Quotes by British Authors - Page 678

Delighting in the Lord, knowing His Word, and committing yourself to Him are ways to ensure that your plans and desires for yourself match God’s plans.
Elizabeth George
All that evening he talked to the Candle of Arras, in a low confidential tone. When you get down to it, he thought, there's not much difference between politics and sex; it's all aboutpower. He didn't suppose he was the first person in the world to make this observation. It's a question of seduction, and how fast and cheap you can effect it: if Camille, he thought, approximates to one of those little milliners who can't make ends meet - in other words, an absolute pushover - then Robespierre is a Carmelite, mind set on becoming Mother Superior. You can't corrupt her; you can wave your cock under her nose, and she's neither shocked nor interested: why should she be, when she hasn't the remotest ideawhat it's for?
Hilary Mantel
The Christian tradition was passed on to me as a great rich mixture a bouillabaisse of human imagination and wonder brewed from the richness of individual lives.
Mary Bateson
I’m working on another Lyra book right now – it’s called The Book of Dust.“It’s going very well and it will be finished when I write the words ‘The End’.
Philip Pullman
It is not easy being different, you just have to accept it and say sod YOU!!!
Kristina Howells
Just as we use speech and gestures to communicate, so we use touch. Words can say, ‘I love you’, but touch can also say how and how much, and, at the same time, ‘I respect you’, ‘I need you’, and ‘thank you’. For a long time, scientists somehow thought that touch served merely to emphasize a verbal message. But now it is clear even to them that touch can be the message, and that it can be more nuanced and sophisticated than either speech or gestures, and more economical to boot. What’s more, touch is a two-way street; and a person’s reaction to our touch can tell us much more than their words ever could. Finally, while words can lie, or be taken for granted, primal touch is difficult to either ignore or discount.
Neel Burton
In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.
C.S. Lewis
I was told once by some country people that a magician should never tell his dreams because the telling will make them come true. But I say that is great nonsense.
Susanna Clarke
There is a predictable interlude when the rivals suddenly come together and speak for a second of their common loneliness, thus tritely demonstrating that we really are all the same, though I can't think of any really first-rate film, play, or book that isn't unconsciously dedicated to the fact that we are all inconsolably different.
Penelope Gilliat
Live for each second without hesitation
Elton John
Men have always hated the wolf.""Why?" said the boy indignantly, suddenly looking very unhappy indeed."Maybe because they see something in the wolf that they hate and fear in themselves. Maybe because wolves take their sheep and goats, as if we shouldn't all share life's bounty.
David Clement-Davies
Every hour that passed added to her grief, because it bore her further away from the living man, and because it was a tiny foretaste of the eternity she would have to spend without him. Again and again she found herself forgetting, for the space of a heartbeat, that he was gone forever and that she could not turn to him for comfort.
J.K. Rowling
. . . if there was a hope of comfort for any moment, the heart or head of no human being in this house could yield it . . .
Charlotte Brontë
People don't really change, they just adapt to circumstances.
Ruth Ahmed
Forcing yourself to see the world through love's gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.
Matt Haig
Perhaps we are both doing what we think right. But what we think right is so damned different that there can be nothing between us in the way of concession. There is nothing possible between us but honor and death.
G.K. Chesterton
Oh, those hateful sods will never make it to Heaven. They’re all on an express elevator to the gay spit-roast dungeon in Hell. Within five minutes of kicking the bucket, they’ll have demon balls swollen with fiery spunk slapping off their shapeless chins.
Michael Logan
You cannot become what you already are.
John McAfee
The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.
Bertrand Russell
Sometimes we don't want to be tethered to yesterday. It's nicer to forget. Maybe the gaps in our memory are there for a reason, evolutionary perhaps, to give us the space to grow, to get away from childishness or childish things. Or maybe it's so we have the chance to invent, or at least include, some magic in our yesterdays, surely the consolation of getting older, of moving away from youth, is that we can shape our past to our fantasies. So, even if the present isn't going the way we want it, we can stand and remember our earlier selves as exciting and funny and daring
Sue Perkins
And people think she killed him?" said Miss Tick. She sighed. "They probably think she cooked him in the oven, or somet
Terry Pratchett
The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.
Graham Greene
There is an illusion that has much to do with ... most of our unhappiness. ... We expect too much.
Joseph Farrell
You may possibly become rich by just caring about yourself and what you want to gain from your profession and your life but you cannot possibly enrich the lives of everyone you meet that way.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Patience that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.
Thomas Hardy
You can't oversleep if you don't make plans to wake up early.
Elizabeth Jane Howard
CUSTOMER: I don’t know why she wants it, but my wife asked for a copy of The Dinosaur Cookbook.BOOKSELLER: The Dinah Shore Cookbook?
Jen Campbell
There are two main reasons why this assumption is wrong. First, once basic material needs have been met, there is very little evidence that pursuing financial prosperity generates much extra happiness for individuals or for nations. Second, by blindly pursuing economic growth, we are creating a whole set of social and environmental issues that will undermine the potential happiness and well-being of future generations.
Nic Marks
But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she hardly had a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. To this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying. Though he had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness. (6.12)
Jane Austen
Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down.
Walter Pater
What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition and settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.
G.K. Chesterton
Settling into a new country is like getting used to a new pair of shoes. At first they pinch a little, but you like the way they look, so you carry on. The longer you have them, the more comfortable they become. Until one day without realizing it you reach a glorious plateau. Wearing those shoes is like wearing no shoes at all. The more scuffed they get, the more you love them and the more you can't imagine life without them.
Tahir Shah
People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.
Nick Hornby
Dor woke again as dawn came. The sun had somehow gotten around to the east, where the land was, and dried off so that it could shine again.
Piers Anthony
I wanted to wake you straightaway, but I knew I had to wait several hours to ensure you were safely recovered.""What! How long has it been?""Five minutes. I got bored.
Jonathan Stroud
Christian holiness consists not of trying as hard as we can to be good but of learning to live in the new world created by Easter, the new world we publicly entered in our baptism. There are many parts of the world we can’t do anything about except pray. But there is one part of the world, one part of physical reality, that we can do something about, and that is the creature each of us call “myself.
N.T. Wright
Control of what happens is the ultimate solution to life.
Steven Redhead
I reinvented myself. I acquired a taste for evil. I found I have a talent for it. And I murdered the old me.
Mark Kirkbride
Oh, I thought of calling it Journeyings in Germany. It sounds well, and would be correct. Or Jottings from German Journeyings--I haven't quite decided yet... (Minora)
Elizabeth von Arnim
The 'pre-emption' versus 'prevention' debate may be a distinction without much difference. The important thing is to have it understood that the United States is absolutely serious. The jihadists have in the past bragged that America is too feeble and corrupt to fight. A lot is involved in disproving that delusion on their part.
Christopher Hitchens
Her black is beautiful, his society is ugly.
Habeeb Akande
Never had a decent report in his life!" Tony repeated, hardly able to believe the words. He was thinking, in shocked surprise, that even Tante Bettina did not know how mad the English could be.
Constance Savery
This condition in which women live is created out of, and defended by, a system of ideas represented by the world's religions, by psychoanalysis, by pornography, by sexology, by science and medicine and the social sciences.
Sheila Jeffreys
Those in the System, would like us to share their belief that all the changes [we are witnessing] are not connected: they are simply anomalies, isolated symptoms to be treated or preferably ignored, before the all-powerful Western capitalist patriarchal model goes on to ever greater heights and grander ejaculations. Most are numb to it, caught in fear, denial or resistance.But we, Burning Woman, know this process intimately. Amongst Burning Women and Men, there is a fierce, quiet knowing that these are both the death pangs of the old, and the birthing pangs of the new.
Lucy H. Pearce
The Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte had been banished to the island of Elba. However His Imperial Majesty had some doubts wheter a quiet island life would suit him - he was, after all, accustomed to governing a large proportion of the known world.
Susanna Clarke
I have been so very, very fortunate in my life. I've met or been in contact with several of my childhood heroes. I've interacted with people all over this planet, and even though I couldn't possibly hope to remember all their names, I remember a photograph, a poem, a sound, a joke, kind words of encouragement. All is not lost.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
But words are things, and a small drop of ink,      Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;      ’T is strange, the shortest letter which man uses Instead of speech, may form a lasting link      Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces Frail man, when paper — even a rag like this, Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.
George Gordon Byron
.... just find your way, like a river settling into its bed, and the sigh of the wind over a lake, light but restful... content with the joy in the arc of an arm throwing a ball for a dog to fetch, the ease of the grassy slope stretching away, birds in the trees singing sweet high notes, flowers growing close in the ditch.
Jay Woodman
There are only two problems in my life. The political ones are insoluble and the economic ones are incomprehensible.
Alec Douglas-Home
The essence of me, is YOU.
Anthony T.Hincks
I don’t know why Kate was trying to impress him, as far as I could see the guy had all the allure and social grace of a psychotic slug with halitosis and a bad head cold.
Sharon Sant
Better the demon which makes you improve than the angel who threatens.
Idries Shah
Serpent-Breath was famous...Wasp-Sting, short and lethal.
Bernard Cornwell
Are you the stuff that hero's are made of? Or are you a jellyfish in a skirt?
Cressida Cowell
He leans back in his seat. His legs are spread and his head tipped back, with his eyes challenging me. “Okay what’s next, boss?”I shudder theatrically. “I see why you like it. Just the word makes me feel all powerful.
Lily Morton
That is the eternal folly of man. To be chasing after the sweet flesh, without realizing that it is simply a pretty cover for the bones.
Neil Gaiman
All of this comes out of what is now an empty space. There are depths to this. It's a lot to think about. From an empty space the future. If there's no empty space where can one put the future? It all figures if you take the time to think it out.
Russell Hoban
Nothing is over our heads if we hold them high enough.
Johnny Rich
The corridor didn't seem long enough to contain so much blackness.'Passing Through Peacehaven
Ramsey Campbell
The limits of your language are the limits of your world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein