Quotes by British Authors - Page 721

Does light go faster when it goes downhill?
Anthony T.Hincks
If Fancy's lips had been real cherries probably Dick's would have appeared deeply stained.
Thomas Hardy
And though, indeed, it only happened once, it’s gone on happening, the way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there’s a memory for them to happen in …
Graham Swift
Mathematics is not arithmetic. Though mathematics may have arisen from the practices of counting and measuring it really deals with logical reasoning in which theorems—general and specific statements—can be deduced from the starting assumptions. It is, perhaps, the purest and most rigorous of intellectual activities, and is often thought of as queen of the sciences.
Christopher Zeeman
I believe in it because it is impossible.
Paul Torday
What is particularly striking about his reconstruction and criticisms of the traditional account of friendship is that he finds it deficient not only by the light of his own Christian viewpoint; he also finds friendship deficient when judged from the perspective of its own self-proclaimed ethical foundations. Thus, Kierkegaard concludes that the reciprocity involved in friendship actually betrays its essential selfishness.
Graham Smith
If we were entirely sane, if madness did not have a serious grip on one side of us, other people's tragedies would hold a great deal less interest for us.
Alain de Botton
It is a mother's duty to teach her daughters about the uses of blood, particularly a magical daughter.
Zen Cho
Mapleshade: "Your punishment is complete now, Crookedstar. You have lost everything." Crookedstar: "No, Mapleshade. You're wrong. I still have a clan that I love and am proud to lead. And now... ...now everything precious to me is here, in StarClan. My family is waiting here for me, when my ninth life has passed. It's you who have lost. You have no power over me anymore." Mapleshade: "I have destroyed you!" Crookedstar: "No, Mapleshade. I still have the cats that I loved. You have nothing and no one.
Erin Hunter
To be alive at all involves some risk.
Harold Macmillan
Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin where it belongs.
George Orwell
One thing I’ve learnt about humans: you can’t judge their strength by the size of their actions, but by the devotion of an act, no matter how small.
Dianna Hardy
I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.
Douglas Adams
My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there.
J.M.W. Turner
We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence.
Charlotte Brontë
To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world.
Virginia Woolf
Old buildings whisper to us in the creaking of floorboards and rattling of windowpanes.
Fennel Hudson
No angel. The reason I went with all them girls was to try and get over you. I wake up to you everyday. you send my mind and body into frenzy. I can smell your hair when I close my eyes, or I can imagine how your hand feels when you lay it on my chest. It kills me everyday to be so close to you, but be so far away.
Kirsty Moseley
I stared at him. Maybe it had been hard for him being second best too.
Jacqueline Wilson
In prayer the lips ne'er act the winning part without the sweet concurrence of the heart.
Robert Herrick
You’ve become a miserable bastard and I can’t deal with it anymore.”Bex on Egg – Book 2 “Having it
Jamie Scallion
For once reality and his brains came into contact and the result was fatal.
Thomas Henry Huxley
But the future is uncertain, and he can't get up enough enthusiasm even to masurbate.
M.R. Carey
I'd finally reached the end of myself, all my self-reliance and denial and pride unraveling into nothingness, leaving only a blank Alison-shaped space behind. It was finished. I was done.But just as I felt myself dissolving on the tide of my own self-condemnation, the dark waves receded, and I floated into a celestial calm.I saw the whole universe laid out before me, a vast shining machine of indescribable beauty and complexity. Its design was too intricate for me to understand, and I knew I could never begin to grasp more than the smallest idea of its purpose. But I sensed that every part of it, from quark to quasar, was unique and - in some mysterious way - signifi
R.J. Anderson
Leave your mark on the world by leaving behind a child who grows up to love and serve the Lord.
Elizabeth George
When we lose these woods, we lose our soul. Not simply as individuals, but as a people.
Kevin Walker
Love and being in love are not the same thing. The woman takes the man she loves into her body and absorbs his oils and essence. A part of him enters her and becomes a part of her.
Chloe Thurlow
When I'm in a couple, I feel I'm disappearing, dying - losing my mind.
Stephen Grosz
Knackered inmates are easier to control than pumped-up ones. And dead inmates are even easier to control, if you follow me.
Alexander Gordon Smith
This little man was of the order of beings who must not be opposed, unless you possessed an all-dominant force sufficient to crush him at once.
Charlotte Brontë
Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril.
Andrew Motion
Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for the afternoon, and then—fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work— What are these Martians? What are we? I answered, clearing my throat.
H.G.Wells
Social media is basically standing at a bucket filled with other people’s vomit and you suck the vomit through a straw, and gag and wince at the unbearable taste of other people’s vomit. Yet strangely we continue to suck through the straw as if we’ve never tasted such lovely vomit. And then before you know it you’re old and you’re grey. And that’s the end of you. A lonely death. Your gravestone is marked with the six saddest words: Social Media Drained My Soul AwayAnd they all mourn your loss at a budget funeral service while updating their social media statuses on mobile phones apps. And in years to come nobody remembers any of your updates; even those updates that you deep-down believed were going to bring about world peace. The Digital Age is more disposable than nappies and just as full of shit.
Rupert Dreyfus
... the love of money is the root of all evils." - John de Alençon, Pg, 64
The Medieval Murderers
What was it that Granny Weatherwax had said once? "Evil starts when you begin to treat people as things". And right now it would happen if you thought there was a thing called a father, and a thing called a mother, and a thing called a daughter, and a thing called a cottage, and told yourself that if you put them all together you had a thing called a happy family.
Terry Pratchett
You don’t come to live here [New York City] unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn’t a strong aspect of your personality. 'A reality shaped around your own desires' — there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
Zadie Smith
Words are only words
Jude Morgan
Fear no one except the One.
Habeeb Akande
Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,––to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow.
Charles Dickens
I don't want anything to happen to you. You being hurt...that thought fills me with dread. I can't promise not to interfere, not if I think you'll come to harm." He pauses and takes a deep breath. "I love you, Anastasia. I will do everything in my power to protect you. I cann't imagine my life without you.
E.L. James
I could marry the Devil himself if he had some money.
Dodie Smith
The sun was boiling, the swaying was uncomfortable, the horse stank. She felt wonderful
Peter F. Hamilton
Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament … There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth.
J.R.R. Tolkien
It’s in our dreams that we pull people towards us.
Glenn Haybittle
If I were dead, I wouldn't be sad, and I wouldn't be glad, because I wouldn't be.
Marcus Sedgwick
...the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.
G.K. Chesterton
Becoming drunk is a journey that generally elates him in the early stages—he's good company, expansive, mischievous and fun, the famous old poet, almost as happy listening as talking. But once the destination is met, once established up there on that unsunny plateau, a fully qualified drunk, the nastier muses, the goblins of aggression, paranoia, self-pity take control. The expectation now is that an evening with John will go bad somehow, unless everyone around is prepared to toil at humouring and flattering and hours of frozen-faced listening. No one will be.
Ian McEwan
The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.
C.S. Lewis
I'm not young enough to know everything.
J.M. Barrie
I hate you. I wish you was dead."Mrs. Carey gasped. He said the words so savagely that it gave her quite a start. She had nothing to say. She sat down in her husband's chair; and as she thought of her desire to love the friendless, crippled boy and her eager wish that he should love her--she was a barren woman and, even though it was clearly God's will that she should be childless, she could scarcely bear to look at little children sometimes, her heart ached so--the tears rose to her eyes and one by one, slowly, rolled down her cheeks. Philip watched her in amazement. She took out her handkerchief, and now she cried without restraint. Suddenly Philip realised that she was crying because of what he had said, and he was sorry. He went up to her silently and kissed her. It was the first kiss he had ever given herwithout being asked. And the poor lady, so small in her black satin, shrivelled up and sallow, with her funny corkscrew curls, took the little boy on her lap and put her arms around him and wept as though her heart would break. But her tears were partly tears of happiness, for she felt that the strangeness between them was gone. She loved him now with a new love because he had made her suffer.
W Somerset Maugham
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility, or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law, or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self-improvement.
J.K. Rowling
Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
Thomas Hardy
There is a soul-jealousy that can be as frantic as any body-jealousy.
Arthur Conan Doyle
We only listen to what we want to hear.
Anthony T.Hincks
Intimacy with one person could do this-empty the world of friendships, give a distaste for women's kisses and their bright chatter, make the ordinary world a little unreal and very uninteresting.
Graham Greene
You do realize that if anything happens to you, my son will be devastated?”Ella’s throat closed. She really didn’t want to think about James, not when he was in so much danger. She nodded. “I know.”“Then make sure nothing happens to you. This Kingdom needs a Queen who can show these men we’re not all delicate little flowers.
Michelle Smart
Life is enthusiasm zest.
Sir Laurence Olivier
The universe, they say, depended for its operation on the balance of four forces which they identified as charm, persuasion, uncertainty, and bloody-mindedness.
Terry Pratchett
No Condemnation now I dread,Jesus, and all in Him, is mineAlive in Him, my Living Head,And clothed in Righteousness Divine,Bold I approach th' eternal Throne,And claim the Crown, through Christ my own
Charles Wesley
Groanings which cannot be uttered are often prayers which cannot be refused.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon