Quotes by British Authors - Page 704

Windows 10 could only have been a worse experience if I had paid for it!
Steven Magee
To go back home was to play with impressions in this way, the way I played with the first pair of glasses I had, looking at a world now sharp and small and not quite real, now standard in size and real but blurred.
V.S. Naipaul
What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects--with their Christianity latent.
C.S. Lewis
I'm not sexist, I'd f**k both sexes equally if I was gay - John Blu
David Gallie
I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.
John Fowles
It’s hard not to be impatient with the absurdity of the young; they tell us that two and two make four as though it had never occurred to us, and they’re disappointed if we can’t share their surprise when they have discovered that a hen lays an egg. There’s a lot of nonsense in their ranting and raving, but it’s not all nonsense. One ought to sympathize with them; one ought to do one’s best to understand. One has to remember how much has to be forgotten and how much has to be learnt when for the first time one faces life. It’s not very easy to give up one’s ideals, and the brute facts of every day are bitter pills to swallow. The spiritual conflicts of adolescence can be very severe and one can do little to resolve them.
W Somerset Maugham
This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays
Douglas Adams
Life and light will not let me be.
Paula Hawkins
Learn to Open Your Heart and mind to the infinite wonder that exists for you in life.
Steven Redhead
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.
Emily Brontë
The Marquis sighed. "I thought it was just a legend," he said. "Like the alligators in the sewers of New York City."Old Bailey nodded, sagely: "What, the big white buggers? They're down there. I had a friend lost a head to one of them." A moment of silence. Old Naeiley handed the statue back to the Marquis. Then he raised his hand, and snapped it, like a crocodile hand, at the Carabas. "It was OK," gurned Old Bailey with a grin that was most terrible to behold. "He had another.
Neil Gaiman
He doesn't mind if he dies... indeed, he would like to die; but yet he fears to fall. He would welcome a long sleep; but not at the price of falling to it.
William Golding
It was like letting go and falling back into water and seeing yourself grinning up through the water, your face like a mask, and seeing the bubbles coming up as if you were trying to speak from under the water. And how do you know what it's like to try to speak from under water when you're drowned?
Jean Rhys
Listen. You know what it's like when you're in a room with the light on and then suddenly the light goes out? I'll show you. It's like this."He turns out the light.BLACKOUT
Harold Pinter
The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time?Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?
Jeanette Winterson
But time given to wishing for what can't be is not only spent, but wasted, and for all that we waste we shall be accountable.
Penelope Fitzgerald
To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
C.S. Lewis
Many governments employ torture but this was the first time that the element of Saturnalia and pornography in the process had been made so clear to me. If you care to imagine what any inadequate or cruel man might do, given unlimited power over a woman, then anything that you can bring yourself to suspect was what became routine in ESMA, the Navy Mechanics School that became the headquarters of the business. I talked to Dr. Emilio Mignone, a distinguished physician whose daughter Monica had disappeared into the precincts of that hellish place. What do you find to say to a doctor and a humanitarian who has been gutted by the image of a starving rat being introduced to his daughter's genitalia? Like hell itself the school was endorsed and blessed by priests, in case any stray consciences needed to be stilled.
Christopher Hitchens
Everything from the humble woodlouse to specks of dust moving through a ray of sunlight. Each tells a story.
Fennel Hudson
It's spider season. Every year, right about now, thousands of the godless eight-legged bastards emerge from the bowels of hell (or the garden, whichever's nearest) with the sole intention of tormenting humankind.
Charlie Brooker
Don't let the cares of the day interfere with living the life that you desire.
Steven Redhead
Projections' - attempts to blame all and sundry for my own past folly - will be found of no avail, and we must learn to withdraw them. None other is to blame for our body, home or circumstance, our friends and enemies, our job and place in the world. We made it all; let us accept and use and better it.
Christmas Humphreys
Where are Haldad my father, and Haldad my brother? If the king of Doriath fears a friendship between Haleth and those who have devoured her kin, then the ways of the Eldar are strange to Men.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The rose I gave you was an emblem of myheart,' said she; 'would you take it away andleave me here alone?' 'Would you give me your hand too, if I askedit?' 'Have I not said enough?
Anne Brontë
I've done everything. All of it. You think it, I've done it. All the things you never dared, all the things you dream about, all the things you were curious about and then forgot because you knew you never would. I did 'em, I did 'em yesterday while you were still in bed.What about you? When's it gonna be your turn?
Melvin Burgess
You can't even communicate in English. Real life is not a series of levels.
Sophie Kinsella
And I thought, I am in love. For the first time I am in love. And loved. Someone loves me. And I love them. And within me things clicked and whirled like the insides of some gigantic clock, cog against wheel, spring against spiral, tick against tock, and I knew that nothing would ever be the same again. I had shown someone what I really was. I had shown someone my truth, my secret. Out there, beyond the walls of the Castle, there was a boy who had seen inside my chrysalis. And I would never be safe again.
Philip Ridley
He had to be nice to me at the moment because he had to be surrounded by people. This was because boys like him were, essentially, pasta. Everyone thought they loved him because they had never been forced to experience the true blandness of him on his own.
Matthew Crow
I'm committed to seeing this project done. To see if within this decade we can finally hold in our hands the rule for our universe, and know where our universe lies in the space of all possible universes.
Stephen Wolfram
Who's got the last laugh now?If you will pardon the expression.
Anthony T.Hincks
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way
Alan W. Watts
No man can be a failure if he thinks he's a success; If he thinks he is a winner, then he is.
Robert W. Service
Bruce Wayne/Batman: A hero can be anyone, even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat on a young boy's shoulders to let him know that the world hadn't ended.
Christopher Nolan
My heart was in my mouth. I realised that I had no desire to know any more about her past. What was behind her made me feel sick, petrified. Only the future mattered now.
Ruth Ahmed
I never know," Harry called to Hagrid over the noise of the cart, "What's the difference between a stalagmite and a stalactite?""Stalagmite's got an 'm' in it," said Hagrid.
J.K. Rowling
Do you know that one of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas.
Margaret Thatcher
Replace worry with prayer. Make the decision to pray whenever you catch yourself worrying.
Elizabeth George
In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement.
Christopher Hitchens
But in truth, a general prohibition in a state may increase the sum of liberty, and a general permission may diminish it. It does not follow, as these people would have us believe, that a man is more free where there is least law and more restricted where there is most law.
H.G.Wells
We get no good by being ungenerous, even to a book, and calculating profits...so much help by so much reading. it is rather when we gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound, impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth--'tis then we get the right good from the book.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
Success is simply the wisdom born out of so called failures
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Each word's evocative value or virtue, its individual power of touching springs in the mind and of initiating visions, becomes a treasure to revel in. Besides this hold on affection a word may well have about it the glamorous prestige of high adventures in great company. Think of that the plain word "dust" calls to mind. "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was." "Dust hath closed Helen's eye." "All follow this and come to dust." "The way to dusty death." So, to the lover of words, each word may be not a precious stone only, but one that has shone on Solomon's temple or in Cleopatra's hair.
C.E. Montague
Progress is not one of those floating comparatives, so beloved of our friends in advertising, we need a context, a perspective. What are we better than? Who are we better than? Examine this statement: Most people are better off. Financially? socially? educationally? medically? spiritually? I dare not ask if you are happy? Are you happy?
Jeanette Winterson
Having something is not always better than not having it.
Beth Kempton
I don’t reckon it’s allowed, going round setting fire to people,” said Adam. “Otherwise people’d be doin’ it all the time.”“It’s all right if you’re religious,” said Brian reassuringly. “And it stops the witches from goin’ to Hell, so I expect they’d be quite grateful if they understood it properly.
Terry Pratchett
The present is not so glorious but that I should wish to dwell a little in the past.
Emmuska Orczy
The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know; our knowledge of our ignorance. For this indeed, is the main source of our ignorance - the fact that our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
Karl R. Popper
I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was diff
Jeanette Winterson
You don’t so much as become an atheist as find out that’s what you are. There’s no moment of conversion. You don’t suddenly think ‘I don’t believe this anymore.’ You essentially find you don’t believe it.
Christopher Hitchens
I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.
William Golding
By all means, become an abomination--but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.
Glen Duncan
A man is rich not only by what he has, but also, and above all, by what he doesn't.
Neel Burton
The universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. There is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.
Terry Pratchett
I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves, in all their unreason.
Angela Carter
True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.
Henry James
Sock Monsters Pay-It-Forward to offer hospitalized children a chance to smile, if only for a while!
Dalene Davies
Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude: and even in their choice of a grave will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man; thus, in a symbolic language universally understood, seeking (in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth)’ Humbly to expressA penitential loneliness.
Thomas de Quincey
The creative personality is always one that looks on the world as fit for change and on himself as an instrument for change. Otherwise, what are you creating for? If the world is perfectly all right the way it is, you have no place in it. The creative personality thinks of the world as a canvas for change and of himself as a divine agent of change.
Jacob Bronowski
I'm an atheist, and I don't have any belief in an afterlife. You could say that I'm resigned to the fact that this wonderful life that we get here is it. And having hit 60, it's a good time to get resigned to these things and not be too nervous or upset - and enjoy what great times one can have.
David Gilmour
There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them.
Nick Hornby