Quotes by British Authors - Page 60

I'm well aware that there is no job more important than that of raising a child, but the problem is that it isn't valued.
Paula Hawkins
Only the learned read old books, and... now... they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. ...[G]reat scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that "history is bunk..." [for] ...when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer's development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man's colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the "present state of the question." To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge-to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior-this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. ... [Therefore, even though] learning makes a free commerce between the ages... every generation [is cut] off from all others... [and] ...characteristic errors of one [are not] corrected by the characteristic truths of another.
C.S. Lewis
I think you inhaled too much lead from those scantron sheets
Simon Holt
You know that place between sleep and awake, that place where you still remember dreaming? That’s where I’ll always love you. That’s where I’ll be waiting.
J.M. Barrie
God never denied that soul anything that went as far as heaven to ask it.
John Trapp
Every week seems to bring another luxuriantly creamy envelope, the thickness of a letter-bomb, containing a complex invitation – a triumph of paper engineering – and a comprehensive dossier of phone numbers, email addresses, websites, how to get there, what to wear, where to buy the gifts. Country house hotels are being block-booked, great schools of salmon are being poached, vast marquees are appearing overnight like Bedouin tent cities. Silky grey morning suits and top hats are being hired and worn with an absolutely straight face, and the times are heady and golden for florists and caterers, string quartets and Ceilidh callers, ice sculptors and the makers of disposable cameras. Decent Motown cover-bands are limp with exhaustion. Churches are back in fashion, and these days the happy couple are travelling the short distance from the place of worship to the reception on open-topped London buses, in hot-air balloons, on the backs of matching white stallions, in micro-lite planes. A wedding requires immense reserves of love and commitment and time off work, not least from the guests. Confetti costs eight pounds a box. A bag of rice from the corner shop just won’t cut it anymore.
David Nicholls
To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead.
Alan W. Watts
The way I’d put it,” said Makin, “is that Rike can’t make an omelet without wading thigh deep in the blood of chickens and wearing their entrails as a necklace.
Mark Lawrence
At that moment there was a knock on the door, and Sam came in. He ran to Frodo and took his left hand, awkwardly and shyly. He stroked it gently and then he blushed and turned hastily away.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I do not say that there is no glory to be gained [in war]; but it is not personal glory. In itself, no cause was ever more glorious than that of men who struggle, not to conquer territory, not to gather spoil, not to gratify ambition, but for freedom, for religion, for hearth and home, and to revenge the countless atrocities inflicted upon them by their oppressors.
G.A. Henty
To whomever swapped my tattoo cream for toothpaste........ well played.
R.D. Ronald
The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.
Charles Williams
For there was nothing in his eyes but the black night and the cold stars.
Susanna Clarke
Sometimes, one yearns for something.For the ultimate in happiness. I yearn for it,and don't know where to look for it any longer. And I don't know if I would recognize it if I found it. And the longer I look, the more selfish I grow.For I think only of my own happiness. i think I have lost the ability to make someone else happy. If I ever had it. And I suppose we can never be happy unless we can also give happiness.
Mary Balogh
There's a pleasure being mad that only the madman knows.
Elly Griffiths
Witta feared nothing - except to be poor.
Rudyard Kipling
No prayers can be heard which do not come from a forgiving heart.
J.C. Ryle
Stimulated by the juice, I believe, men have even been known to ride alligators.
P.G. Wodehouse
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard, are sweeter
John Keats
What's the point of being a grown-up if you don't get to be immature?
Steven Moffat
He looked at me, and then looked away quickly.But I could tell he was interested.I think my tight t-shirt might have had something to do with it. And the way I was pushing my breasts towards him, with an inviting smile on my face.
Fiona Thrust
The realm of God is dangerous. You must enter into it and not just seek information about it
Archbishop Anthony Bloom
We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign people. For him who seeks the truth there is nothing if higher value than truth itself
Albert Hourani
I think that it [the Church] stands for everything most hostile to the mental emancipation and stimulation of mankind. It is the completest, most highly organized system of prejudices and antagonisms in existence. Everywhere in the world there are ignorance and prejudice, but the greatest complex of these, with the most extensive prestige and the most intimate entanglement with traditional institutions, is the Roman Catholic Church. It presents many faces towards the world, but everywhere it is systematic in its fight against freedom.
H.G.Wells
Live humbly and for the moment.
Fennel Hudson
The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
Alfred North Whitehead
You are what you share.
Charles W. Leadbeater
The key point about life is that in the end nothing really matters.
Steven Redhead
I'd rather be a rising ape than a falling angel.
Terry Pratchett
Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world.
Simon Reynolds
It is refreshing, and salutary, to study the poise and quietness of Christ. His task and responsibility might well have driven a man out of his mind. But He was never in a hurry, never impressed by numbers, never a slave of the clock.
J.B. Phillips
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
George Orwell
Fear not that thy life shall come to an end but rather that it shall never have a beginning.
John Henry Cardinal Newman
Life with a man is more businesslike after it, and money matters work better. And then, you see, if you have rows, and he turns you out of doors, you can get the law to protect you, which you can't otherwise, unless he half-runs you through with a knife, or cracks your noddle with a poker. And if he bolts away from you--I say it friendly, as woman to woman, for there's never any knowing what a man med do-- you'll have the sticks o' furniture, and won't be looked upon as a thief.
Thomas Hardy
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of suble air.
Doris Lessing
In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greatest human virtues from the worst human vice, collective egotism.
W.H. Auden
O Lord let me not live to be useless!
Bishop John de Stratford
That's the thing about your destiny how are you supposed to know when it arrives? How are you supposed to recognise it from random life?
David Baddiel
Self-development is a contradiction in terms Personal development is the way.
Frank Ra (Exstatica)
Family wasn't like that, not really. It was not something small and compact, a "nuclear family": it was a great big mess of people, all interlinked, cousins and aunts and relatives-by-marriage and otherwise--it was a network, like the Conversation or a human brain. It was what he had tried to escape, going into the Up and Out, but you cannot run away from family, it follows you, wherever you go.
Lavie Tidhar
Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.
George Eliot
What I'am learning is the world laughs through its ass every day, then just lies double-time when shit goes down. It's like we're on a Pritikin diet of fucken lies. I mean - what kind of fucken life is this?
D.B.C. Pierre
The perfect life, the perfect lie, I realised after Christmas, is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do.
Geoff Dyer
Let it be admitted at once, mournful as the admission is, that every instinct in his intelligence went out at first to greet the new light. It had hardly done so, when a recollection of the opening chapter of 'Genesis' checked it at the outset.
Edmund Gosse
All the more recent work on alkaptonuria has... strengthened the belief that the homogentisic acid excreted is derived from tyrosine, but why alkaptonuric individuals pass the benzene ring of their tyrosine unbroken and how and where the peculiar chemical change from tyrosine to homogentisic acid is brought about, remain unsolved problems.
Archibald E. Garrod
the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirrored on every page
Peter Ackroyd
The function of camera movement is to assist the storytelling. That's all it is. It cannot be there just to demonstrate itself.
Mike Figgis
One day Wallace was fishing in the Irvine when Earl Percy, the governor of Ayr, rode past with a numerous train. Five of them remained behind and asked Wallace for the fish he had taken. He replied that they were welcome to half of them. Not satisfied with this, they seized the basket and prepared to carry it off. Wallace resisted, and one of them drew his sword. Wallace seized the staff of his net and struck his opponent's sword from his hand; this he snatched up and stood on guard, while the other four rushed upon him. Wallace smote the first so terrible a blow that his head was cloven from skull to collar-bone; with the next blow he severed the right arm of another, and then disabled a third. The other two fled, and overtaking the earl, called on him for help; "for," they said, "three of our number who stayed behind with us to take some fish from the Scot who was fishing are killed or disabled."How many were your assailants?" asked the earl.But the man himself," they answered; "a desperate fellow whom we could not withstand."I have a brave company of followers!" the earl said with scorn. "You allow one Scot to overmatch five of you! I shall not return to seek for your adversary; for were I to find him I should respect him too much to do him harm.
G.A. Henty
Diplomacy and virtue do not make easy companions.
Iain Pears
In every remark he found a meaning, but not always the true meaning, and his life, though vivid, was largely a dream.
E.M. Forster
As the year goes on, certain deputies—and others, high in public life—will appear unshaven, without coat or cravat; or they will jettison these marks of the polite man, when the temperature rises. They affect the style of men who begin their mornings with a splash under a backyard pump, and who stop off at their street-corner bar for a nip of spirits on their way to ten hours’ manual labor. Citizen Robespierre, however, is a breathing rebuketo these men; he retains his buckled shoes, his striped coat of olive green. Can it be the same coat that he wore in the first year of the Revolution? He is not profligate with coats.While Citizen Danton tears off the starched linen that fretted his thick neck, Citizen Saint-Just’s cravat grows ever higher, stiffer, more wonderful to behold. He affects a single earring, but he resembles less a corsair than a slightly deranged merchant banker.
Hilary Mantel
I will not debate with you Dark Elf. By the swords of the Noldor alone are your sunless woods defended. Your freedom to wander there wild you owe to my kin and but for them long since you would have laboured in thraldom in the pits of Angband. And here I am King and whether you will it or will it not my doom is law. This choice is given to you: abide here or to die here and so also for your son.
J.R.R. Tolkien
A Socialist State demands precisely the same human symbols as that of Fascist or Nazi, and the same surrender of human liberties if it is to succeed.
Eden Phillpotts
Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.
Mark Fisher
Basically, financial reporting is this sinking hole at the centre of journalism. You start by swimming around it until finally, reluctantly, you can't fight the pull anymore and you get sucked down the drain into the biz pages.
Tom Rachman
Early accounts of the abundance of fish and wildlife offer us a window to the past that helps reveal the magnitude of subsequent declines. They provide us with benchmarks against which we can compare the condition of today's seas. Such benchmarks are valuable in countering the phenomenon of shifting environmental baselines, whereby each generation comes to view the environment into which it was born as natural, or normal. Shifting environmental baselines cause a collective societal amnesia in which gradual deterioration of the environment and depletion of wildlife populations pass almost unnoticed. Our expectations diminish with time, and with them goes our will to do something about the losses.
Callum Roberts
What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.
Bertrand Russell
The world is constantly evolving, while the family endeavours to stay the same. Updated, refurbished, modernised, but essentially the same. A house in the landscape, both shelter and prison.
Rachel Cusk
In boom times companies have high profits. They increase production to satisfy demand for goods. This leads to excess supply. Companies cut prices to compete for customers. leading to lower profits, lay-offs, and economic depression. Eventually lower prices lead to an increase in demand and profits go back up. The economy is a yo-yo.
Niall Kishtainy
There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.
George Eliot