Quotes by British Authors - Page 691

Perhaps there is a beast...maybe it's only us.
William Golding
Everybody pretends to feel and tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first defined what picturesque beauty was. I detest jargon of every kind, and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning.
Jane Austen
If only i could get that under control then i feel like i could stay here a long time, watching the days leaking into the nights, swilling over the buildings, bleeding back again. I could lie and not think of anything but ways to describe the sky, the clouds, the light.
Gwendoline Riley
Don't kiss me", he said, looking into Natalie's eyes. There was a second's silence. "Let me kiss you. I'm old-fashioned that way.
Rowan Coleman
Attachment exerted an invisible but powerful pull on the child, just as heavenly bodies are connected by gravitational forces. But unlike gravity, attachment makes its presence known by a negative inverse square law: the further the attached person is from their secure base, the greater the pull of attachment. The 'elastic band' which constitutes the attachment bond is slack and imperceptible in the presence of a secure base. If the secure base becomes unreliable or the limits of exploration are reached, the bond tugs at the heartstrings.
Jeremy Holmes
The Happiest Man in The WorldThe French interpreter for the 14th Dalai Lama, former academic and dedicated meditator Matthieu Ricard, came into the spotlight in the field of neural science after being named “the happiest man in the world”. Naturally, there are many other men and women who demonstrate such equanimity, but the studies on his brain uncovered truly astonishing results. MRI scans showed that Matthieu Ricard and other serious long-term meditators (with more than 10,000 hours of practice each) were mentally, emotionally and spiritually fulfilled and displayed an abundance of positive emotions and equanimity in the left pre-frontal cortex of the brain. When talking about his mindfulness training, Matthieu Ricard said with humility that: “Happiness is a skill. It requires effort and time”.
Christopher Dines
You Englishmen,’ said Herr Wurter. ‘You are all the same. Wherever you are you behave as if you were at home and your word was law.
Derek Raymond
This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
Alan W. Watts
Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.
Robert Harris
I cannot read my own words,Lest I shed a tear,For all the aching memories,That I hold so very dear.
Anthony T.Hincks
Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. -The Subjection of Women
John Stuart Mill
The successful man is he who when he sees that no further certainty is attainable promptly decides on the most probable side as if he were completely sure it was right.
Mark Rutherford
We have a calling: a need to be close to Nature, where she may cleanse our souls and wash away the stresses of yesterday. It is emotional recompense for the cost of living.
Fennel Hudson
I'm not a psychopath, I'm a high-functioning sociopath. Do your research.
Arthur Conan Doyle
A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good but for neglecting his neighbor's.
Richard Whately
A Depressive?' 'Smiles in ballrooms, weeps in bedrooms. Ill in her head.' Olive tapped her temple. 'And here.' She touched her heart.
Jessie Burton
I couldn’t imagine leaving a child. Not because it was unthinkable, but because I couldn’t imagine having a child to leave.
V.T. Davy
Diets don't really work & can be destructive, but if you get healthy overall (mind, body, spirit) then your weight balances naturally.
Jay Woodman
Welcome back, Jem.
J.A. Belfield
But I couldn’t comprehend this making friends business. My friends had always made me.
Colin MacLaughlin
The English woman is so refined She has no bosom and no behind.
Stevie Smith
The secret of Sufism is that it has no secret at all'.
Idries Shah
The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.
Christopher Hitchens
Noble dragons don't have friends. The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive.
Terry Pratchett
Better to quarrel with a friend than to support enemies.
Idries Shah
Negativity is often looked upon [in the USA] as a kind of thought crime. Not since the advent of socialist realism has the world witnessed such pathological upbeatness.
Terry Eagleton
…numerical precision is the very soul of science, and its attainment affords the best, perhaps the only criterion of the truth of theories and the correctness of experiments.
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
To be honest one must be inconsistent.
H.G.Wells
A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The principles we live by in business and in social life are the most important part of happiness.
Harry Harrison
Dissembling was so large a part of middle-class life that honesty and frankness seemed the most devious stratagem of all. The most outright lie was the closest one came to truth.
J.G. Ballard
It's our version of "me" that causes us the most stress and heartache. Which is why it comes as a relief to discover that this version is as transient as a cloud in the sky. Focus on the cloud and the result is uncertain. Focus on the sky and we discover clarity.
David Michie
Ambition is all very well, my lad, but you must cloak it.
Jonathan Stroud
And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.
Neil Gaiman
The middle years caught between children and parents free of neither: the past stretches back too densely it is too thickly populated the future has not yet thinned out.
Margaret Drabble
Have you ever truly, keenly felt like you don't know who you are? Do you ever do something and think, Who is at the controls? Like some mad pilot has locked you out of the cockpit? I definitely do. I feel a kind of vertigo that makes me shake afterwards. I guess we all feel it when making a difficult-seeming choice, and sometimes you seriously don't know what you want because you don't know who you're supposed to be, or who you want to be. Physics, my first and second families, my philosophy degree, had all failed to help me answer that question. The former has led me to wonder whether I am one of an infinite number of Alices in multiple universes. A quantum fuck-up, which is someone who fucks up in every one of those universes but in different ways.
Olivia Sudjic
If through no fault of his own the hero is crushed by a bulldozer in Act II, we are not impressed. Even though life is often like this—the absconding cashier on his way to Nicaragua is killed in a collision at the airport, the prominent statesman dies of a stroke in the midst of the negotiations he has spent years to bring about, the young lovers are drowned in a boating accident the day before their marriage—such events, the warp and woof of everyday life, seem irrelevant, meaningless. They are crude, undigested, unpurged bits of reality—to draw a metaphor from the late J. Edgar Hoover, they are “raw files.” But it is the function of great art to purge and give meaning to human suffering, and so we expect that if the hero is indeed crushed by a bulldozer in Act II there will be some reason for it, and not just some reason but a good one, one which makes sense in terms of the hero’s personality and action. In fact, we expect to be shown that he is in some way responsible for what happens to him.
Bernard Knox
The journey not the arrival matters.
T.S Eliot
The world, I soon learned, held a different estimate: and I make no doubt, the world is very right in its view, yet believe also that I am not quite wrong in mine.
Charlotte Brontë
A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.
C.S. Lewis
Being in Harry Potter is like being in the Mafia. Once you are in, you are never really out.
Daniel Radcliffe
The sad part was that everything I said was true but I was going about the healing in entirely the wrong way. As I was to be taught later, you can’t heal the sick by force-feeding them with ideas they’re not ready to accept; you can’t cure people by the simple imposition of your will. It’s the power of the Holy Spirit that heals, not the power of a would-be wonder-worker trying to play God.
Susan Howatch
The history of mankind," said Dreed, "has been a history of betrayals, the perennial betrayal of the common man by the men he has trusted.""By the men the lazy, haphazard, childish oaf was too wilfully stupid to mistrust," said Bodisham. "The history of mankind from the very beginning has been a history of over-trusted trustees, corrupted by their unchecked opportunities.
H.G.Wells
I have to be alone very often. I'd be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That's how I re
Audrey Hepburn
And if, by the end [of this book], you reckon you might still disagree with me, then I offer you this: you'll still be wrong, but you'll be wrong with a lot more panache and flair than you could possibly manage right now.
Ben Goldacre
Holy mother of rectangles.
Dan Howell
Miss Dearheart gave him a very brief look, and shook her head. There was movement under the table, a small fleshy kind of noise and the drunk suddenly bent forward, colour draining from his face. Probably only he and Moist heard Miss Dearheart purr: ‘What is sticking in your foot is a Mitzy “Pretty Lucretia” four-inch heel, the most dangerous footwear in the world. Considered as pounds per square inch, it’s like being trodden on by a very pointy elephant. Now, I know what you’re thinking: you’re thinking, “Could she press it all the way through to the floor?” And, you know, I’m not sure about that myself. The sole of your boot might give me a bit of trouble, but nothing else will. But that’s not the worrying part. The worrying part is that I was forced practically at knifepoint to take ballet lessons as a child, which means I can kick like a mule; you are sitting in front of me; and I have another shoe . Good, I can see you have worked that out. I’m going to withdraw the heel now.’There was a small ‘pop’ from under the table. With great care the man stood up, turned and, without a backward glance, lurched unsteadily away.‘Can I bother you?’ said Moist. Miss Dearheart nodded, and he sat down, with his legs crossed. ‘He was only a drunk,’ he ventured.‘Yes, men say that sort of thing,’ said Miss Dearheart.
Terry Pratchett
I'll fall.''You wont fall.''I'll fall. I'll fall and I'll die.'As I said it, I could see it happening. The foot stepping on air, pulling the rest of my body with it, tree limbs breaking as I plummeted down. 'No,' he said, his voice assured, 'You'd never do that to me.
Kamila Shamsie
What interest hath this empty world in me? and what is there in it that may seem so lovely, as to entice my desires and delight from thee, or make me loth to come away? When I look about me with a deliberate, undeceived eye, methinks this world is a howling wilderness, and most of the inhabitants are untamed, hideous monsters. All its beauty I can wink into blackness, and all its mirth I can think into sadness ; I can drown all its pleasures in a few penitent tears, and the wind of a sigh will scatter them away (650).
Richard Baxter
There are no short cuts to Heaven only the ordinary way of ordinary things.
Vincent McNabb
I listen to people talking sometimes, that great river that is language, with all its undercurrents of grammar and nuance, and I wonder how we all learn so quickly to speak it, given that we begin when we are barely old enough to stand upright. I have no memory of finding it hard. Indeed, I have no memory of it at all.
Sarah Dunant
Patience is sorrow's salve.
Winston Churchill
LOGAN: ...Izzy could do whatever the hell she wanted. All she needed to do was not give a sh*t about fitting in.
Sam Crescent
Worship is an inward reverence, the bowing down of the soul in the presence of God.
Elizabeth George
We see nobody clearly. We see only the ghosts of absent others, and mistake for reality the fictions we construct from blueprints drawn up in early childhood. This is the problem.
Patrick McGrath
Some of my best ideas come from when I'm sitting on the toilet.
Anthony T.Hincks
Sometimes since I've been in the garden I've looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Money can't buy friends but you can get a better class of enemy.
Spike Milligan
Has this version of me been lurking there all along, somewhere deep below the surface, biding its time, waiting for its chance to make an appearance?
Cat Clarke
A real piece of writing is one in which the writer has tried to enrich not only the book, but also his understanding of the words. The words themselves have to be open to new ideas and suggestions, and the writer himself must have the audacity to attempt new things and to risk failure
Karl Wiggins