Quotes by British Authors - Page 716

One should not confuse creativity with whining.
Silvia Hartmann
Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.
Alan W. Watts
I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been born in God's thought, and then made by God is the dearest, grandest, and most precious thing in all thinking."This is a prayer of contentment
C.S. Lewis
When the battle is over, the winners find it very hard not to pursue their violence. If you are strong enough to hold violence, you are strong enough to hold true to your pact. Then you have more moral fiber than most adults. Free will is one of the pillars of being human.
Alan McCluskey
Even beyond the Middle East, the role of the independent women remains as warped as a Lewis Caroll novel. We may control $12 trillion of the world's $184 trillion in annual consumer spending (I read it in Newsweek), and yet our self-worth apparently ccomes in a shampoo bottle ("because you're worth it").
Amy Mowafi
Nanny Ogg was an attractive lady, which is not the same as being beautiful. She fascinated Casanunda. She was an incredibly comfortable person to be around, partly because she had a mind so broad it could accommodate three football fields and a bowling alley.
Terry Pratchett
Things haven't always been this bad, therefore they won't always be this bad.
Carrie Hope Fletcher
For despite his confidence, and his apparent maturity, I suspected that there was in him a deep and childish need to elevate, and idealize, the love object. This is not uncommon in artists. The very nature of their work, the long periods of isolation followed by public self-display, and the associated risk of rejection all conspire to create unnaturally intense relationships with their sexual partners. Then, when disillusion occurs, as of course it must, the sense of betrayal is profound...
Patrick McGrath
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
T.S Eliot
When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold, wafted backwards and forwards as if in an invisible process of air conditioning, creating a pervasive physical disturbance.
Anthony Powell
... I fell in love with him even more, because I realized I was not just falling in love with Taymour but also with generations of him that connect through history, traits that had been passed down from one generation to the next. I was in love with his ancestry that stretched out for centuries.
Saleem Haddad
I'd prefer to be alone by myself,than alone in a room full of people.
Anthony T.Hincks
A note on language. Be even more suspicious than I was just telling you to be, of all those who employ the term "we" or "us" without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription, designed to suggest that "we" are all agreed on "our" interests and identity. Populist authoritarians try to slip it past you; so do some kinds of literary critics ("our sensibilities are enraged...") Always ask who this "we" is; as often as not it's an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs. An absurd but sinister figure named Ron "Maulana" Karenga—the man who gave us Ebonics and Kwanzaa and much folkloric nationalist piffle—once ran a political cult called "US." Its slogan—oddly catchy as well as illiterate—was "Wherever US is, We are." It turned out to be covertly financed by the FBI, though that's not the whole point of the story. Joseph Heller knew how the need to belong, and the need for security, can make people accept lethal and stupid conditions, and then act as if they had imposed them on themselves.
Christopher Hitchens
The masses have yet to realize that generating your own electricity is a potentially hazardous activity to engage in.
Steven Magee
An old codger rampant and still learning.
Aldous Huxley
The play is independent of the pages on which it is printed, and ‘pure geometries’ are independent of lecture rooms, or of any other detail of the physical world.
G H Hardy
I mean, you want the truth as you wanna hear it? I can't do that. You couldn't afford me.
Keith Moon
We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day.We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep,Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow,The path of its departure still is free.Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;Nought may endure but Mutability!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is 'hard,' 'small,' 'heavy,' 'yellow,' 'dense,' etc. That is how our language is made: 'The stone is hard.' And so on. And that way of talking is good enough for the marketplace: 'That is a new brand.' 'The potatoes are rotten.' 'The container is damaged.' ... And so on. But this way of talking is not good enough in science or epistemology. To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least -two- sets of interactions in time. ...Language continually asserts by the syntax of subject and predicate that 'things' somehow 'have' qualities and attributes. A more precise way of talking would insist that the 'things' are produced, are seen as separate from other 'things,' and are made 'real' by their internal relations and by their behaviour in relationship with other things and with the speaker. It is necessary to be quite clear about the universal truth that whatever 'things' may be in their pleromatic and thingish world, they can only enter the world of communication and meaning by their names, their qualities and their attributes (i.e., by reports of their internal and external relations and interactions).
Gregory Bateson
Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.
Christopher Hitchens
The conception of two people living together for twenty-five years without having a cross word suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep
A.P. Herbert
One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
Charles Darwin
I'll wager that in ten years it will be fashionable again to be a virgin.
Barbara Cartland
A person who has not done one half his day's work by ten o'clock, runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.
Emily Brontë
There's a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there's no Evil Book about how to be evil and how to be bad. The Devil had no prophets to write his Ten Commandments, and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folklore about evil people. All we have is the living example of people who are least good, or our own intuition.
Ian Fleming
Whatever man imagines is possible
Julie Andrews Edwards
To act with common sense according to the moment is the best wisdom and the best philosophy is to do one's duties to take the world as it comes submit respectfully to one's lot and bless the goodness that has given us so much happiness with it whatever it is.
Horace Walpole
You wanted magic, watch". She put her hand into the struggling mass of insects and made a shrill faint piping noise in the back of her throat. There was a movement in the mass, and a large bee lander and flatter then the others crawled onto her hand. A few workers followed it stroking it and generally ministering to it."How did you do that" said Esk."Ahhh," said Granny, "wouldn't you like to know"."Yes I would that's why I asked Granny," said Esk severely."Do you think I used magic", Esk looked down at the queen bee, then up at the witch."No, I think you just know a lot about bees".Granny grinned, "Exactly correct, that's one form of magic of course"."What just knowing things"."Knowing things that other people don't know," said Granny
Terry Pratchett
Malt does more than Milton can To justify God's ways to man.
A.E. Housman
… Shannon’s fingers itched to smash the man in the face. Inside his head he kept telling himself, Keep cool, baby, absolutely cool.
Frederick Forsyth
He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which he had before known but darkly - the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things.
Thomas Hardy
The face that greeted me, however, was far from welcoming, it was a miniature stick insect of a woman with wiry white hair and enormous glasses that emphasized her heavily wrinkled face. She blinked twice and looked me up and down. By the look on her face, she wasn’t that impressed with what she saw. “Who is it, Ethel?”She responded, “It’s some homeless woman. She looks like she needs money and a good wash.” And I thought I’d already reached the lowest point of my day.
Suzanne Kelman
The sacred exists only at the expense of the truth.
Mark Russell
I can't be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of gloom and eucalyptus.
Gerald Durrell
the currency of the future will be memory
Dean Cavanagh
I wore a groove in the kitchen floor with endless trips to the fridge, hoping against hope that I had somehow missed a plateful of cold sausages on the previous 4,000 excursions. Then, for no obvious reason, I decided to buy a footstool.
Jeremy Clarkson
I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.
Jeanette Winterson
To the Virgins, To Make much of TimeGather ye rose-buds while ye may,Old Time is still a-flying;And this same flower that smiles today,tTomorrow will be dying.The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,tThe higher he’s a-getting,The sooner will his race be run,tAnd nearer he is to setting.That age is best which is the first,tWhen youth and blood are warmer;But being spent, the worse, and worsttTimes still succeed the former.Then be not coy, but use your time,tAnd while you may, go marry;For having lost but once your prime,tYou may for ever tarry.
Robert Herrick
Always allocate enough time to pursue the things that are of value to you.
Steven Redhead
It has always been my contention that an individual who can be relied upon to be himself and to be honest unto himself can be relied upon in every other way.
J. Paul Getty
Nevertheless, scientific method is not the same as the scientific spirit. The scientific spirit does not rest content with applying that which is already known, but is a restless spirit, ever pressing forward towards the regions of the unknown, and endeavouring to lay under contribution for the special purpose in hand the knowledge acquired in all portions of the wide field of exact science. Lastly, it acts as a check, as well as a stimulus, sifting the value of the evidence, and rejecting that which is worthless, and restraining too eager flights of the imagination and too hasty conclusions.
Archibald E. Garrod
It is a world that is made of love. Did you think there is only the kind of love your sister has for her husband? Did you think there must be here, a man with whiskers, and over here, a lady in a gown? Haven't I said, there are no whiskers and gowns where spirits are? And what will your sister do if her husband should die, and she should take another? Who will she fly to then, when she has crossed the spheres? For she will fly to someone, we will all fly to someone, we will all return to that piece of shining matter from which our souls were torn with another, two halves of the same.
Sarah Waters
So does nobody care about Ireland?""Nobody. Neither King Louis, nor King Billie, nor King James." He nodded thoughtfully. "The fate of Ireland will be decided by men not a single one of whom gives a damn about her. That is her tragedy.
Edward Rutherfurd
Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.
Emily Brontë
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
George Orwell
No! Please! I'll tell you whatever you want to know!" the man yelled. "Really?" said Vimes. "What's the orbital velocity of the moon?""What?""Oh, you'd like something simpler?
Terry Pratchett
Clay lies still but blood's a rover Breath's a ware that will not keep Up lad when the journey's over There'll be time enough to sleep.
A.E. Housman
...and to-morrow looked in my face more steadily than I could look at it
Charles Dickens
I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover.
Tom Stoppard
Let my worship be within the heart that rejoices, for behold, all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals.Therefore, let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you.
Doreen Valiente
The idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion is what I absolutely do not subscribe to.
John Cleese
I carried this problem around in my head basically the whole time. I would wake up with it first thing in the morning, I would be thinking about it all day, and I would be thinking about it when I went to sleep. Without distraction I would have the same thing going round and round in my mind.(Recalling the degree of focus and determination that eventually yielded the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.)
Andrew John Wiles
Lust was a positive high-tension cable, plugged into my core, activating a near-epileptic seizure of conviction that this was the one thing I had to do in life.
Will Self
There are certain natures of which the mutual influence is such, that the more they say, the more they have to say. For these out of association grows adhesion, and out of adhesion, amalgamation.
Charlotte Brontë
In life, you have to take lots of decisions and if you don't take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do.
Mark Haddon
Old Barley might be as old as thee hills, and might swear like a whole field of troopers, but there were redeeming youth and trust and hope enough in Chinks's Basin to fill it to overflowing.
Charles Dickens
In a culture in which interpersonal relationships are generally considered to provide the answer to every form of distress, it is sometimes difficult to persuade well-meaning helpers that solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support.
Anthony Storr
Science, as long as it limits itself to the descriptive study of the laws of nature, has no moral or ethical quality and this applies to the physical as well as the biological sciences.
Ernst Boris Chain
Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in bewilderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer.
Jeanette Winterson
If Adam and Eve were not hunter-gatherers, then they were certainly gatherers. But, then, consumer desire, or self-embitterment, or the 'itch,' as Schopenhauer called it, appeared in the shape of the serpent. This capitalistic monster awakens in Adam and Eve the possibility that things could be better. Instantly, they are cast out of the garden and condemned to a life of toil, drudgery, and pain. Wants supplanted needs, and things have been going downhill ever since.
Tom Hodgkinson