Quotes by British Authors - Page 587

Then she is on me. Her soft, hot body collapses onto my own ravenous frame. She pushes my legs open with her knees and pulls my arms above my head with her hands, holding me a willing hostage. For one long moment we are eye to eye. Her breasts press down into my nipples, goading them but offering no release, and then her lips come crashing down on mine. She kisses me as though she already owns me; exploring my mouth with her tongue, dragging it aggressively from one side of my lips to the other.
Felicity Brandon
Love in a night shall live and die,Love in a day shall wing and fly;Love in the Spring shall last an hour,Easily fade a spring-tide flower.
Aleister Crowley
My wife is a sex object - every time I ask for sex she objects.
Les Dawson
Fat Charlie had had no real liking for the police, but until now, he had still managed to cling to a fundamental trust in the natural order of things, a conviction that there was some kind of power--a Victorian might have thought of it as Providence--that ensured that the guilty would be punished while the innocent would be set free. This faith had collapsed in the face of recent events and had been replaced by the suspicion that he would spend the rest of his life pleading his innocence to a variety of implacable judges and tormenters, many of whom would look like Daisy, and that he would in all probability wake up in cell six the next morning to find that he had been transformed into an enormous cockroach. He had definitely been transported to the kind of maleficent universe that transformed people into cockroaches.
Neil Gaiman
Any punishment is an insult to the crime
Nathan Filer
This is where the whole ape-descended thing reveals its worth, I thought madly. Sucks to be you, quadruped. Opposable thumbs - don't leave home without them.
Ben Aaronovitch
I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.
Olivia Laing
You don’t have to go through your life being a dumbnuts. Relax a little. You don’t have to be responsible for the whole world. The earth was in orbit when we got here, and it will be here when we leave.” - Erin
Sierra Cartwright
There is rarely a chance for life to remain constant.
Steven Redhead
So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian.
Evelyn Waugh
As far as Samson was concerned I was just another foreigner in pursuit of a lunatic quest.
Tahir Shah
In strange and uncertain times such as those we are living in, sometimes a reasonable person might despair. But hope is unreasonable and love is greater even than this. May we trust the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse.
Robert Fripp
Men love war because it allows them to look serious because it is the only thing that stops women laughing at them.
John Fowles
I step back further, until I feel cold tiles against my back. It is then I get the glimmer that I associate with memory. As my mind tries to settle on it, it flutters away, like ashes caught in a breeze, and I realize that in my life there is a then, a before, though before what I cannot say, and there is a now, and there is nothing between the two but a long, silent emptiness that has led me here, to me and him, in this house.
S.J. Watson
Unhappy: People look around and think, why are there so many people that are unhappy? We have progressed so far, yet people are still unhappy. Why isn’t this world the wonderful place it could be? Changing the world doesn’t change us.It does not matter how much we progress materially; it will not change anything. Only learning and seeing the truth will change us, and thus change everything.The truth transforms a mortal man into an immortal spiritual being.It does this because the truth just shows you what you truly are, and that changes everything. The truth does the same thing for the way we see the world and for the same reason. It shows you life clearly; it shows you true life for the first time.
Michael Smith
Therefore it seemed a dreadful injustice that these wise races should perish at the hands of creatures who were still little more than animals. It was as if vultures feasted on and squabbled over the paralyzed body of the youthful poet who could only stare at them with puzzled eyes as they slowly robbed him of an exquisite existence they would never appreciate, never know they were taking.
Michael Moorcock
I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend...I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend...
Neil Gaiman
Offend her and she knows not to forgive Oblige her and she'll hate you while you live.
Alexander Pope
I close my eyes, but my mind runs and runs. Tubes and fluids enter my body, but there's nothing to stop the anxiety. My heart pounds and sometimes I fear I'm on the cusp of crossing into whatever lies on the other side of sane.
James Morris
So he had them into the slaughter house, where was a butcher killing a sheep. And behold, the sheep was quiet and took her death patiently. Then said the Interpreter, "You must learn of this sheep to suffer, and put up wrongs without murmurings and complaints. Behold how quietly she takes her death! And without objecting she suffereth her skin to be pulled over her ears. Your King doth call you his sheep.
John Bunyan
The journey is the destination.
Dan Eldon
The ultimate concept car will move so fast, even at rest, as to be invisible.
J.G. Ballard
Wouldn’t that be an incredibly stupid thing to do? To say ‘I never want to smoke again’, then spend the rest of your life saying ‘I’d love a cigarette.’ That’s what smokers who use the Willpower Method do. No wonder they feel so miserable. They spend the rest of their lives desperately moping for something that they desperately hope they will never have.
Allen Carr
What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence, the question is what you can make people believe that you have done.
Arthur Conan Doyle
God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.
C.S. Lewis
Drunkenness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative a momentary cessation of unhappiness.
Bertrand Russell
All animals except man know that the ultimate of life is to enjoy it.
Samuel Butler
It had never occurred to me that simply being with a fellow prisoner would make me feel like I was still in prison.
Elizabeth Wein
My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, 'Me next! Go on! My turn!' I have to select. And once I have chosen, the others lie quiet for ten months or a year, until I come to the end of the story, and the clamor starts up again.
Diane Setterfield
Christ is, then, the perfect art work in the sense of that reality in whom is realised those goals that all artistic making has as its explicit or implicit ends. Because he is infinite meaning, life and being perfectly synthesised with finite form, the cave painters at Lascaux, or Hesiod penning his hymns, or Beethoven working on his last quartets, were all gesturing towards him though they realised it not.
Aidan Nichols O.P.
The essential quality that an entity needs, if it is to become an effective gene vehicle, is this. It must have an impartial exit channel into the future, for all the genes inside it. This is true of an individual wolf. The channel is the thin stream of sperms, or eggs, which it manufactures by meiosis. It is not true of the pack of wolves. Genes have something to gain from selfishly promoting the welfare of their own individual bodies, at the expense of other genes in the wolf pack. A bee-hive, when it swarms, appears to reproduce by broad-fronted budding, like a wolf pack. But if we look more carefully we find that, as far as the genes are concerned, their destiny is largely shared. The future of the genes in the swarm is, at least to a large extent, lodged in the ovaries of one queen. This is why—it is just another way of expressing the message of earlier chapters—the bee colony looks and behaves like a truly integrated single vehicle.
Richard Dawkins
I tumbled into the taxi alone, closing the door closed with a dull thud before I could possibly change my mind. Not like this, I remember thinking. Whatever this thing is between us, it could only be tainted and cheapened by a semi-drunken encounter on the night of our first meeting. As the car pulled away I stared back at him. The thought that I might never see him again, that I might never know what it would feel like to be kissed by him, seemed unbearably cruel.At a crossroads, I had been faced with a choice: two possible versions of my future mapped out ahead of me. But I didn't feel like I had made any sort of decision. All I had done was run away.
Catherine Sanderson
By the way, you haven’t seen an alien around here, have you? About six foot eight with a face like a cross between a boar and an upturned crab. Probably carrying a spear and a bag full of severed heads.’ Parker shrugged. ‘I dunno. It gets busy here.’ ‘He’s got quite an unusual laugh.’ ‘Oh, that bloke? He’s down the bottom of the ramp. You know him, then?
Toby Frost
Cause they say home is where your heart is set in stone, it's where you go when're you're alone, its were you go to rest your bones. It's not just where you lay your head, it's not just where you make your bead. As long as we're together does it matter where we go?
Gabrielle Aplin
If I dropped a tear upon your hand, may it wither it up! If I spoke a gentle word in your hearing, may it deafen you! If I touched you with my lips, may the touch be poison to you! A curse upon this roof that gave me shelter! Sorrow and shame upon your head! Ruin upon all belonging to you!
Charles Dickens
Let us thank God for valour in abstractionFor those who go their own way, will not kissThe arse of law and order nor compoundFor physical comfort at the price of pride
Louis MacNeice
You don't run,' he corrected me. 'But you're more than able.' There was no shadow of doubt in his voice. Hearing it from someone else made me realize: there was nothing stopping me from running but me.
Alexandra Heminsley
His mercy is so great that it forgives great sins to great sinners after great lengths of time and then gives great favors and great privileges and raises us up to great enjoyments in the great heaven of the great God!
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
There is no treasure like the human heart.
Jocelyn Murray
Mma Ramotswe reflected on how easy it was to find oneself committed to a course of action simply because one lacked the courage to say no.
Alexander McCall Smith
The totality of life cannot be understood, so runs Sufi teaching, if it is studied only through the methods which we use in everyday living.
Idries Shah
I love to draw—pencil, ink pen—I love art. When I go on tour and visit museums in Holland, Germany or England—you know those huge paintings?—I’m just amazed. You don’t think a painter could do something like that. I can look at a piece of sculpture or a painting and totally lose myself in it.
Michael James Jackson
Wasting time changes the nature of time. And the heart is stilled.
Rose Tremain
But perhaps the most celebrated of these auto-incendiaries is Kalanos. You will remember, no doubt, that Kalanos (the Greek version of the Sanskrit Kalyāna) was an Indian ascetic—though not a Buddhist—who accompanied Alexander's army on its withdrawal from India. At a certain moment he announced that his time had come to die, and arranged for a funeral pyre to be constructed. He mounted the pyre, had it set alight, and, sitting cross-legged, remained motionless until his body was consumed by the flames. What an occasion! With the entire Greek army, and probably Alexander the Great himself, watching him; with each one of those hardened and undefeated veterans, themselves no stranger to pain and mutilations, wondering if he himself would be capable of such cold-blooded endurance: with the eyes of posterity upon him (his peculiar fame has come down for more than twenty centuries); and with the honour of Indian asceticism at stake (and Indian asceticism is India);—how could he fail? For a moment one could almost wish to have been Kalanos. And yet, from the point of view of Dhamma, all this is foolishness—a childish escapade.
Nanavira Thera
Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it.
Winston S. Churchill
The preparation of good food is merely another expression of art, one of the joys of civilized living…
Dione Lucas
A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.
Richard Dawkins
Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.
George Eliot
Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin. It is largely because of the books, films and reminiscences that have come between that the war of 1914-18 is now supposed to have had some tremendous, epic quality that the present one lacks.
George Orwell
I think you're talking shit. You think we don't all feel like that? Like we're crazy, like we're not a real person, like we don't exist? Everyone feels that way sometimes. I can remember talking to you when you lost your bag. So what? You can't remember and that's not a bad thing. It doesn't make me better than you. I'm a stranger to you, but here's what I see: I see a girl who has suffered a terrible damage to her brain. Someone who, it seems, is shut away by her parents to keep her safe. But inside there is a vibrant person, a traveler, and her memory of this boy Drake has propelled her into action. I think, Flora, that you came here not to find Drake but to find yourself. It wasn't Drake--he's an unlikely romantic hero, really--it was you. Didn't you come here, perhaps, because you heard him talking about the place he was going to, and it called to you?"I don't know what to say. I don't say anything. " Our come from Oslo, and Svalbard called me, even though I'm not really the rugged adventurous type. Like you, I had to come. Some of us are meant to be here. We need this place...We need to be small specks in wild nature, by the pole. The midnight sun. The midday darkness. The northern lights. It called to you, Flora, and you answered. You overcame everything, and you came here, alone. You are the bravest person I've ever met.
Emily Barr
It is sometimes the man who opens the door who is the last to enter the room.
Elizabeth Asquith Bibesco
They jogged along in silence, Jem playing with the thong of the whip, and Mary aware of his hands beside her. She glanced down at them out of the tail of her eye, and she saw they were long and slim; they had the same strength, the same grace, as his brother's. These attracted her; the others repelled her. She realised for the first time that aversion and attraction ran side by side; that the boundary line was thin between them. The thought was an unpleasant one, and she shrank from it. Supposing this had been Joss beside her ten, twenty years ago? She shuttered the comparison at the back of her mind, fearing the picture it conjured. She knew now why she hated her uncle.
Daphne du Maurier
The only place where success comes before work is a dictionary.
Vidal Sassoon
I do not always know what I want, but I do know what I don't want.
Stanley Kubrick
A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony.
Arthur Conan Doyle
HARRY: "Oh, Draco . . . we can’t. We can’t use it."Draco looks up at Harry, and for the first time — at the bottom of this dreadful pit — they look at each other as friends.DRACO: "We have to find them — if it takes centuries, we must find our sons —
J.K. Rowling
And what is hell? Can you tell me that?”“A pit full of fire.”“And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?”“No, sir.”“What must you do to avoid it?”I deliberated a moment; my answer, when it did come, was objectionable: “I must keep in good health, and not die.
Charlotte Brontë
Please ejaculate", I silently urged the man, "so I can go to sleep". (In this way I imagine I was like millions of women before me
Jon Ronson
Resolution number one: Obviously will lose twenty pounds. Number two: Always put last night's panties in the laundry basket. Equally important, will find sensible boyfriend to go out with and not continue to form romantic attachments to any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment phobic's, peeping toms, megalomaniacs, emotional fuckwits or perverts. And especially will not fantasize about a particular person who embodies all these things
Helen Fielding
William groaned. It was Vimes. Worse, he was smiling, in a humourless predatory way."Ah, Mr de Worde," he said, stepping inside. "There are several thousand dogs stampeding through the city at the moment. This is an interesting fact, isn't it?"He leaned against the wall and produced a cigar. "Well, I say dogs," he said, striking a match on Goodmountain's helmet. "Mostly dogs, perhaps I should say. Some cats. More cats now, in fact, 'cos, hah, there's nothing like a, yes, a tidal wave of dogs, fighting and biting and howling, to sort of, how can I put it, give a city a certain . . . busyness. Especially underfoot,because - did I mention it? -they're very nervous dogs too. Oh, and did I mention cattle?" he went on, conversationally. "You know how it is, market day and so on, people are driving the cows and, my goodness, around the corner comes a wall of wailing dogs . . . Oh, and I forgot about the sheep. And the chickens, although I imagine there's not much left of the chickens now.
Terry Pratchett