Quotes by British Authors - Page 699

People feeling the need to live inside of Faraday cages is a sad reflection on modern society that humans are devolving into living inside of safe spaces.
Steven Magee
How could they have forgotten the importance of today’s date? My brain screamed at me as, with shaking fingers, I climbed the stairs to the bus, before making my way to the back, out of sight. My birthday, like the norm, happens on the same date every year. Therefore, the confused part of my brain argued, how could they have all simply forgotten this fact and acted so “normal” when I entered the kitchen this morning? They may have been abducted by aliens in the night? This was a voice from the incomprehensible area of my mind. Consequently, their behaviour would make complete sense then! Furthermore, answered another voice from the same ridiculous compartment, they could’ve simply gone to bed last night fine and then awoken the next morning with amnesia? Sometimes, these things happen unexpectedly. Adele Rose, Awakening.
Adele Rose
We're just two lost souls Swimming in a fish bowl, Year after year, Running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fears. Wish you were here.
Roger Waters
He that would pun would pick a pocket.
Alexander Pope
Anything she might have said died in her throat at the sight of him. His black hair was disheveled, his morning stubble hypnotic, and the rakish way his shirt was undone at the throat and his tie hung in abandoned disarray beneath the collar, was just plain panty-melting.I’m not wearing any panties.
Christina Phillips
Tut, tut, child!" said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.
Lewis Carroll
The ink was secret nectar, for Marin isn't married.
Jessie Burton
Do not dwell upon the sins and mistakes of yesterday so exclusively as to have no energy and mind left for living rightly today, and do not think that the sins of yesterday can prevent you from living purely today.
James Allen
We are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell.
Bruce Robinson
She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.
Clive James
Fox-terriers are born with about four times as much original sin in them as other dogs.
Jerome K. Jerome
If you can film an idea in your mind, follow that film idea shot for shot, scene for scene, that idea is worth making.
Craig Mapp
Obedience is a foundational stepping-stone on the path of God’s will.
Elizabeth George
Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living (...).
J.K. Rowling
A black cat crossed my path, and I stopped to dance around it widdershins and to sing the
Joanne Harris
Mother, before God," I say, my voice shaking with tears, "I swear that I have to believe that there is more for me in life than being wife to one man after another, and hoping not to die in childbirth!
Philippa Gregory
Polished brass will pass upon more people than rough gold.
Lord Chesterfield
He was top-heavy with conceit.
J.M. Barrie
We cannot control the mind by trying to force it to be peaceful or positive. Many have attempted this using a plethora of methods throughout the ages, but it simply does not work. Trying to fight the human mind is like walking into a lion’s den empty-handed and believing that you have a realistic chance of defending yourself.
Christopher Dines
It is a curious and painful fact that almost all the completely futile treatments that have been believed in during the long history of medical folly have been such as caused acute suffering to the patient. When anesthetics were discovered, pious people considered them an attempt to evade the will of God. It was pointed out, however, that when God extracted Adam's rib He put him into a deep sleep. This proved that anesthetics are all right for men; women, however, ought to suffer, because of the curse of Eve.
Bertrand Russell
As most real writers do, he wrote because he had something to say, not because of any specific ambition to be a writer.
James Hilton
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.
Doris Lessing
You don't even care enough about us to hate us, do you?
William Golding
I like looking nice, but I always put comfort over fashion. I don't find thin girls attractive; be happy and healthy. I've never had a problem with the way I loo. I'd rather have lunch with my friends than go to the gym.
Adele
And yet she was content to pair off with this dull young adventurer in the tarnished lace! It was, he supposed, the sort of thing to be expected of a sex that all philosophy had taught him to regard as the maddest part of a mad species.
Rafael Sabatini
Man unlike the animal has never learned that the sole purpose of life is to enjoy it.
Samuel Butler
I will honor my ancestors in StarClan, but not those who have ever walked in the Dark Forest. Guide my steps wisely, warriors of the past. And warriors of now.
Erin Hunter
The world we write is but a dappled expression of the one in which we live.
Virginia Crow
To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
George Orwell
Thou shalt wear trousers, but they shall fall half down to teach humility over arrogance.
Jay Woodman
As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
Alain de Botton
History warns us ... that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Good and evil both increase at compound interest.
C.S. Lewis
Conversation between Jem and Ethan on Sean:'"... Has it never occurred to you that maybe your brother brings out the worst in people?""Or the best," he said, "depending on which way you look at it.""You're as bad as he is.""Actually, I'm much worse.
J.A. Belfield
A man without enemies is a man without character.
David Gandy
Stories are just lies made to look like truth.
Johnny Rich
Your smile carries my heart away every time that I see you.
Anthony T.Hincks
There's nothing like a pack of mules to give one a sense of entourage.
Tahir Shah
To utter a word? no that will only heavy the air you breath, for your eyes speak more then your pretty mouth
William Brade
Hawaii was paradise, Milan was beautiful but New York was electric.
Lindsey Kelk
These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device - a means of summing up and making a knot of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads were there; still, if I stopped to disentangle, I could collect a number. But whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past.
Virginia Woolf
The Marxist analysis has got nothing to do with what happened in Stalin's Russia: it's like blaming Jesus Christ for the Inquisition in Spain.
Tony Benn
It is therefore scientifically correct to say that 'natural selection has been proved to be an agent of evolutionary change' - we can, in fact, prove it by doing. But it is totally illegitimate to claim that the discovery of this mechanism - natural selection - proves that the cause of evolution 'was automatic with no room for divine guidance or design'.
Ernst F. Schumacher
I was glad my father was an eye-smiler. It meant he never gave me a fake smile because it's impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren't feeling twinkly yourself. A mouth-smile is different. You can fake a mouth-smile any time you want, simply by moving your lips. I've also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it. So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you but his eyes stay the same. It's sure to be a phony.
Roald Dahl
The origins of Aragon's independent history, and of the fundamental characteristics which differentiated it so sharply from Castile, are to be found in the long struggle of medieval Spain against Islam. The Arabs had invaded the Iberian peninsula in 711, and conquered it within seven years. What was lost in seven years it took seven hundred to regain.
J.H. Elliott
The Women in Black are Israeli Jews who meet wall in Jerusalem. They meet every Friday, the Sabbath evening, and pray. They begin by singing Kaddish for all the Israelis killed in the fighting in Israel that week. When they are finished, they pause and read all the names. Then, they turn again to face the wall and sing Kaddish again, this time for all of Palestinians killed in the fighting that week, and they turn when they are finished and once again recite the litany of the names of those killed.
Megan McKenna
So it was in Botswana, almost everywhere; ties of kinship, no matter how attenuated by distance or time, linked one person to another, weaving across the country a human blanket of love and community. And in the fibres of that blanket there were threads of obligation that meant that one could not ignore the claims of others. Nobody should starve; nobody should feel that they were outsiders; nobody should be alone in their sadness.
Alexander McCall Smith
As for Fergus. He had a habit which Maud was not experienced enough to recognise as a common one in ex-lovers of giving little tugs at the carefully severed spider-threads or puppet-strings which had once tied her to him.
A.S. Byatt
She seemed out of place at the Fairweather. Too posh, as Susan said. Too well dressed. She never strolled along the shore or went bathing or brought a picture postcard. She just sat on the veranda all day with a book she never read, gazing out to sea. Probably wondering why on earth she came here. Susan had said. She looks as if she'd be more at home in Monte Carlo. I know- she's lost all her money gambling and she's waiting for the sea to warm up before she throws herself in. I hope she remembers to pay her bill first.
Vivien Alcock
The future though imminent is obscure.
Winston Churchill
the supposedly intelligent are often too quick to judgewhen really all that's needed is loveand understandingbut try not to judge them in return because they will often judge themselves even more harshlywhich is so sad in a world that's already so full of pain that hugsand forgiveness should be called forevery single day
Jay Woodman
When nations grow old the Arts grow coldAnd commerce settles on every tree
William Blake
While differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.
Karl R. Popper
The man who wishes to know the "that" which is "thou" may set to work in any one of three ways. He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and, by a process of "dying to self" --- self in reasoning, self in willing, self in feeling --- come at last to knowledge of the self, the kingdom of the self, the kingdom of God that is within. Or else he may begin with the thous existing outside himself, and may try to realize their essential unity with God and, through God, with one another and with his own being. Or, finally (and this is doubtless the best way), he may seek to approach the ultimate That both from within and from without, so that he comes to realize God experimentally as at once the principle of his own thou and of all other thous, animate and inanimate.
Aldous Huxley
For thirty minutes I sat back and felt the glimmer of pride that historically precedes the most catastrophic falls.
Antony John
a Nepali outlook, pace and philosophy had prevented us being swamped by our problems. In Nepal it was easier to take life day by day.
Jane Wilson-Howarth
History will always repeat itself, because it makes for good reading. It doesn't have to be truthful or factual, just entertaining with the odd fact thrown in for good measure.
Anthony T.Hincks
But maybe all it needs is a moment to change the course of history.
Sally Gardner
During the Reformation and the Enlightenment, nature came to be understood in a mechanistic sense as bereft of any capacity for divine grace or revelation. We’ll explore this suggestion further in the next chapter. In order to appreciate the significance of this, we have to recognize that nature is a cultural construct. When we speak of nature, we are using language to describe the world around us with all its species, life-forms and landscapes. But nature is a concept whose meaning changes with different perceptions and ways of looking at the world. This means that supernatural is also a concept which has different meanings, for it refers to phenomena or experiences which do not seem to fit within our particular expectations of what nature is or should be. The term supernatural therefore depends on a certain concept of what natural is. For many people who are less determinately materialist than Dawkins, there may be an indeterminate region which is neither strictly natural nor strictly supernatural. A red rose may be natural, but when I am given one by the person I love, I experience a range of emotions, memories and associations which endow that rose with symbolic significance and make it, in some sense, supernatural. It transcends its natural biological functions to communicate something in the realms of beauty, hope and love.
Tina Beattie
I recalled that inward sensation I had experienced: for I could recall it, with all its unspeakable strangeness. I recalled the voice I had heard; again I questioned whence it came, as vainly as before: it seemed in ME--not in the external world. I asked was it a mere nervous impression--a delusion? I could not conceive or believe: it was more like an inspiration. The wondrous shock of feeling had come like the earthquake which shook the foundations of Paul and Silas's prison; it had opened the doors of the soul's cell and loosed its bands--it had wakened it out of its sleep, whence it sprang trembling, listening, aghast; then vibrated thrice a cry on my startled ear, and in my quaking heart and through my spirit, which neither feared nor shook, but exulted as if in joy over the success of one effort it had been privileged to make, independent of the cumbrous body.
Charlotte Brontë