Quotes by British Authors - Page 714

Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,And has the nature of infinity.
William Wordsworth
Deep silence fell about the little camp, planted there so audaciously in the jaws of the wilderness. The lake gleamed like a sheet of black glass beneath the stars. The cold air pricked. In the draughts of night that poured their silent tide from the depths of the forest, with messages from distant ridges and from lakes just beginning to freeze, there lay already the faint, bleak odors of coming winter.("The Wendigo")
Algernon Blackwood
Maturity' really means: being very unsurprised by, and calm around, pain and disappointment.
Alain de Botton
You know your Bible too well and life too little.
Richard Llewellyn
Sing, then. Sing, indeed, with shoulders back, and head up so that song might go to the roof and beyond to the sky. Mass on mass of tone, with a hard edge, and rich with quality, every single note a carpet of colour woven from basso profundo, and basso, and baritone, and alto, and tenor, and soprano, and also mezzo, and contralto, singing and singing, until life and all things living are become a song.O, Voice of Man, organ of most lovely might.
Richard Llewellyn
I was never sure what possessed Guy and Teo, 2 alien princelings to land in Paris that day.
Sally Ann Melia
Susan stared at him.The blue glow in Death’s eyes gradually faded, and as the light died it sucked at her gaze so that it was dragged into the eye sockets and into the darkness beyond……which went on and on, for ever. There was no word for it. Even eternity was a human idea. Giving it a name gave it a length; admittedly, a very long one. But this darkness was what was left when eternity had given up. It was where Death lived. Alone.
Terry Pratchett
There are kisses and kisses, I am told, and this must have been quite the other sort from Millie's resonant signals of regard.
H.G.Wells
But I cannot love her as I did, because she is not open, because she withholds what matters, because she makes me, with her pride or her madness, live a lie.
A.S. Byatt
We must grant the artist his subject his idea his donnee: Our criticisms apply only to what he makes of it.
Henry James
Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.
Bill Bryson
I fear no bad angel, and have offended no good one.
Horace Walpole
The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls.
Wilkie Collins
What if there is no such thing as other people's wrongness..... ?
Jay Woodman
If he can't reach you he can't hit youIf he can't hit you he can't hurt you
Arun D. Ellis
Glenn could see I was bricking it and turned round to me as I sat there, gripping the armrests."You all right?" he said."I hate flying, Boss. I'm shitting myself.""Don't worry, Merse. It's going to be OK. We *won't* crash."I thought, "Thank God for that. Glenn's said we're going to be safe. Nothing's going to fuck with us now.
Paul Merson
It never took her long to darken any conversation, as from birth she was inclined to see misery in each and every story, and to fabricate some when there was none.
Elif Shafak
ScrapsThe scraps from the meal of the Emir are larger than the gifts of halwa from the merchant. Timur Fazil
Idries Shah
And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.
G.K. Chesterton
Friendship often ends in love but love in friendship - never.
Charles Caleb Colton
Ladies should also remember that gentlemen look more to the effect of a dress in setting off the figure and countenance of a lady than to its cost. Very few gentlemen have any idea the value of ladies' dresses. This is a subject for female criticism. Beauty of person and elegance of manners in women will always command more admiration from the opposite sex than beauty, elegance or costliness of clothing."The Scholars' Companion and Ball Room Vade MecumThomas Hillgrove, 1857
Thomas Hillgrove
What I feel now doesn't matter at all? But at what point am I entitled to say to myself, what I am feeling now is valid? After all, Anna-' Here Tommy turned to face her: 'one can't go through one's whole life in phases. There must be a goal somewhere.' His eyes gleamed out hatred; and it was with difficulty that Anna said: 'If you're suggesting that I've reached a goal, and I'm judging you from some superior point, then it's not true.''Phases,' he insisted. 'Stages. Growing pains.''But I think that's how women see-people. Certainly their own children. In the first place, there's always been nine months of not knowing whether the baby would be a girl or a boy. Sometimes I wonder what Janet would have been like if she'd been born a boy. Don't you see! And then babies go through one stage after another, and then they are children. When a woman looks at a child she sees all the things he's been at the same time. When I look at Janet sometimes I see her as a small baby and I feel her inside my belly and I see her as various sizes of small girl, all at the same time.' Tommy's stare was accusing and sarcastic, but she persisted: 'That's how women see things. Everything in a sort of continuous creative stream-well, isn't it natural we should?
Doris Lessing
The nature of a work of art is to be not a part, nor yet a copy of the real world but a world in itself, independent, complete, autonomous; and to possess it fully you must enter that world, conform to its laws, and ignore for a time the beliefs, aims, and particular conditions which belong to you in the other world of reality.
A.C. Bradley
I'm not lazy. I'm just really gifted, only instead of being good at music or math I'm good at sleeping late.
Elizabeth Jane Howard
The very fact that a Frenchman was prepared, after tow minutes of conversation, to be so friendly towards anyone, especially one who had come from England, made me restless.
Tahir Shah
To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.
Winston S. Churchill
Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.
Samuel Johnson
We’re making strange fictions of strange things inside ourselves.
Clive Barker
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
Winston S. Churchill
The function of advertising is simply to promote and sustain competitive advantage for brands.
John Hegarty
You can't do magic with books unless they're very special copies.
Jo Walton
apart from being suicidal I'm fine
jack harries
Listen to this. A bomb goes off downtown and the police arrest the Easter bunny, Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and Osama Bin Laden. They put them in an identity parade and have a witness try to point out the perpetrator. Who does she pick?"Joe said, "I don’t know.""Osama Bin Laden," the taxi driver said. "Because the other three don’t exist.
Lavie Tidhar
Perhaps the nearest one could get to a common characteristic of poststructuralism would be a radical suspicion of reason, order and certainty as governing principles of knowledge and existence...the absurd and the irrational can no longer be distinguished from the real and the rational
Margaret Maclure
Afterward, there was some debate as to whether we'd actually "done it properly," which gives you some idea of the awesome skill and artful dexterity of my lovemaking technique.
David Nicholls
It's because there are too many people who want to stop us having fun. That's the reason.
Alexander McCall Smith
The chief means of liberating women is replacing of compulsiveness and compulsion by the pleasure principle. Cooking, clothes, beauty, and housekeeping are all compulsive activities in which the anxiety quotient has long since replaced the pleasure or achievement quotient. It is possible to use even cooking, clothes, cosmetics and housekeeping for fun. The essence of pleasure is spontaneity. In these cases spontaneity means rejecting the norm, the standard that one must live up to, and establishing a self-regulating principle.
Germaine Greer
Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world.
Arthur C. Clarke
Make an enemy of certainty and befriend doubt. When you can change your mind, you can change anything.
Kevin Ashton
It is often wonderful how putting down on paper a clear statement of a case helps one to see not perhaps the way out but the way in.
Arthur Christopher Benson
As life speeds up & the political becomes ever more personal democracy continues to foster change as fast as the movement of tectonic plates
Dean Cavanagh
If you hate, you lose who you are.
Louisa Reid
Jesus. Low-Key Lyesmith," said Shadow. and then he heard what he was saying and he understood. "Loki," he said. "Loki Lie-smith.""You're slow," said Loki, "but you get there in the end." And his lips twisted into a scarred smile and the embers danced in the shadows of his eyes.
Neil Gaiman
I just don't get it. You've been in love with this bloke since you were a kid, and he's never once got his hair cut short enough that it doesn't poke him in the damn eye.
Kristina Adams
Death never mattered at those times - in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the wathchign her torch trail across to the opposite side of the common like the tail-light of a low car driving away.
Graham Greene
In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.
Zadie Smith
The ignorant frighten children with ghosts, and the better educated assure them there is no such thing. Our understanding may believe the latter, but our instincts believe the former; so that, out of this education, we retain the terror, and just believe enough to make it very troublesome whenever we are placed in circumstances that awaken it.
Catherine Crowe
I had to let someone know who I was: not merely Simon's assistant, his chronicler, his poor scribbling friend, but the great love of a great life. That I may have lived in his shadow, but I was always by his side. That I was as needful to him as air.
K.J. Charles
He began to realize what the criminal class knows so well, the impossibility of explaining anything to a man with power.
Graham Greene
...there is something very vital happening when we breathe—without it we die—but trying to speed it up, force it, grasp it, push it away or control it tends to get in the way. As in breathing, so in life—we can learn a lot from the natural rhythm, pace, and un-fussiness of the way breath continues its work, without making a big deal out of it.
Ed Halliwell
Dickens writes that an event, "began to be forgotten, as most affairs are, when wonder, having no fresh food to support it, dies away of itself.
Charles Dickens
Sex × Technology = the Future.
J.G. Ballard
In the old days he had clutched life with such violence that the juice of it ran out between his fingers and was lost, but now he would touch it delicately, thankful for the good and accepting the ills with patience.
Elizabeth Goudge
If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.
Douglas Adams
Our lives teach us who we are." I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own ... then you might as well be dead.
Salman Rushdie
Often I wished for someone to share my mind with; but their hearts were in little things, they would have thought me a dreamer, and I had to plan alone.
Mary Renault
(On period costume posture coaching:)"We all stand about like parboiled spaghetti being straightened out.
Emma Thompson
Oh she's alright it's just that - I don't want to get mixed up with anyone in the house. I don't want to get mixed up at all with anybody anymore.
Lynne Reid Banks
Improving upon nature is the very essence of plant breeding, and so it goes to the heart of one of the central debates of the human condition: the relationship between humanity and nature and the degree to which the human race has a right (or indeed a responsibility) to change plant life for its own ends.
Noël Kingsbury
Emily’s world fascinates and disturbs: in it you can touch thick Yorkshire speech, and moorland rain slants across your mind with a smell of mossy limestone and yet you are not at home, you might almost be in Gondal or Angria except the towers and the dungeons are of the spirit, the dungeons especially; and sometimes when Emily reads out in her low, almost guttural voice Charlotte wants to run but can’t think why or where she would run to.
Jude Morgan