Quotes by British Authors - Page 593

Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power....
Aldous Huxley
I do not think it matters whether one agrees or not as long as ons is forced to think.
Vanessa Bell
For really it was the refinement of civilized cruelty, this spick, span, and ingenious affair of shining leather and gleaming steel, which hoisted you and tilted you and fitted reassuringly into the small of your back and cupped your head tenderly between padded cushions. It ensured for you a more complete muscular relaxation than any armchair that you could buy for your own home: but it left your tormented nerves without even the solace of a counter-irritant. In the old days the victim's attention had at least been distracted by an ache in the back, a crick in the neck, pins and needles in the legs, and the uneasy tickling of plush under the palm. But now, too efficiently suspended between heaven and earth, you were at liberty to concentrate on hell.
Jan Struther
It was the forest’s fault. Those two handsome woodcutters. An evil place, the forest, everyone knew it, full of temptations and imps...
Tanith Lee
Books are an extension of our imagination
Danny Saunders
Look,’ said Cyrus, raising his knife again and pointing it at her. ‘Give me one reason why we shouldn’t kill your boyfriend over there. Come on. The dark scowling face is reason enough in my book.’She could have sworn she heard the sound of Lucas’s eyes narrowing to slits.‘Come on, just one reason,’ Cyrus repeated, ‘and it better not include the words love, eternal or soul.
Sarah Alderson
He lifted her and entered her body in one swift, gliding movement that shattered the remnants of her resistance. 'Blood and sex and Elizabeth,' he said inside her head. 'Bastard, can't you even say hello?' He detached his teeth from her neck and flicked his tongue over the wound to heal it. His burning gaze lifted to hers. 'Hello,' he said huskily, and took her mouth.
Marie Treanor
She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age.
C.S. Lewis
I still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.
G.K. Chesterton
Most rich people have a gangster in their ancestry somewhere.
Ken Follett
No man will say, "There is no God" 'till he is so hardened in sin that it hasbecome his interest that there should be none to call him to account.
Matthew Henry
We inherited these principles and these freedoms and we here highly resolve that we shall pass them on, as we will pass on an undivided Republic purged of racism and slavery, to our descendants. The popgun discharges of a few pathetic sectarians and crackpot revisionists are negligible, and will be drowned by the mounting chorus that demands: 'Mr Jefferson! BUILD UP THAT WALL'.
Christopher Hitchens
I'm the biggest critic of my own work, but sometimes you nail a chapter so good that you have to take a step back and admire that bitch.
R.D. Ronald
Have you thought about what it means to be a god?" asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. "It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme (...)".
Neil Gaiman
Gulliver was soon being read "from the cabinet council to the nursery".
John Gay
As my heart begins to return to normal, I look down at -- and feel such an intense rush of love and relief it takes my breath away. "I will never let you put of my sight again," I promise --
Camilla Way
It's hard to criticize someone if you are praying for them.
Elizabeth George
In 1829 Rossini was at an age which has often proven critical in the lives of musicians, painters and writers. Lapses into silence far more complete than Rossini's, creative failures, suicides, and unanticipated deaths have been common in the middle to late 30s. As Charles Rosen has noted, 'It is the age when the most fluent composer begins to lose the ease of inspiration he once possessed, when even Mozart had to make sketches and to revise'.
Richard Osborne
You want to meet your gods, you filthy cockroaches? Tell the evil sods that Molly Templar says hello when you see them.
Stephen Hunt
To still seek God after discovering Him may be a love paradox of the soul, as A.W. Tozer reminds us; but to earnestly continue to perceive God and make Him perceivable, is the quintessence of worship.
Tristan Sherwin
It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man's psychological makeup is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises.
C.S. Lewis
But Fate does iron wedges drive,And always crowds itself betwixt.
Andrew Marvell
Surely we want to get to a point where women can be strong and powerful and not sexy. Or only sexy when they feel like it, not as a requirement to getting media coverage or being valued.
Anna Kessel
One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowhip with other human beings as we take our place among them.
Virginia Woolf
It's going to be all right, sir," Harry said over and over again, more worried by Dumbledore's silence than he had been by his weakened voice. "We're nearly there ... I can Apparate us both back ... don't worry ...""I am not worried, Harry," said Dumbledore, his voice a little stronger despite the freezing water. "I am with you.
J.K. Rowling
The problem with today’s world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion AND have others listen to it. The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense!
Brian Cox
We all have our patchwork ideas of India, our notions and opinions and prejudices–often fallacious and absurd–of this enormous, disparate country, which, as I take pleasure in reminding newcomers, bigger in population than all but its own continent: Asia. It is a place onto which foreigners have projected their own exotic fantasies and fears, their explanatory and simplifying schemata. And they never seem quite to make up their minds–as they swing from one extreme to the other–whether this country is of great wealth or of appalling poverty, of spiritual renunciation or of unabashed materialism, of fasting or of gluttony, of erotic sophistication or of sexual puritanism, of corruption or of moral superiority. They probably fail to admit that it might be all these things, and even more so, everything in between.
Sam Miller
Schopenhauer said only men had the total objectivity necessary for genius, and that you only had to look at a woman’s shape to see that she wasn’t intended for much mental or physical work.
Jacky Fleming
On Saturday mornings Mr Ewing would make his rounds, giving each tradesman £1 and the apprentices, ten shillings. Needless to say, we were all peeping around corners awaiting his arrival!
Ian Thompson
The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once though…things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly to another universe. So if you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up – there’s a way out.
Stephen Hawking
Back from where? you're not going out again and leaving me here are you?? Holy Hercules I sound like somebody's wife
Ruth Downie
Repentance means turning from as much as you know of your sin to give as much as you know of yourself to as much as you know of your God, and as our knowledge grows at these three points so our practice of repentance has to be enlarged.
J.I. Packer
It is not the strength of the body that counts, but the strength of the spirit.
J.R.R. Tolkien
We have to let the Warrior Code rule our hearts. The death of a warrior does not mean victory.
Erin Hunter
The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.
Max Beerbohm
When from our better selves we have too longBeen parted by the hurrying world, and droop,Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,How gracious, how benign, is Solitude
William Wordsworth
I say, ‘We believe in a Christ’. If that being existed physically or not, it’s still important, because the message was so basic and sensible and powerful, that we should live by those truths. Love, compassion, generosity. God doesn’t punish anyone. Churches aren’t needed. Money in connection to belief is an abomination. They say, ‘Oh…’. Then they quote the Old Testament.
Genesis P-Orridge
But now he felt as if the whole world were tipping backwards over his head, and this, he couldn’t help feeling, was a very worrying thing for the world to do.
Douglas Adams
Mr. Pritchard! What are you doing? Is that O-soto-gari? No! It is not! It is a yak mating with a tractor! That is really very very not very good! My grandfather is weeping in Heaven, or he would if there were such a place, which there is not because religion is a mystification contrived by monarchists! Again! Again, and this time do it properly!
Nick Harkaway
Man with goatee. Man who looked like a Beatle. All the Beatles at once. Woman wearing newspaper hat. I'd grown used to how weird New Yorkers were, and I could fit them into types.
Olivia Sudjic
...are you happy?""I am content.""What is the difference?""Between happiness and contentment? Ah, there you have me. It is not easy to put into words. Contentment is a state of mind and body when the two work in harmony, and there is no friction. The mind is at peace, and the body also. The two are sufficient to themselves. Happiness is elusive--coming perhaps once in a life-time--and approaching ecstasy.""Not a continuous thing, like contentment?""No, not a continuous thing. But there are, after all, degrees of happiness.
Daphne du Maurier
Today will still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.
Stephen Hawking
Perhaps talk of counters turned the boy’s thoughts to his father’s glove shop. His father would have accounted for all his transactions using the tokens. They were hard and round and very thin, made of copper or brass. There were counters for one pair of gloves, and for two pairs, and three and four and five. But there was no counter for zero. No counters existed for all the sales that his father did not close.
Daniel Tammet
The silence of the storm weighs heavilyOn their strained spirits: sometimes one will saySome trivial thing as though to ward awayMysterious powers, that imminently lieIn wait, with the strong exorcising graceOf everyday's futility. DesireBecomes upon a sudden a crystal fire,Defined and hard: If he could kiss her face,Could kiss her hair! As if by chance, her handBrushes on his ... Ah, can she understand?Or is she pedestalled above the touchOf his desire? He wonders: dare he seekFrom her that little, that infinitely much?And suddenly she kissed him on the cheek.
Aldous Huxley
All good things comes to those who wait.
Violet Fane
The platform underneath the balloon fell on her as she was trying to escape," she explained. "She was crushed.""I'd have been disappointed too.
Anthony Horowitz
The World is a Treasure Map.
Roger James Hamilton
...his eyes lit up and glowed red against the dark bulk of it. A moment they remained so ... then they soared up, phosphorescently opalescent, with a predominance of red, like two sinful dead planets escaping from Hell.
Jessie Douglas Kerruish
Dreams shouldn't be about what you can buy--they should be about what mark you leave in the world.
Claire Cross
Imagine that a literalist and a moderate have gone to a restaurant for lunch, and the menu promises "fresh lobster" as the speciality of the house. Loving lobster, the literalist simply places his order and waits. The moderate does likewise, but claims to be entirely comfortable with the idea that the lobster might not really be a lobster after all—perhaps it's a goose! And, whatever it is, it need not be "fresh" in any conventional sense—for the moderate understands that the meaning of this term shifts according to context. This would be a very strange attitude to adopt toward lunch, but it is even stranger when considering the most important questions of existence—what to live for, what to die for, and what to kill for. Consequently, the appeal of literalism isn't difficult to see. Human beings reflexively demand it in almost every area of their lives. It seems to me that religious people, to the extent that they're 'certain' that their scripture was written or inspired by the Creator of the universe, demand it too. - pg. 67-68
Sam Harris & Maajid Nawaz
Starting out to make money is the greatest mistake in life. Do what you feel you have a flair for doing and if you are good enough at it the money will come.
Greer Garson
It's not the lies he tells, it's the seductive way in which he persuades you they are not true.
Virginia Alison
If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.
Alan W. Watts
Always let them think of you as singing and dancing.
Anita Brookner
It matters not how strait the gate How charged with punishments the scroll I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
W. E. Henley
[T]here are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.
Raymond Williams
Much was said, and much was ate, and all went well.
Jane Austen
Some things are worth the wait. A little suspense heightens the pleasure.
Jocelyn Murray
I go backwards and forwards, recapturing the past, wondering about the future—and, most unreasonably, I find myself longing for the past more than for the future.
Dodie Smith
A friend is someone who walks into a room when everyone else is walking out.
Gary Moore