets lined and your scruples drugged.
Henry James
This is her home now--of her own free will.
Paul Gallico
Joshua?" I called out, a slight hitch in my voice. "Yeah?" "What do I look like to you?" He tilted his head to the side, frowning. "What do I look like to you?" I repeated urgently, afraid that if I didn't talk fast enough, I would have time to realize how absolutely, mind-bogglingly stupid I sounded. Joshua smiled. He answered me, so quietly I almost couldn't hear him. "Beautiful. Too beautiful for people not to have noticed you the other night.
Tara Hudson
He seemed to be having trouble remembering the steps, for he was pumping my arm and counting under his breath (one, two, three), and his breath smelled like the open maws of the pub cellars that grapes on Whitchurch pavements on delivery day. Beer.
Lorna Sage
But in that first flush of victory and happiness and relief, and God knows what other emotions were involved in this great moment, we were all very much one, and we were all in a state of euphoria, drunk with our happiness.
Harry Bernstein
What now matters most is how we respond to various risks to the survival of humanity. We are creating some of these risks, and discovering how we could respond to these and other risks. If we reduce these risks, and humanity survives the next few centuries, our descendants or successors could end these risks by spreading through this galaxy.Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. Since human history may be only just beginning, we can expect that future humans, or supra-humans, may achieve some great goods that we cannot now even imagine. In Nietzsche’s words, there has never been such a new dawn and clear horizon, and such an open sea.If we are the only rational beings in the Universe, as some recent evidence suggests, it matters even more whether we shall have descendants or successors during the billions of years in which that would be possible. Some of our successors might live lives and create worlds that, though failing to justify past suffering, would give us all, including some of those who have suffered, reasons to be glad that the Universe exists.
Derek Parfit
The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties.
Neil Gaiman
Even when you’d lost everything you thought there was to lose, somebody came along and gave you something for free.
Jenny Valentine
Most of us are naturally inclined to struggle against the restrictions our friends and family impose upon us, but if we are so unfortunate as to lose a loved one, what a difference then! Then the restriction becomes a sacred trust.
Susanna Clarke
There is no pathos more bitter than that of parting from someone we have never met.
P.G. Wodehouse
Woman cannot survive on droplets, she requires waves to regularly crash over her shores as the moon gives way to the sun...
Virginia Alison
He suggested devils, skulls, harsh masculine drawings. This thing was…heart poundingly good. She wanted to pluck it, and bury her face in it, and keep it in a vase by her bedside.
Charlotte Stein
I wish that without me your heart would break, i wish that without me you'd be spending the rest of your nights awake, I wish that without me you couldn't eat, I wish I was the last thing on your mind before you went to sleep
Kate Nash
We oft know little of who we were, only something of who we are, and nothing of who we may be.
Charlie Fletcher
A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day.Aragorn, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
J.R.R. Tolkien
In a word, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life of my life.
Charles Dickens
In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points', one can surely only recognise such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Love does not broadcast its arrival, it just creeps up and envelops your soul when you least expect it. It is up to you whether you welcome or fight it, but one thing is for sure...It will get you in the end...
Virginia Alison
In poor Rosamond’s mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.
George Eliot
If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.
Winston S. Churchill
Love is not a hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed; but, flower or weed, whose scent and colour are always, wild!
John Galsworthy