Quotes by British Authors - Page 592

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.
Virginia Woolf
That strange blend of the commercial traveller the missionary and the barbarian conqueror which was the American abroad.
Olaf Stapledon
What you think is the heart might well be another organ.
Jeanette Winterson
He's half absolv'd Who has confess'd.
Matthew Prior
to love is to destroy
Cassie Clare
Italians make you laugh and break your heart.
Chloe Thurlow
There's also a lot of random stuff about poetry, flowers and lute music, plus kissing and cuddling (lots of this), wearing similar outfits, talking incessantly about the current object of devotion, and generally losing one's faculties.
Joanne Harris
It is important for women to do something about what they see.
Roma Tearne
He says in his defence he never meddled with married women, only with virgins.
Hilary Mantel
Marvellous!" he repeated, looking up at me. "Look! The beauty--but that is nothing--look at the accuracy, the harmony. And so fragile! And so strong! And so exact! This is Nature--the balance of colossal forces. Every star is so--and every blade of grass stands so--and the mighty Kosmos il perfect equilibrium produces--this. This wonder; this masterpiece of Nature--the great artist.
Joseph Conrad
I am trying now to be entirely honest. I did actually comfort in the thought that the Devil had, on Strawless Common, defeated God. I much preferred that thought to the thought that God hadn't cared, hadn't helped Robin. I thought all the way back to the story of Eden. God, all-loving, all-wise, had surely wanted people to be happy and healthy and good; it was the Devil who spoiled it all...and since so many people were miserable and sickly and bad the Devil must indeed by very powerful. The lifeless, voiceless thing, lately a singing boy, which they had cut down and put under a sack in the barn to await an unhallowed cross-road grave seemed to me to prove the power of the Devil."Lady Alice Rowhedge
Norah Lofts
In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.
George Eliot
The Dalai Lama says that the world will be saved by Western women. Not any women, perhaps not all women, but Burning Women. Women who have stepped out of silence and into the fullness of their power. Angry women who love the world and her creatures too much to let it be destroyed so thoughtlessly for a moment longer.Burning Woman is the heart and soul of revolution – inner and outer. She burns for change, she dances in the fire of the old, all the while visioning and weaving the new.
Lucy H. Pearce
Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
A.S. Byatt
Thoughtful for Winter’s future sorrow,Its gloom and scarcity;Prescient to-day, of want to-morrow,Toiled quiet Memory.’Tis she that from each transient pleasureExtracts a lasting good;’Tis she that finds, in summer, treasureTo serve for winter’s food.And when Youth’s summer day is vanished,And Age brings Winter’s stress,Her stores, with hoarded sweets replenished,Life’s evening hours will bless.
Charlotte Brontë
A great deal of thought is only a substitute for the thoughts that the individual would really find useful at the time.
Idries Shah
A man's character is best described in his epitaph
Marilyn L Rice
And it's really very difficult to kill someone when all your inner instincts would oblige you to take off your hat first!
Susan Kay
And indeed if you think you're a genius at something what you achieve is very much according to your expectations; if you think you're no good, you're not going to get anywhere.
Diana Wynne Jones
Beauty isn't skin-deep. It's bone-deep. Heart-deep. Soul-deep. Only put to sleep. When we prick our finger on fear. Beauty can't be bought or made. It can only be awoken through laughter, and living, and love. Through being you and being true.
Siobhan Curham
Sooner or later our dream will become a true, (Independence)
Davan Yahya Khalil
Well, if pirates are bad,And vampires are worse,Then I pray that as long as I beThat though I sing of VampiratesI never one shall see.Yea, if pirates are dangerAnd vampires are death,I'll extend my prayer for thee-That thine eyes never see a Vampirate...and they never lay a hand on thee
Justin Somper
But...surely you know where your nephew is going?' she asked, looking bewildered.'Certainly we know,' said Vernon Dursley. 'He's off with some of your lot, isn't he? Right, Dudley, let's get in the car, you heard the man, we're in a hurry.'Again, Vernon Dursley marched as far as the front door, but Dudley did not follow.'Off with some of our lot?'Hestia looked outraged. Harry had met the attitude before: witches and wizards seemed stunned that his closest living family took so little interest in the famous Harry Potter.'It's fine,' Harry assured her. 'It doesn't matter, honestly.''Doesn't matter?' repeated Hestia, her voice rising ominously.'Don't these people realise what you've been through? What danger you are in? The unique position you hold in the hearts of the anti-Voldemort movement?'Er - no, they don't,' said Harry. 'They think I'm a waste of space, actually, but I'm used to -''I don't think you're a waste of space.'If Harry had not seen Dudley's lips move, he might not have believed it.
J.K. Rowling
Q: How can I help myself?A: By remembering the proverb: ‘The Path is not to be found anywhere except in human service’, from Saadi.
Idries Shah
She felt a tightness in her chest and sent for Dr Simcox.'What's the trouble?''Look out there, that's the trouble! It's so green and quiet and it's always bloody raining.''That's England, Mrs Mallard-Greene. I'm afraid there's no known cure for it.
John Mortimer
There was a warmth of fury in his last phrases. He meant she loved him more than he her. Perhaps he could not love her. Perhaps she had not in herself that which he wanted. It was the deepest motive of her soul, this self-mistrust. It was so deep she dared neither realise nor acknowledge. Perhaps she was deficient. Like an infinitely subtle shame, it kept her always back. If it were so, she would do without him. She would never let herself want him. She would merely see.
D.H. Lawrence
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
George Eliot
umm... abit gross it kinda about boyfriend and girlfriend kinda going throw then they break up then they love each other then they make up again and the girl father said u have to come home until 9pm but the girls want more time to be with her boyfriend :)
Jacqueline Wilson
The way I tell it, he says to Fitzwilliam, you would think that the blow on the head had improved him. That he actually set out to get it. That every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.
Hilary Mantel
I know it is something of a cliche to say that love makes all things possible, but I believe it does. It is not a magic wand that can be waved over life to make it all sweet and lovely and trouble free, but it can give the energy to fight the odds and win.
Mary Balogh
You could be together forever, but one of you is going to have to go first. I want it to last. I love him and I want it to stay.
Emma Forrest
Water is intrinsically linked to the mystery and excitement of discovering new worlds.
Fennel Hudson
There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't.
Neil Gaiman
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,Or what's a heaven for?
Robert Browning
He had been frightened and so he had been vehement.
Graham Greene
It was another dark and windy night. Like so many others.
Lisa Williamson
Oh no. I split my time between Paris and New York. They're the only places to really live.
Naomi Wood
...American book jackets reflect the spirit of country - little homogeneity, lots of diversity.
Jhumpa Lahiri
A thousand pounds for clothes--when on thinks how long poor people could live on it! When one thinks how long we could live on it, for that matter!
Dodie Smith
Can't stay long, Mother," he said. "I'm up front, the prefects have got two compartments to themselves-""Oh, are you a prefect, Percy?" said one of the twins, with an air of great surprise. "You should have said something, we had no idea.""Hang on, I think I remember him saying something about it," said the other twin. "Once-""Or twice-""A minute-""All summer-""Oh, shut up," said Percy the Prefect.
J.K. Rowling
I am not in my gallery and neither do I hold your sigil. Will you speak to me?
Neil Gaiman
Delicate humor is the crowning virtue of the saints.
Evelyn Underhill
Perhaps we will not be great people, chosen by God, but just happy.
Philippa Gregory
The one who never repents shall be the one who never sleeps.
Charles Lee
The world was created for Mankind, not for some of mankind.
Richard Llewellyn
A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.
Diane Setterfield
Memory is not what the heart desires. That is only a mirror....
J.R.R. Tolkien
the perhaps rather prosaic truth that law is an imperfect yet indispensable vehicle by which both to conserve and transform society
Raymond Wacks
But all that is warm will go cold. My ears will fall off and my eyes will melt. My mouth will be clamped shut. My lips will turn to glue....No taste or smell or touch or sound.Nothing to look at. Total emptiness for ever.
Jenny Downham
If you thing political correctness is no big deal, just remember that the communists started by eliminating inconvenient speech and ended by eliminating inconvenient people.
James Crabtree
A five-week sand blizzard?" said Deep Thought haughtily. "You ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff.
Douglas Adams
This world, I am afraid, is designed for crashing bores.
Morrissey
If the human race wishes to have a prolonged and indefinite period of material prosperity, they have only got to behave in a peaceful and helpful way toward one another.
Winston S. Churchill
Disease is a manifestation of human thought because it is ideas, worldviews, and beliefs that create the conditions in which a society can be riddled with disease, strife, and poverty, or can continue in health and harmony.
F. David Peat
This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.
Neil Gaiman
There are no other choices for you, Prince Jalan, and when there are no choices all men are equally brave.
Mark Lawrence
Depression is our way of telling ourselves that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing.
Neel Burton
A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity.
Dorothy L. Sayers
It is the custom on the stage in all good, murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes in as regular alternation as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon.
Charles Dickens
For nearly thirty years the powerful propaganda machines of Stalinism worked furiously to expunge Trotsky's name from the annals of the revolution, or to leave it there only as the synonym for arch-traitor. To the present Soviet generation, and not only to it, Trotsky's life-story is already like an ancient Egyptian sepulchre which is known to have contained the body of a great man and the record, engraved in gold, of his deeds; but tomb-robbers and ghouls have plundered and left it so empty and desolate that no trace is found of the record it once contained. The work of the tomb-robbers has, in this present instance, been so persistent that it has strongly affected the views even of independent Western historians and scholars.
Isaac Deutscher