Quotes by British Authors - Page 67

so that it may grow fatter and
Virginia Woolf
I suppose this was the first time I had ever felt an urge not to be. Never an urge to die, far less an urge to put an end to myself - simply an urge not to be. This disgusting, hostile and unlovely world was not made for me, nor I for it.
Stephen Fry
Unfortunately most ways of making big money take a long time. By the time one has made the money one is too old to enjoy it.
Ian Fleming
Dolorita Hunsickle says that the chipmunks tell your fortune if you catch them but I never did. She says a chipmunk told her she would grow up to be a famous ballerina and that she would die of consumption unloved in a boardinghouse in Prague.
Neil Gaiman
People more often kill those they love than those they hate. Possibly because only the people you love can really make life unendurable to you.
Agatha Christie
The simple act of paying attention can take you a long way.
Keanu Reeves
The more you learn about other people, the more you understand yourself; and the more you understand yourself, the more you understand other people.
Father Brown
You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.
Arthur Conan Doyle
I hate being poor.
J.K. Rowling
The myosin in our own skeletal muscles is more closely related to the myosin driving the flight muscles of that irritating housefly buzzing around your head than it is to the myosin in the muscles of your own sphincters
Nick Lane
There is no greater evil than killing. I don't care whether they call it war or justice. Life is precious.
Brian Jacques
He puffed out his pigeon chest and waddled across the room towards me. With his feet pointing outwards, he looked like a fat duck with a grievance.
Chris Thrall
Deep experience is never peaceful.
Henry James
The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.
George Eliot
But why always think the worst of people? What would she be doing to herself if she adopted that attitude to life? It was better to think the best and be wrong than to think the worst and be wrong.
Mary Balogh
The world holds no trace of what happens in it unless we carve it in with violence or concrete.
Barney Norris
While grief is fresh every attempt to divert it only irritates.
Samuel Johnson
Caine erupted in disbelieving laughter. "Yeah, that'll do it. 'I'm just a kid, Your Honor!' Hah. They'll have to find a few scapegoats, and guess who it will be? You and me, surfer boy. You and me.
Michael Grant
I am rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
Edward Moore
Modesty is the only sure bait when you angle for praise.
Lord Chesterfield
I was never less alone than when by myself.
Edward Gibbon
Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does:otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that the character peaks a little later;between twenty and thirty, say. And after that we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also if this isn't too grand a word--our tragedy.
Julian Barnes
The year's in the wane There is nothing adoring The night has no eve And the day has no morning Cold winter gives warning!
Thomas Hood
...if thou art persuaded that God is true, why dost thou doubt of his promises?—and if thou believest that God is beauty and perfection itself, why dost not thou make him alone the chief end of all thine affections and desires? for if thou lovest beauty, he is most fair; if thou desirest riches, he is most wealthy; if thou seekest wisdom, he is most wise. Whatsoever excellency thou hast seen in any creature, it is nothing but a sparkle of that which is in infinite perfection in God...
Lewis Bayly
Everyone’s got secrets, Jem. It’s what makes people interesting.
Cat Clarke
It is in fact the height of selfishness to merely consume what others create and to retreat into a shell of limited goals and immediate pleasures.
Robert Greene
Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.
Cory Doctorow
Whoever has not first dug a well, should not steal a minaret.
Idries Shah
America's industrial success produced a roll call of financial magnificence: Rockefellers, Morgans, Astors, Mellons, Fricks, Carnegies, Goulds, du Ponts, Belmonts, Harrimans, Huntingtons, Vanderbilts, and many more based in dynastic wealth of essentially inexhaustible proportions. John D. Rockefeller made $1 billion a year, measured in today's money, and paid no income tax. No one did, for income tax did not yet exist in America. Congress tried to introduce an income tax of 2 percent on earnings of $4,000 in 1894, but the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. Income tax wouldn't become a regular part of American Life until 1914. People would never be this rich again.Spending all this wealth became for many a more or less full-time occupation. A kind of desperate, vulgar edge became attached to almost everything they did. At one New York dinner party, guests found the table heaped with sand and at each place a little gold spade; upon a signal, they were invited to dig in and search for diamonds and other costly glitter buried within. At another party - possibly the most preposterous ever staged - several dozen horses with padded hooves were led into the ballroom of Sherry's, a vast and esteemed eating establishment, and tethered around the tables so that the guests, dressed as cowboys and cowgirls, could enjoy the novel and sublimely pointless pleasure of dining in a New York ballroom on horseback.
Bill Bryson
What is to be gained if we are so intent in reaching out to the unchurched that we then unchurch the reached?
David F. Wells
It was the impatience of the way he tore my panties from my body, that really turned me on: I was all he could think of, as his lust got the better of him. The way they looked so small, and cruelly forgotten, was a beautiful symbol of how much we both needed to satisfy our lusts.
Fiona Thrust
We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretense of understanding. We paper over the voids of our comprehension with science and religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across the surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us.The biggest lies we save for ourselves. We play a game in which we are gods, in which we make choices, and the current follows in our wake. We pretend a separation from the wild. Pretend that a man’s control runs deep, that civilization is more than a veneer, that reason will be our companion in dark places.
Mark Lawrence
That's No'-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock, mistress,' said Not-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock. 'Ye were one jock short,' he added helpfully.
Terry Pratchett
There's nothing like a good, long sleep to allow unpleasantness to recede into the past.
David Michie
lose weight, eat backwards.
Benny Bellamacina
My heart is the refuge where you will find everlasting love.
Anthony T.Hincks
A federation of all humanity, together with a sufficient measure of social justice, to ensure health, education, and a rough equality of opportunity to most of the children born into the world, would mean such a release and increase of human energy as to open a new phase in human history.
H.G.Wells
I am what the water gave me, / a smoke-ring in a jar, / the braided rope / my ladder-to-the-light, / my shivering bird heart / caught
Pascale Petit
If I keep observing the uranium, which means a little more than keeping my eyes on the pot on my desk and involves something akin to surrounding it with a whole system of Geiger counters, I can freeze it in such a way that it stops emitting radiation.Although Turing first suggested the idea as a theoretical construct, it turns out that it is not just mathematical fiction. Experiments in the last decade have demonstrated the real possibility of using observation to inhibit the progress of a quantum system.
Marcus du Sautoy
Stephen had spared no expense in making himself more unhappy, his own position as a rejected lover clearer.
Patrick O'Brian
Hitherto, the rights and wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple.
George Orwell
By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, crowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to be barely remarked upon. Meanwhile, in the literally gilded towers above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepeneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept coktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.
David Nicholls
It wasn't a perfect body but it was the body she deserved. Not just from every bar of chocolate or bag of crisps or laden plate of food that she'd eaten. This body was also testament to all the hours in the gym and cycling up hills on her bike and glugging down two litres of water a day and learning to love vegetables and fruits that didn't come as optional extra with a pastry crust. She'd earned this body.This was her body and she had to stop giving it such a hard time.
Sarra Manning
I was wasting my time, praying for love.For a love that never comes, from someone who does not exist.
Morrissey
The ball of dark fur pressed itself into my chest, and I wished she was my kitten, and knew that she was not.
Neil Gaiman
How may times can you lose the one you love?
Lauren James
I will continue to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. But I should be thrice a fool if I did it for aught but my own entertainment.
W Somerset Maugham
Like antidepressants, a substantial part of the benefit of psychotherapy depends on a placebo effect, or as Moerman calls it, the meaning response. At least part of the improvement that is produced by these treatments is due to the relationship between the therapist and the client and to the client's expectancy of getting better. That is a problem for antidepressant treatment. It is a problem because drugs are supposed to work because of their chemistry, not because of the psychological factors. But it is not a problem for psychotherapy. Psychotherapists are trained to provide a warm and caring environment in which therapeutic change can take place. Their intention is to replace the hopelessness of depression with a sense of hope and faith in the future. These tasks are part of the essence of psychotherapy. The fact that psychotherapy can mobilize the meaning response - and that it can do so without deception - is one of its strengths, no one of its weaknesses. Because hopelessness is a fundamental characteristic of depression, instilling hope is a specific treatment for it it. Invoking the meaning response is essential for the effective treatment of depression, and the best treatments are those that can do this most effectively and that can do without deception.
Irving Kirsch
Have you paused to consider that there is no way out? Each way out of one situation necessarily being the way into another situation.
Russell Hoban
It's natural for a man to defend what's dear to him: his own life, his home, his family. But in order to make him fight on behalf of his rulers, the rich and powerful who are too cunning to fight their own battles-in short to defend not himself but people whom he's never met and moreover would not care to be in the same room with him-you have to condition him into loving violence not for the benefits it bestows on him but for its own sake. Result: the society has to defend itself from its defenders, because what's admirable in wartime is termed psychopathic in peace. It's easier to wreck a man than to repair him. Ask any psychotherapist. And take a look at the crime figures among veterans.
John Brunner
YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES."So we can believe the big ones?"YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
Terry Pratchett
The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it.
John Stuart Mill
That was the worst truth of all: alone. The word was a kind of death.
Anne Perry
Human beings love, despite their compulsions to limit it and exploit it chaotically. Their love persuades them to make vows, build houses and turn their passion ultimately to duty.
Germaine Greer
It is not because men’s desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak. There is no natural connection between strong impulses and a weak conscience. The natural connection is the other way. To say that one person’s desires and feelings are stronger and more various than those of another, is merely to say that he has more of the raw material of human nature, and is therefore capable, perhaps of more evil, but certainly of more good. Strong impulses are but another name for energy.
John Stuart Mill
I gather you weren't keen on going back to Scotland with your brother at this time of year. I don't say I blame you. Terribly bleak and cutoff in the winter.""Oh no, Mom," I said, as her words sunk in. "My brother is not going back to Scotland. He and my sister-in-law are going to the Riviera."The Riviera? I had no idea.""For my sister-in-law's health. She's feeling rather frail at the moment.""I don't think that frail would ever be a word to describe your sister-in-law," the Queen said, looking up with a half smile on her lips as a tray of coffee was reeled into the room."I managed to have six children without making a fuss. One just got on with it.
Rhys Bowen
You think that you're in control of your life.Well, think again.
Anthony T.Hincks
The act of committing yourself to the Lord daily allows Him to guide you.
Elizabeth George
Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, "if he could plot, we'd all have to get together and kill him." Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan's writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded.
Warren Ellis
It doesn't seem right to throw dirt at you when you're dead...
Sharon Sant