Quotes by British Authors - Page 703

At the departure gate, a drunken airport security woman was handing out box cutters to the passengers.
Warren Ellis
Presumably, a confused person would be too addled to recognize that he was confused. Ergo, if you know that you are not confused then you are not confused. Unless, it suddenly occurred to me--and here was an arresting notion--unless persuading yourself that you are not confused is merely a cruel, early symptom of confusion. Or even an advanced symptom. Who could tell? For all I knew I could be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusional state characterized by fear on the part of the sufferer that he may be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusional state. That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.
Bill Bryson
Scientists used to do an experiment whereby a dog’s repeated reward for performing a task was unaccountably replaced by punishment. The dog, knowing it would be penalized for doing well or doing badly, would become melancholic and inactive. This and other unforeseeable results were funded by taxing up to sixty percent of people’s earnings. People became strangely melancholic and inactive
Steve Aylett
She had expressed herself, as women will, in a smug broadside of pastel shades. Nothing clashed because nothing had the strength to clash; everything murmured of safety among the hues; all was refinement.
Mervyn Peake
Live large!!! In your mind, not in your body.
Jean Williams
Oh, this coming back to an empty house,' Rupert thought, when he had seen her safely up to her door. People - though perhaps it was only women - seemed to make so much of it. As if life itself were not as empty as the house one was coming back to.
Barbara Pym
Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people’s imagination.
Henry James
I do think that art that doesn't communicate is useless.
William Golding
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!
George Orwell
Happiness is like time and space--we make and measure it ourselves; it is a fancy--as big, as little, as you please; just a thing of contrasts and comparisons, like health or strength or beauty or any other good--that wouldn't even be noticed but for sad personal experience of its opposite!--or its greater!
George du Maurier
When the only exorcise you get is running for a bus, get more buses!
Benny Bellamacina
When I pray coincidences happen and when I don't they don't.
William Temple
I thought that love would last forever. But nothing is forever. Life is not forever. The only reliable permanence is change. Love hurts because change is painful. Love hurts because love lost is an assault on our ego. We fear that we will fail again and those who live in fear of failure slowly but inevitably fail.
Chloe Thurlow
Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
Rebecca West
I mix them with my brains sir.
John Opie
I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.
Julian Barnes
After so many years drifting, not connected to anything, I'm finally tethered. Safe and loved, in the middle.We start senior year like kings, like nothing can ever tear us apart.We're wrong.
Abigail Haas
No more let life divide what death can join together.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Storylines from fiction always seem inherently improbable to occur in real life, yet when we read them we are happy to suspend our disbelief, which may simply suggest that in our everyday lives we have an irrational craving for certainty and probability.
Guy Fraser-Sampson
How to distract Scorpius from difficult emotional issues? Take him to a library." - Albus Severus Potter
J.K. Rowling
The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
William Blake
Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
Alain de Botton
Sleep: the breakfast of champions
Dean Cavanagh
Body and soul can never be marriedI need to become who I already am and will bellow forever at this incongruity which has committed me to hell
Sarah Kane
There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss.
Jeanette Winterson
seven times down eight times up like the Daruma doll
Chris Bradford
Never let stress shape your strategy. Most women think better after a brisk walk, a light meal, a massage and a nap.
Barbara Taylor Bradford
Damson was also old enough to know that you can never rely on other people to act as you would in almost any circumstance.
Josa Young
But to demand that a work be “relatable” expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book or movie or play: she expects the work to be done for her. If the concept of identification suggested that an individual experiences a work as a mirror in which he might recognize himself, the notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism.
Rebecca Mead
England expects every man to do his duty.
Lord Horatio Nelson
It is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are they the result of previous study?
Jane Austen
No answer to prayer is an indication of our merit every answer to prayer is an indication of God's mercy.
John Blanchard
... I was perturbed by the suspicion that the anguish of love contemned was alloyed in her broken heart with the pangs, sordid in my young mind, of wounded vanity. I had not yet learnt how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere. how much baseness in the noble, nor how much goodness in the reprobate.
W Somerset Maugham
When I go to hell, I mean to carry a bribe: for look you, good gifts evermore make way for the worst persons.
John Webster
Homemaking is a passion you can pass on from generation to generation.
Elizabeth George
The day that I left my home, I had prayed that my children would forget me. I wanted to spare them the pain of remembering. But that night, as I crouched in the white mist, waiting, I knew more than anything that I wanted them to remember, I wanted desperately to go on living in someone's memory. If we are not remembered, we are more than dead, for it is as if we had never lived.
Karen Maitland
I get my share of mud flung my way, but the secret is to dance in the rain and the mud will wash away.
Philip Catshill
Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity
T.S Eliot
The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it and it will in turn look sourly upon you laugh at it and with it and it is a jolly kind companion.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Prior to Flew, major apologies for atheism were those of Enlightenment thinkers (David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Friedrich Nietzsche).Major philosophers of Flew’s generation who were atheists: W. V. O. Quine and Gilbert Ryle. But none took the step of developing book-length arguments to support their personal beliefs.In later years, atheist philosophers who critically examined and rejected the traditional arguments for God’s existence: Paul Edwards, Wallace Matson, Kai Nielsen, Paul Kurtz, J. L. Mackie, Richard Gale, Michael Martin. But their works did not change the agenda and framework of discussion the way Flew’s innovative publications did.
Antony Flew
Wealth consists not in having great possessions but in having few wants.
Esther de Wall
Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge
Jane Austen
What would it be like if I were free, not enslaved by my conditioning?
Aldous Huxley
Your readiest desire is your path to joy ... even if it destroys you.
Holbrook Jackson
Stories were migrants, blow-ins, border-crossers, tunnellers from France and Italy and more distant territories where earlier and similar stories had been passed on in Arabic and Persian and Chinese and Sanskrit.
Marina Warner
The pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity the optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
L. P. Jacks
Life has changed a lot, you know. You didn't used to get all this food inside food inside food when I was a girl. The other day I was eating a mushroom and found it had been stuffed with prawns. I've got so many misgivings over this crazy, Boy. It's flying in the face of nature. A mushroom is a woodland fungus and a prawn comes from the sea. People have got no business stuffing one inside the other.
Helen Oyeyemi
That not adhering to those notions Reason dictates (concerning the nature of God), has been the occasion of all superstition, and those innumerable mischiefs that mankind (on account of religion) have done to themselves or to one another.
Matthew Tindal
And it's hard to hate someone once you understand them.
Lucy Christopher
I may be stupid, as you say, to believe in honour and friendship and loyalty without price. But these are virtues to be cherished, for without them we are no more than beasts roaming the land.
David Gemmell
...when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.
Jane Austen
It used to be that a novel would put you among people, tell you a story or stories, give you some sense of what it might be like to see a different cut-out and perspective of the world: as a schoolteacher, an adulteress, the wife of a member of Parliament, an officer, a cockroach.
Michael Hofmann
The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'.
Richard Dawkins
The Kraken was somewhat obsessed with posture. As for Lily, she barely gave it a second thought. In her opinion it was better to read books than balance them. That’s what they were designed for, after all. And if you wanted to wear something on your head there was a perfectly good item designed for that too: it was called a hat.
Peter Bunzl
Yet perhaps even this view falls short of the truth. It is not simply that God has arbitrarily made us such that He is our only good. Rather, God is the only good of all creatures: and by necessity each must find its good in that kind and degree of the fruition of God which is proper to its nature. The kind and degree may vary with the creature's nature: but that there ever could be any other good is an atheistic dream. ... George Macdonald... represents God as saying to men, 'You must be strong with my strength and blessed with my blessedness for I have no other to give you.' That is the whole conclusion of the matter. God gives what He has, not what He has not: He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not. To be God - to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response - to be miserable - these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows - the only food that any possible universe can ever grow - then we must starve eternally.
C.S. Lewis
I consider that the chief dangers which confront the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, and heaven without hell.
William Booth
That's what gets converts these days," Baron said. "It's a buyers' market in apocalypse. What's hot in heresy's Armageddon.
China Miéville
When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more.
C.S. Lewis
I thought of Marius. Wild, wonderful, Byronic-fantasy Marius, who had somehow found something he wanted in the everyday quietness of me. Until he hadn't.
Alexis Hall
Incidentally, although the Cistercians did much to improve the quality of sheep, the animal remained much smaller than its modern descendants; as late as the early eighteenth century a sheep wasn't much bulkier than a Labrador Dog.
Clarissa Dickson Wright