Quotes by British Authors - Page 641

The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.
John Stuart Mill
Pantaloons were often worn tight as paint and were not a great deal less revealing, particularly as they were worn without underwear. . . . Jackets were tailored with tails in the back, but were cut away in front so that they perfectly framed the groin. It was the first time in history that men's apparel was consciously designed to be more sexy than women's.
Bill Bryson
With a savage grin, he let out an inhuman roar of bloodlust and threw himself into an unholy orgy of blood, fangs, claws, and death.
Alan Kinross
And in a flash I understood the meaning of sex. It is a craving of mingling of consciousness, whose symbol is the mingling of bodies. Every time a man and a woman slake their thirst in the strange waters of the other's identity, they glimpse the immensity of their freedom.
Colin Wilson
Colour outside the lines, live outside the box. Don’t let anyone tell you what to do, or not. Don’t be afraid, listen to your heart.tHeaven is a state of being – of one-ness, and Hell is a state of being – lost. We simply need to live as we best define ourselves, find our own ways of being who we are in our world. There is no requirement - only freedom of choice. We should not be judged if we are doing what we think best according to our perceptions at any given time.tGuilt should be discarded, moved beyond - what matters is who we choose to be in the next moment, given what we might have learned. We continually create ourselves anew.tForgiving someone is a great way to show love, and forgive yourself too for the hurt you held onto far too long.tTake back the energy you have wasted on these things and reclaim your power to be your next best self.tHonour the past but refresh, expand, renew, fulfill. Heaven is within us, always reachable.
Jay Woodman
I like a good detective story," he said. "But, you know, they begin in the wrong place! They begin with the murder. But the murder is the end. The  story begins long before that—years before sometimes with all the causes and events that bring certain people to a certain place at a certain time on a certain day.
Agatha Christie
Life may become difficult when you are out of sync with your heart-felt desires.
Steven Redhead
But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.
John Fowles
I want you to know that life will try to crack you like an egg and your silence will eventually break. Someday you will spill some of those painful secrets and taste a modicum of much-needed freedom. You will lose a great deal as a result but the gains will outweigh every loss. You will love and be loved by a beautiful man in a place where your mutual passion won’t be a marker of shame but pride. You will be awkward and alone and alien for a long time but you will transform these qualities, which is to say yourself, into a work of art. You will wear your awkwardness, your aloneness and your alienness in your hair like gold thread. You will adorn your wonkiness on your wrist like a charm bracelet studded with stars.
Diriye Osman
Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to.
Terry Pratchett
Must a name mean something?" Alice asked doubtfully.Of course it must," Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh; "my name means the shape I am - and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.
Lewis Carroll
Upon my word, you five your opinion very decidedly for so young a person.
Jane Austen
Most people are idiots
Christopher G. Nuttall
He stopped at the gate on his way back to the temple, where Gracilis, the Twentieth’s hard-case wolf hunter from the Campanian mountains, was supervising the strengthening of the defences.‘Take some men and tear down the huts along the west wall. And while you’re at it, clear everything for a javelin throw in front of this gate. I want a killing ground from there to about there.’Gracilis grinned and saluted. Like all legionaries, the only thing he liked better than fighting and drinking was destroying someone else’s property. ‘Should we burn them, sir?’ he said hopefully. Valerius shook his head. No point in creating smoke to warn the enemy. ‘Just break them up and add them to the barriers.
Douglas Jackson
Doubts are good. It means you are alive and searching. One does not become a believer overnight. He thinks he is a believer; then something happens in his life and he becomes an unbeliever, after that, he becomes a believer again and then an unbeliever again, and so on. Until we reach a certain stage, we constantly waver. This is the only way forward. At each new step, we come closer to the Truth.
Elif Shafak
Nothing's ever all bad if you think hard enough about it.
Matthew Crow
The Potter books in general are a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for an end to bigotry. And I think it's one of the reasons that some people don't like the books, but I think that's it's a very healthy message to pass on to younger people that you should question authority and you should not assume that the establishment or the press tells you all of the truth.
J.K. Rowling
The youth of Idaho falls should be encouraged to take drugs in order to cope up with the fact that there is plutonium in their drinking water.
Bill Bryson
He was the kind of man I wanted: wild, hot, horny, and losing control. And it all pointed back to me, about how much I felt in control of him, with the power of my body.I felt so in control of him; it was dizzying, and intoxicating.
Fiona Thrust
When the truth finally catches up to you, don't be a hero and run.
John le Carré
A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.
Mark Forsyth
There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa -- and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else's, but likely to be haugthily disagreed with by all those who believed in some other Africa. ... Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers.Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home.
Beryl Markham
I’m not really interested in the black and white, the 'goodies and baddies.' I find the complexity of the gray areas more compelling, more intriguing. As I have said before, there are angels and demons in all of us, and I am interested in the relationship between the two within the ‘ordinary’ person.
Jacqueline Winspear
In order for someone to follow you, you must be true to heart and purpose. This is true in any relationship. Someone may follow you for awhile without it, but not a lifetime.
Jean Williams
In the outworks of our lives, we were almost strangers, but we shared a certain outlook on human life and human destiny, which, from the very first, made a bond of extreme strength . . . . At our very first meeting, we talked with continually increasing intimacy. We seemed to sink through layer after layer of what was superficial, till gradually both reached the central fire. It was an experience unlike any other that I have known. We looked into each other's eyes, half appalled and half intoxicated to find ourselves together in such a region. The emotion was as intense as passionate love, and at the same time all-embracing. I came away bewildered, and hardly able to find my way among ordinary affairs.
Bertrand Russell
A curiosity: my name, Rem, will someday come to mean a line of text in a language spoken only by machines. Specifically, it will mean a line that the machines can safely ignore--one that's only there as a mnemonic, a placeholder, for the people who give the machines their orders. A REM line might say something like "this bit is a self-contained sub loop" or "Steve Perlman in Marketing is a shit." The program as a whole rolls on past and around the REM lines, ignores them completely as it takes its shape, moves through its pre-ordained sequences, unfolds its wonders. My mother named me well.
Louise Carey
t tMonsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder — just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit.And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be treated in an inhuman fashion. You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value.
Andrew Sullivan
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
George Orwell
If you take a book into your hands, be it 'God's book, or any other useful good book,' rely on God to make it profitable to you. Do not waste time reading unprofitable books. When you read, do so not out of vain curiosity but with love for God's kingdom, compassion for human beings, and the intent to turn what you learn into prayers and praises.
Matthew Henry
How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!The world forgetting, by the world forgot.Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d
Alexander Pope
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardour for their curiosity their intolerance of shams the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
Aldous Huxley
Amusement is the happiness of those who cannot think.
Alexander Pope
Our absence is what remains of us.
Catherine O'Flynn
You moved my head so that it was lying in your lap. "Keep your eyes open," you said. "Stay with me."I tried. It felt like I was using every muscle in my face. But I did it. I saw you from upside down, your lips above my eyes and your eyes above my lips. "Talk to me," you said. My throat felt like it was closing up, as if my skin had swollen, making my throat a lump of solid flesh. I gripped your hand. "Keep watching me, then," you said. "Keep listening.
Lucy Christopher
The idea of parts of the body public fighting each other was like the idea of a man's punching himself in the face. It was a physical blasphemy that suited this era as an index of how far it had all gone.
Paul Cornell
Just remember, please, most of that stuff is in the past. It isn't the story I want to tell. At all.You needed to know it, but for the rest of this, I'm choosing my own story.Because if you can't do that, you might as well just give up.
Patrick Ness
As soon as Mr. Prosser realized that he was substantially the loser after all, it was as if a weight lifted itself off his shoulders: this was more like the world as he knew it.
Douglas Adams
Addiction to reading... There are worse things in the world to be Addicted to. I admire your hobby choice it's mine as well.
Christy A. Mair
We are *all* we are, and all in a sense we care to dream we are. And for that matter, anything outlandish, bizarre, is a godsend in this rather stodgy life. It is after all just what the old boy said – it's only the impossible that's credible; whatever credible may mean...
Walter de la Mare
I saw a guy faint at the W. M. Keck Observatory, he stepped out from the tour group and said to me "I'm feeling sick" and then his eyes rolled back and his knees gave way! The group caught him on his way to the ground and he got free emergency medical oxygen for half an hour before being evacuated off the summit by his tour group!!! His friends stated that he was considered the healthiest person in the group while he was gasping for breaths of life on the summit of Mauna Kea! Never saw him again.
Steven Magee
Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,  One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,One more devils’-triumph and sorrow for angels,  One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!
Robert Browning
Everythings a choice. Nobody's born good. Nobody's born evil. It's always a choice.
Tom Hiddleston
Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story.
Rudyard Kipling
I am certain one ought to be allowed to undo what one has done so ignorantly ! I daresay it happens to lots of women; only they submit, and I kick.... When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times that we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say!
Thomas Hardy
Whatever my powers--feminine or the contrary--God had given them, and I felt resolute to be ashamed of no faculty of his bestowal.
Charlotte Brontë
There is shadow under this red rock // (Come in under the shadow of this red rock) // And I will show you something different from either // Your shadow at morning striding behind you // Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you // I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
T.S Eliot
He suddenly exploded in a flurry of arms and legs, out of which flew a ball.
Douglas Adams
We have different forms assigned to us in the school of life, different gifts imparted. All is not attractive that is good. Iron is useful, though it does not sparkle like the diamond. Gold has not the fragrance of a flower. So different persons have various modes of excellence, and we must have an eye to all.
William Wilberforce
The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory. In one high bound it has overleaped the massive of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being. Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one person) by loving our neighbour as ourselves. It is an image, a foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in us without a rival. It is even (well used) a preparation for that.
C.S. Lewis
The quality of life that you have is determined solely by the effort you put into giving your life value, purpose and a reason.
Steven Redhead
Saying of the ProphetSome behaviourI am like a man who has lighted a fire, and all the creeping things have rushed to burn themselves in it.
Idries Shah
Let their faculties have room to unfold, and their virtues to gain strength, and then determine where the whole sex must stand in the intellectual scale.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Everyone needs rules. After all, how can you break what doesn’t exist? Rules give anarchy something to aim at
Jodi Taylor
He opened his mouth to say that she looked extremely beautiful and deserved armfuls of roses, but the words were lost in committee somewhere, shuffled aside by the parts of his head that worked full-time at avoiding ridicule.
Helen Simonson
Hell is paved with good intentions.
Samuel Johnson
I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.
Philip Pullman
Go back?" he thought. "No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!" So up he got, and trotted along with his little sword held in front of him and one hand feeling the wall, and his heart all of a patter and a pitter.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Many mistakes makes for a very smart person.
Steven Magee
The truth hurts when you live a life of lies.
Habeeb Akande
When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them will very easily pass – may pass in the first half hour – into erotic love. Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or later. And conversely, erotic love may lead to Friendship between the lovers. But this, so far from obliterating the distinction between the two loves, puts it in a clearer light. If one who was first, in the deep and full sense, your Friend, is then gradually or suddenly revealed as also your lover you will certainly not want to share the Beloved’s erotic love with any third. But you will have no jealousy at all about sharing the Friendship. Nothing so enriches an erotic love as the discovery that the Beloved can deeply, truly and spontaneously enter into Friendship with the Friends you already had; to feel that not only are we two united by erotic love but we three or four or five are all travelers on the same quest, have all a common vision.
C.S. Lewis