Quotes by British Authors - Page 670

A woman hath nine lives like a cat.
John B. Heywood
Silence propagates itself and the longer talk has been suspended the more difficult it is to find anything to say.
Samuel Johnson
Don’t lose yourself in the fog of normality.
Fennel Hudson
Unni will come, if not today, then tomorrow. Today is nearly gone, but other todays stir fecund in the word tomorrow, many other todays when this one has lapsed from existence. And because I think of Unni, invoking his name in this for ever recurrent today, already he is here for me." - The Mountain is Young
Han Suyin
I personally find that having a couple of projects going at once can be an aid to focus, refreshing my brain as I go back and forth between them – a book review and a novel at the same time, for example. But I’ve seen that writers who are starting out sometimes throw their energy in so many different directions that they can never finish any of the projects, much less all of them.To me a good test is this: what do you like to read? What kind of book moves and affects you the most? Is it the memoir, the novel, the long poem-collection? Personally, I find myself most immersed in the novel, and that’s why I write them – they have the most magic for me. The joy of self-expression is exhilarating, but ultimately choosing one venue for it can make your work much better – and same for your chances of actually finishing something.
Charles Finch
I’m not really one to write simplistic and jovial lyrics, and while on the surface I can see how “Bros” is a happy song – a celebration of friendship and one’s younger years – I see a panic in the words. Particularly the bridge, which I think expresses the fear I had, not of growing up, but of growing up without Sadie. I don’t know which one of us started having trouble entering the Fourth World first – I’d like to think it was me because I was a year older, but I don’t think our age difference was mirrored in our maturity. Either way, I worried that once we entered reality as budding adults – no longer pretending to be “raised by wolves and other beasts” – we wouldn’t be together all the time.
Ellie Rowsell
I don't count my blessings,because just being alive is good enough for me.
Anthony T.Hincks
My problem is that I want to smoke the cigar and for someone else to light it. I want to blow out smoke. Like a volcano. Like a monster. I want to fume. I do not want to be the girl whose job it is to wail in a high-pitched voice at funerals.
Deborah Levy
Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.
John Ruskin
If I lost all, at least I would have played for it. It had always been my philosophy that one must play, or be a loser two-fold.
Anna Freeman
It is a sea of blood. We come from the sea, Tim; our blood is salt, and strange tides ebb and flow within us all.
Neil Gaiman
There are mysterious agencies of the human mind which, like roving gases, travel the world, causing pain and mutilation, without their owners having any full awareness, or even any awareness at all, of the strength and the whereabouts of these exhalations... So it is that we can be terrors to each other, and people in lonely rooms suffer humiliation and even damage because of others in whose consciousness perhaps they scarcely figure at all.
Iris Murdoch
What do you consider the most interesting man-made structure in the galaxy?The dam they are building at the Three Gorges on the Yangtse. Though perhaps '“baffling'” would be a better word. Dams almost never do what they were intended to do, but create devastation beyond belief. And yet we keep on building them, and I can'’t help but wonder why. I'’m convinced that if we go back far enough in the history of the human species, we will find some beaver genes creeping in there somewhere. It'’s the only explanation that makes sense.
Douglas Adams
[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.
Jeanette Winterson
We should be authentic: the ‘real deal’. Neither a clone nor mimic be.
Fennel Hudson
This book is dedicated to the people of America--strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched.
Paul Johnson
How could you receive a member of the Male Sex in your bedroom, and in your dressing gown?Sir, I must request you to leave immediately!""You don't mean to tell me that's a dressing gown?" interrupted Mr Carlton, a dangerous gleam in his eyes." Well, it's by far the most elegant one I've ever been priviledged to see, and I suppose I must have seen scores of 'em in my time-paid for them too!
Georgette Heyer
For this,let gardens grow, where beelines end,sighing in roses, saffron blooms, buddleia;where bees pray on their knees, sing, praisein pear trees, plum trees; beesare the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them.
Carol Ann Duffy
Consider the impact of your personal care choices on our health, water supply and our wider environment.
Joanna Runciman
I buried my face against his neck, breathing him in - the smell of machine oil, summertime, a thousand memories
l.a weatherly
It's important not to waste life chasing after rainbows.
Steven Redhead
Religion lives not in dogma, but utterly within the virtues of love and self-sacrifice. Without those, there is no future I can bear to stand, nor hope for the continuance of God's creation. It is not blasphemy to say that the work of Jesus the redeemer was and is to break the chains of the realms of darkness. And set free the creature from the power of sin.
Warren Ellis
Only a man who has his health, a full stomach and wears clean clothes would ever entertain the notion of tracking down the greatest lost city on Earth.
Tahir Shah
Despair is something horribly simple.
Christopher Isherwood
London is one of the most fascinating, historic, amazing cities in the world!
Sophie Kinsella
If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
Kingsley Amis
Strike was becoming steadily more taciturn, his expression brooding. Robin wondered whether this was because he was hungry—he was a man who needed regular sustenance to maintain an equable mood—or for some darker reason.
Robert Galbraith
Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects....
Alfred North Whitehead
That's most interesting. But I was no more a mind-reader then than today. Iwas weeping for an altogether different reason. When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. Morescientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But aharsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could notremain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn't really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I've never forgotten.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.
William Blake
Have all beautiful things sad destinies?
Jean Rhys
I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.
Charlie Chaplin
To me there is no more tragic sight than the average missionary. …We have given so much, yet not the one thing that counts; we aspire so high, and fall so low; we suffer so much, but so seldom with Christ; we have done so much and so little will remain; we have known Christ in part, and have so effectively barricaded our hearts against His mighty love, which surely He must yearn to give His disciples above all people.
Amy Carmichael
Always remember, that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.
Winston S. Churchill
The conquest of the earth is not a pretty thing.
Joseph Conrad
Five years of someone's life is too much to lose over a throwaway comment.
Clare Mackintosh
Fortunes made in no time are like shirts made in no time it's ten to one if they hang long together.
Douglas Jerrold
Men are in fact, quite unable to control their own inventions; they at best develop adaptability to the new conditions those inventions create.
John Galsworthy
Children with autism are colourful - they are often very beautiful and, like the rainbow, they stand out.
Adele Devine
How true is the saying that the very highest in rank are always the most simple and kindly. It is from you half-and-half sort of people that you get pomposity and vulgarity
H. Rider Haggard
There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena are conveyed in Austen in a way that affords us bursts of almost magical self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we see ourselves more clearly and wish to become whom the author would have wanted us to be.
Alain de Botton
God, what a depressing day that was and what an irony that Britain’s first female prime minister had to be Margaret Thatcher. She was the woman who asked, ‘What has feminism ever done for me?’ Well, dear, if you need to ask that question then you’re obviously not very bright
Jo Brand
Strategy was first used in Athens (508 BC) to describe the art of leadership used by the ten generals on the war council. Some argue for the more creative, human side, while others argue for the more analytic side of strategy.
Max McKeown
Peter was a superb swordsman, and parried with dazzling rapidity; ever and anon he followed up a feint with a lunge that got past his foe's defense, but his shorter reach stood him in ill stead, and he could not drive the steel home
J.M. Barrie
What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.No time to stand beneath the boughsAnd stare as long as sheep or cows...
W.H. Davies
If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!
Jackie Collins
And don't go whining to God about it. It was pretty clear that there was no God up there, no kindly old gent looking down, keeping score in a notebook. You did good, you did bad, it didn't make any difference, did it? This one's going to heaven, this one's going to hell, this one's going to Disneyland.No. God wouldn't have let any of this shit happen. If you were going to believe in anything, then believe in the devil. He was much more real than God. Up there causing mischief. Laughing at the chaos he'd created.
Charlie Higson
Look at me!’ I screeched. ‘Look at me, Amadeus von Linden, you sadistic hypocrite, and watch this time! You’re not questioning me now, this isn’t your work, I’m not an enemy agent spewing wireless code! I’m just a minging Scots slag screaming insults at your daughter! So enjoy yourself and watch! Think of Isolde! Think of Isolde and watch!
Elizabeth Wein
For it is discomfort's own essence to be near a man and to feel him in torture of misery, to feel with him the very pain of the misery, and yet to be unable to help.
Richard Llewellyn
Understanding the world too well, you see too many options and become as indecisive as Hamlet.No matter how far we progress, we remain part animal, and it is the animal in us that fires our strategies, gives them life, animates us to fight. Without the desire to fight, without a capacity for the violence war churns up, we cannot deal with danger.The prudent Odysseus types are comfortable with both sides of their nature. They plan ahead as best they can, see far and wide, but when it comes time to move ahead, they move. Knowing how to control your emotions means not repressing them completely but using them to their best effect.
Robert Greene
Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?
Julian Barnes
Don’t let it worry you," said Ron. "It’s me. I’m extremely famous.
J.K. Rowling
When we blaze, when we fight, when we rejoice, then I am all us, for that is all we are. When I am...afraid...we do not understand, do not like these things. We are me. It is...frightening, having to be me.
Kate Griffin
Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense his own already ... It is like a small child going to its father and saying, 'Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present.' It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction.
C.S. Lewis
I'm a post-menopausal woman who's lived in a man's world for twenty years. A more cynical, cruel creature it's hard to find.
Mo Hayder
Try to think like a human,’ said Gant, lolling in one of the club chairs.‘Why should I restrict myself so severely?
Neal Asher
No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to Hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretends it's God and hate that.
Evelyn Waugh
I have given my word that only death will take me from you.
Philippa Gregory
No one noticed them step off the train, no one saw them arrive in Desolation Road . . . . Then something very much like a sustained explosion of light filled the hotel and there, at the epicenter of the glare, was the most beautiful woman anyone had ever seen. Every man in the room had to swallow hard. Every woman fought an inexpressible need to sigh. A dozen hearts cracked down the middle and all the love flew out like larks and circled round the incredible being. It was as if God Himself had walked into the room. Then the God-light went out and there was a blinking, eye-rubbing darkness. When vision was restored, everyone saw before them a small, very ordinary man and a young girl of about eight who was quite the plainest, drabbest creature anyone had ever seen. For it was the nature of Ruthie Blue Mountain, a girl of stunning ordinariness, to absorb like sunlight the beauty of everything around her and store it until she chose to release it, all at once, like a flashbulb of intense beauty. Then she would return again to dowdy anonymity, leaving behind her an afterimage in the heart of unutterable loss.
Ian McDonald
You hear about ghosts: sad ghosts, angry ghosts.I'll tell you, the worst is when they laugh, and the worst sort are the ones whose faces I've forgotten.
Richard Smyth