Quotes by British Authors - Page 609

The animals haven't split apart into what they think and what they feel. They are whole and trust in their instincts.
Bryn Hammond
Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you’d be okay.
Jojo Moyes
With this and this - and he touched one of the canine teeth and that below it - the little children can be bitten." Unaesthetic as it may seem, vampires bite out of one side of the mouth, and one side only, which is only common sense. The upper canines in themselves are little more than daggers, useless in tearing flesh without employing the lower canines to help pin the skin together. Preoccupied with the erotic, the cinema necessarily rides roughshod over such technicalities.
Clive Leatherdale
I think that those few words were my greatest mistake.
Anita Brookner
O youth! The strenght of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! (...) I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret - as you would think of some one dead you have loved. I shall never forget her.... Pass the bottle.
Joseph Conrad
We are angels just like the rest of our brothers and sisters.
Jay Woodman
Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent... this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.
Alan Watts
Logan looks up, registers my face and smiles immediately. I hold onto the back of a chair to steady my legs. Jeez, he’s got a nice smile; dimples appear in his chiseled cheeks and there is familiarity and warmth in his eyes. Real warmth, the likes of which I’ve not often seen. It suddenly strikes me that this man, whoever he might turn out to be, is genuine.
Annabel Fanning
He gave everything to everybody. Except to me.
J.K. Rowling
I tried to think outside the box but couldn't open the lid.
Alan Dapre
But where do you live mostly now?"With the lost boys."Who are they?"They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expanses. I'm captain."What fun it must be!"Yes," said cunning Peter, "but we are rather lonely. You see we have no female companionship."Are none of the others girls?"Oh no; girls, you know, are much too clever to fall out of their prams.
J.M. Barrie
I should say we’d reach England by Tuesday or thereabouts, with a decent wind behind us. It would be a lot quicker than that if we could just sail straight there, but I was looking at the nautical charts, and there’s a dirty great sea serpent right in the middle of the ocean! It has a horrible gaping maw and one of those scaly tails that looks like it could snap a boat clean in two. So I thought it best to sail around that.’FitzRoy frowned. ‘I think they just draw those on maps to add a bit of decoration. It doesn’t actually mean there’s a sea serpent there.’The galley went rather quiet. A few of the pirate crew stared intently out of the portholes, embarrassed at their Captain’s mistake. But to everyone’s relief, instead of running somebody through, the Pirate Captain just narrowed his eyes thoughtfully.That explains a lot,’ he said. ‘I suppose it’s also why we’ve never glimpsed that giant compass in the corner of the Atlantic. I have to say, I’m a little disappointed.
Gideon Defoe
[Presently, science undergraduates] do not learn to write clearly and briefly, marshalling their points in due and aesthetically satisfying order, and eliminating inessentials. They are inept at those turns of phrase or happy analogy which throw a flying bridge across a chasm of misunderstanding and make contact between mind and mind.
William Lawrence Bragg
There is no one way to recover and heal from any trauma. Each survivor chooses their own path or stumbles across it.
Laurie Matthew
My aim is to argue that the universe can come into existence without intervention, and that there is no need to invoke the idea of a Supreme Being in one of its numerous manifestations.
Peter Atkins
One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that - to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to by others.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Listen to me. Forget all you saw. Leave it. Take your mind from it. It has nothing to do with you. But use it for experience. Now you know what hurt it brings to women when men come into the world. Remember, and make it up to your Mama and to all women...And another thing let it do. There is no room for pride in any man. There is no room for unkindness. There is not room for wit at the expense of others. All men are born the same, and equal. As you saw today, so come Captains and the Kings and the Tinkers and the Tailors. Let the memory direct your dealings with men and women. And be sure to take good care of Mama. Is it?
Richard Llewellyn
If in doubt, keep quiet. Play safe, talk less, and observe.
Alison Golden
The conversation was like the sort one has in dreams—mad but interesting.
Robert Graves
The price the Virgin demanded was purity, and the way the educators of Catholic children have interpreted this for nearly two thousand years is sexual chastity. Impurity, we were taught, follows from many sins, but all are secondary to the principal impulse of the devil in the soul--lust.
Marina Warner
To start utilising of the Power of The Heart is the most significant choice you will make in life.
Steven Redhead
All interpretations of history are propaganda for one idea or another.
Selma Dabbagh
I got tired of feeling like Dracula. I wanted to see some daylight, and not just at six o’clock in the morning.
Kate Moss
It is unrealistic to assume that if all goes well in a child's life, he or she will be happy. Happiness is not something one can ask of a child. Children suffer in a way that adults don't always realize under the pressure their parents put on them to be happy.
Adam Phillips
I feel wonderful and sad. It's the gin.
Stephen Beresford
To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.
John Locke
If he were a man of strong mind, it only gave him fits; but a person of mere average intellect it usually sent mad.
Jerome K. Jerome
It is not triumph which defines a man, but tragedy. Triumph always brings out the best in men, but tragedy shows us what we are made of.
Jocelyn Murray
He who mocks the infant's faithShall be mock'd in age and death.He who shall teach the child to doubtThe rotting grave shall ne'er get out.He who respects the infant's faithTriumphs over hell and death.The child's toys and the old man's reasonsAre the fruits of the two seasons.- "Auguries of Innocence
William Blake
The reality of life is that we are all living someone else's dream. Now that's everyone's fantasy.
Anthony T.Hincks
No critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. For English is a language that simply cannot be fixed, not can its use ever be absolutely laid down. It changes constantly; it grows with an almost exponential joy. It evolves eternally; its words alter their senses and their meanings subtly, slowly, or speedily according to fashion and need.
Simon Winchester
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.
Charles Darwin
Her constant phrase, "Go with God", had puzzled me a good deal. Suddenly it became clear. It was a revelation - acceptance. It filled me with joy. Accept life, the world, Spirit, God, call it what you will, and all else will follow.
Jennifer Worth
If someone tries to use you as a tool, you shouldn't mind it, because it is their choice and folly, not yours.
Jude Morgan
I thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart’s blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.
W Somerset Maugham
If we were walking here together, I’d point out the carnivorous plants that grow on this spot: sundews with sticky red leaves, eating insects to sustain them because the soil is so poor. If you were with me, I’d take you to the Doubler Stones, where thousands of years ago, Neolithic peoples carved channels in the rock to drain away the blood from their sacrifices. I would show you where the plover nests, and the green hairstreak butterfly lays its eggs. I love this place. I love this land. It’s part of me, it’s part of who I am. But it’s no place for you: a seven-year-old girl in a princess costume.
Sanjida Kay
Life gets boring with only humans to talk to.
Stephen Baxter
He stares now at the three words he has written.They are ridiculous. Writing is ridiculous. A sentence, any sentence, is absurd. Just the idea of it; jam one word up against another, shoulder-to-shoulder, jaw-to-jaw; hem them in with punctuation so they can't move an inch. And then hand that over to someone else to peer at, and expect something to be communicated, something understood. It's not just pointless. It is ethically suspect.
Jo Baker
When she bought the cats her mother asked her straight out if they were 'baby substitutes'. 'No,' Ruth had answered, straight-faced. 'They're kittens. If I had a baby it would be a cat substitute.
Elly Griffiths
I'm wondering what to read next." Matilda said. "I've finished all the children's books.
Roald Dahl
Gradually the magic of the island [Corfu] settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen.
Gerald Durrell
Pedersen was always wooing her. Sometimes he was gracious and kind, but at other times when his failure wearied him he would be cruel and sardonic, with a suggestive tongue whose vice would have scourged her were it not that Marie was impervious, or too deeply inured to mind it. She always grinned at him and fobbed him off with pleasantries, whether he was amorous or acrid.'God Almighty,' he would groan, 'she is not good for me, this Marie. What can I do for her? She is burning me alive and the Skaggerack could not quench me, not all of it. The devil! What can I do with this? Some day I shall smash her across the eyes, yes, across the eyes.'So you see the man really loved her.("The Tiger")
A.E. Coppard
Yet in our hands and within our view is a whole universe of discovery and clarification, which is a pleasure to study in itself, gives the average person access to insights that not even Darwin or Einstein possessed, and offers the promise of near-miraculous advances in healing, in energy, and in peaceful exchange between different cultures. Yet millions of people in all societies still prefer the myths of the cave and the tribe and the blood sacrifice.
Christopher Hitchens
The only disability that I have, is that I'm human.
Anthony T.Hincks
He's not safe, but he's good (referring to Aslan, the Lion, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)
C.S. Lewis
Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen...
Douglas Adams
The only interesting thing about religion is how many people it's slaughtered. Communism and Nazism are religions as well, make no mistake about it.
Lemmy Kilmister
Sometimes you just have to turn off the lights, sit in the dark, and see what happens inside of you.
Adam Oakley
His shout was a syllable so ancient and powerful that Saffiyah's mind instantly censored it.
Felix Long
The rights we have as free individuals is the right to choose as we please.
Steven Redhead
Strange, isn't it,' mused Glokta as he watched him struggle for air. 'Big men, small men, thin men, fat men, clever men, stupid men, they all respond the same to a fist in the guts. One minute you think you're the most powerful man in the world. The next you can't even breathe by yourself.
Joe Abercrombie
All crimes, all hatreds, all wars can be reduced to unhappiness.
A.S. Neill
There, did you think to kill me? There's no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There's only an idea.Ideas are bulletproof. Farewell.
Alan Moore
We are the dead . Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone.
George Orwell
Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior.
Julian Barnes
Victory at all costs victory in spite of all terror victory however long and hard the hard may be for without victory there is no survival.
Winston Churchill
I used to want to understand how the world worked. Little things, like heavy stuff goes at the bottom of the laundry bag, or big things, like the best way to get a boy to chase you is to ignore him, or medium things, like if you cut an onion under running water your eyes won't sting, and if you wash your fingers afterwards with lemon-juice they won't stink.I used to want to know all the secrets, and every time I learned one, I felt like I'd taken--a step. On a journey. To a place. A destination: to be the kind of person who knew all this stuff, the way everyone around me seemed to know all this stuff. I thought that once I knew enough secrets, I'd be like them.
Cory Doctorow
Ben Scott couldn't be afraid of the supernatural. He didn't believe in the supernatural. Ben Scott was firmly convinced that he didn't believe in anything,
Jan-Andrew Henderson
You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. 'He has no friends.' This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it.
Christopher Hitchens
In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.
Terry Pratchett