Quotes by British Authors - Page 653

Worry is like a rocking chair-it keeps you busy but gets you nowhere.
Katie Dale
The essential fact which emerges ... is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs ( of carbon in the global carbon cycle), the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same size. This means that large human disturbance of any one of these reservoirs will have large effects on all three. We cannot hope either to understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.
Freeman Dyson
Where beams of imagination play,The memory's soft figures melt away.
Alexander Pope
There seemed no reason why she shouldn't try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same - you couldn't just soak it up and then squeeze it out again.
David Nicholls
At the same time that a massive deployment of biologically harmful radio frequency (RF) radiation devices across the mass population has occurred, we see the reduction of health care for the poor, sick and elderly.
Steven Magee
Though blue sky and the road’s yellow dust and the green of the nearing oasis were all snuffed out, he (newly converted Saul) did not miss them. Light suffused his blinded eyes, his mind.
John Charles Pollock
A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.
Agatha Christie
...most systems end up by making imagined humility into a form of vanity, so they end up with vanity just the same.
Idries Shah
The excellence of every art is its intensity capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.
John Keats
The problem with radio frequency (RF) exposure is not the small amount of brain tumors, is it the large amount of subtle alterations in the brain that lead to attention, confusion, insomnia and fatigue problems.
Steven Magee
Last night, Good Friday night, at the bottom of the escalator at King’s X tube, a weasel-faced man in uniform was sweeping up rubbish with a wide broom, drink cartons, cigarette packets with all the dust and filthy scraps of the day which he pushed towards an elegant long black glove that was lying there. I expected him to pick it up as I would have – I thought of picking it up, but was too late. He smothered it in a wide sweep. It seemed to me extraordinary and shocking that he had no feeling for it. Several images went through my mind, a symbolic hand, a dead blackbird, an ornamental bookmark fallen from a lectern Bible – any once-precious relic being tumbled in the dirt. As I went up the escalator I remembered the Tatterdemallion whom I haven’t seen for months and thought of his body, if he were to die in the tube, being tumbled about with the rest of the thrown-away rubbish.” David Thomson, In Camden Town
David Thomson
We must leave the discovery of this mystery, like all others, to time, and accident, and Heaven's pleasure.
Charles Dickens
You have a perfect right to consign us all to hell, rector, but you must allow us the choice of how we get
Angus Wilson
There is a lot of unhappiness in this world. Try not to feed it.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
...I could never explain how the image and the reality merge, and how they somehow extend and beautify each other.
Dodie Smith
Consider anything, only don’t cry!
Lewis Carroll
Stalin was always exceptional, even from childhood. We have relied on Trotsky’s unrecognizably prejudiced portrait for too long. The truth was different. Trotsky’s view tells us more about his own vanity, snobbery and lack of political skills than about the early Stalin.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
You would be surprised at how many corporations "none of your business" applies to!
Steven Magee
Life is simply too short to live it less perfectly than it could be lived.
J.P. Delaney
Why did dogs make one want to cry? There was something so quiet and hopeless about their sympathy. Jasper, knowing something was wrong, as dogs always do. Trunks being packed. Cars being brought to the door. Dogs standing with drooping tails, dejected eyes. Wandering back to their baskets in the hall when the sound of the car dies away.
Daphne du Maurier
The first condition of human goodness is something to love the second something to revere.
George Eliot
Any kid will tell you that, yes, their music is both an escape and a survival mechanism, and that sometimes the music givesbthem hope and inspiration. It doesn't just placate and pacify.
David Byrne
Fat Charlie wondered what Rosie's mother would usually hear in a church. Probably just cries of "Back! Foul best of Hell!" followed by gasps of "Is it alive?" and a nervous inquiry as to whether anybody had remembered to bring the stakes and hammers.
Neil Gaiman
Greek customs such as wine drinking were regarded as worthy of imitation by other cultures. So the ships that carried Greek wine were carrying Greek civilization, distributing it around the Mediterranean and beyond, one amphora at a time. Wine displaced beer to become the most civilized and sophisticated of drinks—a status it has maintained ever since, thanks to its association with the intellectual achievements of Ancient Greece.
Tom Standage
Sin is a power; wherever it is given room, it will grow in strength, and it will take you where you do not want to go.
Colin S. Smith
Perhaps you'll gave to kiss him again, if you're not sure. Gather more evidence. In the name of science.
Rhiannon Thomas
She hated herself more than she could express.
Jane Austen
All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes - morals, behavior, everything. Absolute trust in someone else is the essence of education.
E.M. Forster
And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.
Jeanette Winterson
I never fell. I don't care what they say. I'm still doing my job, as I see it.
Neil Gaiman
When the range and depth of the suffering of others and what we do to one another no longer bothers us, nor moves us to remedy the situation and stop the pain, then we have lost a part of our own humanity, our own soul.
Megan McKenna
I knew it was coming. I knew they didn't have the nerve.Three days in and they've got faces like vexed tomatoes, their skins flaking sci-fi style: burnt to fuck. They were an embarrassment; not only to me and the wife and The Fall fans but to their own generation.
Mark E. Smith
Corporations and their government minions are capable of anything...just look at the frauds the recent wars became known as. Hundreds of thousands killed in the name of corporate "liberation".
Steven Magee
If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?
Stephen Hawking
In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economy is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects.
Salman Rushdie
It's witchcraft with all the crusts cut off, and real witchcraft is ALL crusts.
Terry Pratchett
How often have I noticed or, indeed, listened to him? We talk, but do I actually listen, or is our conversation mainly a question of my waiting for him to stop and for it to be my turn to say something? For how many of us is that what conversation means - the setting up of our lines?
Alexander McCall Smith
If we are intended for great ends we are called to great hazards.
John Henry Cardinal Newman
Either you like cats or you don't. Whole nations have been divided on what people thought of an animal that mates openly, walks in silence and keeps its own counsel.
John Hillaby
An obstinate man does not hold opinions but they hold him.
Alexander Pope
Don't waste hate on pink geranium.
Elizabeth Goudge
When he smiles, they mostly look away. But Martin likes to think they carry his smile for a few blocks – that even the smallest gesture is something grand.
Simon Van Booy
At the end of our conversation she (Martha Stout) turned to address you, the reader. She said if you're beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of those traits in yourself, if you're feeling a creeping anxiety about it, that means you are not one.
Jon Ronson
It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
P.D. James
Having sex multiple times on the first sleepover does not count as more than one “date”…
Rowena Cherry
But when one does not complain, and when one wants to master oneself with a tyrant’s grip — one’s faculties rise in revolt — and one pays for outward calm with an almost unbearable inner struggle.
Charlotte Brontë
On account of its scale and complexity, the world will always outstrip the capacity of any single body to ask fertile questions of it.
Alain de Botton
[M]an is not permitted without censure to follow his own thoughts in the search of truth, when they lead him ever so little out of the common road.
John Locke
Together we would make reputation, we would have men in halls across Britain telling the story of our exploit. Or of our deaths. They were friends, they were oath-men, they were young, they were warriors, and with such men it might be possible to storm the gates of Asgard itself.
Bernard Cornwell
I suppose one oughtn’t to marry anybody, unless one’s prepared to make him a full-time job.”“Probably not; though there are a few rare people, I believe, who don’t look on themselves as jobs but as fellow creatures.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Step outside for a while - calm your mind. It is better to hug a tree than to bang your head against a wall continually
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Falling in love was as much about receiving as it was giving, was it? It seemed selfish. It was not, though. It was the opposite. Keeping oneself from being loved was to refuse the ultimate gift. He had thought himself done with romantic love. He had thought himself an incurable cynic. He was not, though.He was only someone whose heart and mind, and very soul, had been battered and bruised. It was still - and always - safe to give since there was a certain deal of control to be exerted over giving. Taking, or allowing oneself to receive, was an altogether more risky business. For receiving meant opening up the heart again.Perhaps to rejection.Or disillusionment.Or pain.Or even heart break.It was all terribly risky.And all terribly necessary.And of course, there was the whole issue of trust...
Mary Balogh
The clock struck eleven with the respectful unobtrusiveness of one whose mission in life is to be ignored.
Saki
Straddling him intimately, he slides his hands up my thighs, pushing the silk aside and caressing my pale, exposed skin. Even against his uniform, I can feel his hardness. His body feels taut and poised for action.
Felicity Brandon
They were kissing. Put like that, and you could be forgiven for presuming that this was a normal kiss, all lips and skin and possibly even a little tongue. You'd miss how he smiled, how his eyes glowed. And then, after the kiss was done, how he stood, like a man who had just discovered the art of standing and had figured out how to do it better than anyone else who would ever come along.
Neil Gaiman
I am afraid I shall disappoint people's expectations dreadfully.
Jude Morgan
Passion is such a stronge emotion that it dominates everything. It's like a strong spice in a meal, or a dominant red in a painting. Your senses are drawn to it at the expense of everything else. Dominic and I were not physical friends, so to speak. But I did love him. We can't help loving the people we do, can we? But the love doesn't have to be physical. You can be equally intimate. It doesn't matter.
James Runcie
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
Alan W. Watts
Sometimes we bring to a struggle or cause the gifts we see most clearly, a courage, a strength, or a charm others have told us we have. But often we find more is asked of us than that, more than we intended or thought we possessed. We are asked to offer that which we thought dearest, to forgive what seemed unpardonable, to face what we feared the most and endure it. Sometimes we have to travel to the last step a path that was not of our own choosing. But I promise you this ... it will lead to a greater joy in the end. The difficulty is that the end is beyond our sight, it is a matter of faith, not of knowledge.
Anne Perry
I have always noticed that these artists and writers are very unbalanced
Agatha Christie