Quotes by British Authors - Page 676

Cultivated men and women who do not skim the cream of life and are attached to the duties yet escape the harsher blows make acute and balanced observers.
George Meredith
I'll have your heart, if not by gift my knife Shall carve it out. I'll have your heart, your life.
Stevie Smith
With domineering hand she moves the turning wheel,Like currents in a treacherous bay swept to and fro:Her ruthless will has just deposed once fearful kingsWhile trustless still, from low she lifts a conquered head;No cries of misery she hears, no tears she heeds,But steely hearted laughs at groans her deeds have wrung.Such is a game she plays, and so she tests her strength;Of mighty power she makes parade when one short hourSees happiness from utter desolation grow.(A Consolation of Philosophy, Book II, translated by V.E. Watts)
Boethius - Queen Elizabeth I translation
I'm very grateful that I was too poor to get to art school until I was 21. ... I was old enough when I got there to know how to get something out of it.
Henry Moore
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society must take the place of the victim, and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness.
W.H. Auden
And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.
Hisham Matar
If for instance the sentiment possessing for the moment the empire of our mind is sorrow, will not the genius sharpen the sorrow and the sorrow purify the genius? Together, will they not be like a cut diamond for which language is only the wax on which they stamp their imprint? I believe that genius, thus awakened, has no need to seek out details, that it scarcely pauses to reflect, that it never thinks of unity: I believe that the details come naturally without search by the poet, that inspiration takes the place of reflection and as for unity, I think there is no unity so perfect as that which results from a heart filled with a single idea...The nature of genius is related to that of instinct; it's operation is both simple and marvelous.
Charlotte Brontë
The great thing in these cases is to keep an absolutely open mind. Most crimes, you see, are so absurdly simple.
Agatha Christie
And Siobhan says people go on holidays to see new things and relax, but it wouldn’t make me relaxed and you can see new things by looking at earth under a microscope or drawing the shape of the solid made when 3 circular rods of equal thickness intersect at right angles. And I think that there are so many things just in one house that it would take years to think about all of them properly. And also, a thing is interesting because of thinking about it and not because of it being new.
Mark Haddon
Truth is the vital breath of Beauty Beauty the outward form of Truth.
Grace Aguilar
He saw it for the first time: on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would be unanswered e-mails, and in the hovel he called home there would still be shirts missing cuff buttons, a malfunctioning light in the hall, and unpaid bills, uncleared attics, dead flies, friends waiting for a reply and lovers he had not owned up to.
Ian McEwan
She had always suffered from a curious fear of what was going to happen round the next corner. Even when life went smoothly and nothing occurred to justify her vague apprehensions, they did not altogether disperse. She had tried to face these fears and conquer them, but she could never do so entirely, she could only strain forward into the darkness of the future, expecting and fearing the unknown. She was brave in the face of dangers she could see, but she could not arm herself against shadows. These fears were her weakness.
D.E. Stevenson
Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.
George Monbiot
it wasn’t until the train went past that she saw the small body lying in the long grass by the side of the wood.
Sanjida Kay
The Bolsheviks killed their own most loyal supporters at Kronstadt in 1921, because they failed to understand that the revolution no longer required revolutionaries, but obedient servants.
Peter Hitchens
When I was a boy, I naively thought that this thing called happiness would be something I would wake up to find every day once I could smoke, drink and fornicate.
Jeffrey Bernard
I can change the story. I am the story.
Jeanette Winterson
The bright light of brilliance keeps the darkness away, but it can be so very exhausting.
Fennel Hudson
A precedent embalms a principle.
Benjamin Disraeli
I have always unswervingly held, that God, in our civilizing world, manifests Himself not in the miracles of biblical age, but in progress. It is progress that leads humanity up the ladder towards the God-head. No Jacob's ladder this, no, but rather Civilization's Ladder, if you will.
David Mitchell
How happy I might be, if only she was less greedy, better tempered, not addicted to raking up old grudges, more affectionate, with slightly yellower hair, slimmer, and about twenty years younger! But what is the good of expecting such a woman to reform?
John Collier
Man I’m hot,” I exclaimed, fanning myself. The combination of climbing out of the cave and the sun meant that I was perspiring like crazy. “Why thank you,” retorted Blaine, smirking. “I’m pleased that my presence causes that kind of reaction.
Adele Rose
Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.
Neil Gaiman
There was a profound silence, abruptly broken by an enormously loud rumble from George's stomach. Plaster didn't actually fall from the ceiling, but it was close.
Jonathan Stroud
Don't make changes to suit others, stay true to yourself.
Steven Redhead
I’m not going to be like my mother. You’re maniacs. You’re mad."“Yes,” said Kate. “I know it. And so you won’t be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?
Doris Lessing
Forgive me again.” He lifts the carafe and refreshes his goblet. “What happened to those two children who laughed at dandelion fuzz?” he says softly. “Are they gone forever, do you think?
Melinda Salisbury
They dream in courtship but in wedlock wake.
Alexander Pope
Cuz how do you know yer alive if you don't hurt?
Patrick Ness
The fact is that five years ago I was, as near as possible, a different person to what I am tonight. I, as I am now, didn't exist at all. Will the same thing happen in the next five years? I hope so.
Siegfried Sassoon
In the houses of the humble a little library in my opinion is a most precious possession.
John Bright
I hope I take up the cause of all oppressed people rather warmly.
Wilkie Collins
Trust yourself to be able to confront and work through your emotions. If you believe you can’t do it, you won’t do it and you’ll become stuck. If you believe you can do it, you will.
Sam Owen
I don't believe in the white spectre-type of ghosts you get in stories, but what if ghosts are something else? Like memories somehow caught and trapped in time, released by being in certain places where things first happened.
Julia Green
For the longest time I studied revenge to the exclusion of all else. I built my first torture chamber in the dark vaults of imagination. Lying on bloody sheets in the Healing Hall I discovered doors within my mind that I’d not found before, doors that even a child of nine knows should not be opened. Doors that never close again. I threw them wide.
Mark Lawrence
How are you going to forget him if you keep talking about him? Darling, when things go wrong in life, this is what you do. You lift your chin, put on a ravishing smile, mix yourself a little cocktail... and out you go.
Sophie Kinsella
Beauty can make a woman rich, but if she relies solely on her looks to get by, she'll always remain under a man's thumb.
Ma Jian
What does it say?" asked my lord."It says, `Good-night, God keep you all the night!'--just what she used to say when we were together. Every night she used to say that to me, and every morning she said, `God bless you all the day!' So you see I am quite safe all the time----
Frances Hodgson Burnett
It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
My help had been needed and claimed; I had given it: I was pleased to have done something: trivial, transitory though the deed was, it was yet an active thing, and I was weary of an existence all passive.
Charlotte Brontë
Because every time you see them happy you remember how sad they're going to be. And it breaks your heart. Because what's the point in them being happy now if they're going to be sad later. The answer is, of course, because they a re going to be sad later.
Steven Moffat
Always use your powers to create positive experiences for yourself and others.
Steven Redhead
The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first - wanting to be the centre - wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race. Some people think the fall of man had something to do with sex, but that is a mistake...what Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they 'could be like Gods' - could set up on their own as if they had created themselves - be their own masters - invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come...the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
C.S. Lewis
I was thinking of Cambridge, and then I got a bit homesick for a minute, 'cause I never been this far away from home before. But the I remember you're here, and now I'm not homesick no more.
J.L. Merrow
The evening sky was awash with peach, apricot, cream: tender little ice-cream clouds in a wide orange sky.
Philip Pullman
This is what parenting involved: hard decisions. She was his mother, she reminded herself. He didn't have to like her.
Paula Daly
Depression: the healthy suspicion that modern life has no meaning and that modern society is absurd and alienating.
Neel Burton
If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that.But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.
Tom Stoppard
In the inverted food chain of fame, it was the big beasts who were stalked and hunted
Robert Galbraith
Drinking turns a fool into a merry fool.
Neel Burton
Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.
Kate Atkinson
...But that is a method for cowards; the brave man goes out into the hall, comes back with a stick, and says firmly, "You have just deliberately and cruelly exposed my ignorance before this company; I shall, therefore, beat you soundly with this stick in the presence of them all."This you then do to him or he to you, mutatis mutandis, ceteris paribus; and that is all I have to say on Ignorance.
Hilaire Belloc
We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
C.S. Lewis
Their attention was focused on the strange kid who wore black eyeliner and dressed as if every day was a funeral.
Caroline Mitchell
Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.
Samuel Johnson
I was awarded 'Most Aggressive Rider of the Day', generally given to the most spectacular loser of the day.
David Millar
You have to read a book at the right time for you, and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too often, for it is the key to the enjoyment of literature.
Doris Lessing
You see," I said, "I'm a socialist. I don't think this world was made for a small minority to dance on the faces of everyone else.
H.G.Wells
I am dust and my story ends here.
Hanif Kureishi
The death of God has set the angels free. And they are terrible. There are principalities and powers. Angels are the thoughts of God. Now he had been dissolved into his thoughts which are beyond our conception in their nature and their multiplicity and their power. God was at least the name of something which we thought was good. Now even the name has gone and the spiritual world is scattered. There is nothing any more to prevent the magnetism of many spirits.
Iris Murdoch