Quotes by British Authors - Page 66

I want a man who watches me walk away.
Michael Gilbert
Cheshire Puss,' she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. 'Come, it's pleased so far,' thought Alice, and she went on. 'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?''That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.'I don't much care where—' said Alice.'Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.'—so long as I get SOMEWHERE,' Alice added as an explanation.'Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, 'if you only walk long enough.
Lewis Carroll
I was staying in a hotel in San Francisco for a couple of nights, before flying back to the UK. My hotel was a desperate grey block made from paper and people’s screams. At night the sound of strangers having icy sex echoed off the building and poured through the broken air conditioning, like tiny daggers I couldn't see, reminding me of just the tip of what I was missing.
Craig Stone
The organist was almost at the end of the anthem’s long introduction, and as the crescendo increases the cathedral began to glitter before my eyes until I felt as if every stone in the building was vibrating in anticipation of the sweeping sword of sound from the Choir.The note exploded in our midst, and at that moment I knew our creator had touched not only me but all of us, just as Harriet had touched that sculpture with a loving hand long ago, and in that touch I sensed the indestructible fidelity, the indescribable devotion and the inexhaustible energy of the creator as he shaped his creation, bringing life out of dead matter, wresting form continually from chaos. Nothing was ever lost, Harriet had said, and nothing was ever wasted because always, when the work was finally completed, every article of the created process, seen or unseen, kept or discarded, broken or mended – EVERYTHING was justified, glorified and redeemed.
Susan Howatch
How can you lose me? You’ve owned me from the first moment I saw you.
Dianna Hardy
Your wife is a big hippo! My face is melting! My face is meltinnnnggg!
Terry Pratchett
I can remember thinking I’d been turned inside out. Kind of like the first time I saw you.
Lauren James
Hope may be the thing that pulls you forward, may be the thing that keeps you going, but that it's dangerous, that it's painful and risky, that it's making a dare in the world and when has the world ever let us win a dare?
Patrick Ness
She reflected she must be completely besotted with Peter, if his laughter could hallow an aspidistra.
Dorothy L. Sayers
To be frank, I find religion rather offensive.
Terry Pratchett
The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise. The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls.
Wilkie Collins
The human heart is like india-rubber; a little swells it, but a great deal will not burst it.
Anne Brontë
I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.
John Fowles
Losing him was like having a hole shot straight through me, a painful, constant reminder, an absence I could never fill.
Jojo Moyes
Fate has carried me'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand--Not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breastTo pierce another.
George Eliot
What matter it how far we go?" his scaly friend replied."There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.
Lewis Carroll
Michael Powell knows what I am going to say even before I say it — maybe even before I have thought it – and that is very rare. You are lucky if you meet someone like that once in your life.
Emeric Pressburger
when security is understood in too absolute a sense, the general striving for it, far from increasing the chances of freedom, becomes the gravestthreat to it.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Perfect love is the most beautiful of all frustrations because it is more than one can express.
Charlie Chaplin
​One could have mistakenly assumed that each train could choose its own destination. But there was no choice. The Nazi operator sat in the station booth, his hands on levers and switches, forcing each train along its given path.
Danny M. Cohen
There ́s a metaphor which I love: living like a drawing compass. As you know, one leg of the compass is static, rooted in a place. Meanwhile, the other leg draws a wide circle, constantly moving. Like that, my fiction as well. One part of it is rooted in Istanbul with strong Turkish roots. But the other part travels the world, connecting to different cultures.
Elif Shafak
In every man there are two minds that work side by side, the one checking the other; thus emotion stands against reason, intellect corrects passion and first impressions act a little, but very little, before quick reflection.
Ford Madox Ford
There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
Ian McEwan
Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That's the problem.
A.A. Milne
Man is either Viceroy or else he is an animal that claims special rights by virtue of its cunning and the devouring efficiency of teeth sharpened by technological instruments... But if he is Viceroy, then all decay and trouble in the created world that surrounds him is in some measure to be laid to his account
Charles Le Gai Eaton
It is a fact that the USA corporate government routinely lies to its mass population.
Steven Magee
A new acquaintance is like a new book. I prefer it even if bad to a classic.
Benjamin Disraeli
The question is not, -- how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education -- but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?
Charlotte M. Mason
Sometimes caring for something already growing is more perilous than planting something new.
Rachel Joyce
Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.
Isaac Newton
My school-days! The silent gliding on of my existence—the unseen, unfelt progress of my life—from childhood up to youth! Let me think, as I look back upon that flowing water, now a dry channel overgrown with leaves, whether there are any marks along its course, by which I can remember how it ran.
Charles Dickens
All new news is old news happening to new people
Malcolm Muggeridge
Evening by eveningAmong the Brookside rushes,Laura bow'd her head to hear,Lizzie veil'd her blushes:Crouching close togetherIn the cooling weather,With clasping arms and cautioning lips,With tingling cheeks and fingertips."lie close," Laura said,Pricking up her golden head:"We must not look at Goblin men,We must not buy their fruits:who knows upon the soil they fedTheir hungry thirsty roots?""Come buy," call the GoblinsHobbling down the glen
Christina Rossetti
Nagging is the repetition of unpalatable truths.
Baroness Edith Summerskill
The essential question was always "Who are these fellows who give us orders? By what warrant? And how do we benefit and how does the world benefit? But they are doing no good to anyone, no real good even to themselves! This is not government and leadership; this is imposture. Why stand it?...Why stand it?
H.G.Wells
Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won't be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It'll be because people have changed. They'll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It's healthy.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Library-denigrators, pay heed: suggesting that the Internet is a viable substitute for libraries is like saying porn could replace your wife.
Joanne Harris
It's the little things that make big things happen.
Anthony T.Hincks
Things don’t only change, they also change you; sometimes for good, sometimes not.
Steven Redhead
The years seem to rush by now and I think of death as a fast approaching end of a journey-double and treble reason for loving as well as working while it is day.
George Eliot
You must never believe everything they say about a person. Generally speaking, most of it will be lies, half-truths at best.
Kate Atkinson
Ninety percent of paid work is time-wasting crap. The world gets by on the other ten.
John Derbyshire
If there was ever a more perfect day in the history of time it isn't one I've heard about.
Meg Rosoff
A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child subject still to her power but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother.
Bertrand Russell
When a feeling hits, keep breathing. Let air flow through your body. Let your heart beat as it always faithfully does. And let the feeling pass through you. Maybe it will be momentary, or maybe it will spend the night. But it will not last forever. If you can be with it, sit with it, even if “it” brings a lot of discomfort, that feeling will keep moving. It will move through you, and you will move on. You will move forward.
Stephen Lovegrove
My heart is too thoroughly dried to be broken in a hurry, and I mean to live as long as I can.
Anne Brontë
The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story - of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It's like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you - and it can't, and it shouldn't, because something IS missing. That isn't of its nature negative. The missing part, the missing past, can be an opening, not a void. It can be an entry as well as an exit. It is the fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of Braille.
Jeanette Winterson
For certain, neither of them sees a happy Present, as the gate opens and closes, and one goes in, and the other goes away.
Charles Dickens
It is as absurd to argue men as to torture them into believing.
John Henry Cardinal Newman
Mr. Frimpong is the oldest person from church. That's when I knew why he sings louder than anybody else: it's because he's been waiting the longest for God to answer. He thinks God has forgotten him. I only knew it then. Then I loved him but it was too late to go back.
Stephen Kelman
I know what I'm giving up for Lent: my New Year's resolutions.
Henny Youngman
In the hands of Science and indomitable energy, results the most gigantic and absorbing may be wrought out by skilful combinations of acknowledged data and the simplest means.
George Biddell Airy
What is life without a little risk?" -Sirius Black
J.K. Rowling
Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.
David Mitchell
I forgive him, But I don´t know if I trully trust him, and this is funny thing about trust. You can love and forgive, but you don´t necessarily trust, Broken hearts and promises can be fixed so easily because they break in different way than trust, When trust is broken, it´s shattered into thousand pieces. And sometimes, it´s never put back together the same way.
Emma Hart
I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.
Neil Gaiman
How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.
Graham Greene
Contentment is a pearl of great price, and whoever procures it at the expense of ten thousand desires makes a wise and a happy purchase.
John Balguy
There are no means of finding what either one person or many can do, but by trying - and no means by which anyone else can discover for them what it is for their happiness to do or leave undone
John Stuart Mill
If only you knew who you really were you would be fearless and love yourself with a grand passion! You are a unique shard of God, the Universe, the whole or whatever label you would like to call it. No one can take your place and without you endless synchronicity and evolution would not happen. You are so powerful that just by walking down the street you can change someone's life forever.
Michele Knight