Quotes by British Authors - Page 666

And then he began to laugh in a peculiar way of his own which was both violent and soundless. His heavy reclining body, draped in its black gown, heaved to and fro. His knees drew themselves up to his chin. His arms dangled over the sides of the chair and were helpless. His head rolled from side to side. It was as though he were in the last stages of strychnine poisoning. But no sound came, nor did his mouth even open. Gradually the spasm grew weaker, and when the natural sand colour of his face had returned (for his corked-up laughter had turned it dark red) he began his smoking again in earnest.
Mervyn Peake
He looked up at them, a scruffy Napoleon with his laces trailing, exiled to a rose-trellised Elba.
Terry Pratchett
I do love the beginning of the summer hols,' said Julian. They always seem to stretch out ahead for ages and ages.''They go so nice and slowly at first,' said Anne, his little sister. 'Then they start to gallop.
Enid Blyton
I strongly object to wrong arguments on the right side. I think I object to them more than to the wrong arguments on the wrong side.
G.K. Chesterton
It all comes together inside her, and she can’t begin to explain. “It’s just a pattern,” she says, feeling bad because it’s a lie. She’s lying to Miss Justineau, who she loves more than anyone in the world. And of course the other part of the feeling, that’s even harder to say, is that they’re each other’s home now. They have to be.
M.R. Carey
There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.
Charles Dickens
Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells. ... The success of later Shakespeare is the success of spells, where every element, however uneven, however incredible, is fastened to the next with perfect authority. The enchanted world shimmers but does not waver. A Midsummer Night's Dream is the first of his plays to accomplish this, The Tempest is enchantment's apotheosis.
Jeanette Winterson
Liberty is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress ofcorpses.
Neil Gaiman
So when you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there's always madness. Madness is the emergency exit.
Alan Moore
All the sanguine guesswork of youth is there, and the silliness; all the novelty of being alive and impressed by the urgency of tremendous trivialities.
Siegfried Sassoon
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust.
George Eliot
Never engage in gossip, it kills your soul, and wounds another’s heart
Steven Aitchison
I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician
Charlie Chaplin
Is there a support group for people who didn’t like ‘Brokeback Mountain’? We must, if the rave reviews and the newspaper reports are to be believed, be a very tiny — not to mention vulnerable — minority. Am I dead inside because I didn’t experience the torrent of emotions I’ve been reading about? Am I as emotionally crippled as Ennis because I didn’t blub and hug after sitting through this ‘visceral’ movie, but instead wanted to go and ‘help with the roundup’?
Mark Simpson
Sometimes John had recorded new compositions, or lines from his new poems. Sometimes he'd just record a busy night in The Green Man. Sometimes sheep, seals, skylarks, the wind turbine. If Liam were home there would be some Liam. The summer fair. The Fastnet Race. I would unfold my map of Clear Island. Those tapes prised the lid off homesickness and rattled out the contents, but always at the bottom was solace.
David Mitchell
For nothing is evil in the beginning.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside jigsaws.
Caitlin Moran
It must be something voluntary, something self induced - like getting drunk, or talking yourself into believing some piece of foolishness because it happens to be in the Scriptures. And then look at their idea of what's normal. Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to society. It's unimaginable! No question about what you do with your orgasms. No question about the quality of your feelings and thoughts and perceptions. And then what about the society you're supposed to be adjusted to? Is it a mad society or a sane one? And even if it's pretty sane, is it right that anybody should be completely adjusted to it?
Aldous Huxley
She had privacy, and the privilege of walking up and down the same battlements as the sentries.
John Peter Nettl
And how am I to face the odds of man's bedevilment and God's? I a stranger and afraid in a world I never made.
A.E. Housman
Try not to worry, for time is a great healer.' Such words were futile.
Catherine Cookson
Parents don't know their children at all.No one knows anyone, in fact.
Jenny Downham
I have frequently experienced myself the mood in which I felt that all is vanity; I have emerged from it not by any philosophy, but owing to some imperative necessity of action.
Bertrand Russell
Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say 'My tooth is aching' than to say 'My heart is broken'. Yet if the cause is accepted and faced, the conflict will strengthen and purify the character and in time the pain will usually pass. Sometimes, however, it persists and the effect is devastating; if the cause is not faced or not recognised, it produces the dreary state of the chronic neurotic. But some by heroism overcome even chronic mental pain. They often produce brilliant work and strengthen, harden, and sharpen their characters till they become like tempered steel.
C.S. Lewis
Every secret of the body was rendered up--bone risen through flesh, sacrilegious glimpses of an intestine or an optic nerve. From this new and intimate perspective, [Briony] learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew: that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.
Ian McEwan
Sometimes you need to do something bad to do something good.I guess that's the irony of life.
Anthony T.Hincks
Peace has gone on too long. Something inside me says that trouble such as these shores have never known is headed our way.
Brian Jacques
It was too quiet for hope, and then too loud for safety.She thought of the people she had lost, of the affection, the smiles, the belonging she could never again take for granted. It was the end of a life, and as she stood there, shivering in the brief night-time chill, it dawned on her that it was the end of her childhood.
Radhika Swarup
Remember that fear causes to happen the very things it fears. That's why fear should be unknown to us.
Louis de Bernières
War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Good Christian liturgy is friendship in action, love taking thought, the covenant relationship between God and his people not simply discovered and celebrated like the sudden meeting of friends, exciting and worthwhile though that is, but thought through and relished, planned and prepared -- an ultimately better way for the relationship to grow and at the same time a way of demonstrating what the relationship is all about.
N.T. Wright
Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
G.K. Chesterton
Writing is the supreme solace.
W Somerset Maugham
In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.
David F. Wells
... those who seek the lost Lord will find traces of His being and beauty in all that men have made, from music and poetry and sculpture to the gingerbread men in the pâtisseries, from the final calculation of the pure mathematician to the first delighted chalk drawing of a small child.
Caryll Houselander
Fear not for the future weep not for the past.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Jude leaped out of arm's reach, and walked along the trackway weeping--not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was good for God's birds was bad for God's gardener; but with the awful sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for life.
Thomas Hardy
Some madness doesn't act mad to begin with, sometimes it will knock politely at the door, and when you let it in, it'll simply sit in the corner without a fuss - and grow.
Nathan Filer
My father says that there is only one perfect view — the view of the sky straight over our heads, and that all these views on earth are but bungled copies of it.
E.M. Forster
You're gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the girl of confidence. Either that or a scented candle.
David Nicholls
Thinking of death--strange, beautiful, terrible and a long way off--made me feel happier than ever.
Dodie Smith
At best, love is simply the slipping of a hand in another's, of knowing you are where you belong at last, and of exchanging through the eyes that all-consuming regard which ignores everybody else on earth.
Laurie Lee
When you dream of change, it shines bright, like fire, and burns away all the rot that came before it. It's swift and inexorable. You cry for justice, and justice is done. The world stands with you in your fight. But if there was one thing I had learned in these last few weeks, it was that change had never been that simple. That kind of revolution existed only in daydreams.
Samantha Shannon
Wasn't there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi?
Lionel Shriver
Perhaps [the critics are right and] the drama is played out now and Jesus is safely dead and buried. Perhaps. It is ironical and entertaining to consider that at least once in the world’s history those words might have been said with complete conviction, and that was on the eve of the Resurrection.
Dorothy L. Sayers
There are as many paths to Truth as there are souls of men.
Idries Shah
Is somethin' wrong?" said Daft Wullie."Aye!" snapped the kelda. "Rob willnae tak' a drink o' Special Sheep Liniment!"Wullie's little face screwed up in instant grief."Ach, the Big Man's deid!" he sobbed. "Oh waily waily waily - "Will ye hush yer gob, ye big mudlin!" shouted Rob Anybody, standing up. "I am no' deid! I'm trying to have a moment o' existential dreed here, right? Crivens, it's a puir lookout if a man cannae feel the chilly winds o' Fate lashing aroound his nethers wi'out folks telling him he's deid, eh?
Terry Pratchett
Predators did not need mercy.
Conn Iggulden
Life will always have the value that you give it.
Steven Redhead
Okay, on my first night, he tried to chat me up. You know how the story goes. ‘You have the most beautiful eyes, I’m very rich, want to see my bedroom?’ Blah, blah, blah.”“And because you turned him down, he’s more determined than ever,” Will guessed, with amazing accuracy. “You did turn him down, right?”“Of course,” I told him, insulted by the insinuation I would drop my knickers for a glass of wine. “Do you think I’d risk my job for a quick tumble in the sheets with him?
Kyra Lennon
Unlike them, however, her path was not through daring deeds or the study of magic or the use of miraculous powers. She had been gifted with something almost as rare: an open and eager mind. She had the gift of watching and listening, the gift of taking all the hurts and happenings of others' lives and understanding their purpose.
William Joyce
A person may only touch one person's heart.A rainbow touches many.
Anthony T.Hincks
I really hope that the Japanese are going to stop demonstrating to the world what man-made radiation does to people.
Steven Magee
what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
George Eliot
He had a book to finish. Ten-thousand words. The other ninety thousand had been difficult. This last tenth seemed impossible. His plot had become derailed. He was unable to see his way through the smoke and coke dust of a mythical railway track that should stretch ahead. Yes, the characters were there, good and solid. Indeed, the story's engine was strong and had shunted yet forward and forward, with only one or two sharp halts. But six weeks ago he met the bumpers. R. was now stuck in a deserted station, his progress blocked. ("Out Back")
Garry Douglas Kilworth
By death the moon was gathered in Long ago, ah long ago;Yet still the silver corpse must spinAnd with another's light must glow.Her frozen mountains must forgetTheir primal hot volcanic breath,Doomed to revolve for ages yet,Void amphitheatres of death.And all about the cosmic sky,The black that lies beyond our blue,Dead stars innumerable lie,And stars of red and angry hueNot dead but doomed to die.
Julian Huxley
Officially it was almost spring but someone had forgotten to pass the news on to winter.
Robert Harris
But stories are worlds. New worlds for us to visit. In stories, we live forever.
Joanne Harris
New roads new ruts.
G.K. Chesterton
I'd rather die fighting over great poets than over gods.
Salman Rushdie