Quotes by British Authors - Page 630

We're nothing more than prisoners to your desire.
Jessie Burton
You're not right in the head, and nor am I, and this is why....this is why I like you.
Morrissey
[A]fter all it was true that a girl does not go alone in the world unchallenged, nor ever has gone freely alone in the world, that evil walks abroad and dangers, and petty insults more irritating than dangers, lurk.
H.G.Wells
May the New Year bring you courage to break your resolutions early! My own plan is to swear off every kind of virtue, so that I triumph even when I fall!
Aleister Crowley
I had to go outside. I had to let the element of chance in.
Mark Forsyth
She stared at the bullwhip coiled Indiana Jones-style at his narrow waist, then at the black-handled dagger sheathed on his right hip. An obsidian rapier--Fae-forged and unbreakable--almost merged with one of the taped seams that ran down the sides of his pants. He even wore a dagger gunslinger-style at his hip. Dear Goddess, the man was a walking arsenal, but he was sexy as hell.
Kryssie Fortune
Ultimately not one amongst usWill ever be denied that,The glimmer of a chance to shine.
Scott Hastie
To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words- to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam. It is the same with thinking, which is really silent talking. It is not, by itself, open to the discovery of anything new, for its only novelties are simply arrangements of old words and ideas.
Alan W. Watts
Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will - whatever we may think. They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures - and the best of them lead us not only outwards in space, but inwards as well. Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection....
Lawrence Durrell
Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
J.K. Rowling
Alcohol. It sucks the life out of a face and replaces it with its own dumb shine of inanity. It’s up to you. If you want to lose yourself, have a drink.
Kevin Brooks
There are vampires. They are real, they are of our time, and they are here, close by, stalking us as we sleep...
Nicky Raven
Many people are living life by default.
Steven Redhead
Maybe I should be still; accept my fate. But I have tasted freedom, known love – I have had choice and learnt what it is to have a human heart, not just a compliant one.
Dianna Hardy
Are we labouring at some Work too vast for us to perceive? Are our passions and desires mere whips and traces by the help of which we are driven? Any theory seems more hopeful than the thought that all our eager, fretful lives are but the turning of a useless prison crank. Looking back the little distance that our dim eyes can penetrate the past, what do we find? Civilizations, built up with infinite care, swept aside and lost. Beliefs for which men lived and died, proved to be mockeries. Greek Art crushed to the dust by Gothic bludgeons. Dreams of fraternity, drowned in blood by a Napoleon. What is left to us, but the hope that the work itself, not the result, is the real monument? Maybe, we are as children, asking, "Of what use are these lessons? What good will they ever be to us?" But there comes a day when the lad understands why he learnt grammar and geography, when even dates have a meaning for him. But this is not until he has left school, and gone out into the wider world. So, perhaps, when we are a little more grown up, we too may begin to understand the reason for our living
Jerome K. Jerome
How blest was the created stateOf man and woman, ere they fell,Compared to our unhappy fate:We need not fear another hell.
John Wilmot
When we get down to the very basics of human life we find that we arrive to take a ride on spaceship Earth for several decades and then we leave.
Steven Magee
It is described by some as a moment when the world stops moving...it did just that for me. I knew before she said one word or made a single movement, that our lives would begin to dissolve into each other...we would never part again. This was not love at first sight, but rather second. I had fallen in love at eleven; now I was twenty and now all things were possible.
Graham Kerr
Learn to say 'No' it will be of more use to you than to be able to read Latin.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Leofric met her eye, his own gaze hard. He was clearly losing patience with her. “This is life,” he snapped. “It’s not sweet and it’s not pretty—but before you look at me with scorn remember I’ve just saved both our lives.
Jayne Castel
But though I might fill the world with dragons I never had the slighest real doubt that heroes ought to fight with dragons. I must stop to challenge many child-lovers for cruelty to children. It is quite false to say that the child dislikes the fable because it is moral. Very often he likes the moral more than the fable. Adults are reading their own weary mockery into a mind still vigorous enough to be entirely serious.
G.K. Chesterton
When I have a mission, it gives me something to focus on.
Duncan Bannatyne
The question that naturally occurs is “What would it be like if a star exploded nearby?” Our nearest stellar neighbor, as we have seen, is Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light-years away. I had imagined that if there were an explosion there we would have 4.3 years to watch the light of this magnificent event spreading across the sky, as if tipped from a giant can. What would it be like if we had four years and four months to watch an inescapable doom advancing toward us, knowing that when it finally arrived it would blow the skin right off our bones? Would people still go to work? Would farmers plant crops? Would anyone deliver them to the stores?
Bill Bryson
Judgment is given to men that they may use it. Because it may be used erroneously, are men to be told that they ought not to use it at all? To prohibit what they think pernicious is not claiming exemption from error, but fulfilling the duty incumbent on them, although fallible, of acting on their conscientious conviction. If we were never to act on our opinions, because those opinions ‘lay be wrong, we should leave all our interests uncared for, and all our duties unperformed. An objection which applies to all conduct can be no valid objection to any conduct in particular.
John Stuart Mill
Flammflorbs, archypodsplays, clinker crabs, dorsaldorydabbs, mingslakks, linglimes, occocobbers, firgengobblers, smitesnides, orkusta shelled bunkbarnacles, balootabinks, jorgentua jellyfish, tungol widders, teleosti chimaras, and things stranger, yet to be named, Klubbe and his crew members observed through their portholes, lit by the lamps of their submarine's lanterns.
Philip Dodd
A man may live to be as old as Methuselah,’ said Mr. Filer, ‘and may labour all his life for the benefit of such people as those; and may heap up facts on figures, facts on figures, facts on figures, mountains high and dry; and he can no more hope to persuade ’em that they have no right or business to be married, than he can hope to persuade ’em that they have no earthly right or business to be born. And that we know they haven’t. We reduced it to a mathematical certainty long ago!
Charles Dickens
Every step of the road was just as she'd dreamt it all the time she'd been away. Every step took her further away from the smoke and the noise and the loneliness and fear of the city she'd left behind. Every step drew her deeper into the hollows of the landscape, the green hills and shining rivers and mist-tangled treetops.
Jon McGregor
A truth that's told with bad intentBeats all the lies you can invent.
William Blake
I don't generally feel anything until noon then it's time for my nap.
Bob Hope
As sure as water's wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end.
Neil Gaiman
CREEPOther people have written about war. About how one plane sweeps over and the whole place is ablaze in minutes. About how a young man may kill another young many with perfect legality. I prefer to write about less sudden things. About how we inch further away without even noticing. And then it's too late. Or is it? No it's not too late to say sorry, we were wrong, let's try again to get along. No, it's not too late to quit lying, halt the greed, stop polluting air earth and seas. I prefer to write about less noisy things. About change happening so gradually that one day you just accept the world as different. And you don't question because you're old, and you don't feel like making waves, and anyway, they'd say you were insane.......
Jay Woodman
People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered to be able to answer, such as "Is this the laundry?" "How do you spell surreptitious?" and, on a regular basis, "Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins.
Terry Pratchett
I’m likely to stay here, pen in hand, until dusk comes and my writing melts into the twilight.
Fennel Hudson
I believe it all. If I seem not to, it is only that my joy is too great to let my belief settle itself.
C.S. Lewis
We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.
George Eliot
It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something too of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality.
Anthony Burgess
You're only as old as you feel.
Lucy Ivison
Thomas More: Will, I'd trust you with my life. But not your principles. You see, we speak of being anchored to our principles. But if the weather turns nasty you up with an anchor and let it down where there's less wind, and the fishing's better. And "Look," we say, "look, I'm anchored! To my principles!
Robert Bolt
IF I had only one sermon to preach, it would be a sermon against Pride. The more I see of existence, and especially of modern practical and experimental existence, the more I am convinced of the reality of the old religious thesis; that all evil began with some attempt at superiority; some moment when, as we might say, the very skies were cracked across like a mirror, because there was a sneer in Heaven.
G.K. Chesterton
Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
John Stuart Mill
It’s important for intuitive people to differentiate other people’s energy from their own pre-existing emotional state.
Sam Owen
Many people believe they are attracted by God or by Nature when they are only repelled by Man.
Dean William R. Inge
(1) Use mathematics as shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life (5) Burn the mathematics. (6) If you can’t succeed in 4, burn 3. This I do often.
Alfred Marshall
We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny
Jacob Bronowski
They thought he was scared all the time because he was a coward. The truth was, only he could see the world clearly enough to know how truly scary it was.
Simon R. Green
Sex can lead to nasty things like herpes, gonorrhea, and something called relationships.
Sacha Baron Cohen
You know, I never imagined there were he-dryads. Not even in an oak tree."One of the giants grinned at him.Druellae snorted. "Stupid! Where do you think acorns come from?
Terry Pratchett
Ignoring phone calls leads to a simple life with more free time. Ignoring emails works well also! I do both when I am trying to get things done.
Steven Magee
Where there is no consciousness, there is no time.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
How safe and secure is the internet?Well.....Would you leave all your worldly belongings on the road and expect them to be there when you came back seven years later?
Anthony T.Hincks
You can tempt me, desert me, or cause me great pain; you can create a dark world that my cause me to fear; you can rule your world with blood and terror, that's true.But you can't win. And I know that. Weak as I am, with my imperfections and sins, even with all of my failing, I am stronger than you.I will soon have a body. And I have my agency now. I will increase in my faith and knowledge and power. I am not perfect, but I will be, and there's not a thing you can do! I will become like the Father if I follow the Son. You are powerless to stop me. You can threaten and tempt and whisper lies in my ear, but you can't stop me, Satan; I see that so clearly now! I can stop myslef, yes, but only if I follow you.And I reject you temptations. I reject your whispered lies. I reject you, Lucifer, and your entire plan. You have no power to control me. I am in control of myself. And try as you might, you won't control me on earth. We will defeat you in heaven, and we will deafeat you on earth. Here, or the earth, it doesn't matter; I am always stronger than you.
Chris Stewart
Sure I am this day we are masters of our fate, that the task which has been set before us is not above our strength; that its pangs and toils are not beyond our endurance. As long as we have faith in our own cause and an unconquerable will to win, victory will not be denied us.
Winston S. Churchill
Superior experience and knowledge will be made available to a man or woman in exact accordance with his worth, capacity and earning of it
Idries Shah
...there is the sheer emotional, intellectual, physical, chemical pleasure of your children. The honest truth is that the world holds no greater gratification than lying in bed with your children, putting your leg on top of them in a semi-crushing manner, while saying sternly, "You are a poo.
Caitlin Moran
God wants us to have soft hearts and hard feet. The trouble with so many of us is that we have hard hearts and soft feet.
Jackie Pullinger
All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.
Diane Setterfield
The greatest treasures were most often guarded by the slyest and cruellest dragons.
Adam Nevill
What so tedious as a twice-told tale?
Alexander Pope
Is dishwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.
G.K. Chesterton
You're not like other Wasps.""Aren't I?" Aagen smiled, but it was a painful smile. "No doubt you've killed my kinsmen by the score.""A few," Salma allowed."Well, next time you shed my kinden's blood, think on this: we are but men, no less nor more than other men, and we strive and feel joy and fail as men have always done. We live in the darkness that is the birthright of us all, that of hurt and ignorance, only sometimes... sometimes there comes the sun." He let the bowl fall from his fingers to the floor, watching it spin and settle, unbroken.
Adrian Tchaikovsky