Quotes by British Authors - Page 654

Thou shalt have one God only; whoWould be at the expense of two?No graven images may beWorshipped, except the currency:Swear not at all; for, for thy curseThine enemy is none the worse:At church on Sunday to attendWill serve to keep the world thy friend:Honour thy parents; that is allFrom whom advancement may befall:Thou shalt not kill; but need'st not striveOfficiously to keep alive:Do not adultery commit;Advantage rarely comes of it:Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,When it's so lucrative to cheat:Bear not false witness; let the lieHave time on its own wings to fly:Thou shalt not covet, but traditionApproves all forms of competition.
Arthur Hugh Clough
will I ever get over the pull I feel to both of these places?
Sara Ferguson
‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎The mind of God is greater than all the minds of men, so let all men leave the gospel just as God has delivered it unto us.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Daniel first kisses his brother in a town where no-one knows them, a no-account place that's barely even a town, just some buildings clustered around the highway: a smoky bar, an empty motel, a convenience store that only sells candy and condoms and beer. The nearest gas station is twenty miles away. The nearest bus station is fifty.
Kirsty Logan
What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?""Stories. And they give me hope.
Neil Gaiman
Belief sloshes around in the firmament like lumps of clay spiralling into a potter's wheel. That's how gods get created, for example. They clearly must be created by their own believers, because a brief resume of the lives of most gods suggests that their origins certainly couldn't be divine. They tend to do exactly the things people would do if only they could, especially when it comes to nymphs, golden showers, and the smiting of your enemies.
Terry Pratchett
Politics is a blood sport.
Aneurin Bevan
He was the subject of a little respectful ribbing. But he was, of course, the captain, which meant he had to do lots of the ribbing himself.
Geoff Dyer
All the time she writing the world had continued.
Virginia Woolf
Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.
Hilary Mantel
With him big Phil from Notting Hill an old "face" from the sixties a pin up gangster with a "mars bar" weal scraping his left cheek and of course two "wag" slags in tow trussed up like French Poodles with "Bratz babe" stares and Gucci Handbags
Saira Viola
At last the magic caught, and she managed to vault clumsily onto it before it trundled into the night sky as gracefully as a duck with one wing missing.
Terry Pratchett
....it seems to me that a pleasurable Contemplation of Beauty has certainly an immeasurably greater value than mere Consciousness of Pleasure.
G.E. Moore
The great nations have always acted like gangsters and the small nations like prostitutes.
Stanley Kubrick
Rincewind could scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty-four.
Terry Pratchett
But you don't fuck me cold-heartedly,' she protested.'I don't want to fuck you at all.'Lady Chatterly's Lover
D.H. Lawrence
Happy Hauntings; and, pleasant dreams!
Peter James
Any titles, money, or privilege you inherit are actually hindrances. They delude you into believing you are owed respect.
Robert Greene
Oscar Wilde: "I wish I had said that." Whistler: "You will, Oscar; you will.
James McNeill Whistler
Maybe it was the heart which punished one with such exquisite accuracy.
Mark Haddon
If you're in 'HELL', you're in a bank.If you're in 'HEAVEN', you're on the other side of the counter.Signed....A Goldman Sachs Representative
Anthony T.Hincks
Marriage has many pains but celibacy has no pleasures.
Samuel Johnson
It is a dreadful thing to wait and watch for the approach of death; to know that hope is gone, and recovery impossible; and to sit and count the dreary hours through long, long, nights - such nights as only watchers by the bed of sickness know. It chills the blood to hear the dearest secrets of the heart, the pent-up, hidden secrets of many years, poured forth by the unconscious helpless being before you; and to think how little the reserve, and cunning of a whole life will avail, when fever and delirium tear off the mask at last. Strange tales have been told in the wanderings of dying men; tales so full of guilt and crime, that those who stood by the sick person's couch have fled in horror and affright, lest they should be scared to madness by what they heard and saw; and many a wretch has died alone, raving of deeds, the very name of which, has driven the boldest man away.("The Drunkard's Death")
Charles Dickens
You might want to sit in public squares and people watch for an hour in one place and a month in another. I can tell by the way you're peeling that grapefruit. You want to get lost. Somewhere where they have ordinary life you can join in. Slip right in there and have a bowl of soup in the clothes you have on now. Go hear a concert you read about stapled to a telephone pole. There are lots of places like that in the world.
Kathleen Winter
He was one of those men whose constitutional inability to make small talk forfeits all one's sympathy and makes one think that social grace is sometimes a moral duty.
James Morris
It seems to me, that you people spend a great deal of time talking about honour, but strip away the high sounding words and you are no different from any other race. Family? Has Priam not killed wayward sons? When a king dies do his sons not go to war with one another to succeed him? Men speak of how you reacted to your father's death. They say it was amazing, for you did not order your little brother's execution. Your race thrives on blood and death, Helikaon. Your ships raid the coasts of other nations, stealing slaves, burning and plundering. Warriors brag of how many men they have killed, and women they have raped. Almost all of your kings either seized their thrones with swords and murder, or are children of men who seized power with swords and murder. So put all this talk of honour to one side.
David Gemmell
Your heart is a conduit through which the spirit speaks to the mind.
Steven Redhead
To give to others is but sowing seed for ourselves.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate.
Perry Anderson
Money, money, money! I think about money morning, noon and night! I dare say it's mercenary of me, but there it is
Agatha Christie
The difference between a fairly interesting writer and a fascinating writer is that the fascinating writer has a better nose for what genuinely excites him, he is hotter on the trail, he has a better instinct for what is truly alive in him. The worse writer may seem to be more sensible in many ways, but he is less sensible in this vital matter: he cannot distinguish what is full of life from what is only half full or empty of it. And so his writing is less alive, and as a writer he is less alive, and in writing, as in everything else, nothing matters but life.
Ted Hughes
It is my greatest wish that victims of paranormal attack are treated with the respect and compassion they deserve, and that by writing this book, it will encourage others to come forward and share their stories also.
Caroline Mitchell
Not all dreams are possible or realistic. When this happens you have to bade them farewell. This isn't failure, but it's a sign of maturity and learning on your part. All you need to do is rethink what you wanted to do, in the first place,and see what you can change.Then that is called determination and that, will lead to you having success.
Anthony T.Hincks
Um, you don’t have to join me, but if you’re looking for a table, there are a couple good seats over there.” He nodded toward the far end.
J.M. Richards
Unseen University had never admitted women, muttering something about problems with the plumbing, but the real reason was an unspoken dread that if women were allowed to mess around with magic they would probably be embarrassingly good at it…
Terry Pratchett
I don't like crowds of any kind. A dinner party of more than six people is not, for me, a pleasure. I get less social as I get older... I am very resistant to anything that keeps me away from the business of making these journeys into the fantastique. They are my reason for being on the planet, as far as I can comprehend, and I pursue them to the cost of almost anything.
Clive Barker
In the long years to come, not only will the people of this island but of the world, wherever the bird of freedom chirps in human hearts, look back to what we've done, and they will say 'do not despair, do not yield...march straightforward.
Winston S. Churchill
To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one.
Nick Hornby
I do not believe that any peacock envies another peacock his tail because every peacock is persuaded that his own tail is the finest in the world. The consequence of this is that peacocks are peaceable birds.
Bertrand Russell
At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who always live there.
Angela Carter
If there was ever an example for redemption, it's you.
Michael Grant
The days that followed passed slowly. I lay in my hotel room and watched the kind of strange European TV that would probably make perfect sense if I understood the language, but because I didn’t, the programs just seemed dreamlike and baffling. In one studio show a group of Scandinavian academics watched as one of them poured liquid plastic into a bucket of cold water. It solidified, they pulled it out, handed it around the circle, and, as far as I could tell, intellectualized on its random misshapenness. I phoned home but my wife didn’t answer. It crossed my mind that she might be dead. I panicked. Then it turned out that she wasn’t dead. She had just been at the shops.
Jon Ronson
Whatever gets you through the night
John Lennon
All evil begins with this belief: that another’s existence is less precious than mine.
Tony Hendra
A fierce battle was raging inside Harry's
J.K. Rowling
She had not come to the shopping centre to buy shoes; she had come to buy food, and there was a big difference between shopping for food and shopping for shoes, and that difference concentrated on one word: guilt.
Alexander McCall Smith
As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.
G.K. Chesterton
Each time I say good-bye to a place I like, I feel like I am leaving a part of me behind. I guess whether we choose to travel as much as Marco Polo did or stay in the same spot from cradle to grave, life is a sequence of births and deaths. Moments are born and moments die. For new experiences to come to light, old ones need to wither away.
Elif Shafak
If you look for endings you can always find one, but I truly felt as if I had used up the last of my youth, if youth is that finite stage of life when it all feels expeditionary, inexact.
Charles Finch
The butterflies in my stomach turn into vampire bats as we pull up to the school.
Cat Clarke
Just always be honest about your feelings. If everyone did that then the world would be a much simpler place.
Kiki Archer
Why shouldn't I hate her? She did the worst thing to me that anyone can do to anyone else. Let them believe that they're loved and wanted and then show them that it's all a sham.
Agatha Christie
Men like nails lose their usefulness when they lose direction and begin to bend.
Walter Savage Landor
Whatso'er we perpetrate We do but row we are steered by fate.
Samuel Butler
I would like to have nothing to do with you for hours on end and then come back and find you, come back with things I’ve thought and found all on my own— on my own, not through you.
Helen Oyeyemi
My love, lie down beside me.Let us gaze at the stars above.Wonder with meAt how we came to be.Hold me now and for all eternity
Lily G Blunt
How could one leap on the back of life and wring its scruff?
Virginia Woolf
Great companies don`t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them. People are either motivated or they are not. Unless you give motivated people something to believe in, something better than their job to work toward, they will motivate themselves to find a new job and you`ll be stuck with whoever`s left.
Simon Sinek
....the perfect beauty of the pattern that each raindrop makes as it joins its puddle.
Jay Woodman
It took Pueblo a few seconds to take in his surroundings. The first thing he realised was that he felt bruised all over; the second was that his clothes were waterlogged, even more than before, from the quicksand; and the third, was that he had landed on his front and was lying on a large, uncomfortable stone.No, wait… In his disoriented state, he shifted his weight. The stone didn't move. He was lying on his own fucking erection.
Dianna Hardy