Quotes by British Authors - Page 713

It's one of the most serious things that can possibly happen to one in a battle - to get one's head cut off.
Lewis Carroll
My godfather sad that story was abut taking the chaotic jigsaw of life, making it into a picture and putting a frame around it so that we could look at it, have control over it. Story and art are the humanizing elements of us.
Emma Thompson
Life, how I have dreaded you," said Rhoda, "oh, human beings, how I have hated you! How you have nudged, how you have interrupted, how hideous you have looked in Oxford Street, how squalid sitting opposite each other staring in the Tube! Now as I climb this mountain, from the top of which I shall see Africa, my mind is printed with brown-paper parcels and your faces. I have been stained by you and corrupted. You smelt so unpleasant, too, lining up outside doors to buy tickets. All were dressed in indeterminate shades of grey and brown, never even a blue feather pinned to a hat. None had the courage to be one thing rather than another. What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order to get through one day, what lies, bowings, scrapings, fluency and servility! How you changed me to one spot, one hour, one chair, and sat yourselves down opposite! How you snatched from me the white spaces that lie between hour and hour and rolled them into dirty pellets and tossed them into wastepaper baskets with your greasy paws. Yet those were my life.
Virginia Woolf
There lives more faith in honest doubt Believe me than in half the creeds.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interests.
Aneurin Bevan
...this pattern of casual intrusion whereby women could be leered at, touched, harassed, and abused without a second though, was sexism: implicit, explicit, commonplace, and deep-rooted, pretty much everywhere you'd care to look.
Laura Bates
Man (and woman) has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. A human being may be clinically alive and yet, despite all appearances, spiritually dead.
Idries Shah
Faraday has the Cage, Tesla has the Coil and Magee has the Sandwich!
Steven Magee
And along with indifference to space, there was an even more complete indifference to time. "There seems to be plenty of it", was all I would answer when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time. Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course, have looked at my watch but my watch I knew was in another universe. My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration. Or alternatively, of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse.
Aldous Huxley
There is more to sex appeal than just measurements. I don't need a bedroom to prove my womanliness. I can convey just as much sex appeal, picking apples off a tree or standing in the rain.
Audrey Hepburn
Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.
Philip Pullman
If my attitude be on of fear, not faith, about the one who has disappointed me; if I say “Just what I expected,” if a fall occurs, then I know nothing of Calvary Love.
Amy Carmichael
I thought Mr. Millward never would cease telling us that he was no tea-drinker, and that it was highly injurious to keep loading the stomach with slops to the exclusion of more wholesome sustenance, and so give himself time to finish his fourth cup.
Anne Brontë
Start telling the stories that only you can tell. Because there will always be better writers than you, and there will always be smarter writers than you, and there will always be, you know, people who are much better at doing this or doing that, but you are the only you.
Neil Gaiman
To understand how to be healthy, a person must first comprehend sickness, disease and death.
Steven Magee
Sunshine is delicious rain is refreshing wind braces us snow is exhilarating there is no such thing as bad weather only different kinds of good weather.
John Ruskin
I looked at him nonplussed. I realized that I have spent so many years being on a diet that the idea that you might actually need calories to survive has been completely wiped out of my consciousness. Have reached point where believe nutritional ideal is to eat nothing at all, and that the only reason people eat is because they are so greedy they cannot stop themselves from breaking out and ruining their diets.
Helen Fielding
It is quite useless knocking at the door of heaven for earthly comfort. It's not the sort of comfort they supply there.
C.S. Lewis
What did it all mean? He thought of his own life, the high hopes with which he had entered upon it, the limitations which his body forced upon him, his friendlessness, and the lack of affection which had surrounded his youth. He did not know that he had ever done anything but what seemed best to do, and what a cropper he had come! Other men, with no more advantages than he, succeeded, and others again, with many more, failed. It seemed pure chance. The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.
W Somerset Maugham
He has all of the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
Winston Churchill
Reading is important.Books are important.Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)
Neil Gaiman
The human race has been set up. Someone somewhere is playing a practical joke on us. Apparently women need to feel loved to have sex. Men need to have sex to feel loved. How do we ever get started?
Billy Connolly
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.""But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.""Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Douglas Adams
A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.
Charles Darwin
We celebrate beauty in life and all its possibility so we open it up for others and at the same time for ourselves.
Jay Woodman
The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.
A.S. Byatt
People never fully confront their wrongdoing. They are all trying to push for their own ends, and they lack the strength to truly apologise for that. In my heart of hearts, I wondered if I was just the same.
Guy Mankowski
I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIENTIST, A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE IN EAST LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH. I AM A MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE FORSAKEN ALLAH, I'M NOT SURE. I HAVE A FRIEND—ARCHIE—AND OTHERS. I AM FORTY-NINE BUT WOMEN STILL TURN IN THE STREET. SOMETIMES. (3.81)
Zadie Smith
History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered.
China Miéville
I never said I liked coffee better than sex. I said I'd had it more.
Kevin Sinnott
They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. ~ on children growing up.
Zadie Smith
Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty shell, insensitive shell?
Mary Balogh
Three outstanding qualities make for success: judgement industry health. And the greatest of these is judgement.
William Maxwell Aitken
I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.
Jerome K. Jerome
Kissing Hugh was lovely. Glad I invented it. Can't rely on Austen for a snog, that's for sure.
Emma Thompson
Love is not blind that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound and the more it is bound the less it is blind.
G.K. Chesterton
You don't bless what you love...It's when you want to love and you can't manage it. You stretch out your hands and you say God forgive me that I can't love but bless this thing anyway...We have to bless what we hate...It would be better to love, but that's not always possible.
Graham Greene
If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways, what else can you be but the same old person?
Joe Abercrombie
The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilization of the Fabians.
Dean William R. Inge
Books will never die out as long as there are people around.
Anthony T.Hincks
Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.
Lewis Carroll
Cynicism is what passes for insight when courage is lacking.
Anita Roddick
Sometimes they threaten you with something - something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, "Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so." And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You WANT it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care is yourself.
George Orwell
The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.
Freya Stark
Your world may think what it chooses...but really, opinion and gossip count for nothing at all against truth...
Susan Hill
I felt like a disappointment. I believed I had let my family down. Clearly, I was a screw-up. I couldn’t do anything right. It seemed I hurt people without even trying. I didn’t know better, but obviously, that proved I was stupid. I was so blind to what I was saying …. These were the kinds of thoughts going through my mind. And that was my first experience with shame. Huge difference.
Stephen Lovegrove
While the Saint, when it was necessary to play the part, could assume an aspect of proud or unprincipled poverty that would evoke a responsive twang from any normal heartstring, his usual appearance, fortunately or unfortunately, suggested a person who was so far on the other side of having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth that he must have been seriously shocked when he first learned that gold spoons were not standard issue.
Leslie Charteris
You cannot have too many aconites. They cost, as I said before, about fifty shillings a thousand. A thousand will make a brave splash of colour, which lasts a month. If you can afford ten thousand, you are mad not to buy them. There are so many exciting places you can put them. . . in the hollow of a felled tree, by the border of a pond, in a circle round a statue, or immediately under your window, so that you can press your nose against the glass, when it is too cold to go out, and stare at them, and remember that spring is on its way.
Beverley Nichols
It is strange how easy it is to remember pain.
Eric Lomax
Choice of attention to pay attention to this and ignore that is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer.
W.H. Auden
To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius. And easier. Because it's true. It's a new world every heart beat.
Joyce Cary
I listened to the crashing thundering of a tiny tear tumbling like a wave down her beautiful face.
Craig Stone
Not everyone may not think the way you do.
Steven Redhead
The alphabet is where all our secrets begin.
Salman Rushdie
how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop.
Julian Barnes
When it comes to your self-esteem, it is best not to value the opinions of deluded psychopaths.
Rosen Trevithick
Nobody holds a good opinion of a man who has a low opinion of himself.
Anthony Trollope
The only way to get over the pain is to face it, embrace it, hug it and learn the lessons embedded within it.
Adele Theron
Gods, religions and national boundaries are absolutely imaginary. They don't tend to exist. As soon as you pull back half a mile and look down at the Earth there are no national boundaries. There aren't even national boundaries when you get down and walk around. They're just imaginary lines we draw on maps. I just get fascinated by people who assume that things that are imaginary have no relevance to their lives.
Neil Gaiman
What an odd thing it is to see an entire species -- billions of people -- playing with, listening to meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call 'music.' (-- The Overlords, from Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End)
Oliver Sacks