Quotes by British Authors - Page 635

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.
Charles Darwin
Nor should they be, but everyone needs to feel they're part of something worthwhile. That, in the last analysis, their life has some meaning in a larger context. The questions is what am I part of? What have I done?
Julian Fellowes
Sometimes a step back or away from an idea, task or project brings even more perspective, insight and clarity.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens.
Virginia Woolf
A shade flickered to my left, an eerie shadow balanced even more precariously on the railing than I. Her plimsolls struggled to grip the same rail my fingers now held. I knew her face, just as I knew her death; I’d watched it often enough, those times I’d been unable to avoid crossing here. Nerys was always here, tied to the moment of her death, an echo, forever hurtling down into those waters, only to reappear an instant later, once more wavering on the rails.
Hazel Butler
Unquestionably it is possible to do without happiness it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind.
John Stuart Mill
Look at him now, poor fellow. That's what a dose of reality does for you...Never touch the stuff myself, you understand. Find it gets in the way of the hallucinations.
Alan Moore
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E.L. James
It is a pity that we cannot persuade all ministers to be men, for it is hard to see how other was they can be truly men of God.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Mr. Albert? Mr. Albert?” Harley said.“Just Albert’s fine,” Albert said tersely.“Me and Janice are thirsty.”“I’m sorry, but I don’t have any water on me.” He managed a tight smile and moved on. But now Janice was crying and Harley was pleading.“We used to live with Mary and she gave us water. But now we have to live with Summer and BeeBee and they said we have to have money.”“Then I guess you’d better earn some money,” Albert said. He tried to soften it, tried not to sound harsh, but he had a lot on his mind and it came out sounding mean. Now Harley started to cry, too.“If you’re thirsty, stop crying,” Albert snapped. “What do you think tears are made of?
Michael Grant
Those who reject Christianity will not be moved by Christ’s statement that poverty is blessed. But here a rather remarkable fact comes to my aid. Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere ‘opiate of the people’ have a contempt for the rich, that is, for all mankind except the poor. They regard the poor as the only people worth preserving from ‘liquidation’, and place in them the only hope for the human race. But this is not compatible with a belief that the effects of poverty on those who suffer it are wholly evil; it even implies that they are good. The Marxist thus finds himself in real agreement with the Christian in those two beliefs which Christianity paradoxically demands – that poverty is blessed and yet ought to be removed.
C.S. Lewis
The passing moment is all we can be sure of it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it.
W Somerset Maugham
Xenophobia is when you smile at people and they don't smile back.
Neel Burton
Who can know anybody?' said the bookshop owner. 'Every person is like thousands of books. New, reprinting, in stock, out of stock, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, rubbish. The lot. Different every day. One's lucky to be able to put his hand on the one that's wanted, let alone know it.
Russell Hoban
No one ever tells you that: that there’s no method. Writing’s a lawless place.
Naomi Wood
It is the goldsmith who can assay the gold.
Idries Shah
Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid. In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to BE a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the *whole damned universe*!
Alastair Reynolds
. . .the most important philosophical question we can each ask ourselves is, ‘Do I or do I not wish to commit suicide?’ If we say, ‘No I do not,’ as most of us would, it is because we have reasons for living, or at the very least real hope that we can find such reasons. Then the next question is: what are the reasons I personally have for saying ‘No’ to that question? The answer contains the meaning of my life.
A.C. Grayling
I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself.
Arthur C. Clarke
Pick the day. Enjoy it - to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come... The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present, and I don't want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future.
Audrey Hepburn
Were you proposing to shoot these people in cold blood, sergeant?""Nossir. Just a warning shot inna head, sir.
Terry Pratchett
I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.
E.M. Forster
The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.
Bertrand Russell
His own true hidden reality that he had desired to know grew palpable, recognizable. It seemed to him just this: a great, glad, abounding hope that he had saved his brother; too expansive to be contained by the limited form of a sole man, it yearned for a new embodiment infinite as the stars.What did it matter to that true reality that the man's brain shrank, shrank, till it was nothing; that the man's body could not retain the huge pain of his heart, and heaved it out through the red exit riven at the neck: that hurtling blackness blotted out forever the man's sight, hearing, sense?
Clemence Housman
You should write a book," Ron told Hermione as he cut up his potatoes, "translating mad things girls do so boys can understand them.
J.K. Rowling
No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead.
John Stuart Mill
The future sneaks up on us. It leaks in through the small, ordinary things.
Warren Ellis
It's always advisable to cut potential losses in the early stages.
Steven Redhead
Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality because reality is a spirit.
G.K. Chesterton
What lies before us? Horrible thoughts arise in my heart. If we had died before today we should have been happy.
C.S. Lewis
Home, home - a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease and smells.
Aldous Huxley
And Dilmore seems to be ignoring us again.” Tria says
Charon Lloyd-Roberts
I've never been thrown out of a pub, but I've fallen into quite a few
Benny Bellamacina
Gytha Ogg, you wouldn’t be a witch if you couldn’t jump to conclusions, right?” Nanny nodded. “Oh, yes.” There was no shame in it. Sometimes there wasn’t time to do anything else but take a flying leap. Sometimes you had to trust to experience and intuition and general awareness and take a running jump. Nanny herself could clear quite a tall conclusion from a standing start.
Terry Pratchett
It takes me a while to figure things out, doesn't it?" Edilio grinned. "Do me a favor. When you find Astrid, repeat that to her, word for word, the part about how it takes you a while. Then remember her exact reaction and tell me.
Michael Grant
Well, let's argue this out, Mr Blank. You, who represent Society, have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month. That's my market value, for I am an inefficient member of Society, slow in the uptake, uncertain, slightly damaged in the fray, there's no denying it. So you have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month, to lodge me in a small, dark room, to clothe me shabbily, to harass me with worry and monotony and unsatisfied longings till you get me to the point when I blush at a look, cry at a word. We can't all be happy, we can't all be rich, we can't all be lucky - and it would be so much less fun if we were. Isn't it so, Mr Blank? There must be the dark background to show up the bright colours. Some must cry so that the others may be able to laugh the more heartily.
Jean Rhys
I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.
P.G. Wodehouse
If you think you’ll find intellectual stimulation, you’re thinking of another era. The conversations are invariably about money or property or schools. I’ve never been more bored by casual chat.
Andrew Sullivan
I disagreed with the conduct of the war, with bombing civilians, categorizing everyone as the enemy or simply as armed men, with the racism and the disregard for those people.
Joe Glenton
Your mind is like a spinnin’ wheel, rotatin’ endlessly and pointlessly until threads are fed in, when it starts producing yarn. Information is the foundation to all rational thought. Seek it out. Collect it assiduously. Stock the lumber yard of your mind with as many facts as you can fit in there. Do not attempt to distinguish between important facts and trivial facts: they are all potentially important
Andy Lane
Healing requires a legitimated, credible and culturally appropriate system.
Mildred Blaxter
There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.
Jane Austen
The sword of Gryffindor was hidden they knew not where, and they were three teenagers in a tent whose only achievement was not, yet, to be dead.
J.K. Rowling
The last thing he ever said to me was, 'Just always be waiting for me, and then some night you will hear me crowing.
J.M. Barrie
When psychotherapy began, it was about the practitioner listening to a patient and interpreting what the patient said, in order to afford the patient insights about his or her psyche. But now we understand that the main curative part of psychotherapy is the relationship itself. It appears not to be relevant which psychology school the practitioner belongs to. What matters is the quality of the relationship and the practitioner's belief in what he or she is offering.
Philippa Perry
I do believe something magical can happen when you read a good book
J.K. Rowling
I have been studying the principles of socialism deeply of late, and I came to the conclusion that I must join the cause. It looked good to me. You work for the equal distribution of property and start in by swiping all you can and sitting on it. Ah, noble scheme! Me for it!
P.G. Wodehouse
There's no such thing as a limited victory. Every victory leaves another resentment, another defeated and humiliated people. Another place to guard and defend and fear.
Jeanette Winterson
The Establishment is amassing wealth and aggressively annexing power in a way that has no precedent in modern times. After all, there is nothing to stop it.
Owen Jones
Miss Fairlie laughed with a ready good-humour, which broke out as brightly as if it had been part of the sunshine above us…
Wilkie Collins
There was a monster in me that had to be fed by success. There is a monster in us all that has to be fed by something.
Chloe Thurlow
I feel a thrill of excitement at this first tiny glimpse of self-revelation, of intimacy.
J.P. Delaney
Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
Douglas Adams
His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling.
C.S. Lewis
It is the blight man was born for. It is Margaret you mourn for.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
They Served...reliving memoriesthat will not diegiving their allfor you and I -friends takenlives shaken...
Muse
Whereas I would argue that style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified. It’s not in the mere narrative arrangement of good and bad that morality makes itself felt. It can be there in every sentence
Martin Amis
Death so called is a thing which makes men weep And yet a third of life is pass'd in sleep.
Lord Byron
If you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won't need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away.
Neil Gaiman
This world is run with far too tight a rein for luck to interfere. Fortune sells her wares she never gives them. In some form or other we pay for her favors or we go empty away.
Amelia Barr