Quotes by British Authors - Page 709

I thank the goodness and the grace Which on my birth have smiled And made me in these Christian days A happy Christian child.
Jane Taylor
With approximately 50% of the USA population on prescription drugs and 10% on anti-depressants, it is clear that things are going seriously wrong with human health in the modern world.
Steven Magee
If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
John Keats
Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution?
Richard Dawkins
We live in a society where those that do the greatest damage to humanity and nature reap the greatest financial rewards.
Steven Magee
Being here is such a contrast to where I’d otherwise be.
Fennel Hudson
The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.
G.K. Chesterton
I like to see an angry Englishman," said Poirot. "They are very amusing. The more emotional they feel the less command they have of language.
Agatha Christie
But when you have order, you don't need Gods. When everything is well ordered and disciplined then nothing is unexpected. If you understand everything,' I said carefully, 'then there's no room left for magic. It's only when you're lost and frightened and in the dark that you call on the Gods, and they like us to call on them. It makes them feel powerful, and that's why they like us to live in chaos.
Bernard Cornwell
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues. That is all.
Rebecca West
Now, money, for the night is coming. Money for my hair, money for my teeth, money for shoes that won't deform my feet (it's not so easy now to walk around in cheap shoes with very high heels), money for good clothes, money, money. The night is coming.
Jean Rhys
A man's capacity is the same as his breadth of vision.
Idries Shah
My heart was full of softening showers,I used to swing like this for hours,I did not care for war or death,I was glad to draw my breath.
Stevie Smith
If we are to climb that mountain, we had better find that molehill.
Anthony T.Hincks
I do not think it matters whether one agrees or not as long as one is forced to think.
Vanessa Bell
She could never take an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. The weak and flaccid parity would make her nearly puke. She wants an eye for a tooth, and a life for an eye.
Helen Zahavi
In a capitalist society there are always inequalities of class and wealth. People who inherit money and property will always see themselves as being superior to those who have to work for it.
Sally Wentworth
Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.
Douglas Adams
As I circled the room like a lion about to pounce, another animal, bordering on domestic fucking cat stepped behind Tyler and grabbed her by the waist for a dance. I thought she was going to tell him no thanks, like the others, but instead she looked at me challengingly and accepted the man’s advances.
Jaimie Roberts
It seems to me probably that any one who has a series of intolerable positions to put up with must have been responsible for them to some extent... they have contributed to it by impatience or intolerance or brusqueness-or some provocation.
Robert Hugh Benson
Everything that has existed, lingers in the Eternity.
Agatha Christie
The less said the better.
Jane Austen
The past can't be changed, can it? It can just be forgiven.
Elizabeth George
Suffering is sometimes cleansing,” said the man. His clothes were casual, but expensive. “It can purify."“It can also fuck you up,” said Shadow.
Neil Gaiman
After all, what more does a true genius want? The mind itself is the palace where all the real treasures, the works of art, the indulgences exist.
Alex Scarrow
All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Erol and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.
J.R.R. Tolkien
We are bidden to 'put on Christ', to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.
C.S. Lewis
I loved Emma.' The words, so flat and final, explode into the air. 'But she lied to me. I thought perhaps I could have the love without the lies. With you, I mean. Do you remember your application letter? How you talked about integrity and honesty and trust? That was what made me think it might work, that it might be better this time. But I've never loved you the way I loved her.
J.P. Delaney
Beneath that arch of unmoved and eternal lights: some, so remote from this little earth that the learned tell us it is doubtful whether their rays have been yet discovered it, as a point in space where anything is suffered or done: the shadows of the night were broad and black.
Charles Dickens
Change & transformation. That kind of magic.
Julia Green
...begged them as we read our literary texts, only to listen. To wrench open - it takes an effort of will - the portcullis to their teenage hearts for just a couple of hours once a week, to humbly admit another, and better - a Yeats or Shakespeare, a Crazy Jane or Hamlet - and to welcome them, to allow for those tiny spots of time some vibration in the jelly of being, that makes, once it has settled, a subtle new mould... Otherwise, I would observe tartly...you are merely going to become a product of your family, the few friends you might make and the few lovers you may garner...nothing more than a function of your upbringing - a type. Whereas, if you will only read, and listen, you will admit a multiplicity of voices and points of view, consider them with some humility, allow them gracious entrance however strident or discordant some of them may sound, then you will grow and change, and each of these voices will become a constituent part of who you become, an atom of growing being. It is literature and only literature than can do this.
Rick Gekoski
Wear your learning like your watch in a private pocket and do not pull it out and strike it merely to show that you have one.
Lord Chesterfield
...it struck her, this was tragedy-- not palls, dust, and the shroud; but children coerced, their spirits subdued.
Virginia Woolf
Now against the specialist, against the man who studies only art or electricity, or the violin, or the thumbscrew or what not, there is only one really important argument, and that, for some reason or other, is never offered. People say that specialists are inhuman; but that is unjust. People say an expert is not a man; but that is unkind and untrue. The real difficulty about the specialist or expert is much more singular and fascinating. The trouble with the expert is never that he is not a man; it is always that wherever he is not an expert he is too much of an ordinary man. Wherever he is not exceptionally learned he is quite casually ignorant. This is the great fallacy in the case of what is called the impartiality of men of science. If scientific men had no idea beyond their scientific work it might be all very well — that is to say, all very well for everybody except them. But the truth is that, beyond their scientific ideas, they have not the absence of ideas but the presence of the most vulgar and sentimental ideas that happen to be common to their social clique. If a biologist had no views on art and morals it might be all very well. The truth is that the biologist has all the wrong views of art and morals that happen to be going about in the smart set of his time.
G.K. Chesterton
Our children's won't learn Kurdish Language fluently if we don't tech them.
Davan Yahya Khalil
I'm really very sorry for you all, but it's an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.
W.S. Gilbert
When you realise the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge.
Idries Shah
All your life you look to America for those home-grown, corn-fed tits that the Yank bitches all sprout when they’re about fourteen – those bulging DDs that you wank about as a kid as you look longingly across the Atlantic, simultaneously repulsed and electrified – and then the greatest tits you’ve ever seen walk straight out of Giffnock (Glasgow, but you knew that, right?) and bounce their sweet way down to you via the Caledonian-sleeper train. I know they say America is finished, but Christ, when the Jock lassies are packing the premium chest meat, you know they aren’t kidding.
Matthew Selwyn
He knew more about the death of Lula Landry than he had ever meant or wanted to know; the same would be true of virtually any sentient being in Britain. Bombarded with the story, you grew interested against your will, and before you knew it, you were so well informed, so opinionated about the facts of the case, you would have been unfit to sit on a jury.
Robert Galbraith
I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone. How commonplace and stupid it would be if I had a friend now, sitting beside me, someone I had known at school, who would say: “By-the-way, I saw old Hilda the other day. You remember her, the one who was so good at tennis. She’s married, with two children.” And the bluebells beside us unnoticed, and the pigeons overhead unheard. I did not want anyone with me. Not even Maxim. If Maxim had been there I should not be lying as I was now, chewing a piece of grass, my eyes shut. I should have been watching him, watching his eyes, his expression. Wondering if he liked it, if he was bored. Wondering what he was thinking. Now I could relax, none of these things mattered. Maxim was in London. How lovely it was to be alone again.
Daphne du Maurier
Holiness was always something richly dim.
A.E. Coppard
What a huge inaccessible lumber-room of thought and experience we amounted to, I thought; how much we are, how little we transmit.
H.G.Wells
We think to dance, and dance in thought. But to hibernate in the mind, is to bring upon us an apocalypse of the Soul.
Ilyas Kassam
People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.
Thomas Hardy
We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green.
Geoff Dyer
It's a special form of scholarly neurosis,´ said Camel. `He's no longer able to distinguish between life and literature.´
David Lodge
It isn't a natural thing to keep on worrying about the morality of one's material prosperity. These are proclivities superinduced by modern conditions of the conscience. There is a natural resistance in every healthy human being to such distressful heart-searchings.
H.G.Wells
Sometimes, it is easier to leave things as they are, rather than to fight, go against the flow.
Renita D'Silva
Moderation is commonly firm and firmness is commonly successful.
Samuel Johnson
When a man can't sleep, he won't let anybody else sleep either. If he doesn't go off to dreamland the moment his head hits the pillow, he gets frightfully annoyed and won't stay in bed.
Carter Dickson
The great principle of out-of-door relief is, to give the paupers exactly what they don't want; and then they get tired of coming.
Charles Dickens
You remind me of a boy I used to knowSame Smile, same easy, laid-back styleAnd man, could he kissBlew my mind the very first timeHis lips touched mine.You remind me You remind me of a boy I used to like.Same eyes, strong arms, same open mindAnd man, could he danceArms around me, lost in a tranceI'd hear his heartYou remind meI'm scared of youHow did you find me?Turn and walk away'Cause you remind meYou remind me of a boy I used to loveSame laughter and tears, shared through the years And man, how he feltMade my bones more than meltHe touched my soul.You remind meI'm scared of youHow did you find me?Turn and walk away'Cause you remind me
Malorie Blackman
Matthew would not like this, she had said. He would have liked it even less had he know how much Strike had liked it.
Robert Galbraith
Poems are lenses, mirrors, and X-ray machines.
David Mitchell
Life is an open book as far as potential is concerned.
Steven Redhead
...any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul destroying.
Evelyn Waugh
My wife is a sex object - every time I ask for sex she objects.
Les Dawson
Work is a kind of vacuum, an emptiness, where I just switch off everything except the scant intelligence necessary to keep me going. God, the people are awful - great carved monstrosities from the sponge-stone of secondratedness. Hideous.
Philip Larkin
He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr. Ramsay would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure.
Virginia Woolf
Occupied in observing Mr. Bingley’s attentions to her sister, Elizabeth was far from suspecting that she was herself becoming an object of some interest in the eyes of his friend. Mr. Darcy had at first scarcely allowed her to be pretty: he had looked at her without admiration at the ball; and when they next met, he looked at her only to criticise. But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. To this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying. Though he had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness. Of this she was perfectly unaware: to her he was only the man who made himself agreeable nowhere, and who had not thought her handsome enough to dance with.
Jane Austen