Quotes by British Authors - Page 650

No one has the ability to laugh at their misfortunes like the women of the East End.
Philip Ridley
There are always exquisite things and times to remind us of the original source of all beauty and love.
Jay Woodman
There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers.
A.S. Byatt
Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
Isaac Newton
Man wasn't made to share the universe with gods.
Darren Shan
You may think it all very fine, Mr. Huntingdon, to amuse yourself with rousing my jealousy; but take care you don't rouse my hate instead. And when you have once extinguished my love, you will find it no easy matter to kindle it again.
Anne Brontë
You feel well, Ali? You have a very faraway look on your face, beta,' my dad said. 'Like you have left your heart behind.'He fixed me with eyes as liquid black as mine and for a moment I felt exposed, like he could see right through me. That irrational childhood thought that he could read my mind maybe.'What nonsense, his heart is here with his mother and his family. Tell him, Ali,' my mother said.'Begum, this generation of boys and girls, you know how they are.' My dad never said my mother's name; she was always Begum, the generic term for 'wife'.
Ruth Ahmed
For many people, a western lifestyle equates to living in a toxic home, working a toxic job, eating toxic food, being sick from your thirties onward and eventually dying from preventable disease.
Steven Magee
The cafe was called Tattoos. The fella who owned it didn't have any tattoos... but we never saw his wife.
Karl Pilkington
No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
When you lay down a proposition which is forthwith controverted, it is of course optional with you to take up the cudgels in its defence. If you are deeply convinced of its truth, you will perhaps be content to leave it to take care of itself; or, at all events, you will not go out of your way to push its fortunes; for you will reflect that in the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons. In the long run, we say; it will meanwhile cost you an occasional pang to see your cherished theory turned into a football by the critics. A football is not, as such, a very respectable object, and the more numerous the players, the more ridiculous it becomes. Unless, therefore, you are very confident of your ability to rescue it from the chaos of kicks, you will best consult its interests by not mingling in the game.
Henry James
First love can break you. But it can also save you.
Katie Khan
Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists. Agree, disagree, show no interest in or obsess over their narrative of history, you couldn't say their didn't shore it up with footnotes and research.
China Miéville
When my late father died — now I'm in mourning for my late mother — that sense of grief and bereavement suddenly taught me that so many things that I thought were important, externals, etc., all of that is irrelevant. You lose a parent, you suddenly realize what a slender thing life is, how easily you can lose those you love. Then out of that comes a new simplicity and that is why sometimes all the pain and the tears lift you to a much higher and deeper joy when you say to the bad times, "I will not let you go until you bless me.
Jonathan Sacks
Their ghosts are gagged, their books are library flotsam,Some of their names - not all - we learnt in schoolBut, life being short, we rarely read their poems,Mere source-books now to point or except a rule,While those opinions which rank them high are basedOn a wish to be different or on lack of taste.
Louis MacNeice
If you blend in, you don't stand out.
Anthony T.Hincks
most of us happily disavow fairies, astrology and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, without first immersing ourselves in books of Pastafarian theology etc.
Richard Dawkins
I realized, when I saw the forest burning, how fascinating the firelight is. It's beautiful, and people stare at it, don't they? It destroys things and kills people, but humans love it. Is it because they crave their own destruction, Sam? I want to understand your kind. I am going out into the wider world, and I must learn. But first things first. First, to escape this shell, this egg in which I have gestated, all eyes will be on the fire, all eyes blinded by the smoke, and when I walk out of here, out into your large world with its billions, no one will even see. It's the beauty of light, don't you see, Sam? It reveals, but it also distracts and blinds. It's even better than darkness.
Michael Grant
Misfortunes make us wise
Mary Norton
I think honesty is the most heroic quality one can aspire to.
Daniel Radcliffe
Whole new theories of money were growing here like mushrooms: in the dark and based on bullshit.
Terry Pratchett
After nearly a year of mourning, I feel like the Victorians when Edison came along- all those years in the darkness, and then electric light. I've got the earth between my toes.
Harriet Reuter Hapgood
You can't do anything about the past, it's done and can't be mended. But the future is different, if you just think what you really want and reach out and take it.
Lesley Pearse
You've been away a long time. Were you lost?' He sounds lost himself, half strangled and fighting to stay conscious.'Wounded, not lost,' I tell him, but I do feel lost.
Sally Green
Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand was open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a man's. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal.
Charles Dickens
Before the sparrow arrived, you had almost stopped thinking about flight. Then, last winter, it soared through the sky and landed in front of you, or more precisely on the windowsill of the covered balcony adjoining your bedroom. You knew the grimy window panes were caked with dead ants and dust, and smelt as sour as the curtains. But the sparrow wasn’t put off. It jumped inside the covered balcony and ruffled its feathers, releasing a sweet smell of tree bark into the air. Then it flew into your bedroom, landed on your chest and stayed there like a cold egg.
Ma Jian
Stay home and the crooks win. They get the night, by default and concession, the night which should rightly belong to all of us.
Claire Cross
As Ginny and Hermione moved closer to the rest of the family, Harry had a clear view of the bodies lying next to Fred: Remus and Tonks, pale and still and peaceful-looking, apparently asleep beneath the dark, enchanted ceiling.
J.K. Rowling
The Amoeba?" she asked Aiden."The gang," he said, tossing his hand to indicate all around. "Mypeople. A large amorphous mass that keeps on changing size, hasn'tmuch apparent use, sometimes makes you sick, and occasionally breaksoff into smaller parts that act exactly like the parent.
Annette Curtis Klause
Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce...As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.
Aldous Huxley
Quantum physics findings show that consciousness itself created order - or indeed in some way created the world - this suggested much more capacity in the human being than was currently understood. It also suggested some revolutionary notions about humans in relation to their world and the relation between all living things. What they were asking was how far our bodies extended. Did they end with what we always thought of as our own isolated persona, or ‘extend out’ so that the demarcation between us and our world was less clear-cut? Did living consciousness possess some quantum field like properties, enabling it to extend its influence out into the world? If so, was it possible to do more than simply observe? How strong was our influence? It was only a small step in logic to conclude that in our act of participation as an observer in the quantum world, we might also be an influencer, a creator. Did we not only stop the butterfly at a certain point in its flight, but also influence the path it will take - nudging it in a particular direction?This explains action at a distance, what scientists call non locality. The theory that two subatomic particles once in close proximity seemingly communicate over any distance after they are separated.
Lynne McTaggart
It was a storm in a tea cup but in politics we sail in paper boats.
Harold Macmillan
The evidence of history is against you. The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation. It is a question of getting the true perspective, of seeing things in proportion.
Agatha Christie
Don’t you find it striking? The personality is constantly dying and it feels like continuity. Meanwhile, we panic about death, which we cannot ever experience. Yet it is this illogical fear that motivates our lives. We gore each other and mutilate ourselves for victory and fame, as if these might swindle mortality and extend us somehow. Then, as death bears down, we agonize over how little we have achieved.
Tom Rachman
Leela: Why are we listening to them? It is a waste of time.The Doctor; It is difficult to know what will be a waste of time until after the time has been wasted, by which time it is too late. So predicting what will be a waste of time is something of a waste of time. Unless it gives you pleasure of course when it probably doesn't count as a waste of time.Leela (yawning): I am sorry I did not hear what you said, Doctor.The Doctor (smiling): That was a waste of time then.
Chris Boucher
Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.
G.K. Chesterton
Grey has no agenda. . . . Grey has the ability, that no other colour has, to make the invisible visible.
Roma Tearne
That she had loved Sylveste because he was such a self-important bastard and made something noble of being a self-important bastard, did it with such utter aplomb that it became a kind of virtue, like the wearing of sackcloth
Alastair Reynolds
The world is a room of heavy furniture. Eventually you are allowed to leave.
Adam Foulds
Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Our friend Chewy doesn’t speak much, but he chews a lot of tobacco so we call him Chewbacco.
Michael Diack
without the power to concentrate thatis to say, without the power to dictate to the brain its task and to ensure obedience true life is impossible. Mind control is the first element of a full existence.
Arnold Bennett
Standing in the ring of fire, the eye of the storm, the vortex of pain and pressure is simultaneously the most vulnerable and most powerful place to be. Here we embody paradox. We stand our ground and surrender completely. Here we know the full power of the Feminine.
Lucy H. Pearce
We love each other. You love me, you do.” His eyes beseech me to believe it, to remember it, to feel it.
Siobhan Davis
Jenny retained a flimsy essence of the truth. It was a quiet knowing she'd always hold in her heart...''Broken Mirror by Oliver Rixon
Oliver Rixon
We are taught we can redeem them, she said to me once. We are taught it as soon as we can read. We can turn the beast into a prince, if only we love him enough.
Louise Doughty
I can’t decide if Burt and Crazel are made for each other or if their joint mentalism could cause a tsunami.”Tea – Book 2 “Having it
Jamie Scallion
This is what it means to love someone. This is what it means to grieve someone. It’s a little bit like a black hole. It’s a little bit like infinity.
Harriet Reuter Hapgood
I know everything must be a lie, but I believe it anyway.
Johnny Rich
Courage for the big troubles in life, lad' he'd say, 'and patience for the small. Be of good cheer. God is awake.
Louisa Young
It is always useful to face an enemy who is prepared to die for his country," he read. "This means that both you and he have exactly the same aim in mind.
Terry Pratchett
The living together for three long rainy days in the country has done more to dispel love than all the perfidies in love that have ever been committed.
Arthur Helps
For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
Virginia Woolf
Remember you’re all representing your country, and you ought to behave as the Empire does.’ ‘So we can kill and loot at will, steal their goods and claim the planet as our own?’ Suruk said.
Toby Frost
Many things can prolong your life, but only wisdom can save it.
Neel Burton
I apologise, your Highness. Murder can be a painful business.
Joe Abercrombie
What do we live for if not to make life less difficult for each other?
George Eliot
TWO AND TWO MAKES FIVE
George Orwell
Other unsolved murders or untimely deaths were readily blamed on the supposedly sinister Jews: If a Jewish doctor failed to save a life, the whole Jewish community might be attacked and fined.
Robert Winder
I thought you guys could detect witches." Jonathan muttered as soon as he got over his shock at seeing two people materialise in front of him. The wiccan sat on the floor, his shoulder being strapped with a makeshift bandage, by the ever-practical Ian."We detect magic, not witches." Hunter clarified. "We can't feel anything out of the ordinary, unless they start casting.""Oh fantastic!" Jonathan groaned. "I'll remember that excuse later.
K.S. Marsden