Quotes by British Authors - Page 710

Digging through my roots to understand the way my branches grew.
Saleem Haddad
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
George Eliot
Keep your standards even when everyone around you is losing theirs.
Habeeb Akande
This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.
John Cleese
I think that's what we all want, in the end.To know that we left footprints when we passed by, however briefly.We want to be remembered.So remember us.Please.Remember us.
Mike A. Lancaster
The greatest influence over content was necessity--they had holes to fill on every page and jammed in any vaguely newsworthy string of words, provided it didn't include expletives, which they were apparently saving for their own use around the office.
Tom Rachman
I had a dream I was awake and I woke up to find myself asleep.
Stan Laurel
I often wondered how it would be to tramp off into the mountains and keep going until I was exhausted, then simply sink into the snow and fall asleep. Then the wolves could have me.To want to die in the forest and be eaten by wolves: another marker of incipient madness.
Patrick McGrath
When we're being mindful, we're paying attention to the present moment, deliberately and non-judgementally. When we're meditating, we're being mindful of a specific object, such as the sensation of the breath at the tip of our nostrils, for a sustained period of time.
David Michie
The new mathematics is a sort of supplement to language, affording a means of thought about form and quantity and a means of expression,more exact,compact, and ready than ordinary language. The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential facts of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world wide states that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write.
H.G.Wells
Myrtle shook her head. "I told myself that I was lucky," she said. "Your father never struck me, never drank and if he had mistresses he had the good grace to be discreet. He provided for me and my children, and yet I tried, year after year, to make myself his companion. The doors never opened, Faith. In the end I lost hope. Ah, but I cannot complain!" Myrtle swatted away the past with one delicate little hand. "It has made me what I am. When every door is closed, one learns to climb through windows. Human nature, I suppose.
Frances Hardinge
You cannot live with a paw in each world.
Erin Hunter
All men were born in the same way: no privilege existed that was not of man's own contriving.
Winston Graham
Expect poison from the standing water.
William Blake
We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?
George Eliot
My mother insured that a life of petty facts and dutiful farming was kept at bay by her passionate intensity, which nurtured the essential dreaminess of his nature
Josephine Hart
I do not know that Lady Glencora's heart was made of that stern stuff which refuses to change its impressions; but it was a heart, and it required food. To love and fondle someone, - to be loved and fondled, were absolutely necessary to her happiness. She wanted the little daily assurance of her supremacy in the man's feelings, the constant touch of love, half accidental half contrived, the passing glance of the eye telling perhaps of some little joke understood only between them two rather than of love, the softness of an occasional kiss given here and there when chance might bring them together, some half-pretended interest in her little doings, a nod, a wink, a shake of the head, or even a pout.
Anthony Trollope
Even the 'right to live'...extends no further than the right to protection against murder. Charity certainly will, morality possibly may, and public utility perhaps ought to add to this protection supererogatory provision for continuance of life; but it is questionable whether strict justice demands it.
George Saintsbury
If this man had not twelve thousand a year, he would be a very stupid fellow.
Jane Austen
We pledge to fight 'blue-sky thinking wherever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day.
Gavin Pretor-Pinney
There is no shortage of external inspiration. Open your eyes and look and you'll be dazzled by it. But it's nothing if you fail to see the magic, wonder and potential that resides within.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
I tell you I can't be bothered with things like that. I've got a soul above buttons.
George Orwell
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.
Winston S. Churchill
Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.
C.S. Lewis
I think there are two kinds of marriage," Ethel said thoughtfully. "One is a comfortable partnership, where two people share the same hopes and fears, raise children as a team, and give each other comfort and help." She was talking about herself and Bernie, Daisy realized. "The other is a wild passion, madness and joy and sex, possibly with someone completely unsuitable, maybe someone you don't admire or don't even really like." She was thinking about her affair with Fitz, Daisy felt sure. She held her breath: she knew Ethel was now telling her the raw truth. "I've been lucky. I've had both," Ethel said. "And here's my advice to you. If you get the chance of the mad kind of love, grab it with both hands, and to hell with the consequences.
Ken Follett
I'm not saying it's what I would have wanted. But don't you see? We fuck up our lives again and again and it's always our children who pick up the bill. We move on to new relationships, always starting over, always thinking we've got another chance to get it right, it's the kids from all these broken marriages who pay the price. They - my son, your daughters, all the millions like them - are carrying around wounds that are going to last a lifetime. It has to stop.
Tony Parsons
An English teacher at school once said to her, 'Alice, one thing I hope you never find out is that a broken heart hurts physically.' Nothing she has ever experienced has prepared her for the pain of this. Most of the time her heart feels as though it's waterlogged and her ribcage, her arms, her back, her temples, her legs all ache in a dull, persistent way: but at times like this the incredulity and the appalling irreversibility of what has happened cripple her with a pain so bad she often doesn't speak for days.
Maggie O'Farrell
You have to be a friend to have them.
J.M. Richards
‎She was not a little girl heart-broken about him; she was a grown woman smiling at it all, but they were wet smiles.
J.M. Barrie
By the time it came to the edge of the Forest, the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, “There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” But all the little streams higher up in the Forest went this way and that, quickly, eagerly, having so much to find out before it was too late.
A.A. Milne
Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.
C.S. Lewis
Our first point of discussion is the hunt. (...) My idea is to start the film with an image of the vixen locked out of her lair which has been plugged up. Her terror as she's pursued across the country. This is a big deal. It means training a fox from birth or dressing up a dog to look like a fox. Or hiring David Attenbrorough, who probably knows a few foxes well enough to ask a favour.
Emma Thompson
The greatest things to have can't be possessed, they exist within yet can be shared, like freedom, love, trust, integrity, fun, dreams, creativity, wisdom, peace.
Jay Woodman
What Caul liked most about Tom was his kindness. Kindness was not valued back in Grimsby, where the older boys were encouraged to torment the younger ones, who would grow up to torment another batch of youngsters in their turn. “Good practice for life,” Uncle said. “Hard knocks, that’s all the world’s about!” But maybe Uncle had never met anyone like Tom, who was kind to other people and seemed to expect nothing more than kindness in return.
Philip Reeve
If you make art, people will talk about it. Some of the things they say will be nice, some won’t. You’ll already have made that art, and when they’re talking about the last thing you did, you should already be making the next thing.If bad reviews (of whatever kind) upset you, just don’t read them. It’s not like you’ve signed an agreement with the person buying the book to exchange your book for their opinion.Do whatever you have to do to keep making art. I know people who love bad reviews, because it means they’ve made something happen and made people talk; I know people who have never read any of their reviews. It’s their call. You get on with making art.
Neil Gaiman
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.
Charles Darwin
Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.
C.S. Lewis
We are participatory beings who inhabit a participatory reality, seeking relationships that enhance our sense of what it means to be alive. In terms of dharma practice, a true friend is more than just someone with whom we share common values and who accepts us for what we are. Such a friend is someone with whom we share common values and who accepts us for what we are. Such a friend is someone whom we can trust to refine our understanding of what it means to live, who can guide us when we’re lost and help us find the way along a path, who can assuage our anguish through the reassurance of his or her presence.
Stephen Batchelor
...and for a great deal it seemed good to him, for in the music there were no flaws.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Now I am twenty-eight, and am in reality more illiterate than many schoolboys of fifteen. It is true that I have thought more, and that my day dreams are more extended and magnificent; but they want (as the painters call it) keeping; and I greatly need a friend who would have sense enough not to despise me as romantic, and affection enough for me to endeavour to regulate my mind.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.
Jane Austen
Our approach to reality, our sense of reality, cannot assume that the text of nature, the book of life, is a cryptogram concealing just a single meaning. Rather, it is an expanding riddle of a multiplicity of resonating images.
Peter Redgrove
Manners are the ability to put someone else at their ease...by turning any answer into another question.
Tina Brown
The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.
Banksy
So easy now that Elder Sister has explained to her what all young girls in houses are taught—that with care and meticulous acting and tears of pretended pain and fear, and the final modest telltale stains cautiously placed, a girl can, if necessary, be virgin ten times for ten different men.
James Clavell
Whenever a homeless person speaks to me in the USA, I always assume that I am speaking to a police officer and play along with the suspected charade.
Steven Magee
She exhaled curtly. ‘I’m a serryn. That’s all you see. I’m just something to be tortured, slain or sold off as a commodity. That’s hardly the most appealing of traits.’ ‘Tell your eyes that. Because you really shouldn’t look at me the way you do. No serryn has looked at me like that.
Lindsay J. Pryor
Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.
Cory Doctorow
We are not such fools as to pay for reading inferior books, when we can read superior books for nothing.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realise my good fortune and would never again forget it.
Tahir Shah
one should never assume anything
Dick Francis
Always remember rule #6... don't take yourself so damn seriously
Ben and Rosamund Zander
There is a wisdom of the head, and... there is a wisdom of the heart.
Charles Dickens
Fresh is best.
Die Booth
And what could the darkness be, other than humanity? This crushing, heavy mass of people who had no legitimate right to life. How many souls lived on earth now? Six billion? Seven? All of them like insects, crawling around on their hands and knees or slaughtering one another in pursuit of scraps. They were ignorant, they were cruel, they were the night that smothered the day. They did not deserve their existence.
Alexander Gordon Smith
Affraig’s eyes moved to the oak tree that towered above her, its branches like antlers against the white sky. Her gaze travelled up to the weathered web that hung from one of the higher boughs, the slender noose swinging inside. In her mind she saw herself weaving it while she chanted words against Malachy’s wrathful curse. She remembered the lord’s hand settling on her shoulder, the hiss of the fire,his breath on her neck and, outside, stars falling like fiery rain. Her gaze moved west towards Turnberry.Her memory clouded with thoughts of the earl, but as she thought of his son her mind cleared. The stars had been falling too on the night he was born. She remembered seeing Mars, full and red, a bloody eye winking in the black.
Robyn Young
But Shelley had a hyperthyroid face.
John C. Squire
Ever seen a two-year-old tattering around a garden? There might be a poison ivy, or rose bushes or hawthorne around the edges. There might be spades or secateurs lying on the lawn. The kid doesn't care. He just wants to play with all those brightly coloured things he sees. To him, the world is a safe place. And you might want to rush out and cut back all those sharp spiky plants so they can't hurt him, and you might want to clear away all those dangerous tools just in case, he picks them up and cut himself on them, but you know you shouldn't because if you keep doing that then he either will grow up thinking the can never hurt him, or he might go the other way, and think that everything is dangerous, and he should never go far from your side. So you just watch. And wait. And if he does get rush from the poison ivy or if he does cut his fingers off with the secateurs, then you get him to the hospital as quickly as you can, in the reasonably sure knowledge the he'll never make the same mistake again.
Andy Lane
Her definition of romance was absentminded intimacy, the way someone else's hand stray to your plate of food.I replied: no, that's just friendship; romance is always knowing exactly where that someone else's hands are. She smiled and said, there was a time I thought that way, too. But at the heart of the romance is the knowledge that those hands may wander off elsewhere, but somehow through luck or destiny or plain blind groping they'll find a way back to you, and maybe you'll be smart enough then to be grateful for everything that's still possible, in spit of your own weaknesses- and his.
Kamila Shamsie
I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished.
Olivia Laing