Quotes by British Authors - Page 698

[Religious belief is] outmoded and ridiculous. [Belief in gods was a] worn out but once useful crutch in mankind's journey towards truth. We consider the time has come for that crutch to be abandoned.It is a vacuous answer... To say that 'God made the world' is simply a more or less sophisticated way of saying that we don't understand how the universe originated. A god, in so far as it is anything, is an admission of ignorance. thundered over the horizon and in a few decades of observation and thought . . . arrived at an answer.I regard teaching religion as purveying lies. I came here today to de-corrupt you all.
Peter Atkins
The difference between virtuality and life is very simple. In a construct you know everything is being run by an all-powerful machine.Reality doesn't offer this assurance, so it's very easy to develop the mistaken impression that you're in control.Quellcrest FalconerEthics on the Precipice
Richard K. Morgan
If you are uninterested in what I say, there's an end to it. If you like what I say, please try to understand which previous influences have made you like it. If you like some of the things I say, and dislike others, you could try to understand why. If you dislike all I say, why not try to find out what formed your attitude?
Idries Shah
Philip looked incredulously at the tiny bundle in Johnny’s arms. He reached out a hand tentatively, and lifted a corner of the blanket. He saw a wrinkled pink face, an open toothless mouth and a little bald head—a miniature of an aging monk.
Ken Follett
I call education, not that which smothers a woman with accomplishments, but that which tends to consolidate a firm and regular system of character; that which tends to form a friend, a companion, and a wife. I call education not that which is made up of the shreds and patches of useless arts, but that which inculcates principles, polishes taste, regulates temper, cultivates reason, subdues the passions, directs the feelings, habituates to reflection, trains to self-denial, and, more especially, that which refers all actions, feelings, sentiments, tastes, and passions, to the love and fear of God.
Hannah More
Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.
George Orwell
Waddya want me to do? through my sling shot at him?
Shirley Hughes
There were details like clothing, hair styles and the fragile objects that hardly ever survive for the archaeologist—musical instruments, bows and arrows, and body ornaments depicted as they were worn. … No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely.
Mary Leakey
Killing a pig for a good old fry-up is one thing. But there’s no excuse for being cruel, even if you’re a bored teenage kid.
Ozzy Osbourne
Also – for there had been more than a few migrants aboard, yes, quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands’ genitalia, a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British Government had cast its ever-reasonable doubts – mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home.
Salman Rushdie
You've a good heart. Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it's not.
Neil Gaiman
The curly red lines across the African deserts had the fascination of a magnet, and I hoped fervently that the pioneers who were writing their names over the blank spaces, would leave just one small desert for me.
Rosita Forbes
Oh, I am so sick of the young men of the present day!” exclaimed she, rattling away at the instrument. “Poor, puny things, not fit to stir a step beyond papa’s park gates: nor to go even so far without mama’s permission and guardianship! Creatures so absorbed in care about their pretty faces, and their white hands, and their small feet; as if a man had anything to do with beauty! As if loveliness were not the special prerogative of woman—her legitimate appanage and heritage! I grant an ugly woman is a blot on the fair face of creation; but as to the gentlemen, let them be solicitous to possess only strength and valour: let their motto be:—Hunt, shoot, and fight: the rest is not worth a fillip. Such should be my device, were I a man.
Charlotte Brontë
I don't care if you fall off your broom as long as you catch the Snitch first.
J.K. Rowling
There seemed to be no one in a position of power, from the Vatican to Wall Street, from Parliament to Scotland Yard to Fleet Street, who could think of anything better to do than abuse it....
Edward St. Aubyn
I said 'I was imagining you as a little boy, and as a teenager, and as an old man.'He said: 'I was looking at you and thinking how young you look, and how old at the same time.
Gwendoline Riley
We should have just killed him, that's a lesson, don't get creative with revenge
China Miéville
Quite rapidly Etta became acquainted with the realities of poverty in one of its loneliest forms -- that of the poor middle-class girl looking for a job. Only youth can engage in this struggle and survive as a vital human entity. For the other ones it is death, death of the spirit, because the pittance, the bit of bread and drink, the wisp of clothing, the flicker of fire must be begged of Business, not even as charity, but as a gracious boon in exchange for the best waking hours. It is always your money _and_ your life. Not that Business is intelligently ruthless, don't think it. Business is like a huge cretin, scuffing its great feet over the flower-beds of life while it thinks itself the most wonderful puffing billy, self-invented into the bargain.
Richard Aldington
Proudly buck the trend. Dare to be different.
Fennel Hudson
Destiny's what you make of it. You have to face whatever life throws at you.
Darren Shan
I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.
Jerome K. Jerome
It would be desirable if every government when it comes to power should have its old speeches burnt.
Philip Snowden
The wretchedness of being rich is that you live with rich people.
Logan Pearsall Smith
When African slave Phillis Wheatley wrote poetry, 18 men came to assess whether that was possible.
Jacky Fleming
It could be kindness. Faith felt hollow at the thought. She had needed kindness before, and has received none. Now it was too late, and she did not know what to do with it.
Frances Hardinge
Faith - The most precious asset you can build up for all generations.
Christian Hunt
If fate means you to lose give him a good fight anyhow.
William McFee
You have everything inside you, though you sometimes only recognise certain bits relating to the current stage of your path.
Jay Woodman
I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.
Lawrence Durrell
The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
Sydney J. Harris
Here now in his triumph where all things falter, Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,As a god self-slain on his own strange altar, Death lies dead.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. 'Anything,' he thinks, 'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and--in the shape of rich men--is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as 'smart' hotels.
George Orwell
The white policeman was a man who gave an impression of heaviness. It wasn't that he was fat, but he sagged as if with a moral or psychic burden; his shoulders sagged, his eyes sagged, his suit sagged and he sat sagged in his chair, as if his disappointments with the world were bearing down on him. He made it clear that Shahid was one of these disappointments.
John Lanchester
I believe Western culture -- rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. -- is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation.
Mark Steyn
Got your fingerprints as evidence all on my bodyPut your right hand on the book and you were found guiltyI can’t wait forever but that’s how it’s gonna beFor me they’ll never beCase Closed
Little Mix
...[Y]ou cannot successfully navigate the future unless you keep always framed beside it a small clear image of the past.
Jan Struther
The wonder of life is infinite, yet most fail to comprehend this.
Steven Redhead
To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity.
C.S. Lewis
Falling in love is one of the activities forbidden that tiresome person the consistently reasonable man.
Sir Arthur Eddington
Arthur shook his head and sat down. He looked up.“I thought you must be dead …” he said simply.“So did I for a while,” said Ford, “and then I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks. I kept myself amused all that time jumping in and out of a gin and tonic.
Douglas Adams
That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all.
Nick Hornby
One of the most beautifully disturbing questions we can ask, is whether a given story we tell about our lives is actually true, and whether the opinions we go over every day have any foundation or are things we repeat to ourselves simply so that we will continue to play the game. It can be quite disorienting to find that a story we have relied on is not only not true - it actually never was true. Not now not ever. There is another form of obsolescence that can fray at the cocoon we have spun about ourselves, that is, the story was true at one time, and for an extended period; the story was even true and good to us, but now it is no longer true and no longer of any benefit, in fact our continued retelling of it simply imprisons us. We are used to the prison however, we have indeed fitted cushions and armchairs and made it comfortable and we have locked the door from the inside.The imprisoning story I identified by the time the entree was served was one I had told myself for a long time. “In order to write I need peace and quiet and an undisturbed place far from others or the possibility of being disturbed. I knew however, that if I wanted to enter the next creative stage, something had to change; I simply did not have enough free space between traveling, speaking and being a good father and husband to write what I wanted to write. The key in the lock turned surprisingly easy, I simply said to myself, “What if I acted as if it wasn’t true any more, what if it had been true at one time, but now at this stage in the apprenticeship I didn’t need that kind of insulation anymore, what if I could write anywhere and at any time?” One of the interesting mercies of this kind of questioning is that it is hard to lose by asking: if the story is still true, we will soon find out and can go back to telling it. If it is not we have turned the key, worked the hinges and walked out into the clear air again with a simple swing of the door.
David Whyte
The lamp hummed:'Regard the moon,La lune ne garde aucune rancune,She winks a feeble eye,She smiles into corners.She smoothes the hair of the grass.The moon has lost her memory.A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,Her hand twists a paper rose,That smells of dust and old Cologne,She is aloneWith all the old nocturnal smellsThat cross and cross across her brain."The reminiscence comesOf sunless dry geraniumsAnd dust in crevices,Smells of chestnuts in the streets,And female smells in shuttered rooms,And cigarettes in corridorsAnd cocktail smells in bars.
T.S Eliot
Sober or blotto, this is your motto: keep muddling through.
P.G. Wodehouse
Only by fully experiencing fear, can you ever hope to control it.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
George Eliot
Loneliness makes us more capable of true intimacy if ever better opportunities do come along. We might be isolated for now, but we'll be capable of far closer, more interesting bonds with anyone we do eventually locate. 
Alain de Botton
Share too much and someone can hurt you.
Dorothy Koomson
The purr is very important. It's the purr that does it every time. It's the purr that makes up for the Things Under the Bed, the occasional pungency, the 4 a.m. yowl. Other creatures went in for big teeth, long legs or over-active brains, while cats just settled for a noise that tells the world they're feeling happy.
Terry Pratchett
I'm in the back of a limousine with Charlie Chaplin and it’s 1928. Charlie is beautiful; his body language seems to skip, and reel and rhyme, heartbreaking and witty at the same time. It seems to promise a better world.
Geoff Ryman
We are ready to despair too soon, we are ready to say, ‘What’s the good of doing anything?’ Hope is the virtue we should cultivate most in this present day and age.
Agatha Christie
A stolen kiss is not easily returned.
Idries Shah
and then the chosen lie would pass into the permanent records and become truth
George Orwell
How different this world to the one about which I used to read, and in which I used to live! This is one peopled by demons, phantoms, vampires, ghouls, boggarts, and nixies. Names of things of which I knew nothing are now so familiar that the creatures themselves appear to have real existence. The Arabian Nights are not more fantastic than our gospels; and Lempriere would have found ours a more marvelous world to catalog than the classical mythical to which he devoted his learning. Ours is a world of luprachaun and clurichaune, deev and cloolie, and through the maze of mystery I have to thread my painful way, now learning how to distinguish oufe from pooka, and nis from pixy; study long screeds upon the doings of effreets and dwergers, or decipher the dwaul of delirious monks who have made homunculi from refuse. Waking or sleeping, the image of some uncouth form is always present to me. What would I not give for a volume by the once despised 'A. L. O. E' or prosy Emma Worboise? Talk of the troubles of Winifred Bertram or Jane Eyre, what are they to mine? Talented authoresses do not seem to know that however terrible it may be to have as a neighbour a mad woman in a tower, it is much worse to have to live in a kitchen with a crocodile. This elementary fact has escaped the notice of writers of fiction; the re-statement of it has induced me to reconsider my decision as to the most longed-for book; my choice now is the Swiss Family Robinson. In it I have no doubt I should find how to make even the crocodile useful, or how to kill it, which would be still better.("Mysterious Maisie")
Wirt Gerrare
We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.
Jon Ronson
What they prefer to that is to find someone to have power over; someone to own and to bully, to smash and to waste. She wondered if she would ever be in love.
Gwendoline Riley
In the aftermath, she (Misty) still felt as though she were floating and as Leone shifted back from her she leant over him, silver-grey eyes bright with emotion, and whispered, ‘I died and went to heaven the day I found you.’ A wolfish grin of appreciation slashed his wide, sensual mouth. ‘Are you sure you’re feeling all right? You don’t sound at all like yourself.’ ‘Enjoy it while it lasts,’ she advised, happiness flooding through her as he curved her close and pressed a slow, sweet kiss to her reddened mouth. ‘I didn’t realise I’d found heaven until I stumbled into hell,’ Leone traded feelingly.
Lynne Graham
A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
Cyril Connolly
Complaining is a complete waste of one's energy. Those who complain the most accomplish the least.
Robert Tew
Yet there be certain times in a young man’s life, when, through great sorrow or sin, all the boy in him is burnt and seared away so that he passes at one step to the more sorrowful state of manhood
Rudyard Kipling