Quotes by British Authors - Page 683

... civilization—a word that simply means "living in cities..."Excerpt From: Standage, Tom. “A History of the World In 6 Glasses.
Tom Standage
Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
A.S. Byatt
YOUR LIFE IS WHAT YOU CHOOSE IT TO BE FROM EVERY MOMENT ONWARDS, WITHIN THE LIMITS OF YOUR CONTROL. AT TIMES YOU WILL HAVE TO REGROUP AND ADAPT DUE TO ISSUES OUTSIDE OF YOUR CONTROL. BUT MANY OF LIFE’S OUTCOMES ARE DETERMINED BY ITS CHIEF MASTER: YOU!
Jonny Oates
A successful man is like a bottle of wine, just gets better with age.
Habeeb Akande
The man nodded and brought a bottle from the glass-fronted fridge,
Ian Rankin
Q: When is the perfect time? A: Who can say, but probably somewhere between haste and delay - and it's usually most wise to start today.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
In a perfect world, you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again.
Neil Gaiman
Unlearn your knowledge about what WAS working to understand what is working NOW
Roger James Hamilton
Well, I’d rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here.
Aldous Huxley
These,” he said gravely, “are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then most historical facts are unpleasant.
Aldous Huxley
The only problem was, when your whole existence is something you have to cope with, you look back one day and find that your strategy has become a way of life.
Joanna Cannon
God's 'permission' of evil so multiplied is not simply to be accounted for by his respecting our free will. He takes the harms we mutually inflict and overrules them for our good.
Jocelyn Gibb
We inhabit a world in which we tend to put labels on each other and expect that we will then march through life wearing them like permanent sandwich boards.
Nick Webb
At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. Bat at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of 'commenting on life,' can add to it.
C.S. Lewis
It is so beautiful but home is home, and home is best.
Michael Morpurgo
And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence
Bertrand Russell
The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace--
Oliver Sacks
Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.
Alan W. Watts
Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable—we're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job.
Jeanette Winterson
For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.
William Wordsworth
I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.
W Somerset Maugham
First one must understand conditioning - only then can we speak of choice
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Heaviness coats my brain, and I’m surprised at the turn in our conversation; we’re getting into the deep stuff. “Right now, you and me? This feels like fate, if fate can be felt.
Siobhan Davis
People talk about ‘service, effort, love, knowledge’. But with knowledge you know what love is, and what it is not.
Idries Shah
I follow my own methods, and tell as much or as little as I choose. That is the advantage of being unofficial.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Men want a girl who looks like a boy. They want to protect her but she must be a survivor. And she must come...like a train...but with...elegance.
Patrick Marber
I want to tell you what's really happened.""Not now. Please not now. Whatever's happened, come and make love to me."And we did make love; not sex, but love; though sex would have been so much wiser.
John Fowles
On the whole she found erring children easier to deal with than their frantic parents, confirming her conclusion that marriage did strange things to the adult mind.
Miranda Neville
Don’t ever leave us again. Vaughn has been horrible. Like pre-Grace horrible.
Sarra Manning
The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.
Diane Setterfield
The monarchy is a labour-intensive industry.
Harold Wilson
I don't believe anyone who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self.
Graham Greene
There was a brief silence in which the distant echo of Hagrid smashing down a wooden front door seemed to reverberate through the intervening years.
J.K. Rowling
These days, we've got booksellers in cities, in deserts, and in the middle of a rain forest; we've got travelling bookshops, and bookshops underground. We've got bookshops in barns, in caravans and in converted Victorian railway stations. We've even got booksellers selling books in the middle of a war. Are bookshops still relevant? They certainly are.All bookshops are full of stories, and stories want to be heard.
Jen Campbell
It's when you sit alone,Or lay in your bed, That we will be watching,Waiting,Until you get scared.Then we will come,A scratch and a chill,For you will feel goosebumps,Look at the windowsill!Did you see a face?Looking in at you,You know that you did,Beware...you'll turn blue.Is that the wind,Howling at the moon,Or is it a werewolf,That's coming for you?So sit in your chair,Or lay in your bed,Because we''ll be there,And you'll be dead!
Anthony T.Hincks
I have been in love only once in my life. I suppose that makes me a romantic, in a sense. The idea that you have one true love, that no one else will compare after they have gone. It's a sweet idea, but the reality is terror itself. To be faced with all those lonely years after. To exist when the point of you has gone.
Matt Haig
For a moment he came near to sharing their incredible belief—it would do no harm to mutter a prayer of thanks to the God of his childhood, the God of the Common and the castle, that no ill had yet come to Sarah's child. Then a sonic boom scattered the words of the hymn and shook the old glass of the west window and rattled the crusader's helmet which hung on a pillar, and he was reminded again of the grown-up world. He went quickly out and bought the Sunday papers. The Sunday Express had a headline on the front page—"Child's Body Found in Wood.
Graham Greene
All ceremony depends on symbol; and all symbols have been vulgarized and made stale by the commercial conditions of our time...Of all these faded and falsified symbols, the most melancholy example is the ancient symbol of the flame. In every civilized age and country, it has been a natural thing to talk of some great festival on which "the town was illuminated." There is no meaning nowadays in saying the town was illuminated...The whole town is illuminated already, but not for noble things. It is illuminated solely to insist on the immense importance of trivial and material things, blazoned from motives entirely mercenary...It has not destroyed the difference between light and darkness, but it has allowed the lesser light to put out the greater...Our streets are in a permanent dazzle, and our minds in a permanent darkness.
G.K. Chesterton
Will there ever be an encyclopedia? Possibly. I would say two things about the encyclopedia: firstly, I’ve always said and I stand by it, whenever I do do a printed encyclopedia I would like all the proceeds to go to charity. Back in 1998 I never dreamt I personally I would be in the position that I could set up a large charitable foundation and personally do things for charity, and I’ve done other charity books already.
J.K. Rowling
A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce - we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has done away with religion but not with religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives - money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough.
Jeanette Winterson
We are selfish, my illness and I. We think only of ourselves. We shape the world around us into messages, into secret whispers spoken only for us.
Nathan Filer
The French, it seems to me, strike a happy balance between intimacy and reserve. Some of this must be helped by the language, which lends itself to graceful expression even when dealing with fairly basic subjects.... And there's that famously elegant subtitle from a classic Western.COWBOY: "Gimme a shot of red-eye."SUBTITLE: "Un Dubonnet, s'il vous plait."No wonder French was the language of diplomacy for all those years.
Peter Mayle
We know one another. This is the present. There is no past and no future. Here I am washing my hands, and the cracked mirror shows me to myself, suspended as it were, in time; this is me, this moment will not pass. And then I open the door and go to the dining-room, where he is sitting waiting for me at a table, and I think how in that moment I have aged, and passed on, how I have advanced one step towards an unknown destiny.We smile, we choose our lunch, we speak of this and that, but - I say to myself-I am not she who left him five minutes ago. She has stayed behind. I am another woman, older, more mature…
Daphne du Maurier
He that has cut the claws of the lion will not feel quite secure until he has also drawn his teeth.
Charles Caleb Colton
The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.
Nancy Astor
…breaking the heart of someone you still love is a rare horror, not funny to anyone, except perhaps Satan…and even his pleasure would be spoiled by not having had a hand in it, by the dumb, wasteful accident of the thing. The Devil wants meaning just like the rest of us.
Glenn Duncan
You must learn to tell worry from thought and thought from prayer. Sometimes a light will go from your life, and a thought becomes a prayer til you are strong enough to stand under the weight of your own thought again.
Richard Llewellyn
How is something authorised as 'feng shui compliant' he wondered. Is there a Chinese Ministry of Magic?
Felix Long
Always think backwards before moving forwards
Benny Bellamacina
To lose someone you love is the very worst thing in the world. It creates an invisible hole that you feel you are falling down and will never end. People you love make the world real and solid and when they suddenly go away forever, nothing feels solid any more.
Matt Haig
For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.
D.H. Lawrence
Labels are devices for saving talkative persons the trouble of thinking.
John Morley
Get up,” she said. “Get up, my lord. If you do not have long, there is still much to do. You must not waste another day, another morning! Take hold of your life with both hands and crush it to you, my lord. You will not have another in this world.
Conn Iggulden
I couldn't stand the waiting anymore. I couldn't stand how alone it made me feel."And a part of you wished it would just end, said the monster, even if it meant losing her.And the nightmare began. The nightmare that always ended with -"I let her go," Conor choked out. "I could have held on but I let her go."And that, the monster said, is the truth."I didn't mean it, though!" Conor said, his voice rising. "I didn't mean to let her go! And now it's for real! Now she's going to die and it's my fault!"And that, the monster said, is not the truth at all.
Patrick Ness
It is a sad state of affairs that I donot know of any astronomer who fully understands the energy in their own daily environment. Untilthat changes, Dark Energy will always be a mystery to the astronomical community.
Steven Magee
Sometimes one must become something one fears or loathes in order for the greater self to survive.
Alex Lamb
I live not in myself, but I becomePortion of that around me: and to meHigh mountains are a feeling, but the humof human cities torture.
George Gordon Byron
She was no malleable, since frigid, substance upon which desires might be executed; she was not a true prostitute for she was the object on which men prostituted themselves.
Angela Carter
After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts – like a Chinese nest of boxes – oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front – in our ancestors, back and back until...
Walter de la Mare
Nernst was a great admirer of Shakespeare, and it is said that in a conference concerned with naming units after appropriate persons, he proposed that the unit of rate of liquid flow should be called the falstaff.
J.R. Partington