Quotes by British Authors - Page 681

Look in the mirror and say, 'There is none other like you and for that reason alone you are beautiful.
Miranda Hart
I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad about her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss.
Jeanette Winterson
Parenting at its best comes as naturally as laughter. It is automatic involuntary unconditional love.
Sally James
If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance very various heroic and mean splendid and sordid infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme as great as a man some think even better.
Virginia Woolf
...trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one.
Lionel Shriver
Aberrations of the human mind are to a large extent due to the obsessional pursuit of some part-truth, treated as if it were a whole truth.
Arthur Koestler
Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.
Henry Thomas Buckle
The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a dance of exquisite fidelity, orchestrated with breathtaking precision. Vastly more elaborate than the most complicated ballet, the dance of life encompasses countless molecular performers in synergetic coordination. Yet this is a dance with no sign of a choreographer. No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating.
Paul Davies
think of the condition of Europe for twenty years before, where people were fighting, not by thousands, but by millions; each one of whom as he struck his enemy wounded horribly some other innocent heart far away.
William Makepeace Thackeray
I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice...
China Miéville
Some people were born to the shape they would occupy all their lives.("Wait")
Conrad Williams
Did I really read every single book in the school? My mother maintains I did. Maybe I just told the teachers I had and they all believed me. Maybe this is where the lying about books really began. Where were the checks and balances? I blame the authorities.
Andy Miller
I have sometimes thought of the final cause of dogs having such short lives and I am quite satisfied it is in compassion to the human race; for if we suffer so much in losing a dog after an acquaintance of ten or twelve years, what would it be if they were to live double that time?
Walter Scott
THE ONLY THING THAT CAUSES DEATH, IS LIFE
David Lake
Outwardly, I hope, I wear my usual mask of detachment, even irony, for there has never been a situation,however dire, even this one, that did not strike me as containing at least some element of the human comedy.
Robert Harris
Want less, live more
Benny Bellamacina
Bond sat for a moment frozen to his chair. Suddenly, there flashed unwanted into his mind that most sinister line in poetry: 'They reckon ill who leave me out. When me they fly, I am the wings.
Ian Fleming
The time for princes and tsars and holy madmen was gone.In its place came a world of war and revolution, of tanks andtelephones, murder and assassination.
Marcus Sedgwick
Now,' cried the fiend, 'follow me! You must understand that I cannot get out by the great gate - the porter will not suffer that. Once here, there is no retreat. Follow me, therefore: we will just go to your house, where you shall dress yourself; for you can hardly go to a ball in your present costume - especially as it is not a bal masque. Mind and wrap yourself well up in your winding-sheet, for the nights are cold, and you may feel unpleasantly touched by it.'As he said this, Satan laughed malignantly; and I continued silently to walk after him.'I am sure,' continued he, 'that, in spite of the service I am doing you, you do not yet like me. You are always thus, you men - ungrateful to your friends. Not that I blame ingratitude; it is a vice upon which I pride myself, since I invented it myself; and I must say, that it is one most in vogue. But I do wish to see you a little more merry - it is the only thing I ask of you.'I answered not, but still followed my guide, white as a statue, and as cold. I was silent; but, at the pauses in the fiend's voice, I could hear my teeth chatter against each other, and my bones rattle in my body. ("The Dead Man's Story")
James Hain Friswell
Things Happen and once they start happening you pretty much just to hold on for dear life and see where they drop you when they stop.
Meg Rosoff
But the vicar of St. Botolph's had certainly escaped the slightest tincture of the Pharisee, and by dint of admitting to himself that he was too much as other men were, he had become remarkably unlike them in this - that he could excuse others for thinking slightly of him, and could judge impartially of their conduct even when it told against him. [from Middlemarch, a quote my mother thinks describes the kind of man my father was]
George Eliot
... those sectaries in Europe who are always expecting the end of the world, but who hope that, after the earth has been consumed by fire, they will be seated in glory: grilled a little, crisp at the edges and blackened in parts, but still, thanks be to God, alive for eternity, and seated at his right hand.
Hilary Mantel
My formula for success is rise early work late and strike oil.
J. Paul Getty
The past is a reality that exists just beyond our reach.
Joanna Denny
Half our family does seem to owe you their lives, now I stop and think about it," Mr. Weasley said in a constricted voice. "Well, all I can say is that it was a lucky day for the Weasleys when Ron decided to sit in your compartment on the Hogwarts Express, Harry.
J.K. Rowling
There is a saying, if any stranger enquire of the first met of Maan, were it even a child, “Who is here the sheykh?” he would answer him “I am he.
Charles M. Doughty
Nothing is the whole story. The self’s curse – and the writer’s.
Glen Duncan
That which is capable of perceiving objective reality is, in Sufism, the human soul (ruh).
Idries Shah
I can't talk you in terms of time --your time and my time are different
Graham Greene
Assumptions close doors. Intrigue opens them.
Sam Owen
Auntie Phyl's last months in the care home were extra pieces. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate enough to die swiftly and suddenly, in full possession of our faculties and our fate, but more and more of us will be condemned to linger, at the mercy of anxious or indifferent relatives, careless strangers, unwanted medical interventions, increasing debility, incontinence, memory loss. We live too long, but, like the sibyl hanging in her basket in the cave at Cumae, we find it hard to die.
Margaret Drabble
I mean what does a democracy depend on? A democracy depends on the individual voter making an intelligent and rational choice for what he regards as his enlightened self-interest, in any given circumstance.
Aldous Huxley
He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass: environment is but a looking glass.
James Allen
Samuel Vimes dreamed about Clues. He had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They got in the way. And he distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen* and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!
Terry Pratchett
The Doctor: Amazing. Nancy: What is? The Doctor: 1941. Right now, not very far from here, the German war machine is rolling up the map of Europe. Country after country, falling like dominoes. Nothing can stop it, nothing. Until one tiny, damp little island says "No. No, not here." A mouse in front of a lion. You're amazing, the lot of you. I don't know what you do to Hitler, but you frighten the hell out of me.
Steven Moffat
A woman who was a schoolgirl at Hiroshima asked, “Those scientists who invented the atomic bomb, what did they think would happen if they dropped it?
Jonathan Glover
Well, it's really no use our talking in the way we have been doing if the words we use mean something different to each of us...and nothing.
Malcolm Bradbury
My notion of a wife at forty is that a man should be able to change her like a banknote for two twenties.
Douglas Jerrold
How you look it is pretty much how you'll see it
Rasheed Ogunlaru
The truth is the last thing that matters,' she said. 'And you can believe one thing of the truth and me: I keep it well hidden, inside my heart.
Philippa Gregory
Sometimes the heart demands.
Andrew Miller
What I mean is, right from that first time, there wassomething in Tommy's manner that was tinged with sadness, that seemed tosay: “Yes, we're doing this now and I'm glad we're doing it now. But what apity we left it so late.
Kazuo Ishiguro
A truth that's told with bad intent Beats all the lies you can invent.
William Blake
We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
Charles Kingsley
The results of decades of neurotransmitter-depletion studies point to one inescapable conclusion: low levels or serotonin, norepinephrine or dopamine do not cause depression. here is how the authors of the most complete meta-analysis of serotonin-depletion studies summarized the data: "Although previously the monoamine systems were considered to be responsible for the development of major depressive disorder (MDD), the available evidence to date does not support a direct causal relationship with MDD. There is no simple direct correlation of serotonin or norepinephrine levels in the brain and mood.' In other words, after a half-century of research, the chemical-imbalance hypothesis as promulgated by the drug companies that manufacture SSRIs and other antidepressants is not only with clear and consistent support, but has been disproved by experimental evidence.
Irving Kirsch
I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.
Graham Chapman
Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain his cover as a typical second-hand book seller, he used every means short of actual physical violence to prevent customers from making a purchase. Unpleasant damp smells, glowering looks, erratic opening hours - he was incredibly good at it.
Terry Pratchett
Everything is clearer when you're in love.
John Lennon
History is like a constantly changing tree.
David Irving
The sky [above Tehran] was like a star-eaten black blanket, and so far as I could read them its constellations were unfamiliar. Lawrence speaks somewhere of drawing 'strength from the depths of the universe'; Malcolm Lowry speaks about the deadness of the stars except when he looked at them with a particular girl; I had neither feeling. The founder of the Jesuits used to spend many hours under the stars; it is hard to be certain whether his first stirrings of scientific speculation or pre-scientific wonder about space and the stars in their own nature were some element in his affinity with starlight, or whether for him they were only a point of departure, but in this matter I think I am about fifty years more modern than Saint Ignatius; stars mean to me roughly what they meant to Donne's generation, a bright religious sand imposing the sense of an intrusion into human language, and arousing a certain personal thirst to be specific.
Peter Levi
What should I do—how should I act now, this very day . . . What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness.
George Eliot
Walls get made, walls crumble, buildings get built, buildings collapse, memories get made, memories last.
Jill Telford
The manner of your speaking is full as important as the matter as more people have ears to be tickled than understandings to judge.
Lord Chesterfield
Gratitude is the best food and fuel to start the day for you. Have some at lunchtime and again at dinner too. It will energise and sustain you - the whole day through. But it will also leave you room, power and the thirst to do what you need to do and contribute.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Morality, for all the conditioning to which the human mind has been and is subjected, is always a personal choice in the last analysis.
John Christopher
Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.
Paul McCartney
What constitutes a beautiful girl? It is not merely an anatomical or aesthetic quality. Beautiful girls have an inner beauty, an inner light that defeats the darkness. It is a way of walking, smiling, of being. They have a certain smell, sweet as baby breath. They radiate good will, kindness, selflessness.
Chloe Thurlow
In the first play, the crisis is Thomas More. In the second it’s Anne Boleyn. In the third book, and the third play, it’s crisis every day, an overlapping series of only just negotiable horrors. It’s climbing and climbing. Then a sudden abrupt fall - within days.
Hilary Mantel
When I was young I used to have this nightmare about dying. I used to lie awake at night screaming. All my schoolfriends went to heaven or hell, and I was sent to Southend.
Douglas Adams
I don't know why, but people seem to be fascinated to learn how some members of society fall through the cracks. I think it's partly that feeling that... it could happen to anyone. But I think it also makes people feel better about their own lives. It makes them think, 'Well, I may think my life is bad, but it could be worse, I could be that poor sod.
James Bowen