Quotes by British Authors - Page 674

The whole time I hadn't slept with anyone at university had made it harder and harder to finally do it. Like spending too long on a very high diving board, until finally you have to exit ignominiously, the same way you climbed up.
Olivia Sudjic
After all, you can argue – argue until you cry – about whatmodern, codified misogyny is; but straight-up ungentlemanliness,of the kind his mother would clatter the back of his head for, isinarguable. It doesn’t need to be a ‘man vs woman’ thing. It’s just atiff between The Guys.Seeing the whole world as ‘The Guys’ is important. The ideathat we’re all, at the end of the day, just a bunch of well-meaningschlumps, trying to get along, is the basic alpha and omega of myworld view. I’m neither ‘pro-women’ nor ‘antimen’. I’m just ‘Thumbsup for the six billion’.
Caitlin Moran
And if I vas to point at a castle on a towering crag and say 'Yonder is...zer castle' a volf would be bound to howl mournfully. In zer old country, zer scenery is psychotropic and knows vot is expected of it. Here, alas, people just look at you in a funny vay.
Terry Pratchett
If, again, the most superficial introspection teaches the physiologist that his conscious life is dependent upon the mechanical adjustments of his body, and that inversely his body is subjected with certain limitations to his will, then it only remains for him to make one assumption more, namely, that this mutual interdependence between the spiritual and the material is itself also dependent on law, and he has discovered the bond by which the science of the matter and the science of consciousness are united into a single whole.
Samuel Butler
Without publicity, no good is permanent; under the auspices of publicity, no evil can continue.
Jeremy Bentham
Bucket lists are supposed to be about doing things you've always dreamt about not torturing yourself.
Anna Bell
There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say," returned the nephew. "Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round -- apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that -- as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, Uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!" Fred, A Christmas Carol.
Charles Dickens
Beauty is a female thing. That's why nature is so stunning.
Anthony T.Hincks
Dr. Xia was working as a salaried doctor attached to another man's medicine shop, which did not give him much chance to display his skill. But he worked had, and gradually his reputation began to grow. Soon he was invited to go on his first visit to a patient's home. When he came back that evening he was carrying a package wrapped in a cloth. He winked at my mother and his wife and asked them to guess what was inside the package. My mother's eyes was glued to the steaming bundle, and even before she could shout out "Steamed rolls!" she was already tearing the package open. As she was devouring the rolls, she looked up and met Dr. Xia's twinkling eyes. More than fifty years later she can still remember his look of happiness, and even today she says she can remember any food as delicious as those simple wheat rolls.
Jung Chang
God isn't the son of Memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.
Aldous Huxley
At any time, and under any circumstances of human interest, is it not strange to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amid which we live can gain on our hearts and minds? We go to Nature for comfort in trouble, and sympathy in joy, only in books. Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature.
Wilkie Collins
I have no talent; it's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.
Graham Greene
I prefer not to elaborate on the various stages of our dealings over the next few days - disbelief, anger, recrimination, the raking up of old sores, bitter silence and so on - but I can say that they gave lasting strength to our relationship, like a thick scar is stronger than the skin around it.
John Mole
His voice sounded like molten metal. As if he had something thick at the back of his throat and it was making him sound deeper and richer than he actually was.
Charlotte Stein
An hour later we were walking past rows of busy beach huts and weaving between sunbathers and Frisbee games. I was surprised that people weren't taking more notice of us. Everyone looked so strange to me that I couldn't believe I didn't look equally strange to them.
Alex Garland
There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, " This is new, and therefore better.
John Brunner
Why now? Why not? Live or die, a man and a woman need love. There is a need in the race. We need to share. To belong. Perhaps you will die before the year is out. But remember this: to have may be taken from you, to have had never. Far better to have tasted love before dying, than to die alone.
David Gemmell
Whether the Eisenhower administration has underestimated the American people's interest in space exploration or Truman never full appreciated MacArthur, the Soviet Union's Sputnik program has created a public spectacle that even Disney and von Braun might envy.
Ken Hollings
Just as you cannot stop a bird from flying over your head, in the same way you cannot stop the devil from dropping ideas into your mind. However, in the same way that you can stop a bird from building a nest on your head, you can stop the Enemy’s suggestions from wandering without restriction and taking root in your mind.
Pedro Okoro
...perhaps, when it got utterly dark, the peace of the darkness would become the same as light so that my last experience would become as mysterious and musical as my first, so that in my last darkness there might not be the same need of understanding anything so far away as the world anymore.
Derek Raymond
How fortunate we were who still had hope I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die
Vera Brittain
...there was something in the texture of the weave that felt happy: theecho of a memory so far down in his soul it was all emotion, aburst of colour and warmth, adrift from time and place.
Alexia Casale
If you seek small things to do, and do them well, great things will seek you, and demand to be performed.
Idries Shah
Women would rather talk to other women than to men, even when they would rather talk to a man than to a woman.
Berta Ruck
I am not fond of uttering platitudes In stained-glass attitudes.
W.S. Gilbert
I only come here seeking knowledge
Sting Police
The feature that makes people look at her twice, sometimes with suspicious glances, is her eyes. They are too large, wide-set, slanted a bit. And they judge, those eyes do, they watch and they take note and they judge all that they see, and lots of folks do not like that much.To the innocent, her eyes are arresting. To a person with something on his conscience, they seem too knowing.
Michael Grant
How grand, to be a Doctor of whatever and to weigh up and decide people's future.
Sebastian Faulks
I propose a conspiracy of orphans. We exchange winks. We reject hierarchies. All hierarchies. We take the shit of the world for granted and we exchange stories about how we nevertheless get by. We are impertinent. More than half the stars in the universe are orphan-stars belonging to no constellation. And they give off more light than all the constellation stars.
John Berger
Give Bethod a kick from me, once you have him under your boot.""That I will, unless he gets me under his.""Never easy, kicking upwards.
Joe Abercrombie
Failure and success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling of fighting with their star or against it and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle.
E.M. Forster
Scripture offers the unique access to the story of redemption and then, in turn, funds tradition, reason and experience, as God's Word is remembered, experienced, and thought about.
Clark H. Pinnock
A good mother loves fiercely but ultimately brings up her children to thrive without her. They must be the most important thing in her life, but if she is the most important thing in theirs, she has failed.
Erin Kelly
Normally, anything done in the name of 'the kids' strikes me as either slightly sentimental or faintly sinister—that redolence of moral blackmail that adheres to certain charitable appeals and certain kinds of politician. (Not for nothing is baby-kissing the synonym for public insincerity.)
Christopher Hitchens
Here, are the stiffening hills, here, the rich cargoCongealed in the dark arteries,Old veinsThat hold Glamorgan's blood.The midnight miner in the secret seams,Limb, life, and
Mervyn Peake
We sleep peaceably in our beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf"--Opening to "My Father's Son," attributed to George Orwell
George Orwell
I can only strive for what is important
Rosie Thomas
Incredible. Humans are such irrational creatures. So here you sit,a small space filled with demons that could tear you limb from limb as easy as pulling wings off a butterfly and you're scared of the helicopter crashing, which has a less than 2 percent chance... tell me Keira girl, what do you think the percentage is of a vampire sucking a human dry?
Stephanie Hudson
I decided to give up meaningless sex, but then I remembered that everything is meaningless.
Oli Anderson
The literature of childhood abounds with evidence that the peaks of a child's experience are not visits to the cinema, or even family outings to the sea, but occasions when he escapes into places that are disused and overgrown and silent. To a child there is more joy in a rubbish tip than a flowery rockery, in a fallen tree than a piece of statuary, in a muddy track than a gravel path.
Iona Opie
I couldn't claim that I have never felt the urge to explore evil but when you descend into hell you have to be very careful.
Kathleen Raine
For the artist himself art is not necessarily therapeutic; he is not automatically relieved of his fantasies by expressing them. Instead, by some perverse logic of creation, the act of formal expressions may simply make the dredged-up material more readily available to him.
Al Álvarez
All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.
Jane Austen
He's pressing me to his chest. I melt. Oh, this is where I want to beI rest my head against him, and he kisses my hair repeatedly. This is home. He smells of linen, fabric softener, body wash, and my favourite smell - Christian. For a moment, I allow myself the illusion that all will be well, and it soothes my ravaged soul
E.L. James
Business is really more agreeable than pleasure it interests the whole mind . . . more deeply. But it does not look as if it did.
Walter Bagehot
A tongue in a bag. Teeth. A room drenched in blood.
Richard House
Life is so full of rough edges - small tasks and expectations that scratch you bloody and remind you that you're naked and alone.
Alexis Hall
How can man put a cost on saving this planet of ours?Have we traversed so far down the road that all we care about is money and wealth?Do we honestly care about the coming generations or are we so greedy that we don't really give a damn about what happens after we leave this life behind?To all of you that read this, stop and look at your son's or daughter's. Walk to your windows and look outside and see other children playing heedless of their parent's greed and selfish ideals.It's the children who we are saving this world for.Not Us!
Anthony T.Hincks
Everything I have to say has already crossed your mind.""Then possibly my answer has crossed yours.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Of course Tucker Crowe was in pain when he made [the record], but he couldn't just march into a recording studio and start howling. He'd have sounded mad and pathetic. He had to calm the rage, tame it and shape it so that it could be contained in the tight-fitting songs. Then he had to dress it up so that it sounded more like itself.
Nick Hornby
Rest time is the waste time. It is economy to gather fresh strength.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I know love is dark work; you have to get your hands dirty. If you hold back, nothing interesting happens. At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you; too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?
Hanif Kureishi
We would rather be ruined than changedWe would rather die in our dreadThan climb the cross of the momentAnd let our illusions die.
W.H. Auden
Everything suggests a beyond.
Isabella L. Bird
Some trees are too deeply rooted to move … And if they are uprooted, they will die…
Jocelyn Murray
I love, therefore I am.
Robert Graves
Every article and review and book that I have ever published has constituted an appeal to the person or persons to whom I should have talked before I dared to write it. I never launch any little essay without the hope—and the fear, because the encounter may also be embarrassing—that I shall draw a letter that begins, 'Dear Mr. Hitchens, it seems that you are unaware that…' It is in this sense that authorship is collaborative with 'the reader.' And there's no help for it: you only find out what you ought to have known by pretending to know at least some of it already.It doesn't matter how obscure or arcane or esoteric your place of publication may be: some sweet law ensures that the person who should be scrutinizing your work eventually does do so.
Christopher Hitchens
The online music magazine Pitchfork once wrote that I would collaborate with anyone for a bag of Doritos.
David Byrne
Patience is bitter, but bears a sweet fruit.
Idries Shah
Very few USA citizens realize that the USA corporate military is regarded by many to be both a domestic and international terrorist organization.
Steven Magee