Quotes by British Authors - Page 719

One honest John Tompkins, a hedger & ditcher, Although he was poor, did not want to be richer;For all such vain wishes in him were preventedBy a fortunate habit of being contented.
Jane Taylor
...the more risks you allow children to take, the better they learn to take care of themselves. If you never let them take any risks, then I believe they become very prone to injury. Boys should be allowed to climb tall trees and walk along the tops of high walls and dive into the sea from high rocks... The same with girls. I like the type of child who takes risks. Better by far than the one who never does so.
Roald Dahl
Those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
J.K. Rowling
A great deal of thought must be given to your daughter's marriage. Otherwise, she will simply slink off like a cat on a dark night to be fertilized under a bush to God knows whom!
J.G. Farrell
The Butcher of Babylon featured in over 500 porn films between 1974 and 1982, and was best known for his motto: Come for the butcher, stay for the meat.
Mark Jackman
I stretched out my hand towards the little bookshelf where I kept cookery and devotional books, the most comfortable bedside reading.
Barbara Pym
Light may be shed on man and his origins.
Charles Darwin
Perhaps it was as well that she had been unconscious for four weeks. She had missed the aftermath, the SO-1 reports, the recriminations, Snood and Tamworth's funerals. She missed everything...except the blame. It was waiting for her when she awoke...
Jasper Fforde
Oh! Do not excite yourself. Shall I say that he interested me because he was trying to grow a mustache and as yet the result is poor." Poirot stroked his own magnificent mustache tenderly. "It is an art," he murmured, "the growing of the mustache! I have sympathy for all who attempt it.
Agatha Christie
Sins of omission should be regarded as far more serious than sins of commission,
Stephen Bungay
If you would know what the Lord God thinks of money you have only to look at those to whom he gives it.
Maurice Baring
No demon could ever care enough to let go." ~ Muse
Pippa DaCosta
Is there such depravity in man as that he should injure another without benefit to himself?
Samuel Johnson
There is no such thing as death In nature nothing dies: From each sad moment of decay Some forms of life arise.
Charles Mackay
When you sleepI will creepInto your thoughtsLike a bad debtThat you can't payTake the easy wayand give in!
Morrissey
NEWT: Now there's absolutely nothing for you to worry about.JACOB: Tell me - has anyone ever believed you when you told them not to worry?NEWT: My philosophy is that worrying means you suffer twice.
J.K. Rowling
The Karpman drama triangle is a classic model of codependent behaviour. First of all, a codependent will rescue someone. Then, when their ‘brave and charitable’ work hasn’t been acknowledged, they become very angry at the person they have attempted to rescue. And finally, they start to feel like a victim. They feel sorry for themselves and complain how the person they rescued never appreciated them. The important thing to learn here is that if a person wants to change, it’s because they have made a decision to do so.
Christopher Dines
His hands as he worked were deft and sure, but so gentle -- he was being careful not to hurt me any more than he had to. I sat very still, hardly daring to move.I was in love with him.The knowledge swept through me, truer than anything I'd ever known. Oh, my God, I was in love with him.
l.a weatherly
A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.
Virginia Woolf
For with any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation. There comes a certain point in such conditions when only three things are possible: first a perpetuation of Satanic pride, secondly tears, and third laughter.
G.K. Chesterton
Stale godliness is ungodliness. Let our religion be as warm, and constant, and natural as the flow of the blood in our veins. A living God must be served in a living way.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Freedom had no place in the Soviet System. Freedom was another word for anarchy, and that wouldn't do at all.
Mal Peet
Everything had shattered. The fact that it was all still there — the walls and the chairs and the children’s pictures on the walls — meant nothing. Every atom of it had been blasted apart and reconstituted in an instant, and its appearance of permanence and solidity was laughable; it would dissolve at a touch, for everything was suddenly tissue-thin and friable.
J.K. Rowling
The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.
Paul Graham
When he asked if he was mine, tears in his eyes, I think he knew what he would do, what he would have to do, and he was mourning us. He was mourning us the whole time.
Emma Forrest
No course was open to me save to leap, with eyes self-bound, into the yawning abyss of the future.
William Beckford
Now say, have women worth, or have they none? Or had they some, but with our Queen is’t gone? Nay Masculines, you have thus tax’d us long, But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong. Let such as say our sex is void of reason Know ‘tis a slander now, but once was tre
Anne Bradstreet
The downtrodden who are the great creators of slang hurl pithiness and colour at poverty and oppression.
Anthony Burgess
There are some wonderful aspects to Christmas. It's magical. And each year, from at least November, well, September, well, if I'm honest, May, I look forward to it hugely.
Miranda Hart
Time was this place didn’t make sense and I could live with it. Either it’s changed, or I have.
Warren Ellis
Social media is addictive precisely because it gives us something which the real world lacks: it gives us immediacy, direction, a sense of clarity and value as an individual.
David Amerland
If a couple isn’t following God’s guidelines for life or being led by the Holy Spirit, disagreements and misunderstandings skyrocket.
Elizabeth George
The heart cannot feel joy without also feeling pain, it cannot know love without also knowing loss.
Menna van Praag
Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.
Noël Coward
There is no bitterness like that of man who finds out he has been believing in a ghost.
Salman Rushdie
Who is this man?''Chinaman, or rather half Chinese and half German. Got a daft name. Calls himself Doctor No - Doctor Julius No.''No? Spelt like Yes?''That's right.
Ian Fleming
Challenge yourself everyday to do better and be better. Remember, growth starts with a decision to move beyond your present circumstances.
Robert Tew
They say you can tell a lot about a country by the way it treats its prisoners…I believe the same can be said for how a country treats its children
Jill Telford
Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young...
J.K. Rowling
The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey.
Hilary Mantel
The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
Samuel Johnson
the nation's young men havebeen proved by surveys to be completely unmarriageable, and as a result there's a wholegeneration of single girls like me with their own incomes and homes who have lots of fun anddon't need to wash anyone else's socks.
Helen Fielding
Never regret. If it's good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it's experience.
Victoria Holt
Sometimes, on our way through the world, we meet someone who touches our heart in a way others don't.
Philip Reeve
The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.
Virginia Woolf
But in terms of "psychological" time, most of us are still living in centuries past, stirred by ancient grudges, controlled by obsolete prejudices, driven by buried fears.
Sydney J. Harris
the battered woman--for she wore a skirt--with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love--love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago, her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death's enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple heather, there on her high burial place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the universe would be over.
Virginia Woolf
Many think that the mark of a great champion is the nature and margin of their victories and the peaks they scale and reach. That’s only part of it. The mark of the greatest of champions is how they react and respond to defeat. That is when they become enshrined in our hearts and minds – as they rise again and into the immortal pages of history.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
The Death Eaters can't all be pure-blood, there aren't enough pure-blood wizards left," said Hermione stubbornly. "I expect most of them are half-bloods pretending to be pure. It's only Muggle-borns they hate, they'd be quite happy to let you and Ron join up" "There is no way they'd let me be a Death Eater!" said Ron indignantly...."My whole family are blood traitors! That's as bad as Muggle-borns to Death Eaters!" "And they'd love to have me," said Harry sarcastically. "We'd be best pals if they didn't keep trying to do me in.
J.K. Rowling
I'm gonna take all my sadness, frustration, anger and energy and channel it into becoming the best possible student.I AM GOING TO BECOME A LEARNING MACHINE.
Peter Rogers
I hate the endless admonishments of a nanny state that lives in fear of its lawyers. While colonies of dim-witted traffic wardens swarm about looking for minor parking infringements, nobody seems to notice that our very social fabric is falling apart.
Christopher Fowler
At Times I Am A Flower...at times I am a flower ~singularly defined ...
Muse
Don't worry, all is well. All is so perfectly, damnably well.
David Mitchell
Why do Twolegs do anything? If we knew that, our lives would be a lot easier.
Erin Hunter
It is the hardest thing of all, the one thing that will show if you have the one true courage. To know that you have failed, that your best efforts have been defeated, to not be able to stand it, to not be able to go on and yet to go on nonetheless.
Silvia Hartmann
I died of a broken heart.Oh! And the gunshot wound to the chest!
Anthony T.Hincks
She came and took away all his miseries, his sorrows !!Then SHewent and left him restlessly numb. He was herpainkiller. SHe, his anesthetic.
Douglas Self
The happy people are those who are producing something.
William Ralph Inge
I preached as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.
Richard Baxter
BALLS! We want the finest wines available to humanity. We want them HERE, and we want them NOW.
Bruce Robinson