Quotes by British Authors - Page 643

Hope springs eternal in the human breast Man never is but always to be blest.
Alexander Pope
The worth of a gift lies as much in the way it is offered as in its intrinsic value.
Aldous Huxley
.....it's hard to describe a psychosoteric battle at close quarters..... Think of those tennis-ball firing machines, but loaded with hand-grenades trapped in a shipping container, on a ship caught in a force-ten gale.
David Mitchell
A great irony is that the quest for secular immortality is being funded by foundations and individuals who seem to hate life
Dean Cavanagh
Altogether forty-five Emperors had claimed the Spear of Destiny as their possession between the coronation in Rome of Charlemagne and the fall of the old German Empire exactly a thousand years later. And what a pagentry it was! THe Spear had passed like the very finger of destiny through the millenium forever creating new patterns of fate which had again and again changed the entire history of Europe. ... According to the legend associated with the Spear of Longinus, the claimant to this talisman of power has a choice between the service of two opposing Spirits in the fulfilment of his world historic aims -- a Good and an Evil Spirit.
Trevor Ravenscroft
At bed-time I went into my room and put out the light. I didn't get undressed. I lay on my bed and looked out of the window at the stars. I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. I've never wanted to be an astronaut because of the helmets. If I were up there on the moon, or by the Milky Way, I'd want to feel the stars round my head. I'd want them in my hair the way they are in paintings of the gods. I'd want my whole body to feel the space, the empty space and points of light. That's how dancers must feel, dancers and acrobats, just for a second, that freedom.
Jeanette Winterson
For most people the environment controls them rather than being in full control of experiences.
Steven Redhead
He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a featherhat, walking on his hind legs.
Joseph Conrad
I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.
Neil Gaiman
Prof McGonagall : ... bravery doesn't forgive stupidity. ...
J.K. Rowling
The price of stability is unpreparedness.
Anthony Ryan
The author compares rationalism and much of organized religion do a dictator who paves over natural springs in order to dispense water in a more organized fashion. The pushback of the world hungry for wonder may be compared to the break out of those springs from their constraints. Not everything they produce is healthy, but the overreaction of eliminating them is worse.
N.T. Wright
I had too many things to say, and too small a brain to sort them out with.
Hugh Laurie
Nobody told me about him [my grandfather], and he died when I was six, and yet within the last year or two, that strange Indian summer of remembrance that comes to us in the leisured times when the children have been born and we have time to think, has made me know him perfectly well. It is rather an uncomfortable thought for the grown-up, and especially for the parent, but of a salutary and restraining nature, that though children may not understand what is said and done before them, and have no interest in it at the time, and though they may forget it at once and for years, yet these things that they have seen and heard and not noticed have after all impressed themselves for ever on their minds, and when they are men and women come crowing back with surprising and often painful distinctness, and away frisk all the cherished little illusions in flocks.
Elizabeth von Arnim
With little going for me other than unstoppable eagerness, a sense of total commitment, and a stubborn refusal to give up on what felt like a divinely ordained scheme, I cast myself upon the waters of the world’s oceans.
Roz Savage
while she wanted to look neither to her past nor her future, she lived exclusively in both. They had took different paths, but they had journeyed, so she realized, together.
Monica Ali
May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
Julian Barnes
All artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why are so few prepared to learn to draw?
Banksy
Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of an extraordinary destiny.
C.S. Lewis
If you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without every having noticed it.
C.S. Lewis
They all laughed when I said I'd become a comedian. Well, they're not laughing now.
Bob Monkhouse
Words borrowed of antiquity do lend a kind of majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes.
Ben Jonson
just show a little humility. If you know your weaknesses you will not be enslaved by them.
Fiorella De Maria
I can still smell dog poo everywhere. It stinks.
Emily Williams
Temujin had had not the slightest notion that bad emotion can just grow and grow from inside you and squeeze out the universe.
Bryn Hammond
Even our fears make us feel important, because we fear we might not be.
Terry Pratchett
I don’t believe it can be taught as if it were a recipe. There aren’t ingredients and techniques that will guarantee success. Parameters exist that, if followed, will ensure a business can continue, but you cannot clearly define our business success and then bottle it as you would a perfume. It’s not that simple: to be successful, you have to be out there, you have to hit the ground running; and, if you have a good team round you and more than your fair share of luck, you might make something happen. But you certainly can’t guarantee it just by following someone else’s formula. Business is a fluid, changing substance.
Richard Branson
I awoke one morning and found myself famous.
Lord Byron
But this, all this, isn't the story I'm trying to tell. This is all past. This is the part of your life where it gets taken over by other people's stories and there's nothing you can do about it except hold on tight and hope you're still alive at the end to take up your own story again. So that's what we did. Me, Mel, and Meredith all moved on, and we're the stories we're living now.Aren't we?
Patrick Ness
It's a terrible thing for a man when his woman gangs up on him wi' a toad
Terry Pratchett
A warrior fears the battle he missed. More than any fight he can make his own, he fears the fight that’s gone, that ended without him, that no feat of arms can change.
Mark Lawrence
Thus with most careful devotionThus with precise attentionTo detail, interfering preparationOf that which is already preparedMen tighten the knot of confusionInto perfect misunderstanding.
T.S Eliot
My father lost me to the Beast at cards
Angela Carter
The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.
Saki
The world goes quiet and warm.I am dying, he thinks, I have failed and there will be nothing left, nothing but ash and hungering darkness.Something within him dims, fluttering to nothing like a flame fading to cold embers.He tries to raise his sword.He is falling…He was…… running the ashes of a dead world through his fingers.
John French
Secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster.
Charles Dickens
Over the plains of Ethiopia the sun rose as I had not seen it in seven years. A big, cool, empty sky flushed a little above a rim of dark mountains. The landscape 20,000 feet below gathered itself from the dark and showed a pale gleam of grass, a sheen of water. The red deepened and pulsed, radiating streaks of fire. There hung the sun, like a luminous spider's egg, or a white pearl, just below the rim of the mountains. Suddenly it swelled, turned red, roared over the horizon and drove up the sky like a train engine. I knew how far below in the swelling heat the birds were an orchestra in the trees about the villages of mud huts; how the long grass was straightening while dangling locks of dewdrops dwindled and dried; how the people were moving out into the fields about the business of herding and hoeing.
Doris Lessing
The erotic is not about nudity and nudity is rarely erotic. The erotic is subtle, a feeling, a gesture, a mood, a story frozen in the moment that holds you breathless waiting for the next moment. Understand this, and you understand the erotic.
Chloe Thurlow
The last thing she wanted was to see her friend getting ideas in her head. There was such a lot of room in there for them to bounce around and do damage.
Terry Pratchett
The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that's only chance, failure, they're like grubs that die without changing.
China Miéville
We may fight for the cause of international peace because we are very fond of fighting.
G.K. Chesterton
As the Spanish proverb says "He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him." So it is in traveling: a man must carry knowledge with him if he would bring home knowledge.
Samuel Johnson
Regarding solar power systems, the bigger the system is, the more likely it may go on fire.
Steven Magee
Everyone knows that border across which he cannot go, even in thought, and it is that, not the former, that people automatically shut out and cannot face. Yet one knows at times (in the middle of the night, perhaps, when one is sleepless, or on encountering some revolting experience) that this horror haunts every form of experience (always and ever), and hastily one readjusts the blinkers that had slipped. Put the beautiful before you and the horror behind you. Yes, but then I shall not dare to turn round.The world is a bad place. Is it? But it seems that this haunting, this self-delusion by wearing blinkers, is not an attribute of the world. The haunting is in consciousness itself, in its very nature. Just as when I set up any object in the sunlight a shadow is cast (because it is the nature of sunlight to cast shadows), so anything that comes into the light of consciousness casts a shadow of the unknown. It is in the unknown that the horror resides in the dark of knowledge where the patterns can no longer be traced, where chaos resides, and whence utterly hostile systems may emerge, devour, and digest us.
Nanamoli Thera
some people are lonely for all the right reasons.
Meg Rosoff
Talk lives in a man’s head, but sometimes it is very lonely because in the heads of many men there is nothing to keep it company - and so talk goes out through the lips.
Beryl Markham
It used to be said, not so long ago, that every suicide gave Satan special pleasure. I don't think that's true—unless it isn't true either that the Devil is a gentleman. If the Devil has no class at all, then okay, I agree: He gets a bang out of suicide. Because suicide is a mess. As a subject for study, suicide is perhaps uniquely incoherent. And the act itself is without shape and without form. The human project implodes, contorts inward—shameful, infantile, writhing, gesturing. It's a mess in there.
Martin Amis
In all pleasure hope is a considerable part.
Samuel Johnson
What you deny or ignore, you delay, What you accept and face, you conquer.
Robert Tew
The world belongs to the Enthusiast who keeps cool.
William McFee
The thrill of theft, of violence, the urge to live easy - is it worth it when we have undeniable proof, yes, yes, incontrovertible evidence that hell exists?
Anthony Burgess
Writers are always alone, even in a room bursting with noises of the familiar.
Rachel Thompson
What will has caused, will must be brought to correct.
Jocelyn Gibb
Sir, you do understand that - officially - I'm not actually a centurion. I haven't even been assigned to a legion yet.'tThe general continued writing as he spoke. 'What was the name?'t'Corbulo, sir.'t'Corbulo, you have an officer's tunic and an officer's helmet; and you completed full officer training did you not?'tCassius nodded. He could easily recall every accursed test and drill. Though he'd excelled in the cerebral disciplines and somehow survived the endless marches and swims, he had rated poorly with sword in hand and had been repeatedly described as "lacking natural leadership ability." The academy's senior centurion had seemed quite relieved when the letter from the Service arrived. t 'I did, sir, but it was felt I would be more suited to intelligence work than the legions, I really would prefer -' t'And you did take an oath? To Rome, the Army and the Emperor?'t'I did, sir, and of course I am happy to serve but -'tThe General finished the orders. He rolled the sheet up roughly and handed it to Cassius. t'Dismissed.'t'Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. I just have one final question.'tThe General was on his way back to his chair. He turned around and fixed Cassius with an impatient stare. t'Sir - how should I present myself to the troops? In terms of rank I mean.' t'They will assume you are a centurion, and I can see no practical reason whatsoever to disabuse them of that view.
Nick Brown
Working is prayer for the likes of us,” his master often said. “It’s the way we commune with God.”“Then how does He respond to us?” Jahan had once asked, way back when he was younger.“By giving us more work, of course.
Elif Shafak
Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.
Lewis Carroll
Was I gleeful, settled, content, during the hours I passed in yonder bare, humble schoolroom this morning and afternoon? Not to decieve myself, I must reply -- No: I felt desolate to a degree. I felt -- yes, idiot that I am -- I felt degraded. I doubted I had taken a step which sank instead of raising me in the scale of social existence. I was weakly dismayed at the ignorance, the poverty, the coarseness of all I heard and saw around me. But let me not hate and despise myself too much for these feelings; I know them to be wrong -- that is a great step gained. I shall strive to overcome them.
Charlotte Brontë
The invisible people knew that happiness is not the natural state of mankind, and is never achieved from the outside in.
Terry Pratchett
Faith is a beautiful thing. When you believe in an image; an ideal; a supreme being or figure and you stand in the sunshine and you feel the warmth as it spreads through your body. And with that warmth comes a smile and a knowing that you were right to believe in the first place.That is what having faith is.It's regardless of which religion you belong to, because faith is universal. That is why it is magical and the sooner we put away our differences and start to believe in each other then that is when we truly start to use faith as it was intended to be used.
Anthony T.Hincks
A robin redbreast in a cagePuts all heaven in a rage.A dove-house fill'd with doves and pigeonsShudders hell thro' all its regions.A dog starv'd at his master's gatePredicts the ruin of the state.A horse misused upon the roadCalls to heaven for human blood.Each outcry of the hunted hareA fibre from the brain does tear.A skylark wounded in the wing,A cherubim does cease to sing.The game-cock clipt and arm'd for fightDoes the rising sun affright.Every wolf's and lion's howlRaises from hell a human soul.- "Auguries of Innocence
William Blake