Quotes by British Authors - Page 662

I didn't want him to be the one I avoided because he'd hurt me. If I was just his friend, then I would still be blessed. If that meant swallowing my pride and being his shoulder when he got hurt, or being the one he ranted at when he was angry; I was prepared to do it and to do it with dignity.
Jessica Thompson
...killing Dirk, killing anybody, was not going to change anything apart from Francisco's f***ing ego, which was already large enough to house the world's poor twice over, with a few million bourgeoisie in the spare-room.
Hugh Laurie
We're on a mission from Glod.
Terry Pratchett
Genius does what it must and talent does what it can.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
What will you tell him?""The truth."Fortismer thinks about that."Yes," he says at last. "Probably the best thing. Bloody deceptive, honesty.
Nick Harkaway
You could call her perilous because she was so strong in herself.
J.R.R. Tolkien
You are my flesh and blood and I have always doted on you, but right now I would have to say you deserve a haughty, ruined chit for your own and she deserves you.
Mary Balogh
I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.
Emily Brontë
the believer claims to know, not just that God exists, but that his most detailed wishes are not merely knowable but actually known. Since religion drew its first breath when the species lived in utter ignorance and considerable fear, I hope I may be forgiven for declining to believe that another human being can tell me what to do, in the most intimate details of my life and mind, and to further dictate these terms as if acting as proxy for a supernatural entity.
Christopher Hitchens
Ultimately, we all have to decide what our own life is for. I will die one day, and, whether my day is near or far, I choose to look back on my time and know that I walked through the doors that inspired me.
Shaun Chamberlin
By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You shewed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.
Jane Austen
It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree but smiles.
Muriel Spark
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done whether you like it or not it is the first lesson that ought to be learned and however early a man's training begins it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.
Thomas Huxley
The past is the best way to suppose what may come.
Lord Halifax
One cliche attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely.
Matt Haig
The tendency of modern science is to reduce proof to absurdity by continually reducing absurdity to proof.
Samuel Butler
Books, in the plural lose their solidity of substance and become a gas, filling all available space.
John Derbyshire
I wish I was your favorite girl, I wish you thought I was the reason you are in the world, I wish I was your favorite smile, I wish the way I dressed was your favorite kind of style
Kate Nash
Am I right in suggesting that ordinary life is a mean between these extremes, that the noble man devotes his material wealth to lofty ends, the advancement of science, or art, or some such true ideal; and that the base man does the opposite by concentrating all his abilities on the amassing of wealth?'Exactly; that is the real distinction between the artist and the bourgeois, or, if you prefer it, between the gentleman and the cad. Money, and the things money can buy, have no value, for there is no question of creation, but only of exchange. Houses, lands, gold, jewels, even existing works of art, may be tossed about from one hand to another; they are so, constantly. But neither you nor I can write a sonnet; and what we have, our appreciation of art, we did not buy. We inherited the germ of it, and we developed it by the sweat of our brows. The possession of money helped us, but only by giving us time and opportunity and the means of travel. Anyhow, the principle is clear; one must sacrifice the lower to the higher, and, as the Greeks did with their oxen, one must fatten and bedeck the lower, so that it may be the worthier offering.
Aleister Crowley
Excuse me,’ I said cheerily. ‘Is the job still going?’ I pointed to the notice.‘Of course,’ he said, looking back at me with a warm smile. I think he was as hopeful as I was about where this could lead to. ‘We need all the hands we can get.’I looked at the tight swell of his shirt against his chest, and thought, 'Mmm, yes, I can imagine my hands getting your fucking clothes off right now.
Fiona Thrust
If I were only allowed to read or enjoy art or listen to music made by people whose opinions and beliefs were the same as mine, I think the world would be a pretty dismal sort of a place... Most, probably all, human beings get to do awful things and believe things that other human beings think they should be burned for believing, and they get to do and believe wonderful things too, and artists, writers, musicians, creators, actors, are nothing if not human beings.
Neil Gaiman
I felt tears pricking inside my eyelids. Maybe I came first With Oliver.
Jacqueline Wilson
The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end.
Benjamin Disraeli
A person who is worth nothing must introduce you to a person worth next-to-nothing, and that person to another, and so on and so forth until finally you can step across the threshold, almost one of the family.
Michel Faber
Tragedy is like a strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.
D H Lawwrence
I'd rather be a comma than a full stop.
Chris Martin
My father never told us how the stories worked. He didn't reveal the layers, the nuggets of information, the fragments of truth and fantasy. He didn't need to -- because, given the right conditions, the stories activated, sowing themselves.
Tahir Shah
Psychopathy is like sunlight. Overexposure can hasten one’s demise in grotesque, carcinogenic fashion. But regulated exposure at controlled and optimal levels can have a significant positive impact on well-being and quality of life.
Kevin Dutton
The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
Alain de Botton
Speaking personally, I find it helpful to detect in the four evangelists four dimensions of the saving purpose of God: its length, depth, breadth and height. Matthew reveals its length, for he depicts the Christ of Scripture, who looks back over long-centuries of expectation. Mark emphasizes its depth, for he depicts the Suffering Servant who looks down to the depths of the humiliation he endured. In Luke it is the breadth of God's purpose which emerges, for he depicts the Savior of the world who looks round in mercy to the broadest possible spectrum of human beings. Then John reveals its height, for he depicts the Word made flesh who looks up to the heights from which he came and to which he intends to raise us.
John R.W. Stott
I am one of those people who are blessed ... with a nature which has to interfere. If I see a thing that needs doing I do it.
Margery Allingham
I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.
G.K. Chesterton
Apparently people don't like the truth, but I do like it; I like it because it upsets a lot of people. If you show them enough times that their arguments are bullshit, then maybe just once, one of them will say, 'Oh! Wait a minute - I was wrong.' I live for that happening. Rare, I assure you
Lemmy Kilmister
If ever two were one then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife then thee.
Anne Bradstreet
Excess makes the heart grow fonder...
John Balance
You know that when a police officer refuses to produce formal identification on request, they are probably engaging in some form of corruption.
Steven Magee
The mob is a sort of bear while your ring is through its nose it will even dance under your cudgel but should the ring slip and you lose your hold the brute will turn and rend you.
Jane Porter
I was always on my oddy knocky.
Anthony Burgess
Civilization depends on continually making the effort, of never giving in. It needs to be cared for by men of goodwill, protected from the dark.
Iain Pears
I never made a mistake in my life; at least, never one that I couldn't explain away afterwards.
Rudyard Kipling
What she liked was simply life. "That's what i did it for," she said, speaking aloud to life... Could any man understand what she meant, either, about life? …But to go deeper, beneath what people said, and these judgments, how superficial, how fragmentary, they are. In her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? It was an offering…it was her gift.
Virginia Woolf
She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
Jane Austen
This was the plan: we would take a holy and sacred picture of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Elvis Presley, to the very summit of the earth; once there, we would place it with sincere reverence amongst the chimerical shimmering palaces of ice and snow and then (accompanied by some weird Zen magic) we would light joss sticks, dance about making screechy kung-fu noises, get off our faces, and that would be it: Planet Earth saved. Simple.
Mark Manning
Adaptability to change is itself a hallmark of successful education.
Peter Hilton
I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that?
C.S. Lewis
Endurance is nobler than strength and patience than beauty.
John Ruskin
There's so much one doesn't know; it wasn't my business to know. I mean, when a child asks you how a helicopter works or who made the world–well, what are you to answer if you're a Beta and have always worked in the Fertilizing Room? What are you to answer?
Aldous Huxley
I have occupied this idle, empty winter with writing a story. It has been written to please myself, without thought of my own vanity or modesty, without regard for other people's feelings, without considering whether I shock or hurt the living, without scrupling to speak of the dead.The world, I know, is changing. I am not indifferent to the revolution that has caught us in its mighty skirts, to the enormity of the flood that is threatening to submerge us. But what could I do? In the welter of the surrounding storm, I have taken refuge for a moment on this little raft, constructed with the salvage of my memory. I have tried to steer it into that calm haven of art in which I still believe. I have tried to avoid some of the rocks and sandbanks that guard its entrance.[from the introduction]
Dorothy Bussy
Civilization is a movement and not a condition a voyage and not a harbor.
Arnold Toynbee
Living by faith includes the call to something greater than cowardly self-preservation.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The very fact that it is necessary in the twenty-first century to explain why it's not okay to publicly debate whether or not women are "asking" for sexual assault is mind-boggling.
Laura Bates
Dickens enjoyed human beings as he found them, unregenerate, peculiar and incorrigibly themselves.
John N Gray
As it was, she always did whatever occurred to her, which was, admittedly, not difficult for someone in her position, coming from a background where rick of failure was minimal; in fact, you had to work hard to fail in her world.
Hanif Kureishi
...here also forgiving does not mean excusing. Many people seem to think it does. They think that if you ask them to forgive someone who has cheated or bullied them you are trying to make out that there was really no cheating or bullying. But if that were so, there would be nothing to forgive. (This doesn't mean that you must necessarily believe his next promise. It does mean that you must make every effort to kill every taste of resentment in your own heart - every wish to humiliate or hurt him or to pay him out.)
C.S. Lewis
Being amongst rough lives and confusion does not make you less, it only makes your beauty shine out more clearly.
Sharon Sant
The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write about it.
Benjamin Disraeli
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine—Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile madeThe tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade
John Keats
Even now when I'm furious, what I would like to do is to punch the infuriating person flat on the ground. That solves nothing I know, and I spent a lot of time understanding my own violence, which is not of the pussycat kind. There are people who could never commit murder; I am not one of those people. It's better to know it, better to know who you are, and what lies in you, and what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation.
Jeanette Winterson
The dusty tombs of long-dead exorcist priests lay in the alcoves below, surmounted by stone effigies, the features eroded by the passing of time and the reverent caresses of their grateful parishioners, a reminder, she knew all too well, of the brevity of life.
Sarah Ash
Death drives desire.
Rosemary A. Johns