Quotes by British Authors - Page 673

A selfish person can still love someone else, can't they? Even when they've hurt them and let them down.
Rosamund Lupton
Audiences see personalities on shows interacting with wild animals as if they were not dangerous or, at the other extreme, provoking them to give viewers an adrenaline rush. Mostly, the animals just want to be left alone, so it’s not surprising that these entertainers are seriously hurt or even killed on rare occasions. On one level, it’s that very possibility the shows are selling.
Chris Palmer
We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realize the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a 'resource.' This is crucial, because unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that is able to keep abreast of our technological genius, we will not save our planet.
Karen Armstrong
We need to make our own miracles, it is a wasted exercise to just wait for miracles to happen; they need a spark of energy and desire to make them come true.
Steven Redhead
Take your clothes off." "What?" "You heard me." Evelyn forced her mouth shut. She looked around the room, buying time. The faded brown curtains hung limply over the windows, not quite touching, and the afternoon light filtered through the gaps, its beams turning the dust in the air into diamonds. She could hear the rattle of a wagon on the street below and the regular rhythm of squeaking bedsprings in the adjacent room. "So? What are you waiting for?" She stared at the man on the moth eaten chaise longue in front of her. He was serious.
Molly Ann Wishlade
If simply through talking we are this good at sexless foreplay, imagine, if you will, what ecstasy awaits in our first kiss...
Virginia Alison
I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting (WWI) to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls.
Paul Nash
The mindset of a believer every time he opens the Bible must be the conviction that whatever the Bible says is true. We cannot trust our reason to determine what is true or false, right or wrong.
Michael P.V. Barrett
God’s supernatural self-control is available to us when we walk by the Spirit.
Elizabeth George
I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.
Philip Larkin
It didn't help when he told David that his mother would always be with him, even if he couldn't see her. An unseen mother couldn't go for long walks with you on summer evenings, drawing the names of trees and flowers from her seemingly infinite knowledge of nature; or help you with your homework, the familiar scent of her in your nostrils as she leaned in to correct a misspelling or puzzle over the meaning of an unfamiliar poem; or read with you on cold Sunday afternoons when the fire
David Nicholls
I suppose you can guess the whole story now? After all, it's a primitive story. A man had two enemies. He was a wise man. And so he discovered that two enemies are better than one.
G.K. Chesterton
A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.
James Allen
Whatsoever things are true...think on these things.
Elizabeth George
God has given you a gift, why not open it?!
Habeeb Akande
When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less.
C.S. Lewis
You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.
Hilary Mantel
Ah me, but where are now the songs I sangWhen life was sweet because you call’d them sweet?
Christina Rossetti
(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.
Julian Barnes
Silverfish looked down."Oh. Are you a dwarf?"Cuddy gave him a blank stare."Are you a giant?" He said."Me? Of course not!""Ah. Then I must be a dwarf, yes.
Terry Pratchett
The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning?
Julian Barnes
We were a bit like bacon and eggs, where y'know, the chicken is involved, but the pig is really committed? I totally gave myself to it just as we promised, "for better or worse", and you didn't see it like that.
Dawn French
Sir,’ said Stephen, ‘I read novels with the utmost pertinacity. I look upon them--I look upon good novels--as a very valuable part of literature, conveying more exact and finely-distinguished knowledge of the human heart and mind than almost any other, with greater breadth and depth and fewer constraints.
Patrick O'Brian
One of the chief paradoxes of our culture [is] that the welfare of its children, its _future_, is placed almost exclusively in the hands of people of low status, a class it holds in contempt.
Joan Smith
Besides, the world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters. We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are.
J.K. Rowling
There was a piece of ornamental water immediately below the parapet, on the other side, into which Mr. James Harthouse had a very strong inclination to pitch Mr. Thomas Gradgrind Junior.
Charles Dickens
The big knight fell heavily to the ground, and lay there, as nearly dead as possible. His servants came running from the castle and took him in. He got better in the end, but nobody cared much about that.
Roger Lancelyn Green
A world at war is crazy enough for anything to be believable.
Jack Higgins
Christians have burned each other quite persuaded That all the apostles would have done as they did.
Lord Byron
I didn't set out to discover a truth. I was actually sent to the Outer Fringes to conduct a chair census and learn some humility. But the truth inevitably found me, as important truths often do, like a lost thought in need of a mind.
Jasper Fforde
Satisfaction doesn't come from needs and desires or fulfilling them, it comes from being yourself, being true.
Tony Samara
Was Mrs. Wilcox one of the unsatisfactory people- there are many of them- who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke our interests and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling around them. Then they withdraw. When physical passion is involved, there is a definite name for such behaviour- flirting- and if carried far enough, it is punishable by law. But no law- not public opinion, even- punishes those who coquette with friendship, though the dull ache that they inflict, the sense of misdirected effort and exhaustion, may be as intolerable. Was she one of these?
E.M. Forster
Opportunity, after all, is only another word for temptation.
Penelope Fitzgerald
Helpfiles are traditionally outnumbered by no-help files, which superficially resemble a helpfile in form but not in content because they don't actually tell you anything you don't already know, or they answer every question except the one you're asking, or you open them and a giant animated paper clip leaps out and cheerfully asks where you want to go today. And wikis are worse.
Charles Stross
...How I adore you and want you. You can't know how much...I love belonging to you-- I glory in it, that you alone have bent me to your will, shattered my self-possession, robbed me of my mystery, and made me yours, so that away from you I am nothing but a useless puppet, an empty husk.
Violet Trefusis
☺☺ When a man gets you 99, he starts to think, he may only have another 10 years of sexy lovemaking left... Still Smiling At 99. ☺☺
Michael Levy
I do not think consciously of children [when writing] … I do know that children read me more intelligently than adults do.
Alan Garner
Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immorality that would not imply that the theory of evolution was false.
Richard Dawkins
I realized then that even though I was a tiny speck in an infinite cosmos, a blip on the timeline of eternity, I was not without purpose.
R.J. Anderson
As the sun rises first on mountain-tops and gilds them with his light, and presents one of the most charming sights to the eye of the traveller; so is it one of the most delightful contemplations in the world to mark the glow of the Spirit's light on the head of some saint, who has risen up in spiritual stature.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Live your life, sing your song. Not full of expectations. Not for the ovations. But for the joy of it.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
...But even then you have to reckon with a criminal's chief vice.''What is that?'' Conceit. A criminal never believes that his crime can fail.
Agatha Christie
Here, in the garden at night, it is another world, strange and yet friendly and familiar, never frightening. There is such quietness, such sweetness, such refreshment. Close your eyes. Breathe in again, smell everything mingled together, flowers and earth and leaves and grass. Smell the night.Listen. Nothing at all. Silence, rushing like the sea in your ears.However small and sparse the garden, and wherever it is, even inside a great city, if something grows there, it is a magic place by night. Leave it, walk quietly back towards the lights that shine out of the house. You will take its magic with you.Now, you will sleep.
Susan Hill
As we grow older, we forget how near to the ground we once were. I do not mean merely because our heads were lower down than they are now, though of course that comes into it; but near in the sense of kinship. A small child is aware of the sights and smells and textures of the ground with an acute awareness that we lose in growing up.
Rosemary Sutcliff
... I have waited for this day, and grief faded with time.Or did it? Perhaps grief never leaves us but is merely drowned out by a flood of life overwhelming it. Perhaps the wound that bled once is bleeding still, and I did not notice it until now.
Claire North
Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one--that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.
Alain de Botton
It is our privilege and our adventure to discover our own special light.
Evelyn Dunbar
I wish... I wish he wasn't quite so ashamed of me. And if he could stop feeling so ashamed of himself, then maybe we might stand a chance.
Malorie Blackman
For God’s sake, man!” Frederick Carlyle bellowed across the room. “At least wait until you’re alone before you kiss her, if you please! Remember, her family is watching you, and we haven’t had our dinner yet!
Stephanie Burgis
Cottage of content was better than the Palace of cold splendour, and that where love was, all was.
Charles Dickens
There is nothing more irreligious than self-absorbed religion.
J.I. Packer
From the third case, she took yet more books, but these were the traveling books that she had brought for her new ward: they were at once sterner and more reassuring that the others. She cared for for these, too- they were books after all, and she would sooner have her own spine broken than manhandle a book - but not with the same devotion, and they were placed in a neat pile on the floor.
Wesley Stace
The bee has round it a mysterious inscription, which has been variously interpreted. It contains an allusion to beeswax, and one scholar has suggested that the tesserae were druggists’ tokens for the purpose of advertising the sale of beeswax. Another explanation is that the inscription might be one of the mysterious magic formulae used as charms, and that the tokens might be charms to call the bees home when swarming; but the most plausible solution seems to be that the tesserae were connected with the secret rites of Artemis, especially as the stag of the goddess is the one on the reverse side of the tokens.One of the most important animals connected with the worship of the Asiatic Great-Mother was the lion, and it is a curious fact that we often find a connection between bees and lions. At the old Hittite town of Carchemish behind her a long line of priestesses bearing various articles. We do not suggest that these were called Melissae, but in the jewellry we see how the goddess with her lions merges in or is connected with the ‘Bee-goddess.
Hilda M. Ransome
I take it that what all men are really after is some form of perhaps only some formula of peace.
Joseph Conrad
The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.
Henry James
...the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.
Jane Austen
Note to self," Joel commented. "When you go into Arious it's a 'no touchee, no zappee' situation! Paelen tapped Emily. "I suggest we try it again, just so I can see Joel's face when he gets zapped!" "Let's not, but say we did," Emily said.
Kate O'Hearn
Success is meaningless without fulfilment - both begin within
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Tomorrow never yet On any human being rose or set.
William Marsden
Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun.
Jeanette Winterson