Quotes by British Authors - Page 705

In my opinion, the state of mind of a community is always directly due to the influence of the man at the top.
Agatha Christie
Exposing corruption, brandishing truth.
Chris Cleave
To fish in troubled waters.
Matthew Henry
It is thus that man, with fervent imagination, can endue the rough stone with loveliness, forge the mis-shapen metal into a likeness of all that wins our hearts by exceeding beauty, and breathe into a dissonant trump soul-melting harmonies. The mind of man—that mystery, which may lend arms against itself, teaching vain lessons of material philosophy, but which, in the very act, shows its power to play with all created things, adding the sweetness of its own essence to the sweetest, taking its ugliness from the deformed.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Good and great are seldom in the same man.
Winston S. Churchill
And I pray one prayer--I repeat it till my tongue stiffens--Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you--haunt me, then!...Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!
Emily Brontë
People who have fallacious objectives are like the barren soil. The flowers grow from soil which is composed of the right objectives.
Idries Shah
Shall I ask you how the church is to be filled, if a man is neither to take orders with a living, nor without?
Jane Austen
Philosophy and religion - what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?
William Golding
Come on you target for faraway laughter. Come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!
Pink Floyd
It wasn't so much all the sex that robbed me of my moral bearings, but all the narcotics. I must say, there's something about opium that goes very well with lesbianism.
Alan Moore
Along the field as we came byA year ago, my love and I,The aspen over stile and stoneWas talking to itself alone.'Oh who are these that kiss and pass?A country lover and his lass;Two lovers looking to be wed;And time shall put them both to bed,But she shall lie with earth above,And he beside another love.'And sure enough beneath the treeThere walks another love with me, And overhead the aspen heavesIts rainy-sounding silver leaves;And I spell nothing in their stir,But now perhaps they speak to her,And plain for her to understandThey talk about a time at handWhen I shall sleep with clover clad,And she beside another lad.
A.E. Housman
Come over here and taste me,” he says, his voice little but a seductive whisper.
Felicity Brandon
Sixty years ago the idea of everyone having a telephone in their pockets was science fiction. Our whole way of life is science fiction, if you look at it from the past.
Sam Hawksmoor
Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.
C.S. Lewis
Well, here we are."Sometimes a statement of the bloody obvious was the only appropriate way forward. As if to give life ceremonious permission to proceed.
Michel Faber
Not to be with the one you love, Laura, the one person you should be spending your life with--it’s like a kind of living death. To wake up every morning and know you are still here. To have that brief, sweet moment of blankness, before your mind reminds you who you are, and why you are unhappy. It was like hell. A living hell of the heart’s own making.
Harriet Evans
Sometimes I wonder if the human race isn't collectively as mad as a sack of door knobs.
Jasper Fforde
Growth is the only evidence of life.
Cardinal Newman
I stared up at the sky and raised my middle finger, just in case God was watching. I don't like being spied on.
Annabel Pitcher
A full bosom is actually a millstone around a woman's neck. ... [Breasts] are not parts of a person but lures slung around her neck to be kneaded and twisted like magic putty or mumbled and mouthed like lolly ices.
Germaine Greer
I felt nothing change in the room, except the shock of my voice alone and the peculiar euphoria one feels in the wake of applause, feeling at once cheapened and triumphant.
Jessie Burton
Sacredness grew like a pearl, sometimes around the most unlikely bits of grit.
S.M. Stirling
This would have once been a place for contemplation. He looked up at the towers surrounding him. Many of the dead bodies had been removed. Their places had been taken by the living.
Rupert Thomson
The angry men know that this golden age (of fossil fuels) has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.
George Monbiot
By far the most significant consequence of "selfish capitalism" (Thatch/Blatcherism) has been a startling increase in the incidence of mental illness in both children and adults since the 1970s.
Oliver James
But first, on earth as vampire sent,Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent,Then ghastly haunt thy native place,And suck the blood of all thy race.There from thy daughter, sister, wife,At midnight drain the stream of life,Yet loathe the banquet which perforceMust feed thy livid living corse.Thy victims ere they yet expireShall know the demon for their sire,As cursing thee, thou cursing them,Thy flowers are withered on the stem.
George Gordon Byron
I'm so sorry. I think I'm just tired." The socially accepted excuse for being mental.
Lucy Ivison
The only simple truth is that there is nothing simple in this complex universe. Everything relates. Everything connects
Johnny Rich
When it comes to looking after all the species that are already endangered, there's such a lot to do that sometimes it might all seem to be too much, especially when there are so many other important things to worry about. But if we stop trying, the chances are that pretty soon we'll end up with a world where there are no tigers or elephants, or sawfishes or whooping cranes, or albatrosses or ground iguanas. And I think that would be a shame, don't you?
Martin Jenkins
I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man's place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.
Bertrand Russell
If Mary's blood is Spanish, at least it is royal. And at least she can walk straight and has control of her bowels.
Hilary Mantel
Numinous," Ursula said, breaking the silence eventually. "There's a spark of the divine in the world -- not God, er'er done with God, but something. Is it love? Not silly romantic love, but something more profound...""I think it's perhaps something we don't have a name for," Teddy said. "We want to name everything. Perhaps that's where we've gone wrong.""'And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.' Having dominion over everything has been a terrible curse."Afterwards -- because it turned out there was an afterwards for Teddy -- he resolved that he would try always to be kind. It was the best he could do. It was all that he could do. And it might be love, after all.
Kate Atkinson
As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.
Virginia Woolf
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
Aldous Huxley
So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.
Virginia Woolf
Sublime moments refracted,Even if only for seconds,Caught forever in your soul.
Scott Hastie
The brain. Where words mean something. The heart. Where words feel something. When both work together. Kaboom.
Jill Telford
Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology.' I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.
Graham Greene
It always gives me a shiver when I see a cat seeing what I can't see.
Eleanor Farjeon
After we bring food home from the grocery store...Dogs must think we are the greatest hunters ever!
Ann Taylor
Our natures own predilections and antipathies alike strange. There are people from whom we secretly shrink, whom we would personally avoid, though reason confesses that they are good people: there are others with faults of temper, &c., evident enough, beside whom we live content, as if the air about them did us good.
Charlotte Brontë
[Tolstoy] does not necessarily get rid of [his angry] temperament by undergoing religious conversion, and indeed it is obvious that the illusion of having been reborn may allow one's native vices to flourish more freely than ever, though perhaps in subtler forms.
George Orwell
We search for happiness across every landscape, if only we knew that the seed in which it first grows, is planted within ourselves...
Seja Majeed
Burn them all, little dragon.
Rhiannon Thomas
I have suffered from depression for most of my life. It is an illness.
Adam Ant
It oughtn't to need a war to make us talk to each other in buses, and invent our own amusements in the evenings, and live simply, and eat sparingly, and recover the use of our legs, and get up early enough to see the sun rise. However, it has needed one: which is about the severest criticism our civilization could have.
Jan Struther
What we often take to be the new is simply the old under some novel form.
Henry James
The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.
Samuel Gompers
But if one had everything one could ever need or want, what was left to dream of?
Mary Balogh
And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched him as he watched, gazing where he should not.
Emmanuelle de Maupassant
You either get the point of Africa or you don't. What draws me back year after year is that it's like seeing the world with the lid off.
A.A. Gill
Being under pressure is great, if it's all in the right place.
Benny Bellamacina
Unlike many other journeys, when it comes to finding self and matters of the heart you'll swiftly find yourself lost if you follow someone else's
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Before he'd met Anna, he'd thought he'd known what love was, thought he'd understood about friendship, romance, all o fit, but he hadn't - not at all. Until he'd held Anna in his arms, until he'd let her see his soul, until he'd heard her cry gently when he made love to her for the first time, he'd known nothing.
Gemma Malley
If you have bought the law enforcement department, then you have done nothing wrong when you willfully break multiple laws.
Steven Magee
He who foresees calamities suffers them twice over.
Beilby Porteous
What I really love about them... is the fact that they contain someone's personal history...I find myself wondering about their lives. I can never look at a garment... without thinking about the woman who owned it. How old was she? Did she work? Was she married? Was she happy?... I look at these exquisite shoes, and I imagine the woman who owned them rising out of them or kissing someone...I look at a little hat like this, I lift up the veil, and I try to imagine the face beneath it... When you buy a piece of vintage clothing you're not just buying the fabric and thread - you're buying a piece of someone's past.
Isabel Wolff
Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again.
Charles Dickens
Leaders are made when people discover and express their own authority. This is the powerful message of this book (Ascent: A Practising Managers Growth Mantra), spoken with honest insight by a man who has been there and done it himself. I know—Amit Chatterjee has been a student, colleague, and correspondent of mine for many years and now, with this book, he becomes my teacher too.
Jonathan Gosling