Quotes by British Authors - Page 615

I am the girl who spends hours huddled in a corner of a library, trying to find what you love the most about Marlowe, just so I can write you a poem worthy of Shakespeare. I've made books my lovers, hours my enemies and you the only story.
Nikita Gill
The only real failure is the failure to try, and the measure of success is how we cope with disappointment.
Deborah Moggach
She measured time in pages. Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on the size of the type, and when you think of time in this way there isn’t time for anything else.
Zadie Smith
She was very ugly - the ugliest person you ever saw in your life! Her hair was scraped into a bun, sticking straight out at the back of her head like a teapot handle; and her face was round and wrinkly, and she had eyes like two little black boot-buttons. And her nose! - she had a nose like two potatoes. She wore a rusty black dress right up to the top of her neck and right down to her button boots, and a rusty black jacket and a rusty black bonnet, all trimmed with trembly black jet, with her teapot-handled of a bun sticky out at the back. And she carried a small brown case and a large black stick, and she had a very fierce expression indeed on her wrinkly, round, brown face. But what you noticed most of all was that she had one huge front Tooth, sticking right out like a tombstone over her lower lip. You never, in the whole of your life, ever saw such a Tooth!
Christianna Brand
Man is better off without the confusion and fear of psychic experience and his progress will be faster.' If telepathy ever becomes a possibility he was not sure it would be a good thing, '...for it may put us back in contact with the spirits of the dead and progress does not lie in that direction.
H. Russell Wakefield
But still. It has to end sometime. Wars always do. Everything has to end,' said Josephine, eating another ginger biscuit and getting unexpectedly philosophical. 'Yeah. Things like human civilisation,' I said.
Sophia McDougall
GOOD IDEAS ALTER THE BALANCE IN RELATIONSHIPS. THAT IS WHY GOOD IDEAS ARE ALWAYS INITIALLY RESISTED.
Hugh MacLeod
Indeed His blessings are in the struggle.
Habeeb Akande
There is no one who loves peace more than a soldier
Philippa Gregory
Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.
Germaine Greer
Who was this women?' asked Harry.'I dunno, some Ministry hag.'Mundungus considered for a moment, brow wrinkled.'Little women. Bow on top of er' head.'He frowned and then added, 'Looked like a toad.'Harry dropped his wand.Harry looked up and saw his own shock reflected in Ron and Hermione's faces. The scars on the back of right hand seemed to be tingling again.
J.K. Rowling
God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; he is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
And morning came… It still comes. Our God is here, Emmanuel, among us, always coming towards us, always standing behind us, always standing up for us, always standing with us in solidarity in communion asking us to come with Him now as disciple, as follower, as believer, as a friend, as intimate beloved child of God, now and forever.
Megan McKenna
It was his first definite encounter with the wary-eyed, platitudinous, evasive Labour leaders, and he realised at once the formidable barrier ofinert leadership they constituted, between the discontented masses and constructive change. They seemed to be almost entirely preoccupied byinternecine intrigues and the "discipline of the Party". They were steeped in Party professionalism. They were not in any way traitors to their cause, or wilfully reactionary, but they had no minds for a renascent world. They meant nothing, but they did not know they meant nothing. They regarded Rud just as in their time they had regarded Liberalism, Fabianism, Communism, Science, suspecting them all, learning nothing from them, blankly resistant. They did not want ideas in politics. They just wanted to be the official representatives of organised labour and make what they could by it. Their manner betrayed their invincible resolution, as strong as an animal instinct, to play politics according to the rules, to manoeuvre for positions, to dig themselves into positions -- and squat...
H.G.Wells
Then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven.
John Bunyan
The worst things always happen at night, and oftener than one would think on stormy nights. ("The Compensation House")
Charles Collins
For a terrifying moment I thought he was going to hug me, but fortunately we both remembered we were English just in time. Still, it was a close call.
Ben Aaronovitch
Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.
Lewis Carroll
Everyone who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves to multiply the ways in which they exist to make their life full significant and interesting.
Aldous Huxley
Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom.
D.H. Lawrence
The tragedy about history - personally and globally - is that while we may learn it we rarely learn from it.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.
Malcolm Gladwell
Learning how to learn involves examining assumptions. Mulla Nasrudin tales very often fulfil this funcition.
Idries Shah
It is often said that second thoughts are best. So they are in matters of judgment but not in matters of conscience.
John Henry Newman
Already he knew something of the history of the intervening years. He had heard now of the moral decay that had followed the collapse of supernatural religion in the minds of ignoble man, the decline of public honour, the ascendency of wealth. For men who had lost their belief in God had still kept their faith in property, and wealth ruled a venial world.
H.G.Wells
Suddenly, I’m struck by the magnitude of the moment. Hurtling through the air becomes freeing, not terrifying. This time last year, I was suffocating within the confines of my life. I would’ve done anything to escape. That my life has come full circle is as exhilarating as it is scary. Life is for living. For moments like this.
Siobhan Davis
I don’t want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I’ll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it’s possible to be. I’m growing and I don’t know how to grow. I’m living but I haven’t started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it’s like I’m not here in the world at all and I simply don’t exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid.
David Almond
Work ... has always been my favorite form of recreation.
Anna Howard Shaw
Do not let the endless succession of small things crowd great ideals out of sight and out of mind.
Charlotte M. Mason
Much of the outward business of kingship came naturally.
Dan Jones
When I was lost in the fog, it was as though nothing else existed. And, afterwards, it seemed incomprehensible that I had ever really thought like that. Self-recrimination inevitably followed.
Alexis Hall
Yes, the house must be inhabited, and we will see by whom; for imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.
George Eliot
When once we are buried you think we are gone. But behold me immortal!
Jane Austen
You know Americans...Self-improvement. No matter who or what we are, we're always working on ways to become somebody else.
Alan Brown
She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.
Zadie Smith
There had come to him one of those moments of quiet despair that lie in wait for even the happiest. Stealthy-footed they leap upon us, as we walk along the street, as we sit at evening with fruit and wine upon the table and laughter on our lips, as we wake suddenly from sleep in the hour before dawn; neither at our work nor our play nor our prayers are we safe, those moments can leap at any time out of the blackness around human life and suddenly the colors that we have nailed to our mast are there no longer and all that we have grasped is dust.
Elizabeth Goudge
Al he knew was that he'd never met anyone who caused him to doubt and to hope as much as she did.
Catherine Bennett
I'm not letting go of you.
Jojo Moyes
She had quickly learned that to show unhappiness was to risk the loss of love.
P.D. James
The mother who lay in the grave, was the mother of my infancy; the little creature in her arms, was myself, as I had once been, hushed for ever on her bosom.
Charles Dickens
Sarah Palin appears to have no testable core conviction except the belief (which none of her defenders denies that she holds, or at least has held and not yet repudiated) that the end of days and the Second Coming will occur in her lifetime. This completes the already strong case for allowing her to pass the rest of her natural life span as a private citizen.
Christopher Hitchens
Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.
T.S Eliot
Some ghosts tried to be showy. These were the kinds to avoid.
Lesley Howarth
Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.
Iris Murdoch
Unless some people are commissioned for the task, there will be no gospel preachers; unless the gospel is preached, sinners will not hear Christ’s message and voice; unless they hear him, they will not believe the truths of his death and resurrection; unless they believe these truths, they will not call on him; and unless they call on his name, they will not be saved.
John R.W. Stott
Television is a dirty business. To survive in it you have to be part weasel, part python, and part wolf. To succeed in it, you have to be 99.9 percent great white shark. The capacity for barefaced lying also comes in handy, particularly if you are freelance.
Matt Dickinson
Don’t ask why people keep hurting you. Ask yourself why are you allowing it to happen.
Robert Tew
My God - it's a green child!" said the American. "What is this place - the House of Usher?
Dodie Smith
Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one's head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark−haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.
George Orwell
Fireheart dashed to the warrior's side. Cloudtail was standing stiff-legged, every hair in his pelt on end as if he were facing an enemy. His eyes were fixed on the limp heap of tabby fur huddled at his paws."Why, Fireheart?" Cloudtail wailed. "Why her?"Fireheart knew, but rage and grief made it hard to speak. "Because Tigerstar wants the pack to get a taste of cat blood," he rasped. The dead cat lying in front of them was Brindleface.
Erin Hunter
It suits here now to forget last year, but she'll never make me forget last year, not if I live to be a hundred. I didn't know much then. I know now that there's people like her who want to be friendly for what you do, not what you are.
K.M. Peyton
Each day is God’s gift of a fresh unspoiled opportunity to live according to His priorities.
Elizabeth George
The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning.
David Mitchell
I feel as though the cardboard box of my own reality has been flattened and blown open. Now I can see the edge of the world.
Tom Hiddleston
Don't you remember what your grandfather used to say? That thing about pots and people?""That pots were like people," Alex replied flatly, thinking back to his grandfather carrying a tray of wet freshly thrown clay pots across the studio in ancient Athens. "He said you couldn't tell how well they'd turn out until they'd been fired in the kiln.""Well then?""Well then, what?" muttered Alex. "Some pots shatter in the heat, Aries. I should know. I was the one who had to sweep them up every evening. Sometimes it's better not to go near the fire.""Well, that's the spirit I must say!" huffed Aries. "Thank you very much!
Julia Wills
Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.
Robert Fripp
Bravery is the dead man’s virtue.
Joe Abercrombie
The best things in life are things you have to fight for.
Mila Gray
Craigengelt, you are either an honest fellow in right good earnest, and I scarce know how to believe that; or you are cleverer than I took you for, and I scarce know how to believe that either.
Walter Scott
That's what learning is. You suddenly understand something you understood all your life but in a new way.
Doris Lessing