Quotes by British Authors - Page 706

Revolution was never sparked by political philosophy. It has ever been the price of bread that shakes the pillars of the world. Yet they lock up the thinkers and leave the bakers free.
Rod Duncan
If you're going to play it out of tune, then play it out of tune properly.
Mark E. Smith
A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time then I know it can't be much good.
T.S Eliot
Characters begin as your children and become your teachers.
Chloe Thurlow
He is as good as anybody in this parish! He is very particular, too, about going to church-yes, he is!''I am afeard nobody ever saw him there. I never did, certainly.''The reason of that is,' she said eagerly, 'that he goes in privately by the old tower door, just when the service commences, and sits at the back of the gallery. He told me so.'This supreme instance of Troy's goodness fell upon Gabriel's ears like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock. It was not only received with utter incredulity as regarded itself, but threw doubt on all the assurances that had preceded it.
Thomas Hardy
The selection and following of a spiritual guide is the most important duty of a Sufi.
Idries Shah
in our age there is no such thing as " keeping out of politics " all issues are political issues , and politics itself is a mass of lies , evasions , folly , hatred and .
George Orwell
He wondered if he should try to talk to the boy like that. Perhaps the boy wondered why he didn't. But they had silence, and not many people had that.
Nick Harkaway
Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.
C.S. Lewis
...as if Hollywood were the name of the enchanted forest where you loose yourself and find yourself, again; the wood that changes you; the wood where you go mad; the wood where the shadows life longer than you do.
Angela Carter
When there hasn't been anything there, nothing can be said to have vanished from the place where it has not been.("Out Of The Deep")
Walter de la Mare
In this place you could not feel anything, except pain and the foreknowledge of pain.
George Orwell
You are in favour of the common people?” said Dragon mildly.The common people?” said Vimes. “They’re nothing special. They’re no different from the rich and powerful except they’ve got no money or power. But the law should be there to balance things up a bit. So I suppose I’ve got to be on their side.
Terry Pratchett
Merrick and I had both had tattoos, my magpie and his elephant and castle, imposed on us as…it’s a long story. A reward, or apology, or both, from the Dragon Head, or grand master, of one of the larger criminal organisations in China after we accidentally saved his son’s life.”“Accidentally?”“It’s a VERY long story.
K.J. Charles
Unhealthy relationships keep our self-esteem low.
Sam Owen
Badness is only spoiled goodness.
C.S. Lewis
In the new quiet I heard the sea as if my ears were laid against the ocean floor. I could hear everything. The rumbling earthquake of a ship and spider crabs moving between weeds.
Deborah Levy
This rose is not so fragrant as a summer flower, but it has stood through hardships none of them could bear: the cold rain of winter has sufficed to nourish it, and its faint sun to warm it; the bleak winds have not blanched it, or broken its stem, and the keen frost has not blighted it. Look, Gilbert, it is still fresh and blooming as a flower can be, with the cold snow even now on its petals.
Anne Brontë
I am an acquired taste.
W.S. Gilbert
When he told me that he would fight forever, I knew that he would have to be defeated.
Philippa Gregory
Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.
C.S. Lewis
I do not need drugs to be a genius, do not take a genius to be human, but I need your smile to be happy.
Charlie Chaplin
I have known some quite good people who were unhappy but never an interested person who was unhappy.
A.C. Benson
What tale do you like best to hear?' 'Oh, I have not much choice! They generally run on the same theme - courtship; and promise to end in the same catastrophe - marriage.
Charlotte Brontë
By now, at the end of a sloping alley, we had reached the shores of a vast marsh. Some unknown quality in the sparkling water had stained its whole bed a bright yellow. Green leaves, of such a sour brightness as almost poisoned to behold, floated on the surface of the rush-girdled pools. Weeds like tempting veils of mossy velvet grew beneath in vivid contrast with the soil. Alders and willows hung over the margin. From where we stood a half-submerged path of rough stones, threaded by deep swift channels, crossed to the very centre.("The Basilisk")
R. Murray Gilchrist
Other translations may engage the mind, but the King James Version is the Bible of the heart.
David Norton
I'm never getting a tattoo. My secrets are etched safely on the inside and I intend to keep them there.
Lisa O'Donnell
But you're like me,” he says. “An outsider. Different. A freak. We're both weird, which is why we get along.
Darren Shan
Contemporary writers use animal-transformation themes to explore issues of gender, sexuality, race, culture, and the process of transformation...just as storytellers have done, all over the world, for many centuries past. One distinct change marks modern retellings, however, reflecting our changed relationship to animals and nature. In a society in which most of us will never encounter true danger in the woods, the big white bear who comes knocking at the door [in fairy tales] is not such a frightening prospective husband now; instead, he's exotic, almost appealing.Whereas once wilderness was threatening to civilization, now it's been tamed and cultivated; the dangers of the animal world have a nostalgic quality, removed as they are from our daily existence. This removal gives "the wild" a different kind of power; it's something we long for rather than fear. The shape-shifter, the were-creature, the stag-headed god from the heart of the woods--they come from a place we'd almost forgotten: the untracked forests of the past; the primeval forests of the mythic imagination; the forests of our childhood fantasies: untouched, unspoiled, limitless.Likewise, tales of Animal Brides and Bridegrooms are steeped in an ancient magic and yet powerfully relevant to our lives today. They remind us of the wild within us...and also within our lovers and spouses, the part of them we can never quite know. They represent the Others who live beside us--cat and mouse and coyote and owl--and the Others who live only in the dreams and nightmares of our imaginations. For thousands of years, their tales have emerged from the place where we draw the boundary lines between animals and human beings, the natural world and civilization, women and men, magic and illusion, fiction and the lives we live.
Terri Windling
Never dismiss anyone's value until you know him.
Susan Cooper
She was wise enough to hold her tongue. As this is the only instance known of a Woman's ever having done so, it was judged worthy to be recorded here.
Matthew Lewis
Love gives insight, Maggie, and insight often gives foreboding. Listen to me, let me supply you with books; do let me see you sometimes, be your brother and teacher, as you said at Lorton. It is less wrong that you should see me than that you should be committing this long suicide.
George Eliot
God, no. I don’t want to tame her, I want to watch her. I just want to watch her be herself – it turns me on like nothing else.
Dianna Hardy
Jesus told them, "God is like the dad who couldn't stop loving his boy, And people are like the son who said, "Does my dad really want me to be happy?" Jesus told people this story to show them what God is like. And to show people what they are like. So they could know, however far they ran, however well they hid, however lost they were- it wouldn't matter. Because God's children could never run to far, or be too lost, for God to find them.
Sally Lloyd-Jones
When the first living thing existed, I was there waiting. When the last living thing dies, my job will be finished. I'll put the chairs on the tables, turn out the lights and lock the universe behind me when I leave.
Neil Gaiman
... there is something revolting about the way girls' minds so often jump to marriage long before they jump to love. And most of those minds are shut to what marriage really means.
Dodie Smith
You must admit I have a right to live in a pigsty if I want.
Diana Wynne Jones
Lost Cactus is a cornucopia of sights, sounds and inhabitants completely foreign to a little squirrel like Sammy, but attempting to set him straight will only complicate matters.
John Hopkins
9/11 forced us to build another identity, to look deep and say who are we and what do we believe and is killing in the name of Islam part of that religion?No. No. No.
Ruth Ahmed
The world would be a sadder place without stories.
David Gemmell
In a justly ordereduniverse, where loss of equipoise would mean total destruction, individual responsibility must be absolute.
James Allen
So why in the name of Merlin’s saggy left —”“Don’t talk to your mother like that.
J.K. Rowling
I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart for so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time.
A.A. Milne
It was a beautiful summer afternoon, at that delicious period of the year when summer has just burst forth from the growth of spring; when the summer is yet but three days old, and all the various shades of green which nature can put forth are still in their unsoiled purity of freshness.
Anthony Trollope
Mourning is not forgetting. ... It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the dust.
Margery Allingham
Clothes don't make a man. They only make an impression and even then, you dress to suit the occasion.
Anthony T.Hincks
The successful cannot be unhappy -- it was a contradiction in terms.
Barry Unsworth
If you stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you.
Cory Doctorow
The clock had been Sylvie's, and her mother's before that. It had gone to Ursula on Sylvie's death and Ursula had left it to Teddy, and so it had zigzagged its way down the family tree......The clock was a good one, made by Frodsham and worth quite a bit, but Teddy knew if he gave it to Viola she would sell it or misplace it or break it and it seemed important to him that it stayed in the family. An heirloom. ('Lovely word,' Bertie said.) He liked to think that the little golden key that wound it, a key that would almost certainly be lost by Viola, would continue to be turned by the hand of someone who was part of the family, part of his blood. The red thread.
Kate Atkinson
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved. Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
Bertrand Russell
Altitude sickness, unregulated drugs and medical gas enabled workers to become drug abusers/addicts
Steven Magee
So that's little Scorpious. Make sure you beat him in every test, Rosie. Thank god you've inherited your mother's brains.
J.K. Rowling
Our Constitution’s separation of church and state never meant that religion could have nothing to do with the governing of our nation. The Founders simply intended that the United States would not have an established state religion and that no one could be sanctioned by the state for being of the wrong faith. Separation of church and state does not mean, as many people inside government believe today, that religion can never be discussed when investigating a threat or interrogating a suspect. And it definitely does not mean that a subject under surveillance as a threat to American lives cannot be recorded or otherwise monitored when he steps into a mosque. If someone is suspected of being a terrorist, it matters not whether he steps into a mosque, a church, or a temple; he is still a threat and should be treated as such.
Sebastian Gorka
I sleuth, you know. For a hobby. Harmless outlet for natural inquisitiveness, don't you see, which might otherwise strike inward and produce introspection an' suicide. Very natural, healthy pursuit -- not too strenuous, not too sedentary; trains and invigorates the mind.
Dorothy L. Sayers
All seems infected that the infected spy as all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.
Alexander Pope
Shall any gazer see with mortal eyes,Or any searcher know by mortal mind,Veil after veil will lift--but there must be Veil upon veil behind.
Edwin Arnold
The only path of escape he could conceive as yet for Lady Harman lay through the chivalry of some other man. That a woman could possibly rebel against one man without the sympathy and moral maintenance of another was still outside the range of Mr. Brumley's understanding. It is still outside the range of most men's understandings -- and of a great many women's.
H.G.Wells
She toyed around with his smiles and emotions, till they actually turned plastic. And then, She changed the toy…
Douglas Self
This was the sort of thing that happened to persons of this sort, sensitives, who fought the world and always, in the end, let it win, because there was a lot more taste to defeat than to victory.
Malcolm Bradbury
Esoteric things progress not according to time, but by activity, they can be slow or quick, depending upon the efforts made.
Belsebuub