Quotes by British Authors - Page 646

In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble--because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out." - Mere Christianity

That's how birthdays were in our house. All hateful charades of pretty clothes, expensive presents, and ugly words . . .

Growing up is when you understand you get what you give, not what you're given.

I am the Love that Dare not Speak its Name

Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we'll wake up to find our work done because we've lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!

Speaking Akil’s name around Stefan felt like throwing gasoline on a bushfire." ~ Muse

Social Darwinism had continued to flourish in German. Together with Mendelian genetics, it was widely thought to provide a scientific basis for the eugenic ‘Racial Hygiene’ movement.

Maybe because the Dark can only reach people at extremes; blinded by their own shining ideas, or locked up in the darkness of their own heads.

I am an optimist... I choose to be. There is a lot of darkness in our world, there is a lot of pain and you can choose to see that or you can choose to see the joy. If you try to respond positively to the world, you will spend your time better.

Why, so we can look for some little kid who probably doesn’t even know he’s missing?”Again Sam resisted the surge of anger. As mildly as he could he said, “Brother, nobody is making you come.”“You saying I shouldn’t?” Quinn took two quick steps and grabbed Sam’s shoulder. “You saying you want me to leave, brah?”“No, man. You’re my best friend.”“Your only friend.”“Yeah. That’s right,” Sam admitted.“All I’m saying is, who died and made you king?” Quinn asked. “You’re acting like you’re the boss here. How did that happen? How come I’m taking orders from you?”“You’re not taking orders,” Sam said angrily. “I don’t want anyone taking orders from me. If I wanted people taking orders from me, all I had to do was stay in town and start telling people what to do.” In a quieter voice Sam said, “You can be in charge, Quinn.”“I never said I wanted to be in charge,” Quinn huffed. But he was running out of resentment. He shot a dark look at Edilio, a wary look at Astrid. “It’s just weird, brah. Used to be it was you and me, right?”“Yeah,” Sam agreed.In a whining voice Quinn said, “I just want to get our boards and head for the beach. I want everything to go back to how it was.” Then in a startling shout he cried, “Where is everyone? Why haven’t they come for us? Where. Are. My. Parents?

I don’t think I’ve ever met an addict in long-term recovery who hasn’t gone through at least one traumatic childhood experience. Research indicates that one traumatic event in childhood is as grave as continuous combat in a war zone. A traumatic event during childhood can leave a grave imprint on the human body.

The test of a good critic is whether he knows when and how to believe on insufficient evidence.

No demon can withstand the power of Christ,” said my father, repeating the words he had used long ago, and what he meant was that no dissociated mind can withstand the integrating power of the Living God whose spark lies deep in the core of the unconscious mind and who can not only heal the shattered ego but unify the entire personality.

A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not improve.

Do you want to change?" "It's the only evidence of life.

There's room for all sorts of magic and miracles in this world - that's what I think.

I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course--the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end.

I am nurtured within the womb of universal consciousness. It supports my developing awareness as I witness, engage, learn, create, exchange.

The child tends to be stripped of all social influences but those of the market place, all sense of place, function and class is weakened, the characteristics of region and clan, neighborhood or kindred are attenuated. The individual is denuded of everything but appetities, desires and tastes, wrenched from any context of human obligation or commitment. It is a process of mutilation; and once this has been achieved, we are offered the consolation of reconstituting the abbreviated humanity out of the things and the goods around us, and the fantasies and vapors which they emit. A culture becomes the main determinant upon morality, beliefs and purposes, usurping more and more territory that formerly belonged to parents, teachers, community, priests and politics alike.

Logic, it is often said, is the study of valid arguments. It is a systematic attempt to distinguish valid arguments from invalid arguments.

So long as we learn it doesn’t matter who teaches us, does it?

Delirium: You use that word so much. Responsibilities. Do you ever think about what that means? I mean, what does it mean to you? In your head? Dream: Well, I use it to refer that area of existence over which I exert a certain amount of control or influence. In my case, the realm and action of dreaming. Delirium: Hump. It's more than that. The things we do make echoes. S'pose, f'rinstance, you stop on a street corner and admire a brilliant fork of lightning--ZAP! Well for ages after people and things will stop on that very same corner, stare up at the sky. They wouldn't even know what they were looking for. Some of them might see a ghost bolt of lightning in the street. Some of them might even be killed by it. Our existence deforms the universe. THAT'S responsibility.

Happiness is a very pretty thing to feel, but very dry to talk about.

Alice asked the Cheshire Cat who was sitting in a tree "What road do I take?"The cat asked, "Where do you want to go?""I don't know " answered Alice. "Then, said the cat, it really doesn't matter, does it?

Remember that you are an Englishman and consequently have won first prize in the lottery of life.

You fight, work, sweat, nearly kill yourself, sometimes do kill yourself, trying to accomplish something — and you can’t. Not from any fault of yours. You simply can do nothing, neither great nor little — not a thing in the world — not even marry an old maid, or get a wretched 600-ton cargo of coal to its port of destination.

A friendship between a man and a woman was what you called it when one had been pursuing the other for a long time and never gotten anywhere.

If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us--through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives--we are each of us unique.

The New Testament is the very best book that ever was or ever will be known in the world.

I put my hand on the altar rail. 'What if ... what if Heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you're dying of thirst, or when someone's nice to you for no reason, or ...' Mam's pancakes with Toblerone sauce; Dad dashing up from the bar just to tell me, 'Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite'; or Jacko and Sharon singing 'For She's A Squishy Marshmallow' instead of 'For She's A Jolly Good Fellow' every single birthday and wetting themselves even though it's not at all funny; and Brendan giving his old record player to me instead of one of his mates. 'S'pose Heaven's not like a painting that's just hanging there for ever, but more like ... Like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you're alive, from passing cars, or ... upstairs windows when you're lost ...

Nothing has value without self worth

There are some people to whom muddled thinking and self-deception are the two most unforgivable crimes in the world.

The wars of people will be more terrible than those of kings.

There was a sudden stillness like the gap between ticks on a clock, but the next tick never coming.

But as long as you know you're nobody special, you'll be a very decent sort of Horse, on the whole, and taking one thing with another.

Just supposing," he said, "just supposing" --he didn't know what was coming next, so he thought he'd just sit back and listen--"that there was some extraordinary way in which you were very important to me, and that, though you didn't know it, I was very important to you, but it all went for nothing because we only had five miles and I was a stupid idiot at knowing how to say something very important to someone I've only just met and not crash into lorries a the same time, what would you say..." He paused, helplessly, and looked at her."I should do.

And yet - and yet - one's kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it goes, even if everybody else is nasty about it.

I love thee for a heart that’s kind--not for the knowledge in thy mind.

Longbottom, if brains were gold, you'd be poorer than Weasley, and that's saying something.

How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it.

Words for completely novel concepts and technical breakthroughs are devised as soon as needed, explained with ease and absorbed with scarcely an effort by all who need them. This ability to innovate in language is crucial to every scientific advance, to our intellectual curiosity, to our originality as human individuals, because it is crucial to our ability to communicate new ideas and discoveries.

Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, 'The arrant feminist! She says that men are snobs!' The exclamation, to me so surprising - for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex? - was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself. Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

At best he read popular science magazines like the Scientific American he had now, to keep himself up-to-date, in layman's terms, with physics generally. But even then his concentration was marred, for a lifetime's habit made him inconveniently watchful for his own name. He saw it as if in bold. It could leap out at him from an unread double page of small print, and sometimes he could sense it coming before the page turn.

Even friends need private spaces, if only within the depths of their own souls, where no one else is allowed to intrude.

Bradley Headstone, in his decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pantaloons of pepper and salt, with his decent silver watch in his pocket and its decent hair-guard round his neck, looked a thoroughly decent young man of six-and-twenty. He was never seen in any other dress, and yet there was a certain stiffness in his manner of wearing this, as if there were a want of adaptation between him and it, recalling some mechanics in their holiday clothes. He had acquired mechanically a great store of teacher's knowledge. He could do mental arithmetic mechanically, sing at sight mechanically, blow various wind instruments mechanically, even play the great church organ mechanically. From his early childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage. The arrangement of his wholesale warehouse, so that it might be always ready to meet the demands of retail dealers history here, geography there, astronomy to the right, political economy to the left—natural history, the physical sciences, figures, music, the lower mathematics, and what not, all in their several places—this care had imparted to his countenance a look of care; while the habit of questioning and being questioned had given him a suspicious manner, or a manner that would be better described as one of lying in wait. There was a kind of settled trouble in the face. It was the face belonging to a naturally slow or inattentive intellect that had toiled hard to get what it had won, and that had to hold it now that it was gotten. He always seemed to be uneasy lest anything should be missing from his mental warehouse, and taking stock to assure himself.

Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school, was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since.I am so grateful for this. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since.But it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen.As a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal.But once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong.Maybe God wasn’t intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant.The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. If church stinks, then faith must do, too.The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to ‘believe’ like a grown-up.I mean, what does a child know about faith?It took a low point at school, when my godfather, Stephen, died, to shake me into searching a bit harder to re-find this faith I had once known.Life is like that. Sometimes it takes a jolt to make us sit and remember who and what we are really about.Stephen had been my father’s best friend in the world. And he was like a second father to me. He came on all our family holidays, and spent almost every weekend down with us in the Isle of Wight in the summer, sailing with Dad and me. He died very suddenly and without warning, of a heart attack in Johannesburg.I was devastated.I remember sitting up a tree one night at school on my own, and praying the simplest, most heartfelt prayer of my life.‘Please, God, comfort me.’Blow me down … He did.My journey ever since has been trying to make sure I don’t let life or vicars or church over-complicate that simple faith I had found. And the more of the Christian faith I discover, the more I realize that, at heart, it is simple. (What a relief it has been in later life to find that there are some great church communities out there, with honest, loving friendships that help me with all of this stuff.)To me, my Christian faith is all about being held, comforted, forgiven, strengthened and loved – yet somehow that message gets lost on most of us, and we tend only to remember the religious nutters or the God of endless school assemblies.This is no one’s fault, it is just life. Our job is to stay open and gentle, so we can hear the knocking on the door of our heart when it comes.The irony is that I never meet anyone who doesn’t want to be loved or held or forgiven. Yet I meet a lot of folk who hate religion. And I so sympathize. But so did Jesus. In fact, He didn’t just sympathize, He went much further. It seems more like this Jesus came to destroy religion and to bring life.This really is the heart of what I found as a young teenager: Christ comes to make us free, to bring us life in all its fullness. He is there to forgive us where we have messed up (and who hasn’t), and to be the backbone in our being.Faith in Christ has been the great empowering presence in my life, helping me walk strong when so often I feel so weak. It is no wonder I felt I had stumbled on something remarkable that night up that tree.I had found a calling for my life.

And it was in that moment of distress and confusion that the whip of terror laid its most nicely calculated lash about his heart. It dropped with deadly effect upon the sorest spot of all, completely unnerving him. He had been secretly dreading all the time that it would come - and come it did.Far overhead, muted by great height and distance, strangely thinned and wailing, he heard the crying voice of Defago, the guide.The sound dropped upon him out of that still, wintry sky with an effect of dismay and terror unsurpassed. The rifle fell to his feet. He stood motionless an instant, listening as it were with his whole body, then staggered back against the nearest tree for support, disorganized hopelessly in mind and spirit. To him, in that moment, it seemed the most shattering and dislocating experience he had ever known, so that his heart emptied itself of all feeling whatsoever as by a sudden draught.'Oh! oh! This fiery height! Oh, my feet of fire! My burning feet of fire...' ran in far, beseeching accents of indescribable appeal this voice of anguish down the sky. Once it called - then silence through all the listening wilderness of trees.And Simpson, scarcely knowing what he did, presently found himself running wildly to and fro, searching, calling, tripping over roots and boulders, and flinging himself in a frenzy of undirected pursuit after the Caller. Behind the screen of memory and emotion with which experience veils events, he plunged, distracted and half-deranged, picking up false lights like a ship at sea, terror in his eyes and heart and soul. For the Panic of the Wilderness had called to him in that far voice - the Power of untamed Distance - the Enticement of the Desolation that destroys. He knew in that moment all the pains of someone hopelessly and irretrievably lost, suffering the lust and travail of a soul in the final Loneliness. A vision of Defago, eternally hunted, driven and pursued across the skyey vastness of those ancient forests fled like a flame across the dark ruin of his thoughts...It seemed ages before he could find anything in the chaos of his disorganized sensations to which he could anchor himself steady for a moment, and think...The cry was not repeated; his own hoarse calling brought no response; the inscrutable forces of the Wild had summoned their victim beyond recall - and held him fast.("The Wendigo")

He thought of hanging himself, to pass the time.

The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, "I was wrong.

If someone begins to sing, do not maintain eye contact. The general advice given to fellow travellers is thus: leg it.

All speculative theology, which rests on philosophical reasoning rather than biblical revelation, is at fault here. Paul tells us where this sort of theology ends: “The world by wisdom knew not God” (1 Cor 1:21 KJV). To follow the imagination of one’s heart in the realm of theology is the way to remain ignorant of God, and to become an idol-worshipper, the idol in this case being a false mental image of God, made by one’s own speculation and imagination.

They shared an image of the American Christmas--riches, reconciliations, tears, snow, success, sentiment, furs and firs, the shop windows shining like Heaven and everything good for sale.

He was what the egotistical part of me had always longed for: danger, sexiness, popularity, style, unpredictability. The kind of man who'd always keep me guessing. Just one night with him and i'd already started to wonder if perhaps i'd spent the last two years in a comfortable coma.

There is a saying in the medical profession 'Inside everytablet is a little bit of poison'. Avoid medications if you can.

As Confucius says, under some circumstances murder can be forgiven; but unreasonableness never is.

If there were no bad people there would be no good lawyers.

Suicide is a confession of failure. And like divorce, it is shrouded in excuses and rationalizations spun endlessly to disguise the simple fact that all one's energy, passion, appetite and ambition have been aborted.

Luck is made by the making the right choices at the right timing and place.

There is more difference within the sexes than between them.

There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.