Quotes by British Authors - Page 599

Love, its power and authority, always gets there first, comes to believe first, and always waits for the others, especially the leaders, to catch up! This is the reality of what happened among the disciples and the community of the Beloved Disciple, John, and those closest to Jesus, called His friends. They mature and develop differently from other disciples, and the community of the Church has to struggle with the fact that the last one anyone thought would be the leader was the one who betrayed Him and contributed to the dissolution of the disciples when Jesus was arrested and crucified.
Megan McKenna
It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
It's only possible to betray where loyalty is due
Muriel Spark
If I was set an essay on Friday, I’d spend three hours on Saturday morning in the library. Was that normal? I didn’t know. What I did know was that I felt less prone to depression and more normal walking through Venice or staring out over the lake in Zurich. At home I wrestled continually with my moods. The black thing inside me gnawed like a rat at my self-esteem and self-confidence. I felt there was a happy person inside me too, who wanted to enjoy life, to be normal, but my feelings of self-loathing and the deep distrust I had towards my father wouldn’t allow that sunny person to come out. When the black thing had an iron grip on me, I couldn’t even look at my father: Did you do bad things to me when I was little? Like a line from a song stuck in your brain, the words ran through my head and never once came out of my mouth. Not that I needed to say what was in my mind. I was sure Father could read my thoughts in my moods, in the blank, dead stare of my eyes. It was hardly surprising that there was always an atmosphere of strain and awkwardness in the house, and the blame was always mine: Alice and her moods, Alice and her anorexia; Alice and her low self-esteem; Alice and her inescapable feelings of loss and emptiness.
Alice Jamieson
Delay of justice is injustice.
Walter Savage Landor
Everything is temporary but the power of Love is Infinite because it is the space, it is Everything.
Tony Samara
Books appear to be the most immediate instruments of speculative delight.
Richard de Bury
It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor's glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. ... "It is in light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations -- these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit. ... Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.
C.S. Lewis
Whoever gives knowledge to a fool loses itAnd who keeps it from the deserving does wrong.
Idries Shah
The only thing I am afraid of is fear.
Arthur Wellesley
Horror. I can't manage it. I become--well--horrified. Self-help books have a similar effect. When asked, "Any literary genre you simply can't be bothered with?" - (By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the NYT Book Review, by Pamela Paul)
Emma Thompson
The best way to achieve a wonderful life is to have wonderful desires.
Steven Redhead
Frodo raised his head, and then stood up. Despair had not left him, but the weakness had passed. He even smiled grimly, feeling now as clearly as a moment before he had felt the opposite, that what he had to do, he had to do, if he could, and that whether Faramir or Aragorn or Elrond or Galadriel or Gandalf or anyone else knew about it was beside the purpose. He took his staff in one hand and the phial in his other. When he saw that the clear light was already welling through his fingers, he thrust it into his bosom and held it against his heart. Then turning from the city of Morgul, now no more than a grey glimmer across a dark gulf, he prepared to take the upward road.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I won't eat what I can't kill. It seems shoddy, hypocritical.
Jeanette Winterson
Breaking our silence is powerful. Whether it comes as a whisper or a squeak at first, allow that sense of spaciousness, of opening, allow yourself to trust the bottomlessness, and lean into the dark roar which will light up every cell.Though it may start softly, we build in confidence and skills, we realise we do not need to wait for permission before we open our mouths. We do not need to wait for others to make space for us, we can take it. We do not need to read from others’ scripts or style ourselves in weak comparison. We do not need to look to another’s authority because we have our own. Down in our cores. We have waited so long for permission to know that it was our time, our turn on stage. That time is now. Our voices are being heard into being. They are needed.
Lucy H. Pearce
Think of it as an eight-dimensional onion.’ Justine straightened her back and gave her father an exasperated look. ‘Thanks, Dad. That’s helpful. I always think in those terms, it really helps a lot.
Peter F. Hamilton
This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers.
P.G. Wodehouse
I sometimes think you despise poetry,' said Phineas. 'When it is false I do. The difficulty is to know when it is false and when it is true.
Anthony Trollope
To want to tackle everything rationally is irrational.
Ilyas Kassam
But there was nothing. No village or town as far as her eyes could strain. Nowhere for her saviours to come from and take her to; just fields and trees and the weeping arc of the river Greave all the way to the horizon. Just like in the books, Greaveburn was all there was; building and building until streets were foundations, roofs were floors, constantly climbing away from itself. now that Abrasia saw it, her dream of escape crumbled completely like an ancient map in her fingers. The horizon was the world's edge and there was nothing beyond it but mist and falling.Greaveburn stood alone on this little circle of earth, the river running around and into itself like a snake eating its tail. And Abrasia was doomed to watch the sun and stars trade places for all eternity.
Craig Hallam
Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don’t believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It’s all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it’s still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind. Some people make a lot of money out of it. Publishers do well, children, when bright, can come top. It’s an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called history.
Jeanette Winterson
When I was small I dreamed of demons. I thought they were under my bed, but you said, it can't be so, you don't get demons our side of the river, the guards won't let them over London Bridge.
Hilary Mantel
Live all you can: it's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?
Henry James
In a word, in adversity she was the best of comforters, in good fortune the most troublesome of friends...
William Makepeace Thackeray
To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a new whereby to catch something else.
C.S. Lewis
Believe in yourself, your dreams, wishes, desires and goals, even if others don’t.
Lily Amis
Who is fit to be elected?' asked Napoleon. 'A Caesar, an Alexander only comes along once a century, so that election must be a matter of chance.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
The night is dark and I am far from home.
John Henry Newman
When Jill woke next morning and found herself in a cave, she thought for one horrid moment that she was back in the Underworld.
C.S. Lewis
If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.
Aldous Huxley
If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
I'm warning you. I'm going to get waxy. D'you see? You're not wanted. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island! So don't try it on, my poor misguided boy, or else---" Simon found he was looking into a vast mouth. There was blackness within, a blackness that spread.
William Golding
When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.
Gail Honeyman
The keystone… some have called God, some Brahma, some Zeus… some even IAO… but in truth, O seeker, it is Thy-SELF.
Aleister Crowley
It’s not what you get, but what you give that is God’s true measure of a life.
Elizabeth George
Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realize they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners.
David Mitchell
Whenever the nature of the subject permits the reasoning process to be without danger carried on mechanically, the language should be constructed on as mechanical principles as possible; while in the contrary case it should be so constructed, that there shall be the greatest possible obstacle to a mere mechanical use of it
John Stuart Mill
To die hating them, that was freedom.
George Orwell
Fear is an aid to the warrior. It is a small fire burning. It heats the muscles, making us stronger. Panic comes when the fire is out of control, consuming all courage and pride.
David Gemmell
I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.
Nick Hornby
A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.
Graham Greene
Novel-writing can be a cold-blooded business. One uses whatever happens to be lying around in memory and employs it to suit one’s end….Then, again, during the months whilst one is writing about the past, a story is colored by what presently is happening to its writer. So, imperceptibly, the tone of voice changes, original intentions slip away. And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past.
J.L. Carr
Dragons are among the most ancient spirits. Their origins are not known, but they significantly predate the rise of man. [This author advises the reader never to ask a dragon about the early days of humanity, as they tend to remark that we were much more entertaining as a species before we climbed down from the trees.]
Amy Rae Durreson
Many grim tales stem from your green lands, and still deeds both noble and evil shall yet unfold there.
Robin Jarvis
So much of the theatrical can leave you with a yearning for the real. The real is suddenly and starkly there right at the city’s edge and extends for thousands of square miles of desert and mountain and canyon with which human beings can do almost nothing profitable other than to leave it be and just look at it.
Timothy O'Grady
You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
Doris Lessing
We should be carefulOf each other, we should be kindWhile there is still time
Philip Larkin
To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.
Bill Bryson
It's true that heroes are inspiring but mustn't they also do some rescuing if they are to be worthy of their name? Would Wonder Woman matter if she only sent commiserating telegrams to the distressed?
Jeanette Winterson
They said they respect me, which means, their judgment is crazy.
Morrissey
It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.
Penelope Lively
It takes strong, sound leadership, that correspondingly rare commodity, which is afflicted with neither an excess of pity nor callousness, to stand against the insipid tide of superficiality that is sweeping the world.
Tim Macartney-Snape
Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them.
Alan W. Watts
Where the waters do agree, it is quite wonderful the relief they give.
Jane Austen
Love is such a powerful subject matter because it comes in so many different shapes and sizes. It's about timing, fate, failure, redemption.
Jim Sturgess
There are three things which the public will always clamor for sooner or later: namely novelty novelty novelty.
Thomas Hood
The office of president requires the constitution of an athlete the patience of a mother the endurance of an early Christian.
Harold Wilson
The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels.
C.S. Lewis
Our susceptibility to myth is a world danger. Because the application of science to human behaviour has come so late the myth is regarded as less dangerous than the bacillus. It is doubtful whether such a belief is justified.
Goeffrey Pyke
The sea, the sea…Man alone,Passive, unawareIn his elemental sadness.
Scott Hastie