Quotes by British Authors - Page 672

I went to watch the Buzkasgu game taking place on a series of fields - some fallow, some plowed and planted- just to the east of the empty Buddha niches. Buzkashi is a form of polo played with a dead goat instead of a ball.
Rory Stewart
There's nothing an economist should fear so much as applause.
Herbert Marshall
There are eighty-eight keys on a piano and within that, an entire universe.
James Rhodes
When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.
G.K. Chesterton
When tadpole was born, I spent a sleepless night on the maternity ward gazing intently into her inky, newborn eyes, grappling to come to terms with the indisputable fact that this was an actual person looking back at me, not just a version of Mr Frog, or me, or both, in miniature. From the outset she seemed to know what she wanted, and I realised I could have no inkling of the paths she would choose to follow. But if I watch her life unfold carefully enough, perhaps I will see clear signposts pointing to who or what she will become.Because when I look backwards, ransacking my own past for clues with the clarity that only hindsight can bring, several defining moments do stand out. Moments charged with significance; snapshots of myself which, if I were to join the dots together, lead me unswervingly to where I stand today.
Catherine Sanderson
The world and the friends that lived in it are shadows: you alone remain real in this drowsing room.
Aldous Huxley
By degrees they spoke of education , and the book-learning that forms one part of it; and the result was that Ruth determined to get up early all throughout the bright summer mornings, to acquire the knowledge hereafter to be give to her child. Her mind was uncultivated, her reading scant; beyond the mere mechanical arts of education she knew nothing; but she had a refined taste, and excellent sense and judgment to separate the true from the false.
Elizabeth Gaskell
All our talents increase in the using and every faculty both good and bad strengthens by exercise.
Anne Brontë
Give way to the Better if way to the Better there be It exacts a full look at the Worst.
Thomas Hardy
...The Qur'an cannot be translated. ...The book is here rendered almost literally and every effort has been made to choose befitting language. But the result is not the Glorious Qur'an, that inimitable symphony, the very sounds of which move men to tears and ecstasy. It is only an attempt to present the meaning of the Qur'an-and peradventure something of the charm in English. It can never take the place of the Qur'an in Arabic, nor is it meant to do so...
Marmaduke William Pickthall
An old man concludeth from his knowing mankind that they know him too and that maketh him very wary.
Lord Halifax
History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.
Jeanette Winterson
To part with money is a sacrifice beyond almost all men endowed with a sense of order. There is scarcely any man alive who does not think himself meritorious for giving his neighbour five pounds. Thriftless gives, not from a beneficent pleasure in giving, but from a lazy delight in spending. He would not deny himself one enjoyment; not his opera-stall, not his horse, not his dinner, not even the pleasure of giving Lazarus the five pounds.
William Makepeace Thackeray
The baby should always be saved in preference to the mother. That is the advice of the Holy Church, you know that. I was only reminding women of their duty. There is no need to make everything so personal, Margaret. You make everything into your own tragedy.
Philippa Gregory
Am I just a mosaic of myself, held in the shape of a whole person?
Emma Newman
A blessed companion is a book--a book that, fitly chosen, is a lifelong friend...a book that, at a touch, pours its heart into your own.
Douglas William Jerrold
If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.
David Mitchell
Human beings have their great chance in the novel.
E.M. Forster
Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.
C.S. Lewis
What do you know of my heart? What do you know of anything but your own suffering. For weeks, Marianne, I've had this pressing on me without being at liberty to speak of it to a single creature. It was forced on me by the very person whose prior claims ruined all my hope. I have endured her exultations again and again whilst knowing myself to be divided from Edward forever. Believe me, Marianne, had I not been bound to silence I could have provided proof enough of a broken heart, even for you.
Jane Austen
A little bit of hatred can spoil a score of yearsAnd blur the eyes that ought to smile with many needless tears.A little bit of thoughtlessness and anger for a dayCan rob a home of all its joy and drive delight away..A little bit of shouting in a sharp and vicious toneCan leave a sting that will be felt when many years have flown.And just one hasty moment of ill temper can offendAnd leave an inner injury the years may never mend.It takes no mental fiber to say harsh and bitter things;It doesn't call for courage to employ a lash that stings.And cruel words and bitter any fool can think to say,But the hurt they leave behind them takes years to wipe away.Just a little bit of hatred robs a home of all delight,And leaves a winding trail of wrong that time may never right.For only those are happy and keep their peace of mind,Who guard themselves from hatred and words that are unkind!
Edgar A. Guest
When discharging industrial gas into the indoor environment in high altitude astronomy, we never wore breathing respirators that fed us oxygenated air at above the legally required 19.5% oxygen levels.
Steven Magee
Visit Cape Town and history is never far from your grasp. It lingers in the air, a scent on the breezy, an explanation of circumstance that shaped the Rainbow People. Stroll around the old downtown and it's impossible not to be affected by the trials and tribulations of the struggle. But, in many ways, it is the sense of triumph in the face of such adversity that makes the experience all the more poignant.
Tahir Shah
All nationalistic distinctions - all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect - are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them.
George Orwell
But even as she was going through with it she knew it was useless, just as it was useless to save a single earring when the other half of the pair was lost
Jhumpa Lahiri
What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare?
W.H. Davies
Writing for children is an art in itself, and a most interesting one.
Enid Blyton
It is quite wrong to assume that poor people are generally unwilling to change; but the proposed change must stand in some organic relationship to what they are doing already, and they are rightly suspicious of, and resistant to, radical changes proposed by town-based and office-bound innovators who approach them in the spirit of: "You just get out of my way and I shall show you how useless you are and how splendidly the job can be done with a lot of foreign money and outlandish equipment.
Ernst F. Schumacher
He can see what move I'm planning to make in chess and counters before I can do it. He always knows who the killer is in a detective story. I think he could make a career out of detecting, but he wants to write plays for theater. Maybe he could be a Shakespeare instead of a Sherlock. He could be anything. Anything he wants to be.
Sangu Mandanna
My inward experience has often been a wilderness; but Thou hast owned me still as Thy beloved, and poured streams of love and grace into me to gladden me, and make me fruitful.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
You cannot, ever, give up on a friend who is close to giving up on themselves
Jodi Ann Bickley
To be or not to be what exactly?
Chloe Thurlow
Continuous efforts-not strength or intelligence-is the key to unlocking our potential.
Winston Churchill
For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up,’ there is always an edge of disbelief—how could they ever be other than what they are?
Ian McEwan
101 Reasons why its great to be a woman:We have an excuse to justify an inordinate indulgence in bitchiness: It's clearly feminine intuition.
Summersdale Publishers
Each day is a new chance to improve your life, and that of your family, friends and colleagues. Be positive in your outlook, honest in your dealing and determined in your efforts. You will succeed
Arthur Crandon
Music is only love looking for words.
Lawrence Durrell
Not if you like lies so much you want to live one
Mike A. Lancaster
Might not too much investment in teaching Shelley mean falling behind our economic competitors? But there is no university without humane inquiry, which means that universities and advanced capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. And the political implications of that run far deeper than the question of student fees.
Terry Eagleton
Everyone, he continued, wants his life to stand for something other than what it would, which is about eighty years – in the West, at any rate – eighty years of working, eating, sleeping, shitting, breeding, and dying. Lives of buttoning and unbuttoning – who said that?
Zia Haider Rahman
The tongue is the best masseur of furrowed brows.
Idries Shah
We may now understand better, too, why my father was so fond of the story of the butler who failed to panic on discovering a tiger under the dining table; it was because he knew instinctively that somewhere in this story lay the kernel of what true ‘dignity’ is.
Kazuo Ishiguro
The greatest masters have only made single statues, groups are always inferior; that is why Carpeaux, big though he was, is less so than Rodin, for he never knew how to make single statues. He did not know how to find his rhythm in the arrangement of the shapes of one body, but obtained it by the disposition of several. The great sculptors are there to prove it. Think of the masterpieces which we like most, all standing or seated, and one at a time, and they are not in the least monotonous. The connoisseur loves one spicy cake, but the glutton requires at least six to stimulate his pleasure.
H.S. Ede
A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.
Virginia Woolf
It is a good thing to go to Paris for a few days if you have had a lot of trouble, and that is my advice to everyone except Parisians.
Muriel Spark
An act of love that fails is just as much a part of the divine life as an act of love that succeeds for love is measured by fullness not by reception.
Harold Loukes
to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing
David Lodge
Do you know why you’re here? Shall I tell you why we brought you here? To cure you.To make you sane.
George Orwell
Purge me from every sinful blot;My idols all be cast aside: Cleanse me from every evil thought,From all the filth of self and pride.The hatred of the carnal mind Out of my flesh at once remove:Give me a tender heart, resigned, And pure, and full of faith and love.
John Wesley
Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice--perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and running plays over and over again--and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court. . . . spontaneity isn't random.
Malcolm Gladwell
The proper name for the thing is modesty; but as we live in an age of prejudice and must not call things by their right names, we will yield to a more modern nomenclature and call it dignity.
G.K. Chesterton
We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I will tear this folly from my heart, though every fibre bleed as I rend it away!
Walter Scott
The chairs - turned towards one another in groups of twos and threes - seemed like the seats of ghosts in close conversation with one another. There were sets of two chairs - very close to one another - in the far corners of the room, which spoke of recent whispered flirtations, over cold game pie and iced champagne; there were sets of three and four chairs, that recalled pleasant animated discussions over the latest scandals; there were chairs straight up in a row that still looked starchy, critical, acid, like antiquated dowagers; there were a few isolated, single chairs, close to the table, that spoke of gourmands intent on the most recherche dishes, and others overturned on the floor, that spoke volumes on the subject of my Lord Grenville's cellars.
Emmuska Orczy
There was a filmy veil of soft dull mist obscuring, but not hiding, all objects, giving them a lilac hue, for the sun had not yet fully set; a robin was singing ... The leaves were more gorgeous than ever; the first touch of frost would lay them all low to the ground. Already one or two kept constantly floating down, amber and golden in the low slanting sun-rays.
Elizabeth Gaskell
Why is it that we who have enjoyed the human free­doms which our forefathers fought so hard to win and to bequeath to us, do not, with the example of Russia before us, realize the horrors of life without freedom? Why is it that we cannot understand that there is no such thing as embracing Communism as an experiment? It is a one-way street, ending in a cul de sac of secret police terror, firing squads for the intellectuals and leaders and concentration camps and slave labor for the masses. There is no turning back; there is no escape.
Freda Utley
You wrote in a poem, “I love your body,” as if love was for you embodied in the senses, and yet more than the senses together, an enveloping sense itself sensuous, as if all the body made sense.
David Plante
We have forty million reasons for failure but not a single excuse.
Rudyard Kipling
...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
Doris Lessing
Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.
Alain de Botton