Quotes by British Authors - Page 724

I can’t give up my faith in the longpaws. I understand that we can’t rely on the longpaws to help us anymore. But one of us has to remember. One of us has to carry the memories for the rest of the Pack. I’ll do it.
Erin Hunter
Why do you live?Because I have something worth living for.
J.K. Rowling
Sometimes I felt as if we were all wading around in grief, reluctant to admit to others how far we were waving or drowning.
Jojo Moyes
Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.
Ian McEwan
... responsibilities are the anvil on which a man is forged.
Terry Pratchett
It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.
Gerald Brenan
I have drunken deep of joy And I will taste no other wine tonight.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Isolation serves as the ideal antidote to the bone-aching stresses of work.
Fennel Hudson
Blame is a human concept, one of its blackest and most selfish and self-binding.
Patrick Ness
Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.
George Eliot
The cheese-mites asked how the cheese got there, And warmly debated the matter; The Orthodox said that it came from the air, And the Heretics said from the platter. They argued it long and they argued it strong, And I hear they are arguing now; But of all the choice spirits who lived in the cheese, Not one of them thought of a cow.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray.
Christopher Hitchens
Do not give way to useless alarm; though it is right to be prepared for the worst, there is no occasion to look on it as certain.
Jane Austen
Buddhism seeks after God with the largest conception it can find, the all-producing and all-absorbing One; Christianity seeks after God with the most elementary passion it can find—the craving for a father, the hunger that is as old as the hills. It turns the whole cry of a lost universe into the cry of a lost child.
G.K. Chesterton
The sounds of a man crying is a piteous noise, almost worse than an infant's cry. Babies are either hungry, sick or bored, or need changing. This man was none of those things. He was wrapped in grief as deep as the ocean, and no one could do anything to help him.
Samantha Hayes
My pains, sometimes seem like witch hunters: confess, confess, confess. Like a heavy stone on my rib-cage.Confess to what?And, of course, I would confess, if only I knew what it was they wanted to hear.
Richard Smyth
How many feasible projects have miscarried through despondency and been strangled in their birth by a cowardly imagination?
Jeremy Collier
Eleven years she had lived in the dark house and its gloomy garden. He was jealous of the very light and air getting to her, and they kept her close. He stopped the wide chimneys, shaded the little windows, left the strong-stemmed ivy to wander where it would over the house-front, the moss to accumulate on the untrimmed fruit trees in the red-walled garden, the weeds to over-run its green and yellow walks. He surrounded her with images of sorrow and desolation. He caused her to be filled with fears of the place and of the stories that were told of it, and then on pretext of correcting them, to be left in it in solitude, or made to shrink about it in the dark. When her mind was most depressed and fullest of terrors, then, he would come out of one of the hiding-places from which he overlooked her, and present himself as her sole resource.
Charles Dickens
With sociology one can do anything and call it work.
Malcolm Bradbury
It matters to ourselves, of course, but it matters terribly to other people. Moral failure or spiritual failure or whatever you call it, makes such a vicious circle... It seems as if when we love people and they fall short, we retaliate by falling shorter ourselves. Children are like that. Adults have a fearful responsibility. When they fail to live up to what children expect of them, the children give up themselves. So each generation keeps failing the next.
Dorothy Whipple
There's a value in that space - rent, overhead, staffing costs, etc. - that has to be paid back by a certain number of inventory turns per month. In other words, the onesies and twosies waste space. However, when that space doesn't cost anything, suddenly you can look at those infrequent sellers again, and they begin to have value. This was the insight that led to Amazon, Netflix, and all the other companies I was talking to.
Chris Anderson
Roger left the cricket stumps and they went into the drawing room. Grandpapa, at the first suggestion of reading aloud, had disappeared, taking Patch with him. Grandmama had cleared away the tea. She found her spectacles and the book. It was Black Beauty. Grandmama kept no modern children's books, and this made common ground for the three of them. She read the terrible chapter where the stable lad lets Beauty get overheated and gives him a cold drink and does not put on his blanket. The story was suited to the day. Even Roger listened entranced. And Deborah, watching her grandmother's calm face and hearing her careful voice reading the sentences, thought how strange it was that Grandmama could turn herself into Beauty with such ease. She was a horse, suffering there with pneumonia in the stable, being saved by the wise coachman.After the reading, cricket was anticlimax, but Deborah must keep her bargain. She kept thinking of Black Beauty writing the book. It showed how good the story was, Grandmama said, because no child had ever yet questioned the practical side of it, or posed the picture of a horse with a pen in its hoof."A modern horse would have a typewriter," thought Deborah, and she began to bowl to Roger, smiling to herself as she did so because of the twentieth-century Beauty clacking with both hoofs at a machine. ("The Pool")
Daphne du Maurier
Simon hated her for that. Perhaps it was automatic. Her appearance alone made her different from him, and human beings had always feared and hated anyone who was different. Two thousand years of history saw it being repeated over and over, the perpetual struggle of one race, or tribe, or creed, against another... each one thinking they were right, superior, morally justified, or chosen by God. Simon saw himself as normal, Laura as abnormal.
Louise Lawrence
His teachings, said his disciple Musaeus, had one simple theme: 'Everything comes into being from the One and is resolved into the One again.
Ann Wroe
...Chief without soldiers is just a very lonely man in a big bloody field
Joe Abercrombie
The tragedy of power like mine is that there is no way down. There can only be extinction. Dust to dust rags to rags fear to fear.
V.S. Naipaul
In some peculiar way, indeed, the rules were now beginning to seem quite logical. It was then I knew that I had been in India long enough.
Tahir Shah
I don't really like driving in the snow. There's something about the motion of the falling snowflakes that hurts my eyes, throws my sense of balance all to hell. It's like tumbling into a field of stars.
Neil Gaiman
Just the thought of you fills my heart with love.
Anthony T.Hincks
All good knights, pilgrims, sons in search of fortune, seekers after truth, and plain ordinary fools, turn towards the city they have left and take farewell according to their nature. This is a full moment in all journeying, the time when girths are tightened in preparation for the miles that lie ahead.
H.V. Morton
People become concerned with being more humble than other people.
Alan W. Watts
The Sufi way is through knowledge and practice, not through intellect and talk.
Idries Shah
Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper, to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.
T.E. Lawrence
You only live twice:Once when you are bornAnd once when you look death in the face
Ian Fleming
It's wearying, like Caliban buttonholing you in hell and telling you the struggle he's having getting along with himself.
Derek Raymond
I never advise friends to put money in anything,. said Danny. 'It's a no-win situation - if they make a profit they forget that it was you who recommended it, and if they make a loss they never stop reminding you. My only advise would be not to gamble what you can't afford, and never to risk an amount that might cause you to lose a night's sleep
Jeffrey Archer
That physician is no better than a murderer, that negligently delayeth till his patient be dead or past cure (389).
Richard Baxter
If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don't. It's like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don't hurt it. Not even major surgery if it's done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make.
Douglas Adams
There are three modes of bearing the ills of life: by indifference by philosophy and by religion.
Charles Caleb Colton
It does not suit the world to hear that people who are leading a high life, an enviable life, a privileged life are as miserable most days as anybody else, despite the fact that it must be obvious they would be - given that we are all agreed that money and fame do not bring happiness. Instead the world would prefer to enjoy the idea, against what it knows to be true, that wealth and fame do in fact insulate and protect against misery and it would rather we shut up if we are planning to indicate otherwise.
Stephen Fry
Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.”Note the “I Am.” In the Greek it is the strongest possible form of expression – Ego Eimi. Both ego and eimi mean “I am” but the former puts the emphasis on the “I” while the latter puts it on the “am.” Taken together they are the strongest Greek form to express the name of God as the great “I AM.” That is how the risen Christ here refers to Himself. “Lo, I AM with you!” But there is a lovely feature in the Greek construction here which does not reveal itself in our English translation. It reads like this:“And lo, I with you AM…”You and I dear fellow believer, are in between the “I” and the “AM.” He is not only with us, He is all around us. Not only now and then, but “always” which literally translated is, “all the days” … this day, this hour, this moment. Why, when we reflect on it, were not our Lord’s sudden appearings & disappearings during the 40 days between His resurrection and His ascension meant to teach those early disciples (and ourselves) this very thing, that even when He is invisible He is none the less present, hearing, watching, knowing, sympathizing, overruling? Let us never forget that the special promise of His presence is given in connection with our going forth as winners of others to Him.
J. Sidlow Baxter
... Lyotard suggests that while discourse operates as a system of representation which defines meanings according to their relation to other concepts in that system, figure is the realm of the singular, of that which refuses to, or simply cannot, be captured and systematized by the concept.
Nicholas Gane
Without goals we are nothing more than drifters, drifting where?
Marilyn L Rice
Darkness is the womb from which a poet is born.
Ged Thompson Liverpool Poet
Nothing special has happened today; no one can say she was more provoked than usual. It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman. Step by step until it is done.
Naomi Alderman
When the Illuminati thought of their name, they were hiding in a darkened room with one candle.They are still hiding in that room with the same candle.
Anthony T.Hincks
You know what, Sam? We created the council to take pressure off of you. Because you were falling apart.”Sam just stared at her. Not quite believing she’d said it. And Astrid seemed shocked herself. Shocked at the venom behind her own words.“I didn’t mean…,” she started lamely, but then couldn’t find her way to explaining just what it was she didn’t mean.Sam shook his head. “You know, even now, as long as we’ve been together it still surprises me that you can be so ruthless.”“Ruthless? Me?”“You will use anyone to get what you want. Say anything to get your way. Why was I ever even in charge?” He stabbed an accusing finger at her. “Because of you! Because you manipulated me into it. Why? So I would protect you and Little Pete. That’s all you cared about.”“That’s a lie!” she said hotly.“You know it’s the truth. And now you don’t have to bother manipulating me, you can just give me orders. Embarrass me. Undercut me. But as soon as some problem hits, guess what? It’ll be, oh, please, Sam, save us.”“Anything I do, I do for everyone’s good,” Astrid said.“Yeah, so you’re not just a genius now, you’re a saint.
Michael Grant
The first duty of an historian is to be on his guard against his own sympathies.
J. A. Froude
There was a young lady called Peaches,who simply loved animals to pieces.She ate pigs and sheep,and for cows she would weep,when baked in a sauce of rich greases.
Mango Wodzak
A friend gave me a rainbow as a gift, so I put it up in the sky so everyone could share.
Anthony T.Hincks
When harried, we go as far as we dare, and with those we're sure of we dare go very far, knowing where forgiveness is certain.
Ellis Peters
Boys are like elastic bands. It doesn't mean that boys are made of elastic, which is a plus because nobody wants a boyfriend made out of rubber. On the other hand, if they were made out of rubber, you could save yourself a lot of time and effort and heartache by just rustling one up out of a car tire. Boys are different from girls. Girls like to be cozy all the time but boys don't. First of all, they like to get all close to you like a coiled-up rubber band, but after a while, they get fed up with being too coiled and need to stretch away to their full stretchiness. Then, after a bit of on-their-own strategy, they ping back to be close to you. So in conclusion on the boy front, you have to play hard to get and also let them be elastic bands.
Louise Rennison
Wow, we're identical!
J.K. Rowling
It was my Uncle George who discovered alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.
P.G. Wodehouse
Bell defined civilization in the language of a Bloomsbury connoisseur: ‘A taste for truth and beauty, tolerance, intellectual honesty, fastidiousness, a sense of humour, good manners, curiosity, a dislike of vulgarity, brutality, and over-emphasis, freedom from superstition and prudery, a fearless acceptance of the good things of life, a desire for complete self-expression and for a liberal education, a contempt for utilitarianism and philistinism, in two words – sweetness and light.’ Bell argued that ‘as a means to good and as a means to civility a leisured class is essential’. The Bloomsbury group was necessary because ‘It is only when there come together enough civilized individuals to form a nucleus from which light can radiate, and sweetness ooze, that a civilization becomes possible. The disseminators of civilization are therefore highly civilized men and women forming groups sufficiently influential to affect larger groups, and ultimately whole communities.
Richard Davenport-Hines
How you look at it is pretty much how you'll see it
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Antibiotics, viral tabs, painkillers, sterilisation spray,” Kasyanov said. “Other stuff. Bandages, medicines, contraceptives.Hoop raised an eyebrow.“Hey. Forever is a long time.
Tim Lebbon
She would only make me take my seat if I didn't act calm and Swiss about it all.
Bill Bryson
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
Virginia Woolf
His dreamscape sent a tongue of fire across my flowers.
Samantha Shannon