Quotes by British Authors - Page 627

For Persons are selves and, in one respect at least, I was now a Not-self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not-self of the things around me. To this new-born Not-self, the behavior, the appearance, the very thought of the self it had momentarily ceased to be, and ofother selves, its one-time fellows, seemed not indeed distasteful (for distastefulness was not one of thecategories in terms of which I was thinking), but enormously irrelevant.
Aldous Huxley
I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances.
Jeanette Winterson
If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
Alain de Botton
Hate flows from a broken spirit.
Kevin Walker
If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
C.S. Lewis
I may not be beautiful,I may not be tall,I may have no legs,And be hairy and all.I may not be rich,With lifestyle or clothes,I may not tweet,For my arms are too low.I may have warts,An acne or two,I may be incomplete,Compared to all of you.But when I see,The reflection of me,I see someone beautiful,And I know it's me.
Anthony T.Hincks
Despite his attempts to maintain a vigorous structure of errands, golf games, visits, and meetings, there were sometimes days like this one, filled with rain and touched with a gnawing sense of parts missing from life. When the slick mud ran in the flower beds and the clouds smothered the light, he missed his wife.
Helen Simonson
His anger was still there, and he used it to break into her. He liked the way her eyes widened in alarm, as if he was forcing a lock, as if he was breaking and entering. It was the first time he'd ever slept with a woman and it felt like burglary.
Rupert Thomson
Some things are private. I mean, we're grown-ups now. You don't share everything.
Sophie Kinsella
The really happy person is the one who can enjoy the scenery, even when they have to take a detour.
James Hopwood Jeans
The sorrow which has no vent in tears may make other organs weep.
Henry Maudsley
Sometimes it's easy to get caught up in life and take things for granted.
Karli Perrin
The path towards peace is not for the righteous, the ethical, the active and the compassionate to shit on the malicious, the complacent, the violent and the ignorant. The path towards peace is to be peaceful.
Ilyas Kassam
The lady's not for turning.
Margaret Thatcher
Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.
Jane Austen
Fashion is life-enhancing and I think it's a lovely, generous thing to do for other people
Vivienne Westwood
The wisest person is not the one who has the fewest failures but the one who turns failures to best account.
Richard R. Grant
Art, I subsequently realised, is like that. It softens by association and implication. It renders the hard pliable. It creates gaps, gaping holes really, in possibility.
Andrew Miller
There is no such thing as forcing someone to be free. My obligation is not to my love for him but rather to what this love represents. My obligation is only to myself. Like two parallel lines running alongside each other, Taymour and I could only ever come together if one of us were to break.
Saleem Haddad
Society reaps what it sows in the way it nurtures its children, because stress sculpts the brain to exhibit several antisocial behaviors. Stress can set off a ripple of hormonal changes that permanently wire a child's brain to cope with a malevolent world. Through this chain of events, violence and abuse pass from generation to generation as well as from one society to the next. Many world leaders who have been disciplined through anger and cruelty go in to treat their own people abominably, or to bully other nations. As long as we continue to discipline children like this, we will continue to have terrible wars on both the family and the world stage. One very powerful study illustrates the point. Researchers tracked down Germans who, in World War II, risked their own lives by hiding a Jewish person in their house. When interviewed, the researchers found one common feature of all these people. They had all been socialized in ways that respected their personal dignity.
Margot Sunderland
That's like being a hockey player born on January I.
Malcolm Gladwell
Surely you're not saying that the life of a human and the life of an animal are of the same value?' he ven
David Michie
It's so common, it could be anyone. The trouble is, nobody wants to talk about it. And that makes everything worse.
Ruby Wax
We sleep soundly in our beds, because rough men stand ready in the night to do violence on those who would harm us"Orwell cited Kipling's phrase "making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep" (Kipling, Tommy), and further noted that Kipling's "grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very sound. He sees clearly that men can be highly civilized only while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them." (1942)
George Orwell
Our choices are made, our will flexed, in the teeth of events that overwhelm us and devour us.
Zia Haider Rahman
I would fall asleep with my face pressed into her fur, while her deep electrical purr vibrated softly against my cheek. They made me think of the seaside, and so I called her Ocean, and I could not have told you why.
Neil Gaiman
Just because a door appears closed it does not mean that it is locked - nor that it will not open with the right heart, call or touch
Rasheed Ogunlaru
If we could be seen thinking, we would show blown bright one moment, dark the next, like embers; subject to every passing word and thought of our own or other people's, mostly other people's.
Dorothy Whipple
Now, Watson," said he, "we have picked up two clues this morning. One is the bicycle with the Palmer tyre, and we see what that has led to. The other is the bicycle with the patched Dunlop. Before we start to investigate that, let us try to realize what we do know, so as to make the most of it, and to separate the essential from the accidental.
Arthur Conan Doyle
People wonder why you choose certain subjects to write about. The truth is: you don't really. They choose you
Sebastian Faulks
Pity is an insult. Kindness is a miracle.
Patrick Ness
Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.
Bertrand Russell
In the end, you have to choose whether or not to trust someone.
Sophie Kinsella
Not to go back is somewhat to advance. And men must walk at least before they dance.
Alexander Pope
Can you forgive her? Can you do that?There was no response.Because if you can start to forgive, then it will become easier.And?And then you will be able to forgive yourself—and ask others to forgive you.
Alexander McCall Smith
One thing that's good about procrastination is that you always have something planned for tomorrow
Gladys Bronwyn Stern
The real point of watching television is to forget that you have a brain.
Elizabeth Jane Howard
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.""Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
Arthur C. Clarke
It was all extremely symbolic; but then, if you choose to think so, nothing in this world is not symbolical.
Aldous Huxley
[He] didn’t like to think of himself as vain, but there were definitely times when he wished there was someone on hand to take his photograph.
David Nicholls
If you can keep your head when all about youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you,If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,But make allowance for their doubting too;!
Rudyard Kipling
So it is with the mind, Nandini. Allow it to be in balance. Avoid extremes: the middle way is better. Neither force the mind too hard into concentration nor let it wander aimlessly. Meditation is to pay attention, to be aware of your breathing, your posture, your feelings, your perceptions, your thoughts, and all that passes through your mind and the mind itself; whatever is going on within you and between you and the universe. Meditation is not just sitting for an hour here or an hour there; meditation is a way of life. It is practiced all the time. There is no separation between meditation and everyday living. When you have ceased to be bound by the past or by the future, when you are fully present in the here and now, then it is meditation.
Satish Kumar
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T.S Eliot
A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive – and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down.
Malcolm Gladwell
Women love the last blow as well as the last word, and when they fight for love they are pitiless as a wounded buffalo.
H. Rider Haggard
There's nothing weak about beauty, child. The only weakness in it is if you think it means anything important.
Charlie Fletcher
What great philosophers do for us is not to hand out such an all-purpose system. It is to light up and clarify some special aspect of life, to supply conceptual tools which will do a certain necessary kind of work. Wide though that area of work may be, it is never the whole, and all ideas lose their proper power when they are used out of their appropriate context. That is why one great philosopher does not necessarily displace another, why there is room for all of them and a great many more whom we do not have yet.
Mary Midgley
Everybody, professors and students and Proctors the same, knew that if the sign said 'do not walk on the grass', one hopped. Anybody who didn't had failed to understand what Oxford was.
Natasha Pulley
There is time enough for everything in the course of the day if you do but one thing once but there is not time enough in the year if you will do two things at a time.
Lord Chesterfield
Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost. A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; his two-fold security.
Tom Stoppard
Oh ... My twitchy witchy girl I think you are so nice, I give you bowls of porridge And I give you bowls of ice-cream.
Neil Gaiman
Police intentionally murdering a mentally unstable person will always be unacceptable when there are numerous other non-lethal options available to them.
Steven Magee
And Tria this is Vilenthe.” Tria just stares before collapsing onto the floor Ingra looks down “She'll be fine.” Vilenthe scowls “She has seen me before. Many years ago before I was selected for the 11th Tournament, she must've forgotten about that but we have met before.
Charon Lloyd-Roberts
...once you have resolved to embrace the ideology of positive thinking, you will find a way to interpret virtually any eventuality as a justification for thinking positively. You need never spend time considering how your actions might go wrong.
Oliver Burkeman
Does any one suppose that private prayer is necessarily candid—necessarily goes to the roots of action? Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?
George Eliot
In truth she is not a hard lady naturally, and the time has been when the sight of the venerable figure suing to her with such strong earnestness would have moved her to great compassion. But so long accustomed to suppress emotion and keep down reality, so long schooled for her own purposes in that destructive school which shuts up the natural feelings of the heart like flies in amber and spreads one uniform and dreary gloss over the good and bad, the feeling and the unfeeling, the sensible and the senseless, she had subdued even her wonder until now.
Charles Dickens
Despite my mum being from a small village in the middle of a forest, I'm not a country person. I don't like my bacon sandwich to be curiously snuffling at my fingers. But sometimes being police means holding your breath and fondling a pig.
Ben Aaronovitch
Did it matter? George thought perhaps it did, and not in terms of finding truth or of any hope of discovering what really happened at any given moment. There were as many truths - overlapping, stewed together - as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than story's life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew.
Patrick Ness
The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it
Aneurin Bevan
You know what I can't understand? You have all these people telling you all the time how great you are, smart and funny and talented and all that, I mean endlessly, I've been telling you for years. So why don't you believe it? why do you think people say that stuff, Em? Do you think it's a conspiracy, people secretly ganging up to be nice about you?
David Nicholls