Quotes by British Authors - Page 614

My idea of Christmas, whether old-fashioned or modern, is very simple: loving others. Come to think of it, why do we have to wait for Christmas to do that?
Bob Hope
… there’s a difference between having no one because you’ve chosen it and having no one because everyone has been taken away.
Helen Oyeyemi
When setbacks arise - and they will from time to time - regroup, recharge, refocus and refine.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Destiny is desire meeting opportunity. You become who you are driven to be.
Chloe Thurlow
This is the whole stupid thing about all these unblood relationships. They depend on people staying the same, standing in the same spot they were in over a decade ago, when they first met. Surely the reality is that connections between people aren't permanent, but fleeting and random, like a solar eclipse or clouds meeting in the sky. They exist in a constantly moving universe full of constantly moving objects.
Matt Haig
As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.
Stephen Fry
Anyone can speak Troll. All you have to do is point and grunt.
J.K. Rowling
...stooping very low, He engraves with careHis Name, indelible, upon our dust;And from the ashes of our self-despair,Kindles a flame of hope and humble trust.He seeks no second site on which to build,But on the old foundation, stone by stone,Cementing sad experience with grace,Fashions a stronger temple of His own.
Patricia St. John
Snape was a bully who loved the goodness he sensed in Lily without being able to emulate her. That was his tragedy.
J.K. Rowling
To fight with demons, your intent must be pure. And even then, there's no guarantee you'll win.
Simon R. Green
The man might have died in a fit; but then the jewels are missing," mused the Inspector, "Ha! I have a theory. These flashes come upon me at times... What do you think of this, Holmes? Sholto was, on his own confession, with his brother last night. The brother died in a fit, on which Sholto walked off the treasure! How's that?""On which the dead man very considerately got up and locked the door on the inside," said Holmes.
Arthur Conan Doyle
I was thinking, that when my time comes, I should be sorry if the only plea I had to offer was that of justice. Because it might mean that only justice would be meted out to me.
Agatha Christie
She seemed to be lovely still to herself, as if no amount of looking into mirrors could ruin her illusion.
Elizabeth Taylor
You're just a huge romantic at heart, aren't you?""If there's cash involved, I'm anything you want me to be.
Jasper Fforde
The more enchanted the idyll, greater must be the pain of its ending.
Georgette Heyer
The bird which has no knowledge of pure water, has his beak in salt water all year round.
Idries Shah
I say, "Well then I don't know if it was real, and that makes me feel like I'm going insane again.""Absolutely it was real. It was a real, partial picture. Because it ended preemptively, things you would have learned about him in the relationship, you are instead learning in the breakup. You have learned that he has a desperate desire for intimacy and then a desperate desire for the cave. He will get lonely there eventually and come back.""To me?"He doesn't pause. "To someone new.""And I'll have to watch another girl?""You will have to, but you will also know what lies ahead for that poor girl.
Emma Forrest
Hereby perceive we the love of God, because He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren." How often I think of that 'ought.' No sugary sentiment there. Just the stern, glorious trumpet call, OUGHT. But can words tell the joy buried deep within? Mine cannot. It laughs at words.
Amy Carmichael
Why does getting ahead always have to involve getting up early?
Elizabeth Jane Howard
Nice day for a funeral.
Anthony Horowitz
Greater love hath no man than this that he lay down his friends for his political life.
Jeremy Thorpe
Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.
G.K. Chesterton
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
W Somerset Maugham
For me, nature is something you watch on the Discovery Channel, or on the evening news -- as you learn how much more of it's been savaged to make way for the Blackberry realm that is my home
Tahir Shah
If I were you, I'd sue my face for slander.
Terry Pratchett
Do I want to pray or only to think about my human problems? Do I want to pray or simply kneel there contemplating my sorrow? Do I want to direct my prayer toward God or let it direct itself towards me?
Hubert Van Zeller
He'll love and hate equally under cover, and esteem it a species of impertinence to loved or hated again.
Emily Brontë
We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.
Neil Gaiman
It didn’t matter that she didn’t live here, that a relationship was out of the question. It was probably because a relationship wouldn’t happen that he could let himself get this close. He wrapped his arms tighter around her as though this were all that existed in the world. Just the two of them, the mountain, the clean winter air. The taste of her tongue on his lips.
Rebecca Brooks
Police officers seem nice until they start targeting you for stops, give you a bogus speeding ticket and write fake police reports about their interactions with you
Steven Magee
I was going to write a sharp witty email full of devastating one-liners but I suspect you want something nicer than that
Lucy Robinson
Lies breed distrust, and distrust brings conflict.
Robin Jarvis
A monk was told that his father had died. He said to the messenger, "Do not blaspheme. My Father cannot die.
Benedicta Ward
In a nutshell, the universe is 4% visible, 23% undetectable and 73% unimaginable. Welcome to the cosmos, full of mass you can measure but not manhandle, driven by a force you can infer but not explain.
Tim Radford
I can't be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I'm not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion? She says he can. Then he should.
Jeanette Winterson
Prayer is an acknowledgment that our need of God's help is not partial but total.
Alistair Begg
Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.
W.H. Auden
Some people make the mistake of confusing "submission" with "weakness", whereas it is anything but. Submission is a form of peaceful acceptance of the terms of the universe including the things we are currently unable to change or comprehend.I accepted the fact that there are things beyond my limits. I can only see some parts, like floating fragments from a movie, but the bigger scheme is beyond my comprehension.
Elif Shafak
Hope itself is always genuine. It's only what it's placed in that can prove to be false.
Karen Maitland
I was too much taken up with another interest to care; I felt beneath my feet the threshold of the strange door, in my life, which had suddenly been thrown open and out of which came an air of a keenness I had never breathed and of a taste stronger than wine. I had heard all my days of apparitions, but it was a different thing to have seen one and to know that I should in all likelihood see it familiarly, as I might say, again. I was on the lookout for it as a pilot for the flash of a revolving light and ready to generalise on the sinister subject, to answer for it to all and sundry that ghosts were much less alarming and much more amusing than was commonly supposed. There's no doubt that I was much uplifted. I couldn't get over the distinction conferred on me, the exception - in the way of mystic enlargement of vision - made in my favour.("Sir Edmund Orme")
Henry James
That happens in life sometimes, doesn't it? Something terrible happens and you think it's the worst thing ever and then it turns out to be the best.
Sarah Morgan
Learn the art of bringing your dreams alive within your own reality.
Steven Redhead
The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam.
Joseph Conrad
The past was dwindling, like something shrinking to a speck in the rear-view mirror, and the future was shining through the windscreen, demanding her full attention.
Michel Faber
To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.
Friedrich A. Hayek
He was walking into Faerie, in search of a fallen star, with no idea how he would find the star, nor how to keep himself safe and whole as he tried. He looked back and fancied that he could see the lights of Wall behind him, wavering and glimmering as if in a heat-haze, but still inviting.
Neil Gaiman
So, Zed, isn’t this a killer outfit?”“Certainly a killer, baby.”“Good, because I’ve bought another five just like it.”“You horrible, teasing fairy. If you really have more of those fashion disasters in your bags, I’m gonna hang you on top of the family Christmas tree in December.
Joss Stirling
Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.
E.M. Forster
We...advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche.
C.S. Lewis
You remind me of an old cat I once had. Whenever he killed a mouse he would bring it into the drawing-room and lay it affectionately at my feet. I would reject the corpse with horror and turn him out, but back he would come with his loathsome gift. I simply couldn’t make him understand that he was not doing me a kindness. He thought highly of his mouse and it was beyond him to realize that I did not want it.You are just the same with your chivalry. It’s very kind of you to keep offering me your dead mouse; but honestly I have no use for it. I won’t take favors just because I happen to be a female.
P.G. Wodehouse
Humans lie without a second thought.
Ciel Phantomhive
So here I am, upside down in a woman.
Ian McEwan
Like other corrupt people, he would never realize that his punishment was in missing out on what he didn’t know he could have.
Guy Mankowski
[i]We were fighting so very hard and achieving so very little aside from staying alive. BUT THAT’S EVERYTHING, my father wrote to me, when I told him that in a letter.[/i]
Helen Oyeyemi
Education is not filling up a box but seeing what you can create with one and don't you ever forget that!
Jill Telford
Shivers heaved out a sigh. “Just trying to make tomorrow that bit better than today is all. I’m one of those … you’ve got a word for it, don’t you?”“Idiots?”He looked sideways at her. “It was a different one I had in mind.”“Optimists.”“That’s the one. I’m an optimist.”“How’s it working out for you?”“Not great, but I keep hoping.”“That’s optimists. You bastards never learn.
Joe Abercrombie
We scarcely want to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.
Virginia Woolf
The Duke is worried you lack the fitness to walk up Bond Street. You’re generation lacks the drive.
Tyne O'Connell
The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands.
Ian McEwan
Ye know full well that the meaning of life is to find your gift. To find your gift is happiness. Never tae find it is misery.
Terry Pratchett