Quotes by British Authors - Page 62

Things were rather larger, more obvious and rougher on the American side, but the issues were essentially the same. The general public voted and demonstrated, but its voting seemed to lead to nothing. It felt that things were done behind its back and over its head but it could never understand clearly how. It never seemed able to get sound news out of its newspapers nor good faith out of its politicians. It resisted, it fumbled, it was becoming more and more suspicious and sceptical, but it was profoundly confused and ill-informed.
H.G.Wells
By remembering it too often I have blurred the memory itself.
C.S. Lewis
She hands me an ornament of The Virgin Mary. "Pray to the Holy Mary, Mother of God!" I notice she has a gold chain round her neck. It has the holy cross and a shamrock
Suzy Davies
In Africa, there is a birthrate trap: a higher standard of living will lead to smaller families but smaller families will not lead to a higher standard of living.
Christopher Hitchens
He turned away, and suddenly she thought about the old children's story, where the stupid girl opens the box that God gave her, and all the evils of the world fly out, except Hope, which stays at the bottom; and she wondered what Hope was doing in there in the first place, in with all the bad things. Then the answer came to her, and she wondered how she could've been so stupid. Hope was in there because it was evil too, probably the worst of them all, so heavy with malice and pain that it couldn't drag itself out of the opened box.
K.J. Parker
When we are not sure we are alive.
Graham Greene
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The English seem to relish unsystematic learning of this kind, in the same manner that they embarked upon "Grand Tours" of Europe in pursuit of a peripatetic scholarship.
Peter Ackroyd
Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream, And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?---"On death
John Keats
It's strange, isn't it. You stand in the middle of a library and go 'aaaaagghhhh' and everyone just stares at you. But you do the same thing on an aeroplane, and everyone joins in.
Tommy Cooper
The word begone is a Russian doll. A small, single word, which contains so many others; and when all the smaller words inside line up, they look like a bridge: Be Beg Ego Go On One.
Craig Stone
this is a book about something
C.S. Lewis
His whole life was a sham, a fairy tale. The truth hidden behind a wall of lies, each lie another brick in the wall until he probably couldn't see the truth anymore.
Shaun Jeffrey
Sometimes I wake up and lie still enough to hear a petal drop from the vase of flowers. Sometimes I lie awake and wish there was someone to hear my falling.
Simon Van Booy
Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.
Fred Hoyle
Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Alan McCluskey“Despair is an ugly thing when it refuses hope.
Alan McCluskey
No matter what has happened always behave as if nothing had happened.
Arnold Bennett
I have had it with these dumb cakes on this dumb spaceship!
Philip Reeve
Rumi himself once said that counterfeit gold is only to be found because there is such a thing as real gold to be copied.
Idries Shah
He looked around at that one room, and the few things in it. He'd always thought retiring would be going back to his life after some nightmare pause. Some stretch of exile in the land of the dead. Now it came to him that all his life worth living had happened while he was holding a sword.Standing alongside his dozen. Laughing with Whirrun, and Brack, and Wonderful. Clasping hands with his crew before the fight, knowing he'd die for them and they for him. The trust, the brotherhood, the love, the knit closer than family. Standing by Threetrees on the walls of Uffrith, roaring their defiance at Bethod's great army. The day he charged at the Cunmur. And at Dunbrec. And in the High Places, even though they lost. The day he earned his name. Even the day he got his brothers killed. Even when he'd stood at the top of the Heroes as the rain came down, watching the Union come, knowing every dragged out moment might be the last.Like Whirrun said - you can't live more than that. Certainly not by fixing a chair.
Joe Abercrombie
I had grown used to getting a pat on the back and being told after a good result: 'Well done, David - you should be happy, you're the first clean rider.
David Millar
I write for the same reason I eat chocolate - because it is, undeniably a compulsion.
Emma Shortt
No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't fake.
P.D. James
London is a roost for every bird.
Benjamin Disraeli
I want you to have the best of everything I can give you. And I'm not talking money here, Tru. I'm talking memories. Our life together.
Samantha Towle
He is a good and a great man; but he forgets, pitilessly, the feelings and claims of little people, in pursuing his own large views. It is better, therefore, for the insignificant to keep out of his way, lest, in his progress, he should trample them down.
Charlotte Brontë
The universal pervasion of ugliness, hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language...everything. Unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious.
Wilfred Owen
You idiot!" She spat, flattening her ears. "What are you doing in my territory?""Drowning?" Replied Graystripe. "Can't you do that in your own territory?" "Ah, but who would rescue me there?
Erin Hunter
...I never once believed what they wanted us to believe - that we as black people are inferior to whites...
Darcus Howe
If we want kids with 'aspiration', we need to give them something to aspire to.
Owen Jones
He shrank from hearing Margaret's very name mentioned; he, while he blamed her – while he was jealous of her – while he renounced her – he loved her sorely, in spite of himself.
Elizabeth Gaskell
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile - hoping it will eat him last.
Winston Churchill
Her smile was like a swift light passing across a darkened room.("Hair")
Joan Aiken
Grey hoped the Church would yet be able to save England from the fate of Tyre or Carthage, the great trading nations
Thomas Hughes
Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?
Zadie Smith
I really like Septimus Heap. he is my favorite guy in the story. I should make you all read it.
Angie Sage
Truthfulness is a luxury, perhaps the greatest, and let me assure you, the most expensive luxury in our life—and happy the man who has been able to enjoy it from his very child hood.
Friedrich Max Müller
They came to the high stone shaft with the face of Sul; they descended to the terrace below. And here Caradog waited, leaning on his silver-tipped rod and eying the horizon, until the delicate slip of the new moon moved out from behind the shoulder of Mount Damyake, with the mysterious, shadowy ghost of the old moon cradle inside it, like an egg inside its egg cup."Now it is time," he
Joan Aiken
The thoughts you think every day determines the life you lead tomorrow
Steven Aitchison
When Chuck Norris calls 911 it's to ask if everything is ok.
Oliver Oliver Reed
You will only learn in a fight how much you've got to learn.
Richard Llewellyn
Attacking is the only secret. Dare and the world always yields or if it beats you sometimes dare it again and it will succumb.
William Makepeace Thackeray
There are no electromagnetic field (EMF) book millionaires yet, but that may change with the roll out of the fifth generation (5G) wireless networks.
Steven Magee
They hammered on the outer gate and called, but there was at first no answer; and then to their surprise someone blew a horn, and the lights in the windows went out. A voice shouted in the dark: 'Who's that? Be off! You can't come in. Can't you read the notice: No admittance between sundown and sunrise?' 'Of course we can't read the notice in the dark,' Sam shouted back. 'And if hobbits of the Shire are to be kept out in the wet on a night like this, I'll tear down your notice when I find it.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I possess the faculty of enjoying the company of those I - of my friends as well in silence as in conversation.
Anne Brontë
Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.
George Eliot
What does Mrs Preston want to go abroad for?' asked Mr Leslie.'I think her doctor wanted her to, Father,' said Agnes.'Doctors!' said Mr Leslie, wiping the whole of the Royal College of Physicians off the face of the world with this withering remark.
Angela Thirkell
It is one thing to believe in witches, and quite another to believe in witch-smellers.
G.K. Chesterton
Yes, even in your mouse moods you only play with the idea of not being." She cleared her throat again. "Biology, you see. It’s because of biology that we want to live and not to die. And it is because of biology that we come to a time when we want to die and not to live.
Aidan Chambers
Eva: I don't want any tea.
Lil: Don’t make me have it on my own.
Diane Samuels
In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, for knowledge, and even beauty is only a vein sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of ones clothes in a community of blind men.
Joseph Conrad
The last dead leaves of fall crackled underfoot, winter-crisp.
Neil Gaiman
There's the trick: to find the way - whether forwards or back - to what we long to be.
Rose Tremain
When I imagine changing places with her I get the feeling I do on finishing a novel with a brick-wall happy ending---I mean the kind of ending when you never think any more about the characters.
Dodie Smith
The fact is that very few of us know what words mean; fewer still take the trouble to enquire. We calmly, we carelessly assume that our minds are identical with that of the writer, at least on that point; and then we wonder that there should be misunderstandings!The fact is (again!) that usually we don't really want to know; it is so very much easier to drift down the river of discourse, "lazily, lazily, drowsily, drowsily, In the noonday sun."Why is this so satisfactory? Because although we may not know what a word means, most words have a pleasant or unpleasant connotation, each for himself, either because of the ideas or images thus begotten, of hopes or memories stirred up, or merely for the sound of the word itself.
Aleister Crowley
Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can't possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.
Terry Pratchett
I realized how much it must suck to be a parent. You devote everything to your kids, who just end up growing up and disliking you. I felt bad for them briefly, but at least they had each other. In that moment I decided I wouldn't have kids. I don't think I could handle the level of betrayal I'd feel once I realized they weren't interested in me anymore.
Sara Taylor
The key to greatness is knowing when to take the hand that has been offered.
Sam Crescent
Failure is becoming someone who needs others to fail.
Alain de Botton