Quotes by British Authors - Page 69

Money has only a different value in the eyes of each.
William Makepeace Thackeray
I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.
Anthony Burgess
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
John Maynard Keynes
I was the climber of a sheer cliff, dragging myself on bleeding hands towards a summit that I'd never reach and sometimes didn't want to reach. The things I cared about were the hooks I'd driven into the rock face. Depression snapped them, one by one, one by one. My only certainty was the fall.
Alexis Hall
All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost. ...Each human soul has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation. Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.
G.K. Chesterton
There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows--in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain--in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine--it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt, and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction.
George Eliot
Don't Panic.
Douglas Adams
There’s little growth and progression without learning and reflection
Rasheed Ogunlaru
I had done all that I could, and no Man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little.
Samuel Johnson
If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know.
R.D. Laing
It all came back to human time and utterly human impulses: in the end, gods did not appreciate godlike power, but humans did.
Neal Asher
Her sleep was enlivened by several dreams. One where Professor Wanstead's bushy eyebrows fell off because they were not his own eyebrows, but false ones. As she woke again, her first impression was that which often follows dreams, a belief that the dream in question had solved everything. 'Of course,' she thought, 'of course!' His eyebrows were false and that solved the whole thing. He was the criminal.
Agatha Christie
Just remember, honey, you only have one heart.
Louise Bagshawe
The pools had been written onto the fields by the rain. The pools were a magic worked by the rain, just as the tumbling of the black birds against the grey was a spell that the sky was working and the motion of grey-brown grasses was a spell that the wind made. Everything had meaning.
Susanna Clarke
Explorers like to pretend that they are a select breed of people with iron nerve and an ability to endure terrible hardship.
Tahir Shah
I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.
Charles Dickens
I am back in London in a couple of days and looking forward to Sunday. Here is what we are doing. 1. Going to see my favourite mad transgender folk singer at the Roundhouse. 2. Then I am going to feed you tapas in a little place by Mornington Crescent. 3. Then we will go home in opposite directions and I will stare at my silent phone for weeks, wondering what happened. Or we will go for a dirty hump on Primrose Hill. Or maybe we will just have an awkward kiss/hug loaded with the promise of more next time.  
Lucy Robinson
When I got home, I seemed in a dream. My windows looked upon hers; I remained all the day looking at them, and all the day they were closed and dark. I forgot everything for this woman; I slept not, I eat nothing. That evening I fell into a fever, the next morning I was delirious, and the next evening I was DEAD!' 'Dead!' cried his hearers. 'Dead!' answered the narrator, with a conviction in his voice which words alone cannot give; 'dead as Fabian, the cast of whose dead face hangs from that wall!''Go on,' whispered the others, holding their breath.The hail still rattled against the windows, and the fire had so nearly died out, that they threw more wood on the feeble flame which penetrated the darkness of the studio and cast a faint light upon the pale face of him who told the story. ("The Dead Man's Story
James Hain Friswell
The sickened human is something to be experimented with.
Steven Magee
On the plus side, there were no rioters in sight but on the minus side this was probably because everywhere I looked was on fire.
Ben Aaronovitch
Shitting fucking bastard! Fuck off you massive cockwank!’ - Misty Meanor, during a particularly stressful encounter.
Matthew Sylvester
You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
Alain de Botton
We rehearse for the big death through the little death of orgasm, through erotic living. Death as transfiguration
Peter Redgrove
The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be. Every mouthful of food was an acute positive pleasure, now that it was truly their own food, produced by themselves and for themselves, not doled out to them by a grudging master. With the worthless parasitical human beings gone, there was more for everyone to eat. There was more leisure too, inexperienced though the animals were.
George Orwell
Jealousy, you know, is usually not an affair of causes. It is much more-how shall I say?-fundamental than that. Based on the knowledge that one's love is not returned. And so one goes on waiting, watching, expecting...that the loved one will turn to someone else.
Agatha Christie
And for all the richest and most successful merchants life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault of the worlds they'd settled on.
Douglas Adams
[In the Universe it may be that] Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth.
Stephen Hawking
From the first day I met her, she was the only woman to me. Every day of that voyage I loved her more, and many a time since have I kneeled down in the darkness of the night watch and kissed the deck of that ship because I knew her dear feet had trod it. She was never engaged to me. She treated me as fairly as ever a woman treated a man. I have no complaint to make. It was all love on my side, and all good comradeship and friendship on hers. When we parted she was a free woman, but I could never again be a free man.
Arthur Conan Doyle
None of these apparent sightings interested Hawksmoor, since it was quite usual for members of the public to come forward with such accounts and to describe unreal figures who took on the adventitious shape already suggested by newspaper accounts. There were even occasions when a number of people would report sightings of the same person, as if a group of hallucinations might create their own object which then seemed to hover for a while in the streets of London. And Hawksmoor knew that if he held a reconstruction of the crime by the church, yet more people would come forward with their own versions of time and event; the actual killing then became blurred and even inconsequential, a flat field against which others painted their own fantasies of murderer and victim.
Peter Ackroyd
Genius is independent of situation.
Charles Churchill
Stop your dreams from being dreams by turning them into reality.
Kayisha Thomas
One paid for one's knowledge with one's skin.
Rudyard Kipling
The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
Thomas Henry Huxley
The Bible changes your perspective on the people, events, and circumstances of your day.
Elizabeth George
Life becomes involuntary repetitive when you suffer from short term memory loss.
Steven Magee
Love is like the wild-rose briar Friendship is like the holly-tree. The holly is dark when the rose briar blooms But which will bloom most constantly?
Emily Brontë
Being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which psychoanalysis is powerless to bestow.
Sebastian Horsley
I just can't get with this idea that literature is a 12-step program. If someone wants to read a book to see good people get rewarded and the bad people get punished, essentially what they want is a fairy tale.
China Miéville
Where there is life, there will be magic; the one generates the other.
Kate Griffin
The pursuit of illusion is not about studying for prizes, or for study's sake. There's no right or wrong, no pass or fail.
Tahir Shah
If chess has any relationship to film-making, it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.
Stanley Kubrick
You'll never find a rainbow if you're looking down
Charlie Chaplin
...Goldfinger could not have known that high tension was Bond's natural way of life and that pressure and danger relaxed him.
Ian Fleming
I slept badly that night, my vivid dreams populated by ghosts. As much as it revived ailing spirits in day light, the fizzy energy of NY seemed to feed on human frailty at night.
Pete Townshend
If each side had been frankly contending for its own real wish, they would all have kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy; but just because the contention is reversed and each side is fighting the other side’s battle, all the bitterness which really flows from thwarted self-righteousness and obstinacy and from the accumulated grudges of the last ten years is concealed from them by the nominal or official "Unselfishness" of what they are doing or, at least, held to be excused by it.
C.S. Lewis
poetry is not—except in a very limited sense—a form of self-expression. Who on earth supposes that the pearl expresses the oyster?
Cecil Day-Lewis
This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.
Rachel Cusk
Perhaps a wiser eye than hers would be able to read tomorrow in tonight's stars, but where was the fun in that? It was better not to know. Better to be alive in the Here and the Now--in this bright, laughing moment--and let the Hours to come take care of themselves.
Clive Barker
Jealousy that dragon which slays love under the pretense of keeping it alive.
Havelock Ellis
Speech is the small change of silence.
George Meredith
his wife might, I verily believe, be the very happiest woman the sun shines on
Charlotte Brontë
Understanding why so many western women are giving birth to unnaturally large babies that either damage the birth canal or will not fit down it is one of the greatest challenges to modern medicine.
Steven Magee
There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.
J.K. Rowling
She ran a streak of foundation under each eye, highlighter down the bridge of her nose, and bronzer beneath each cheekbone—a layer of armor before battle. Because that’s what these parties were to her, a war on all the heartbreaking boys in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Jessica Taylor
This was the tricky bit. The really tricky bit, trickiness cubed.
Hugh Laurie
No man can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character.
John Morley
Because that's the truth about people with obsessively organised plans: we're not trying to control everything in our lives. We're trying to block everything we can't.
Holly Smale
Heaven is a place where you cannot change and nothing can ever happen, so the things you love are always eternal. Hell is exactly the same.
Geoff Ryman
Regret, Joss. Regret does awful things to a person.
Samantha Young
You're gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the gift of confidence. Either that or a scented candle
David Nicholls