Quotes by British Authors - Page 711

The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.
G.K. Chesterton
if God spared not His own Son, how much less will He spare you!
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
...as the slow sea sucked at the shore and then withdrew, leaving the strip of seaweed bare and the shingle churned, the sea birds raced and ran upon the beaches. Then that same impulse to flight seized upon them too. Crying, whistling, calling, they skimmed the placid sea and left the shore. Make haste, make speed, hurry and begone; yet where, and to what purpose? The restless urge of autumn, unsatisfying, sad, had put a spell upon them and they must flock, and wheel, and cry; they must spill themselves of motion before winter came.
Daphne du Maurier
She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.
Thomas Hardy
All sorts of spiritual gifts come through privations if they are accepted.
Janet Erskine Stuart
So, what’s the status?” said Ira as he pulled himself down to his couch.“Will is turning into a starship,” Hugo replied, clearly only half in jest. “We’re about to watch history in the making.
Alex Lamb
Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.
Virginia Woolf
Happiness is not perfected until it is shared.
Jane Porter
Why didn't they ask the Evans?
Agatha Christie
How can we who are so weak in ourselves, so inferior in power to the enemies confronting us, bear up under our trials which are so numerous, so protracted, so crushing? We could not, and therefore Divine grace has provided for us an all-sufficient Helper. Without His aid we had long since succumbed, mastered by our trials. Hope looks forward to the Glory to come; in the weary interval of waiting, the Spirit supports our poor hearts and keeps grace alive within us.
Arthur W. Pink
The afternoon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby activity all that crowded mass of clothing, with its vague suggestions of drowned, mutilated and flattened humanity. Trunks without heads waved at you arms without hands; legs without feet kicked fantastically with collapsible flourishes; and there were long white garments, that taking the wind fairly through their neck openings edged with lace, became for a moment violently distended as by the passage of obese and invisible bodies. On these days you could make out that ship at a great distance by the multi-coloured grotesque riot going on abaft her mizzen-mast.
Joseph Conrad
Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.
R.D. Laing
You know, people can't fall in love with me just because I'm good at what I do.
Robert Plant
In the midst of aches in the joints, anxiety over the payment of bills, concern for the safety of those you love, envy of the rich, fear of robbers, dog-weariness at the end of a long day, and the unacceptable slipping away of youth, there does occasionally appear, like a ray of light piercing the clouds, a moment of joy. Perhaps you have entered the house and sat down before removing your boots. A friend has pressed a drink into your hands, and is telling you the latest news. You see from his face that he's glad you've come in; and you are glad too. Glad to be sitting down, glad of the warming glow of the dirnk, glad of your friend's furrowed brow and eager speech. For this moment, nothing more is required. It is in its way unimprovable. This is what I mean by the Great Enough.
William Nicholson
I realised with a prickle of discomfort why he bothered me: it was not so much that I resented the hearty backslapping bonhomie of English upper-class gentlemen, for I could tolerate it well enough in Sidney on his own. It was the way Sidney fell so easily into this strutting group of young men, where I could not, and the fear that he might in some ways prefer their company to mine. Once again, I felt that peculiar stab of loneliness that only an exile truly knows: the sense that I did not belong, and never would again.
S.J. Parris
If you make everything solely about money you end up with a very poor society.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
We dream because that's what life is.Anything else and it would be a nightmare.
Anthony T.Hincks
My father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret.
Evelyn Waugh
I was once asked to pick a couple of records for an interview I was doing on Radio 2. I picked one by Will Oldham and one by Joanna Newsome. Someone on the production phoned me to say that I couldn't have either record because they were 'too alternative' and I could just pick two from their playlist. Now, personally, I think that Radio 2's listeners would dig both Joanna Newsome and Will Oldham if they heard their records, and that the fact they don't get to hear them contributes to the cultural wasteland we live in. I told them that I'd been to see Joanna Newsome in the Albert Hall a couple of weeks before and it had been sold out. How could she be 'too alternative'? 'Alternative' and 'mainstream' aren't strictly to do with whether things are popular or minority interest. They are ideological labels. Someone like Joe Pasquale would be called 'mainstream' and regularly pops up on TV, but would play the smaller end of the touring-theatre circuit. If Joanna Newsome can sell out Albert Hall, why can't she get played on Radio 2? I would agree that it's because her work is too layered, challenging and interesting. Think about that. What you get to hear about is filtered, and not filtered to get rid of useless cunts like Joe Pasquale, but of things that might enrich your life.
Frankie Boyle
Please, God,' Ruth would pray, 'don't let me be competitive. Let me realize what a privilege it is to study. Let me remember that knowledge must be pursued for its own sake and please, please stop me wanting to beat Verena Plackett in the exams.'She prayed hard and she meant what she said. But God was busy that autumn as the International Brigade came back, defeated, from Spain, Hitler's bestialities increased, and sparrows everywhere continued to fall.
Eva Ibbotson
Good. Show me a man who thinks that he knows what 'good' is, and I will probably be able to show you a horror of a person. Show me a person who really knows what 'good' is, and I will show you that he almost never uses the word.
Idries Shah
He peeped in again to see why the music had stopped, and now he saw that Mrs. Darling had laid her head on the box, and that two tears were sitting on her eyes.'She wants me to unbar the window,' thought Peter, 'but I won't, not I!'He peeped again, and the tears were still there, or another two had taken their place.'She's awfully fond of Wendy,' he said to himself. He was angry with her now for not seeing why she could not have Wendy.The reason was so simple: 'I'm fond of her too. We can't both have her, lady.
J.M. Barrie
I walked back into the bedroom and, after all that, I actually was surprised. She lay on the bed, her hands nonchalantly behind her head, with the banana between her legs. Only half of it was alfresco. It was if we'd had sex and then, before heading for the bathroom, I'd bookmarked her vagina so as not to lose my place.
Frank Skinner
Now as to politeness... I would venture to call it benevolence in trifles.
Lord Chatham
The man who fails because he aims astray or because he does not aim at all is to be found everywhere.
Frank Swinnerton
...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
Lionel Shriver
But the living must fear death, or they would not struggle to stay alive.
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.
Thomas Hardy
Humility has to precede instruction.
Idries Shah
Nature is usually wrong.
James McNeill Whistler
The boy stood on the burning deck Whence all but him had fled The flame that lit the battle's wreck Shone round him o'er the dead.
Felicia D. Hemans
Perhaps it would be simpler if you just did what you're told and didn't try to understand things.
Terry Pratchett
How age enamels us, she would say. It builds up in layers and locks us inside our own skin, stopping us from breaking out, preventing the outside from burrowing in.
Rosie Thomas
From the standpoint of the upper classes, the system had many merits. They felt that what was paid out of the poor rate was charity, and therefore a proof of their benevolence; at the same time, wages were kept at starvation level by a method which just prevented discontent from developing into revolution...It was plainly the certainty, derived from the old Poor Law, that actual death would be averted by the parish authorities, which induced the rural poor of England to endure their misery patiently...it taught them respect for their 'betters'.While leaving all the wealth that they produced, beyond the absolute minimum required for subsistence, in the hands of the landowners and farmers. It was at this period that landowners built the sham Gothic ruins called 'follies', where they indulged in romantic sensibility about the past while they filled the present with misery and degradation.
Bertrand Russell
Friendships - and indeed most relationships - are measured in the closeness of hearts, minds and soul ties... not in the distance of physical miles or even the passing of time.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
All his life he would cherish the memory of an endless caravan of camels alongside the railway line, the laden beasts plodding patiently through the snow, ignoring the twentieth century as it hurtled past them in a clash of iron and a shriek of steam.
Ken Follett
Successful resistance to temptation may result in an increase of moral muscle, but that is because one is going to need it. A temptation resisted may become more, not less, fierce.
N.T. Wright
I don’t like being left for long struggling with my dangerous self.
Hanif Kureishi
Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.
C.S. Lewis
Life is but a memory Happened long ago. Theatre full of sadness For a long forgotten show.
Nick Drake
Another savage trait of our time is the disposition to talk about material substances instead of about ideas. The old civilisation talked about the sin of gluttony or excess. We talk about the Problem of Drink--as if drink could be a problem. When people have come to call the problem of human intemperance the Problem of Drink, and to talk about curing it by attacking the drink traffic, they have reached quite a dim stage of barbarism. The thing is an inverted form of fetish worship; it is no sillier to say that a bottle is a god than to say that a bottle is a devil. The people who talk about the curse of drink will probably progress down that dark hill. In a little while we shall have them calling the practice of wife-beating the Problem of Pokers; the habit of housebreaking will be called the Problem of the Skeleton-Key Trade; and for all I know they may try to prevent forgery by shutting up all the stationers' shops by Act of Parliament.
G.K. Chesterton
The brains of members of the Press departments of motion-picture studios resemble soup at a cheap restaurant. It is wiser not to stir them.
P.G. Wodehouse
I've got a very nice staff here. People with patience, you know, and good temper, and not too brainy, because if you have people who are brainy, they are bound to be very impatient.
Agatha Christie
They bewailed innocence maltreated, goodness persecuted, love bleeding, meekness about to die; but my heart has a deeper and more bitter cause to mourn. My sins were the scourges which lacerated those blessed shoulders, and crowned with thorn those bleeding brows: my sins cried “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” and laid the cross upon His gracious shoulders. His being led forth to die is sorrow enough for one eternity: but my having been His murderer, is more, infinitely more, grief than one poor fountain of tears can express.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I can’t imagine what other people think cold turkey is like. It is fucking awful. On the scale of things, it’s better than having your leg blown off in the trenches. It’s better than starving to death. But you don’t want to go there. The whole body just sort of turns itself inside out and rejects itself for three days. You know in three days it’s going to calm down. It’s going to be the longest three days you’ve spent in your life, and you wonder why you’re doing this to yourself when you could be living a perfectly normal fucking rich rock star life. And there you are puking and climbing walls. Why do you do that to yourself? I don’t know. I still don’t know. Your skin crawling, your guts churning, you can’t stop your limbs from jerking and moving about, and you’re throwing up and shitting at the same time, and shit’s coming out your nose and your eyes, and the first time that happens for real, that’s when a reasonable man says, “I’m hooked.” But even that doesn’t stop a reasonable man from going back on it.
Keith Richards
It's funny how things work out.Trouble is, I'm still not laughing.
Anthony T.Hincks
Though American scenery is destitute of many of those circumstances that give value to the European, still it has features, and glorious ones, unknown to Europe...the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness
Thomas Cole
It is strange people should be so greedy when they are alone in the world!
Emily Brontë
Sometimes, during the lonely hours on the control deck, Bowman would listen to this radiation. He would turn up the gain until the room filled with a crackling, hissing roar; out of this background, at irregular intervals, emerged brief whistles and peeps like the cries of demented birds. It was an eerie sound, for it had nothing to do with Man; it was as lonely and meaningless as the murmur of waves on a beach, or the distant crash of thunder beyond the horizon.
Arthur C. Clarke
Let’s prioritise here. At the risk of stating the obvious, this isn’t going to be easy. We need to find Norma as fast as we can, avoid the powerful demon that wants me as his slave, and then get the fuck out of Hell. I’m sure we’ll encounter some heinous, unthinkable, soul-scarring shit along the way, but hopefully we make it out alive.
Clive Barker
Do well and right and let the world sink.
George Edward Herbert
The less one has to do the less time one finds to do it in. One yawns one procrastinates one can do it when one will and therefore one seldom does it at all whereas those who have a great deal of business must buckle to it and then they always find time enough to do it.
Lord Chesterfield
It is a terrible, wretched thing to love someone whom you know cannot love you. There are things that are more dreadful. There are many human pains more grievous. And yet it remains both terrible and wretched. Like so many things, it is insoluble.
Naomi Alderman
Our brains are not capable of comprehending the infinite so, instead, we ignore it and eat cheese on toast.
Jonathan Cainer
Who apart From ourselves can see any difference between Our victories and our defeats?
Christopher Fry
Books, books, books!I had found the secret of a garret roomPiled high with cases in my father’s name;Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and outAmong the giant fossils of my past,Like some small nimble mouse between the ribsOf a mastodon, I nibbled here and thereAt this or that box, pulling through the gap,In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,The first book first. And how I felt it beatUnder my pillow, in the morning’s dark,An hour before the sun would let me read!My books!
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!
Lewis Carroll
After an Indian meal they went back to Jamie's flat and Tony did at least two things to him on the sofa that no one had ever done to him before then came back and them again the following evening, and suddenly life became very good indeed.
Mark Haddon
The waste of any resource is unnecessary and deplorable.
Steven Redhead
Jack looked around for understanding, but found only respect.
William Golding