Quotes by British Authors - Page 667

I see a light in the kitchen. Let us not deprive Molly any longer of the chance to deplore how thin you are.
J.K. Rowling
Why harrow oneself by looking on the worst side?... Because it is sometimes necessary.
Agatha Christie
He threw the knife at Karian’s face, deliberately catching his temple. “Sons of Kings shouldn’t play with sharp toys.
Tracey-anne McCartney
[Charles] Nodier’s later view was that fantasy reconciles men to their fate. Fantasy and the taste for chimeras, he wrote, are symptoms of a time of political decay and transition, when the unpleasant realities of political life are too hard to bear. They serve a useful purpose in that they give men hope when scepticism and disillusion would otherwise drive them to despair.
Peter Partner
The Christian ministry is the worst of all trades but the best of all professions.
John Newton
Polly was all too aware that much of her time on holiday would be spent doing the laundry and the cooking and the child-care and all the other chores that back in London would be shared with her cleaning lady. A holiday with Theo and the children represented two weeks of domestic and maternal drudgery.
Amanda Craig
I am a neighbour king to stretch my branches over him, just as Toghrul sheltered me when I was a weed-stalk next to a strong tree.
Bryn Hammond
True evil is always petty and often incompetent.
Claire Chilton
I don't have to touch God to know that he's real.
Anthony T.Hincks
Childish and slender creature! It seemed as if a linnet had hopped to my foot and proposed to bear me on its tiny wing.
Charlotte Brontë
But to begin again? No, Virginia. There can be no beginning again. Love and forgiveness are not the same thing.
Priya Parmar
I feel I'm living in parentheses
Steven Wilson
One day, and it may be long off, but one day there will be bacon again. It might be mouse bacon, but that will do for me.
Frank Tayell
What will not woman gentle woman dare When strong affection stirs her spirit up?
Robert Southey
Education is not a product but a relationship and a process; a relationship between student and lecturer, and process by which knowledge transforms the individual.
Kenan Malik
Let us say that you might have become a telepathic cancer, a malignant mentality which in its inevitable dissolution would have poisoned other and greater minds.
Arthur C. Clarke
They'll never know we were here.
Danny M. Cohen
This indeed is one of the eternal paradoxes of both life and literature-that without passion little gets done yet without control of that passion its effects are largely ill or null.
F.L. Lucas
People's lives take them strange places. They do strange things, and... well, sometimes they can't talk about them.
Alan Moore
God knows what is my greatest happiness, but I do not. There is no rule about what is happy and good; what suits one would not suit another. And the ways by which perfection is reached vary very much; the medicines necessary for our souls are very different from each other. Thus God leads us by strange ways; we know He wills our happiness, but we neither know what our happiness is, nor the way. We are blind; left to ourselves we should take the wrong way; we must leave it to Him.
John Henry Newman
Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment.
Salman Rushdie
We must be content to grow slowly. Most of us will still barely be at the beginning of our recovery by the time we die. But that is better than killing ourselves pretending to be healthy.
Simon Tugwell
There is a truth in Schopenhauer’s view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction. ... In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ‘Let’s get a rough idea’, for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
We place this huge burden on answers to function as finish lines, when they more naturally perform as milestones. We fool ourselves if we believe that answers are the proper response to questions, when the formal acknowledgment of a question is to embrace its invitation to enter into the journey of learning.
Tristan Sherwin
We should do our best to satisfy your interests in stories and books and the world. There are libraries.
Neil Gaiman
Yes, it was a "beautiful" sermon, tugging the emotions and conjuring up pictures of greatness and peace. But were they talking about the decent peppery ordinary old man he knew, or had the subject strayed to the story of some saint of the past? Or were there perhaps two men being buried under the same name? One perhaps had shown himself to Ross, while the other had been reserved for the view of men like William-Alfred. Ross tried to remember Charles before he was ill, Charles with his love of cockfighting and his hearty appetite, with his perpetual flatulence and passion for gin, with his occasional generosities and meannesses and faults and virtues, like most men. There was some mistake somewhere. Oh well, this was a special occasion...But Charles himself would surely have been amused. Or would he have shed a tear with the rest for the manner of man who had passed away?
Winston Graham
No one's an angel - especially if he's a man
Ken Follett
…after all, what is a planet but an island in space?
John Wyndham
The German language is so sonorous, isn't it? Beautiful language...the language of poetry. Angry, angry poetry.
John Oliver
Education is meaningless without manners
Benny Bellamacina
Learning passes for wisdom among those who want both.
William Temple
Worry is a dividend paid to disaster before it is due.
Ian Fleming
Nothing stands still, except in our memory.
Philippa Pearce
Here's a tragedy for you. Arca the Brave, one of the last heroes of Cape Magister, the man who held the line at the Usurper's Fields, who saw even the mighty Guhl fall and die... now he sleeps on my floor and begs for scraps like a dog. Perhaps there are some wars that are not worth fighting.
Steven Poore
You must work to live, not live to work.
Jane Green
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
Zadie Smith
Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.
Alain de Botton
I do not believe in any religion, I will have nothing to do with immortality. We are miserable enough in this life without speculating upon another.
George Gordon Byron
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
J.K. Rowling
You are her mother.Why did you not warn her,hold her like a rotting boatand tell her that men will not love herif she is covered in continents,if her teeth are small colonies,if her stomach is an islandif her thighs are borders?What man wants to lie downand watch the world burnin his bedroom?Your daughter ’s face is a small riot,her hands are a civil war,a refugee camp behind each ear,a body littered with ugly things.But God,doesn’t she wearthe world well?
Warsan Shire
Recognising our own mistakes helps us to empathise non-judgementally with others and helps enable us to understand their issues.
Jay Woodman
Now... Just run.' [said the Doctor.]One of the things you learn very quickly around the Doctor is never to question him when he says that word. You just run. It's almost like breathing.
James Goss
I would never attempt to dissuade anyone from reading a book. But please, if you're reading something that's killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren't enjoying a TV program...All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it. You won't remember it, and you'll be less likely to choose a book over [insert popular contemporary TV program] next time you have a choice.
Nick Hornby
Somehow the killing of the giant spider, all alone by himself in the dark without the help of the wizard or the dwarves or of anyone else, made a great difference to Mr. Baggins. He felt a different person, and much fiercer and bolder in spite of an empty stomach, as he wiped his sword on the grass and put it back into its sheath.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I don’t have perfect teeth. I’m not stick thin. I want to be the person who feels great in her body and can say that she loves it and doesn’t want to change anything.
Emma Watson
I think in terms of the day's resolutions, not the years
Henry Moore
There is no correct path. We pave our own roads. Don't be afraid to find your own way. ...I hate to see people hung up on "what they're supposed to do". Decide for yourself. There is no other way
Alex Gaskarth
Abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them.
Germaine Greer
What compels me to write now is the same as all those years ago. It is the love of writing and storytelling, driven by a desire to escape.
Fennel Hudson
It's called publishing. It's how smart people install new ideas into other peoples brains.
Steven Magee
The regrets about all she had let go flooded her. Where had all that enterprise gone? All that energy? Why had she never traveled? Or had more sex when she could? She had bleached and annihilated every waking moment of the last twenty years. Anything, rather than feel.
Rachel Joyce
and vinegar that makes them sour—and camomile that makes them bitter—and—and barley-sugar and such things that make children sweet-tempered. I only wish people knew that: then they wouldn’t be so stingy about it, you know—
Lewis Carroll
I am Midnight(cats stare dumbfounded)
Erin Hunter
Life's a one way ticket
Colin Tegerdine
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
Doris Lessing
The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.
Alain de Botton
Feelings are like chemicals, the more you analyze them the worse they smell.
Charles Kingsley
Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.
Julian Barnes
Love is at the heart of the world, just as it is at the heart of your life. Your relationships with your lover, your family, your friends, and the world around you define the quality of your emotional wholeness and reflect your relationship with yourself.
Sebastian Pole
The radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools tryin' to anesthetize the way that you feel.
Elvis Costello