Quotes by British Authors - Page 660

I don't know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.
Arthur Wellesley
Only dead mathematics can be taught where competition prevails: living mathematics must always be a communal possession.
Mary Everest Boole
So she quit working to make sense of things— we don’t realise it, but it’s hard work we do almost every waking moment, building out thoughts and memories and actions around time, things that happened yesterday, and things that are happening right now, and what’s coming tomorrow, layering all of that simultaneously and holding it in balance.
Helen Oyeyemi
I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.
Ted Hughes
No man ever yet became great by imitation.
Samuel Johnson
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
George Orwell
When you choose to work with a willing, happy heart, you become a beautiful source of joy to all.
Elizabeth George
As the High Priestess looked down upon the child, she was struck by her holy perfection. She was a tiny person in miniature, and her beautiful eyes, little hands, and long eyelashes were sublime.
Alan Kinross
If Molly had not been so entirely loyal to her friend, she might havethought this constant brilliancy a little tiresome when brought intoevery-day life; it was not the sunshiny rest of a placid lake, it wasrather the glitter of the pieces of a broken mirror, which confusesand bewilders.
Elizabeth Gaskell
I have learned that it is one thing to kill in battle, to send a brave man's soul to the corpse hall of the gods, but quite another to take a helpless man's life...
Bernard Cornwell
There is no place for innocence on the battlefield.
Jocelyn Murray
And please return it. You may think this a strange request, but I find that although my friends are poor arithmeticians, they are nearly all of them good bookkeepers.
Walter Scott
Some days I am more wolf than woman, and I am still learning how to stop apologizing for my wild.
Nikita Gill
Bad, or good, as it happens to be, that is what it is to exist! . . . It is as though I have been silent and fuddled with sleep all my life. In spite of all, I know now that at least it is better to go always towards the summer, towards those burning seas of light; to sit at night in the forecastle lost in an unfamiliar dream, when the spirit becomes filled with stars, instead of wounds, and good and compassionate and tender. To sail into an unknown spring, or receive one's baptism on storm's promontory, where the solitary albatross heels over in the gale, and at last come to land. To know the earth under one's foot and go, in wild delight, ways where there is water.
Malcolm Lowry
Hair is another name for sex.
Vidal Sassoon
Why are you trying so hard to fit in when you were born to stand out?
Ian Wallace
Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.
C.S. Lewis
Fools who wear their hearts proudly on their sleeves, who cannot control their emotions, who wallow in sad memories and allow themselves to be provoked this easily — weak people, in other words...
J.K. Rowling
Freedom is the willingness and ability to choose your own path and experience your life as your true self.
Beth Kempton
To teach how to live with uncertainty yet without being paralyzed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy can do.
Bertrand Russell
There has never been a time in human history where so many people routinely carry recording and surveillance devices.
Steven Magee
Change is the medium to become who you wish to be.
Steven Redhead
Rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity.
Gregory Bateson
After using a paint chart from a local DIY superstore to identify the skin tone of his penis as midnight chocolate, Miriam stayed down on one knee and offered him the citizenship he had always wanted and the middle-aged white woman he would grudgingly accept.
David F. Porteous
I liked to feel I had to do things perfectly; I felt I was earning my freedom. Though I was in hiding, and though I worked every day until midnight, I felt I was much more in charge of myself than I had ever been.
V.S. Naipaul
You want me to spy on a National Colour operative?''Wow,' she said, 'you got it. I thought I was going to have to explain that one for a lot longer.
Jasper Fforde
He who has two grounds of trust is lost! He who relies upon twosalvations, and cannot say of Christ, “He is all my salvation and all my desire,” that man is not only in danger of beinglost, but he is already condemned; because, in fact, he believes not on the Son of God! He is not alive to God at all, but rests partly on the Cross, and then in some measure on something else.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Being loved is the problem, because love is a demand - when you're loved, someone wants more of you.
Stephen Grosz
As I have learned over the years, your friends don’t change; you just learn to ignore or embrace the bad bits.
Carrie Adams
This time he was underwater, running, feet sinking deeper and deeper into the seabed. The surface was within reach if he raised his arms, but he couldn’t get his head out of the water. He had to breathe. The compulsion to inhale was huge. But he couldn’t, musn’t. Still he ran, getting nowhere, each frantic step burying his feet in the wet sand until he was no longer able to lift them. Finally, with one great gulp, he opened his mouth, his lungs to the flood of seawater.
Martyn Bedford
Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.
Bill Bryson
Every time you have an orgasm an angel comes to life..
Chloe Thurlow
And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.
Terry Pratchett
it was Greenspan who through some excessive deregulation prepared the monetary ground for the rise of the subprime mortgage companies: a lending market that specialises in high-risk mortgages and loans.'Innovation', said Greenspan in April 2005, 'has brought about a multitude of new products, such as subprime loans and niche credit programs for immigrants'.It is almost touching to find out that Greenspan cares so much about immigrants.
Gilad Atzmon
That sign of old age extolling the past at the expense of the present.
Sydney Smith
The human spirit lives on creativity and dies in conformity and routine.
Vilayat Inayat Khan
There is no disappointment we endure one-half so great as what we are to ourselves.
Philip James Bailey
Work is more fun than fun.
Noël Coward
You may not believe in chance but it provides us with every opportunity we need.
Chloe Thurlow
Prayer to the patriarchs and prophets was more than the recital of well-known and well-worn phrases-it was the outpouring of the heart.
Herbert Lockyer
It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.
Virginia Woolf
At that moment, Harry fully understood for the first time why people said Dumbledore was the only wizard Voldemort had ever feared. The look upon Dumbledore's face as he stared down at the unconscious form of Mad-Eye moody was more terrible than Harry could have ever imagined. There was no benign smile upon Dumbledore's face, no twinkle in the eyes behind the spectacles. There was cold fury in every line of the ancient face; a sense of power radiated from Dumbledore as though he were giving off burning heat.
J.K. Rowling
Many past mistakes paves the road to future discoveries.
Steven Magee
With privilege comes responsibility, you must understand that. People expect us to lead by example and we shall not disappoint them.
Ben Elton
I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.
John Keats
But I know how much you care for me. I read it in the ribbon. Lorcan sighed. Did you really need to read the ribbon to know that I cared for you?, he said. Really, Grace, don't you know me at all?I thought I did, she said
Justin Somper
It wasn't that I stopped caring about life, but that I've stopped being able to care.
Ruby Elliot
You tell me it's the institution.Well, you know, you'd better free you mind instead.But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow.Don't you know it's gonna be all right?
John Lennon
I'm not leaving until you stop crying" he stated pulling me down so we were now laying on my bed facing each other
Kirsty Moseley
True perfection has to be imperfect. I know that sounds foolish, but it's true.
Noel Gallagher
Fundamentalism's strident denunciation of its opponents is a sign of its weakness, its dogmatic authoritarianism is a pathological mutation of faith.
Alan Aldridge
If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad.
George Gordon Byron
Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
G.K. Chesterton
Tut, Tut, looks like rain
A.A. Milne
All political meetings are very much alike. Somebody gets up and introduces the speaker of the evening, and then the speaker of the evening says at great length what he thinks of the scandalous manner in which the Government is behaving or the iniquitous goings-on of the Opposition. From time to time confederates in the audience rise and ask carefully rehearsed questions, and are answered fully and satisfactorily by the orator. When a genuine heckler interrupts, the orator either ignores him, or says haughtily that he can find him arguments but cannot find him brains. Or, occasionally, when the question is an easy one, he answers it. A quietly conducted political meeting is one of England's most delightful indoor games. When the meeting is rowdy, the audience has more fun, but the speaker a good deal less.
P.G. Wodehouse
Never give up.' This is not sound advice, it is bad advice. You must give up when there is no point in continuing. Then begin a new course. There is no greater failure than not changing course when the time is right to do so.
Chloe Thurlow
I am, a shadowthat grows longer as the sunmoves, drawn outon a thread of wonder.If I bear burdensthey begin to be rememberedas gifts, goods, a basketof bread that hurtsmy shoulders but closes mein fragrance. I caneat as I go. ("Stepping Westward")
Denise Levertov
O child of God, be more careful to keep the way of the Lord, more concentrated in heart in seeking His glory, and you will see the loving-kindness and the tender mercy of the Lord in your life.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Oh! what a silly Thing is Woman! How vain, how unreasonable!
Jane Austen
Talent guided by genius can achieve anything
Jamie Scallion