Quotes by British Authors - Page 617

The reason they don't ask me when they're having kids, of course, is because men can, pretty much, carry on a normal life once they've had a baby.
Caitlin Moran
I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.
Virginia Woolf
He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds—that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.
Virginia Woolf
When a child reaches adolescence, there is very apt to be a conflict between parents and child, since the latter considers himself to be by now quite capable of managing his own affairs, while the former are filled with parental solicitude, which is often a disguise for love of power. Parents consider, usually, that the various moral problems which arise in adolescence are peculiarly their province. The opinions they express, however, are so dogmatic that the young seldom confide in them, and usually go their own way in secret.
Bertrand Russell
I suppose I was artistic as a child. Our house was so full of art and artists that it never occurred to me not to be constantly making things. I just assumed that all kids liked to work with their hands as much as I did. I was an only child so I did have a lot of time to be creative by myself and with my parents.
Wendy Froud
The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.
Quentin Crisp
Jay-Z and Kanye West are to authentic rap culture what diseased rates were to 14th century Europeans
Dean Cavanagh
At that moment, in the sunset on Watership Down, there was offered to General Woundwort the opportunity to show whether he was really the leader of vision and genius which he believed himself to be, or whether he was no more than a tyrant with the courage and cunning of a pirate. For one beat of his pulse the lame rabbit's idea shone clearly before him. He grasped it and realized what it meant. The next, he had pushed it away from him.
Richard Adams
Canadians are generally indistinguishable from Americans and the surest way of telling the two apart is to make the observation to a Canadian.
Richard Staines
When things go wrong, you'll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better.
C.S. Lewis
Delay of pain: that was the meaning of life, wasn’t it?“I’ve made some bad decisions,” Caine said, not really meaning to say it out loud.
Michael Grant
It is customary, in England at least, for Coroners' courts to give the verdict 'Suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed'. This insult automatically puts the victim in the wrong and reassures Society that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Have you ever noticed that Socialist governments have a particular horror of the individual's suicide? It is a direct criticism of their basic tenets.
Nanavira Thera
Let them go, Caine,” Diana pleaded.“Why, Diana? Why do you betray me?”“Betray you?” Diana laughed. “Betray you? I’ve been with you every day, every hour, from the start of this nightmare!”Caine looked at her. “But you hate me, anyway.”“No, you sick, stupid creep, I love you. I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t. You’re sick inside, Caine, sick! But I love you.
Michael Grant
Dying from an aggressive fatal brain tumor is like dying from Alzheimer's disease accelerated one hundred times.
Steven Magee
anything that was ever worth knowing began with once upon a time
Sarah Perry
In high altitude astronomical facilities we routinely discharged large amounts of nitrogen gas into closed spaces. We were never informed by the astronomy management team about the abnormally low oxygen environments that the use of liquid nitrogen creates, how long term exposure to it manifests itself in human health and the resulting abnormal mental behaviors.
Steven Magee
If that's what you want to do, then you should go do it-and do it well.
John Wood
For Mercy has a human heart;Pity, a human face;And Love, the human form divine:And Peace the human dress.Songs of InnocenceCruelty has a human heartAnd jealousy a human face,Terror the human form divine,And secrecy the human dress.The human dress is forged iron,The human form a fiery forge,The human face a furnace seal'd,The human heart its hungry gorge.Songs of Experience - This poem was discovered posthumously.
William Blake
Do you think it's possible for an entire nation to be insane?
Terry Pratchett
I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.
Bill Bryson
the theorem of incompleteness . . . [shows] there is nothing on this level of existence that can fully explain this level of existence.
Pat Cadigan
I remember Mum repeatedly telling us we had good hearts and good brains. When she said that we'd say 'thanks' and it might have sounded as if we were thanking her for seeing us that way but actually we were thanking her for giving us whatever goodness was in us.
Helen Oyeyemi
As Liljana sat stitching a sampler or darning a sock, she dreamed her way into life as a grown woman with her own household to run, her own home to tidy, her own children to mind, and her own husband to cheer after a long day's work as they sat together by the fire. The life that future generations would dismiss as dull and degrading offered Liljana the liberating prospect of being mistress in her own home rather than living to serve others.
Fiorella De Maria
I'm back... and you knew I was coming. On my way here I passed a cinema with the sign 'The Mummy Returns'.
Margaret Thatcher
Stability and security are just illusions. But they are necessary illusions because without them there would be no way of going on.
Andrew Crofts
This-the immediate everyday and present experience-is IT the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.
Alan Watts
Say I feel all sad and self-indulgent, then get stung by a wasp, my misery feels quite abstract and I long just to be in spiritual pain once more - 'damn you tiny assassin, clad in yellow and black, how I crave my former innocence where melancholy was my only trial'.
Russell Brand
Oh, dear God!” Janice bellowed and looked as though her neck was made of rubber as her head wobbled back and forth. Lou set the book back on the credenza as Janice stormed out. “Ashton, I’m sorry you had to witness that. As you well know, Mom has never been a pleasant woman. Since coming to live here, she’s been a nightmare on two legs. I’ve had her head examined, and there’s no tumor or disease to explain her behavior. The neurologist and our family doctor have simply diagnosed her as a chronic jackass.
Robin Alexander
To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.
Alan Bennett
Ankh-Morpork is a godless city--''I thought it had more than three hundred places of worship?' said Maladict. city', he recovered.
Terry Pratchett
So, after three days of incessant brandy-drinking, he had burned out the youth from his blood, he had achieved this kindled state of oneness with all the world, which is the end of youth's most passionate desire.
D.H. Lawrence
...I suppose it is a lingering trace of Plutarch and my ineradicable boyish imagination that at bottom our State should be wise, sane, and dignified, that makes me think a country which leaves its medical and literary criticism, or indeed any such vitally important criticism, entirely to private enterprise and open to the advances of any purchaser much be in a frankly hopeless condition.
H.G.Wells
If way to the Better there be it exacts a full look at the Worst.
Thomas Hardy
Marriages are made in Heaven.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
Streams of consequence flow from every action, and from every conflict there are two paths by which events may go.
Stephen R. Lawhead
Trust is an ethereal quality. Like oxygen or light we notice it only by its absence.
David Amerland
In the land of the blind, a one eyed man is king
Michael Grant
That scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: 'the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation.
Richard Dawkins
I loved him with a passion of which I had no idea I was capable. I loved him partly to defend him against the world and partly because I genuinely believed we were soul mates.
Clare Balding
Admit you’re jealous, Emma.” “Never,” she said defiantly. “Just your nipples then. They’re pouting.
Kate Meader
And her old Uncle William used to say a lady is known byher shoes and her gloves.
Virginia Woolf
Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time.
Malcolm Muggeridge
It’s a popular fact that 90 percent of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. . . . It is used. One of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary, to turn the unusual into the usual. Otherwise, human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing a stupid grin, saying “Wow,” a lot. Part of the brain exists to stop this from happening.
Terry Pratchett
Perhaps...I could not be content with mere contentment!
Angela Carter
What happens," called out Max, "if you win?""We die anyway, but I become legend" I explained
Philip Palmer
But whatever the exact psychology of the process {receiving recognition or literary success}, the present has a way of contaminating the past. And the writing will change accordingly. Turmoil and dilemma once experienced with a certain desperation may be seen more complacently as the writer reflects that through expressing them he has realized his inevitable and well-deserved triumph. The lean years of patient toil when no one paid attention may even begin to seem preferable to the present. The very thing you created in the heat of fierce concentration has destroyed the circumstances that made it possible. The writer is devoured along with his books.
Tim Parks
Every day in my consultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not the slightest idea who they really are or what it is that matters to them. The question 'How shall I live?' is not one I can answer on prescription.
Jeanette Winterson
He said it twice because he had never said it before, and it sounded funny.
A.A. Milne
We’re currently faced with two entirely different challenges – facing down Islamism and jihadism on the one hand, and advancing human rights and democratic culture on the other.
Maajid Nawaz
People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you choose between the two realities. There is so much pain here.
Jeanette Winterson
Because I came to seeThat I should never have been a first-rate potter.I didn't have it in me. It's strange, isn't it, That a man should have a consuming passion To do something for which he lacks the capacity? Could a man be said to have a vocation To be a second-rate potter? To be, at best,A competent copier, possessed by the cravingTo create, when one is wholly uncreative?I don't think so. For I came to see, That I had always known, at the secret moments,That I didn't have it in me. There are occasionsWhen I am transported- a different person,Transfigured in the vision of some marvellous creation,And I feel what the man must have felt when he made it.But nothing I made ever gave me that contentment-That state of utter exhaustion and peaceWhich comes in dying to give something life...
T.S Eliot
In reality, while we aim for excellence, we're always living on somebody's dunghill.
Jo Walton
Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart; My silent heart, lie still and break: Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed For a dream's sake.
Christina Rossetti
The best advice I've ever received is, 'No one else knows what they're doing either.
Ricky Gervais
To Mercy Pity Peace and Love All pray in their distress.
William Blake
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.
Stephen Hawking
Ciss says, 'People have less emotions than actors think they have. For much of the time we hide our emotions, we haven't time for emotions. Our brains work so much faster than our emotions.
Antony Sher
For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes—as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden.[Upon hearing the Periodic Table explained in a first-tern university lecture.]
C.P. Snow
How blind is the delusion that the greatness of a man is measured by his living; rather, it’s always by his giving.
Christian Hunt
I would write my tears, weeping out my pain - I would empty my veins for ink.
Muse