Quotes by British Authors - Page 621

Sirius looked out of the fire at Harry, a crease between his sunken eyes. “You’re less like your father than I thought,” he said finally, a definite coolness in his voice. “The risk would’ve been what made it fun for James.”“Look —”“Well, I’d better get going . . . I’ll write to tell you a time I can make it back into the fire, then, shall I? If you can stand to risk
J.K. Rowling
I became convinced that I was being watched.Because self was still leaking everywhere, a part of me began to think it was Mizuko rather than a stranger. I hoped that there might still be a reunion. I hoped it in the shy, sly way hope comes out of the jar, the mistranslated box, last—after everything and everyone else has escaped.
Olivia Sudjic
There are many men in London, you know, who, some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals. It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one. Save in the Stranger's Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed, and three offenses, if brought to the notice of the committee, render the talker liable to expulsion. My brother was one of the founders, and I have myself found it a very soothing atmosphere.
Arthur Conan Doyle
But don't you see, I say, I don't care. I don't care what you've done or how bad you are. Edward, we belong together. We both know it. Now I know your worst secrets and you know mine. Isn't that what you've always wanted? For us to be completely honest with each other?
J.P. Delaney
In what appears to have been an unplanned quip, Wilberforce asked Huxley if he thought he was descended from an ape on his father's or mother's side. Huxley retorted that he would rather have simian relatives than claim kinship with a man who used his charisma and authority to quash free debate.
Jonathan Clements
This whole scenario is sick, depraved, but also grossly fascinating. I’ve become a Peeping Tom. And. It’s. Turning. Me. On.
Siobhan Davis
My life, as it passes thus, was indeed hateful to me, and it was during sleep alone that I could taste joy. O blessed sleep!
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Remembering the good has also resurrected the bad.
Siobhan Davis
When the white arm rests upon the knee it is a triangle; now it is upright - a column; now a fountain, falling. It makes no sign, it does not beckon, it does not see us. Behind it roars the sea. It is beyond our reach. Yet there I venture. There I go to replenish my emptiness, to stretch my nights and fill them fuller and fuller with dreams. And for a second even now, even here, I reach my object and say, “Wander no more. All is trial and make-believe. Here is the end.
Virginia Woolf
Cayse you left a jagged hole.And I can' stand it any more.
The Wanted
You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.
Margaret Thatcher
The militancy of men, through all the centuries, has drenched the world with blood, and for these deeds of horror and destruction men have been rewarded with monuments, with great songs and epics.
Emmeline Pankhurst
The Sweat and the Furrow was Silas Weekley being earthly and spade-conscious all over seven hundred pages. The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas's last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the the hayloft, everyone else lying low in the barn. The rain dripped from the thatch, and the manure steamed in the midden. Silas never omitted the manure. It was not Silas's fault that its steam provided the only uprising element in the picture. If Silas could have discovered a brand of steam that steamed downwards, Silas would have introduced it.
Josephine Tey
What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?
Tom Stoppard
If the moment is everthing, then everything is time.
Benny Bellamacina
The willingness to change one’s mind in the light of new evidence is a sign of rationality not weakness.
Stuart Sutherland
Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.
Richard Dawkins
Ignorance as a deliberate choice, can be used to reinforce prejudice and discrimination.
Ian Leslie
The point is you are supposed to vote for the principle of the thing, not the itsy-bitsy detail about this percent and that percent.
Helen Fielding
She navigated away from the Parish Council message board and dropped into her favorite medical website, where she painstakingly entered the words "brain" and "death" in the search box.The suggestions were endless. Shirley scrolled through the possibilities, her mild eyes rolling up and down, wondering to which of these deadly conditions, some of them unpronounceable, she owed her present happiness.
J.K. Rowling
It is not the absence of sin but the grieving over it which distinguishes the child of God from empty professors
Arthur W. Pink
Mr. Schlubb, the pear-shaped PE teacher, sent us all out to run half a dozen laps around a preposterously enormous cinder track. For the Greenwood kids—all of us white, marshmallowy, innately unphysical, squinting unfamiliarly in the bright sunshine—it was a shock to the system of an unprecedented order.
Bill Bryson
He runs his eye along the row of knives in their racks, the cleavers for splitting bones. He picks one up, looks at its edge, decides it needs sharpening and says, "Do you think I look like a murderer? In your good opinion?"A silence. After a while, Thurston proffers, "At this moment, master, I would have to say...
Hilary Mantel
Peter was not quite like other boys; but he was afraid at last. A tremour ran through him, like a shudder passing over the sea; but on the sea one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them, and Peter felt just the one. Next moment he was standing erect on the rock again, with that smile on his face and a drum beating within him. It was saying, "To die will be an awfully big adventure.
J.M. Barrie
You don’t know anything about me, Tyler. I would suggest you stop trying to fucking psychoanalyse me. I’ve already told you that I have no love to give. We fuck, that’s about it with you and me.
Jaimie Roberts
When you're born a light is switched on, a light which shines up through your life. As you get older the light still reaches you, sparkling as it comes up through your memories. And if you're lucky as you travel forward through time, you'll bring the whole of yourself along with you, gathering your skirts and leaving nothing behind, nothing to obscure the light. But if a Bad Thing happens part of you is seared into place, and trapped for ever at that time. The rest of you moves onward, dealing with all the todays and tomorrows, but something, some part of you, is left behind. That part blocks the light, colours the rest of your life, but worse than that, it's alive. Trapped for ever at that moment, and alone in the dark, that part of you is still alive.
Michael Marshall Smith
There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. (…)A good novel editor is invisible.
Terri Windling
The human skin evolved in a natural electromagnetic radiation environment and is now in a very unnatural man-made one that is making many people sick.
Steven Magee
My New Year's Eve is always 2 July, the night before my birthday. That's the night I make my resolutions. And this year scares the life out of me, because no matter how successful, how good things appear, there is always a deep core of failure within me, although I am trying to deal with it. My biggest fear, this coming year, is that I will be waking up alone.It makes me wonder how many bodies will be fished out of the Thames, how many decaying corpses will be found in one-room flats. I'm just being realistic.
Tracey Emin
No, I won't be hopeless. I am full of hope. I'm a HopeFUL. ~ Evie Snow
Carrie Hope Fletcher
If you’re trapped in a cage, you don’t want to start being grateful for the protection of the bars. You need to be grateful that there are gaps in between them so you can see what’s on the other side.
Beth Kempton
There is far more spiritual potential within than most people realize. The potential is so great that to define it in words would be impossible.
Belsebuub
Even if I could, I wouldn't. Scars can come in handy. I have one myself above my left knee that is a perfect map of the London Underground.
J.K. Rowling
In fine, that it is not enough to be good, without behaving in such a manner as shall make others acknowledge us to be so.
Eliza Haywood
And if you do see any pirates, I don't want you to pick up any rough manners from them. Do you understand?
Alexander McCall Smith
My meaning is, that no man can expect his children to respect what he degrades.
Charles Dickens
… mess is the material from which life and creativity are built …
Ralph D. Stacey
Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing until you can't take anymore, and then it's off to the nearest multistory car park in the family hatchback with a length of rubber tubing. Surely that's fair enough? Surely the coroner's report should read, "He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become.
Nick Hornby
Let none of us delude himself by supposing that honesty is always the best policy. It is not.
Dean William R. Inge
And Englishmen like posing as gods.
E.M. Forster
They're all so much afraid of the Council that they're not afraid of anything else.
Richard Adams
You are the patient one, Mademoiselle,' said Poirot to Miss Debenham.She shrugged her shoulders slightly. 'What else can one do?'You are a philosopher, Mademoiselle.'That implies a detached attitude. I think my attitude is more selfish. I have learned to save myself useless emotion.
Agatha Christie
There's no alternative to being yourself. Accept it, honour it, value it - and get on with it.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
The characters act for reasons that they can’t control and, as readers, we have to believe in their motivations, their sense of choice and in the reality of their suffering, even though, deep down, we know it’s all just puppetry on the part of the writer.
Johnny Rich
His voice was like ice, cold and unforgiving, which was like hearing a different Draven altogether. Here he wasn't my Draven, soft and gentle. NO, here he was the Master, here he was the one in control... here, he was a God!
Stephanie Hudson
She's always loved writers, even more than the books I think. They're like personal friends to her.
Josephine Hart
Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you've lost forever. There is only now.
Jeanette Winterson
In the dream world, anything is possible. It requires a fertile imagination, and a desire to explore the half-light between the known and the unknown.
Fennel Hudson
Genius, as we tend to talk about it today, is some sort of mysterious and combustible substance that burns brightly and burns out. It's the strange gift of poets and pop stars that allows them to produce one wonderful work in their early twenties and then nothing. It is mysterious. It is there. It is gone.
Mark Forsyth
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W.H. Auden
The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word - a glance. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained.
Ian McEwan
Dad?" Jesus asked."Yes, son?" God replied."Why do birds sing?" Jesus asked."Birds sing to welcome in the day and so that people can rejoice in their sweet voices," God said."What about chickens then?" Jesus asked now."Chickens are alarm clocks," God said."Alarm clocks?" Jesus asked bewildered."Yes, alarm clocks. They let everyone know that a new day is coming. Would you want to miss seeing the beauty of a sunrise?" God asked Jesus."No! I love watching a new day dawn," Jesus said."So it is with a lot of animals and people. That's the magic of life," God said."No dad. That's the magic of you," Jesus said as he smiled."Thank you," God said with a happy smile.
Anthony T.Hincks
The rich believe that their money will insulate them from setbacks and frustrations, and that's one of the absurdist expectations of all.
Alain de Botton
The thought of being whoever I want is a terrifying thing, because I have only ever been who everyone has wanted me to be.
Dianna Hardy
I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest - blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward's society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character - perfect concord is the result.
Charlotte Brontë
To venture ... close (to a lion) on foot ... would mean the sudden shattering of any kindly belief that the similarity of the lion and the pussy cat goes much beyond their whiskers. But then, since men still live by the sword, it's a little optimistic to expect the lion to withdraw his claws, handicapped as he is by his inability to read our better effusions about the immorality of bloodshed.
Beryl Markham
And that reminds me, Mama! I have just intercepted another of that puppy’s floral offerings to my sister. This billet was attached to it.” (Charles)
Georgette Heyer
The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.
Hilary Mantel
Our long wanderings have made a man out of him, too. They have not only strengthened his frame and hardened his constitution, but they have given stability to his character. He is thoughtful and prudent, and his advice will always be valuable, while of his courage I have no doubt.
G.A. Henty
Death is a force, not a man in a horse
Dry the River