Quotes by British Authors - Page 664

Evil is not good's absence but gravity'severlasting bedrock and its fatal chainsinert, violent, the suffrage of our days.
Geoffrey Hill
The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane.
G.K. Chesterton
The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to.
Terry Pratchett
You can judge me all you want, but it's just ridiculous coz we're both part of the same universe. Let's just ride the horses into the meadow and let them roll in the delightful grass.
Jay Woodman
America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe just about anything could happen in America.
Neil Gaiman
And Gandalf said: "This is your realm, and the heart of the greater realm that shall be. The Third Age of the world is ended, and the new age is begun; and it is your task to order its beginning and to preserve what must be preserved. For though much has been saved, much must now pass away; and the power of the Three Rings also is ended. And all the lands that you see, and those that lie round about them, shall be dwellings of Men. For the time comes of the Dominion of Men, and the Elder Kindred shall fade or depart.
J.R.R. Tolkien
You certainly usually find something if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
G.K. Chesterton
Sounds like you're trying to say that creation of new alternate worlds is a conscious decision.''I'm not trying to say it - I just said it.
Neil Gaiman & Michael Reaves
Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of language. It is a process at the same time physical and intellectual. The writer has to hear language until she develops perfect pitch, but she also has to feel language, to know it sweat and dry. The writer finds the words are visceral, and when she can eat them, wear them, and enter them like tunnels she discovers the alleged separation between word and meaning between writer and word is theoretical.
Jeanette Winterson
What we believe about God is the most important truth we believe, and it's the one truth that does the most to shape us. God is the Sun too bright for us to see. Jesus is the Prism who makes the colors beautiful and comprehensible.
Michael Spencer
I hate nobody except Hitler--and that is professional.
Winston S. Churchill
Publishers, readers, booksellers, even critics, acclaim the novel that one can deliciously sink into, forget oneself in, the novel that returns us to the innocence of childhood or the dream of the cartoon, the novel of a thousand confections and no unwanted significance. What becomes harder to find, and lonelier to defend, is the idea of the novel as—in Ford Madox Ford’s words—a “medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case.
James Wood
Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.
Charles Stross
Future generations may or may not judge Wittgenstein to be one of the great philosophers. Even if they do not, however, he is sure always to count as one of the great personalities of philosophy. From our perspective it is easy to mistake one for the other; which he is time will tell.
A.C. Grayling
Such nonsense!" declared Dr Greysteel. "Whoever heard of cats doing anything useful!""Except for staring at one in a supercilious manner," said Strange. "That has a sort of moral usefulness, I suppose, in making one feel uncomfortable and encouraging sober reflection upon one's imperfections.
Susanna Clarke
Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.
Oliver Sacks
How many times have I gone back to the border of memory and peered into the darkness beyond? But it is not only memories that hover on the border. There are all sorts of phantasmagoria that inhabit that realm. The nightmares of a lonely child. Fairy tales appropriated by a mind hungry for a story. The fantasies of an imaginative little girl anxious to explain to herself the inexplicable. Whatever story I may have discovered on the frontier of forgetting, I do not pretend to myself that is the truth.
Diane Setterfield
Writing a story about a place calls that world into existence. Sometimes, as the author, you accompany it for a while. But even as you write, the characters have minds of their own.
Alan McCluskey
A bird in The Strand is worth two in Shepherds Bush
Spike Milligan
The river was glossy, narrow, and quick, a beautiful green color, with the white and maroon striped college punts strung along the near bank. .... The sun, westering, heavy, and hazy, was in those great final throes of energy before the sky whitens and clears, and evening comes. I stood and watched it. That immense body, dying trillions of feet away from me, still warming my face with its steady insensate chemistries.
Charles Finch
I kill in my own time,” he said. “In any case, killing unconscious people isn’t right.”“I can’t think of a more opportune time,” said the Loremaster.
Terry Pratchett
At present we are on the outside… the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the pleasures we see. But all the pages of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get “in”… We will put on glory… that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.We do not want to merely “see” beauty -- though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words–to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.
C.S. Lewis
Horst passed him a bottle he had picked up in his rapid trip from there to here. Remarkably, it's contents had survived the transit. "Drink this," he said, unmoved by Cabal's anger. "You need to save your voice for your next session." Cabal took the bottle testily and swigged from it. there was a moments pause, just long enough for Cabal's expression to change from testy to horrified revulsion. He spat the liquid violently onto the grass like a man who has got absent-minded with the concentrated nitric acid and a mouth pipette. He glared at Horst as he took off his spectacles and wiped his suddenly weeping eyes "Disinfectant? You give me disinfectant to drink?" Horst's surprise was replaced with mild amusement. "It's root beer, Johannes. Have you never had root beer?" Cabal looked suspiciously at him, then at the bottle "People drink this?" "Yes." "For non-medical reasons?" "That's right." Cabal shook his head in open disbelief. "They must be insane.
Jonathan L. Howard
Why would I go looking for someone I know wants to kill me?
J.K. Rowling
The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.
Margot Fonteyn
I realised that one might love him secretly with no hope of encouragement, which can be very enjoyable for the young or inexperienced.
Barbara Pym
When you stopped believing in God," he went on, "did you stop believing in good and evil?""No. But I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that's an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.
Philip Pullman
They glided out of the heat-haze on their camels like specters. There were twenty of them, and they were Tuareg. Their faces were hidden by black veils that left only slits for the eyes, and they wore purple robes that fluttered in the desert wind. They carried swords, muskets and seven-foot iron spears, and wore stilettos in sheaths on their left forearms. They were an impressive, sinister sight.
Michael Asher
Interestingly, this speech by Prospero does not contrast the unreality of the stage with the solid, flesh-and-blood existence of real men and women. On the contrary, it seizes on the flimsiness of dramatic characters as a metaphor for the fleeting, fantasy-ridden quality of actual human lives. It is we who are made of dreams, not just such figments of Shakespeare’s imagination as Ariel and Caliban. The cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of this earth are mere stage scenery after all.
Terry Eagleton
I think I'm a tiny bit like Harry 'cos I'd like to have an owl. Yeah, that's the tiny bit, actually.
Daniel Radcliffe
The local natives were particularly curious to know why the English required such huge quantities of pepper and there was much scratching of heads until it was finally agreed that English houses were so cold that the walls were plastered with crushed pepper in order to produce heat.
Giles Milton
My philosophical heart will not judge thee
Benny Bellamacina
You've already said you were going to kill me," Alex said, "but I didn't think that meant you were going to bore me to death.
Anthony Horowitz
The Googleplex Star Thinker is a super-computer from the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity and has the ability to calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle during a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard.The Deep Thought computer call it a pocket calculator in comparison to itself.
Douglas Adams
There’s no such thing as ‘not enough time’ out here in the woods. I don’t even have a watch. Time is my own, categorised as nothing more than ‘morning, afternoon, evening and night’.
Fennel Hudson
As the head of an expedition, you can't pussyfoot around being polite to everyone. You have to show your teeth once in a while; a little growling goes a long way.
Tahir Shah
I had to be an adult, be a father without a son, so for one last moment I needed to be a son who needed his mother.
Ruth Ahmed
A man may follow vanity as truly in the counting-house as in the theatre. If he be spending his life in amassing wealth, he passes his days in a vain show.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Expectation and disappointment are far from friends but they are close relations.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.
Joe Abercrombie
The temptation is too strong for me. Oh, Lord! where is Thy peace that I believed in, in my childhood? – that I hear people speaking of now, as if it hushed up the troubles of life, and had not to be sought for – sought for, as with tears of blood! [-Jemima, chapter 26, pg. 275]
Elizabeth Gaskell
Everything hurts. He can barely lie still. He feels caught. He wants to run, but where? He feels certain he will always remain like this - trapped within his own body, his own mind. The emotional pain is so strong, it becomes physical. He feels it knotting and twisting inside him, ready to crush him, suffocate him. He is losing his grip, he is losing his mind. He thought he had it all back under control, but suddenly nothing makes sense any more. Does anyone else know what it's like to be stuck somewhere between dead and alive? I't s a half-world of incoherent pain where emotions you put on ice start slowly thawing again. A place where everything hurts, where your mind is no longer strong enough to force your feelings back into hibernation.
Tabitha Suzuma
When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.
John Lennon
I love memory sticks. They seem to me to be magic.
Ruth Rendell
Soon he would be able to touch her, to feel the warmth of her blood. When the time came, nothing would stop him.
Caroline Mitchell
For two decades the state has been taking liberties and these liberties were once ours.
E.P. Thompson
The mind of man is capable of anything.
Joseph Conrad
Sluka shook her head. "We're talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It's like their only reason for existing was so they could die.
Alastair Reynolds
Kiss till you can't kiss any more, kiss on the street in front of everyone, kiss as if each one were the last.
Ali Harris
Few indeed are those who get a choice. We do as we are told. We stand or fall beside those who were born near to us, who look as we do, who speak the same words, and all the while we know as little of the reasons why as does the dust we return to.
Joe Abercrombie
For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.
Virginia Woolf
If you’re going to be killed you invent some kind of flag and country to fight for, and if you survive you get to love the thing
John Buchan
And the question is always "When are you going to have kids?" Rather than "Do you want to have kids?
Caitlin Moran
The mind will enchain yourself, others or both. Your heart will set you / them free
Rasheed Ogunlaru
The sexual mechanisms of the two genders are just not compatible, that’s the horrible truth of it. (...)This is a truth we dare not acknowledge these days - because sameness is our religion and heretics are no more welcome now than they ever were - but I’m going to acknowledge it, because I’ve always felt that humility before the facts is the only thing that keeps a rational man together. Be humble in the face of facts, and proud in the face of opinions, as George Bernard Shaw once said. He didn’t, actually. I just wanted to put some authority behind this observation of mine, because I know you’re not going to like it.
Hugh Laurie
Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.
George Eliot
Savage and unpredictable, a woman, like the sea, takes what she wants and spits the remains back into the boiling cauldron of humanity ...
Virginia Alison
Excuse me, I must go and putt
P.G. Wodehouse
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton