Quotes by British Authors - Page 639

Hot crumpets with butter and jam - what could be more ambrosial?
William Boyd
Never judge yourself by the narrowstandards of others. What we do together here is ourbusiness, nobody else's. Never, never doubt what we havejust done is anything but love. Never let yourself be restrictedby thoughts of what society would have you do, what it wouldaccept or condemn. Please promise me that.
Lynne Connolly
Time can be strange sometimes. It can leave imprints in particular places, leaving ghosts of memories trapped.
Holly Bourne
The USA utility power generation industry subcontracts out their dangerous jobs so that the bad statisitics will not be associated with them. Smart people avoid working for the subcontractors. I have worked directly for a number of subcontractors and overseen subcontractors and their staff were clearly sick, showing behavioral problems and overworked. In some cases they were blatantly breaking OSHA laws. OSHA covers it all up! Unfortunately, the problems can be traced back to OSHA and their wilful lack of enforcement of the law.
Steven Magee
Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.
Salman Rushdie
You wanted a peaceful, comfortable Christmas, with all reminders of poverty, injustice, or other people's griefs well out of sight, so as not to disturb your pleasure. That isn't what Christmas is about, Wallace. Christmas is about offering hope to all people, not just those like ourselves. Christmas is about everyone: rich or poor, friend or stranger. The moment you exclude anyone, you exclude yourself.
Anne Perry
I believe that Human Kindness, Compassion and Caring towards all life, will always prevail. No matter how cruel the night, the dawn will break and Africa will still be here along with all its wild beauty.
Paul Oxton
I'd rather be fried alive and eaten by Mexicans.
Roald Dahl
No man is such a legalist as the good Secularist.
G.K. Chesterton
A woman always has half an onion left over, no matter what the size of the onion, the dish or the woman
Terry Pratchett
When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.
Julian Barnes
Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature
Anita Brookner
If the characters are not wicked, the book is." We must tell stories the way God does, stories in which a sister must float her little brother on a river with nothing but a basket between him and the crocodiles. Stories in which a king is a coward, and a shepherd boy steps forward to face the giant. Stories with fiery serpents and leviathans and sermons in whirlwinds. Stories in which murderers are blinded on donkeys and become heroes. Stories with dens of lions and fiery furnaces and lone prophets laughing at kings and priests and demons. Stories with heads on platters. Stories with courage and crosses and redemption. Stories with resurrections.
G.K. Chesterton
After all I've done for you' has alienated more children from their parents than any act of parent cruelty.
Dorothy Rowe
Which only goes to show that the best of us must sometimes eat our words,' Dumbledore went on, smiling.
J.K. Rowling
Most men—it is my experience—are neither virtuous nor scoundrels, good-hearted nor bad-hearted. They are a little of one thing and a little of the other and nothing for any length of time: ignoble mediocrities.
Robert Graves
Poets make the best topographers.
W.G. Hoskins
War has often been called a game, with good reason. Both have combatants. Both have sides. Both carry the risk of losing.
Samantha Shannon
Children have a different convention of the fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at.
John Wyndham
The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
D.H. Lawrence
Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.
G.K. Chesterton
Two and two continue to make four in spite of the whine of the amateur for three or the cry of the critic for five.
James McNeill Whistler
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
Samuel Butler
With you it is always the law, never equity.
Rafael Sabatini
Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
Richard Dawkins
To err is human, to forgive is divine... but I’m only a cardinal and cardinals are human, so rather than forgiving you I’m going to err towards beating you with this stick.
Mark Lawrence
Unless in one thing or another we are straining toward perfection we have forfeited our manhood.
Stephen McKenna
I regret that I didn’t realize that actually they’ve got no power over you at school — it’s all just a trick to indoctrinate you into being a conditioned, tame, placid citizen. Rebel, children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.
Russell Brand
To appreciate life's small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect.
Alain de Botton
Gabe, you’re sick, and much as you’re a shithead sometimes, I’ve trained you to be a fairly acceptable shithead to me. If you died I’d have to go to all the effort of training someone else.”“If I died maybe you should consider a change of career into the nursing profession. With your lovely bedside manner you’d be a shoo-in.
Lily Morton
you should first follow the plow if you want to dance the harvest jig.
Ken Follett
... drink levels all mankind. It is the ultimate democrat
Terry Pratchett
Just because you can explain it doesn't mean it's not still a miracle.
Terry Pratchett
You wouldn't believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended.
Nick Hornby
I am sure there is Magic in everything, only we have not sence enough to get hold of it and make it do things for us - like electricity and horses and steam.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Under a democratical government, the citizens exercise the powers of sovereignty; and those powers will be first abused, and afterwards lost, if they are committed to an unwieldy multitude.
Edward Gibbon
People lie to cover their mistakes, and then make even worse ones to cover their lies.
Anne Perry
Love isn't all sparks and firecrackers. Sometimes it’s more subtle than that.
Becky Wicks
I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W.I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never.
Jane Austen
It is somehow reassuring to discover that the word "travel" is derived from "travail " denoting the pains of childbirth.
Jessica Mitford
Of course, with any new technology, the question in the back of everyone's mind is 'Can I have sex with it or use it to kill people?'-Flintstones Vol. 2: Bedrock Bedlam
Mark Russell
The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
C.S. Lewis
Burying your head in the sand does not make you invisible it only leads to suffocation.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Behind every no entry sign there's a door.
Peter Jones
Matt shrugged. It was a good shrug, too. All it was missing was a beret, a stripy shirt and a Gauloise cigarette.
D.C. Farmer
Whatever doesn't kill them, makes them make reality TV shows...
Glen Duncan
For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
C.S. Lewis
The theory of Economics must begin with a correct theory of consumption.
William Stanley Jevons
There no such thing as something! Why? Because everything's already turning into something else!
David Mitchell
The surroundings householders crave are glorified autobiographies.
T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings
She didn't want to be reminded of her past or how different her present was from the future she'd taken for granted.
Freya North
There is something about wills which brings out the worst side of human nature. People who under ordinary circumstances are perfectly upright and amiable, go as curly as corkscrews and foam at the mouth, whenever they hear the words 'I devise and bequeath.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Over-familiar, the music has become a kind of audio-Valium, background music rather than something I listen to actively and attentively. A gin and tonic after a long day. A shame, I think, because while each note remains the same, I used to hear them differently. It used to sound better.
David Nicholls
It’s is not just a question of doing what you love for a living. It is a matter of doing what you love with love. Then your life and all lives will be transformed.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Had they known the difficulties that were to befall them, they might not have been so rash in falling in love. But perhaps there was no way of avoiding it. Fate, karma, the will of the Gods… call it what you like, it was surely meant to happen. After all, in all the vastness of the Universe they had been thrown together.
Isabel Greenberg
The road forgets. Make your life a journey, keep moving toward what you want, leave behind anything that's too heavy to carry.
Mark Lawrence
The doctrine of creation of the kind that the Abrahamic faiths profess is such that it encourages the expectation that there will be a deep order in the world, expressive of the Mind and Purpose of that world’s Creator. It also asserts that the character of this order has been freely chosen by God, since it was not determined beforehand by some kind of pre-existing blueprint (as, for example, Platonic thinking had supposed to be the case). As a consequence, the nature of cosmic order cannot be discovered just by taking thought, as if humans could themselves explore a noetic realm of rational constraint to whichthe Creator had had to submit, but the pattern of the world has to be discerned through the observations and experiments that are necessary in order to determine what form the divine choice has actually taken. What is needed, therefore, for successful science is the union of the mathematical expression of order with the empirical investigation of the actual properties of nature, a methodological synthesis of a kind that was pioneered with great skill and fruitfulness by Galileo.
John Polkinghorne
An unhappy woman with access to weed killer had to be watched carefully.
James Ruddick