Quotes by British Authors - Page 733

This was not Aunt Dahlia, my good and kindly aunt, but my Aunt Agatha, the one who chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth.
P.G. Wodehouse
The barbeque is the root of all civilization
Michael Petch
In writing there is art - and in art there is craft ...
Susi Moore
India is a place where colour is doubly bright. Pinks that scald your eyes, blues you could drown in.
Kiran Millwood Hargrave
Let us choose one another as companions!Let us sit at each other's feet!Inwardly we have many harmonies - think notThat we are only what we see.
Elif Shafak
I keep on dreaming, but to find freedom, one must first search inwards.
Fennel Hudson
If a reasoned creator set the stars in their place then we must be capable of understanding them - we must also be creatures of reason, of order!
Sarah Perry
When the middle classes get passionate about politics, they're arguing about their treats—their tax breaks and their investments. When the poor get passionate about politics, they're fighting for their lives. Politics will always mean more to the poor. Always. That's why we strike and march, and despair when our young say they won't vote. That's why the poor are seen as more vital, more animalistic. No classical music for us—no walking around National Trust properties or buying reclaimed flooring. We don't have nostalgia. We don't do yesterday. We can't bear it. We don't want to be reminded of our past, because it was awful: dying in means, and slums, without literacy, or the vote. Without dignity. It was all so desperate then. That's why the present and the future is for the poor—that's the place in time for us: surviving now, hoping for better later. We live now—for our instant, hot, fast treats, to pep us up: sugar, a cigarette, a new fast song on the radio. You must never, never forget when you talk to someone poor, that it takes ten times the effort to get anywhere from a bad post code. It's a miracle when someone from a bad post code gets anywhere, son. A miracle they do anything at all.
Caitlin Moran
Give me the avowed the erect and manly foe Bold I can meet perhaps may turn the blow But of all plagues good Heaven thy wrath can send Save save oh save me from the candid friend!
George Canning
Dare my guilty heart admit the horrible acknowledgement that I love you still?
Charlotte Dacre
The second hugely seductive move is to signal that we view the other person with a mixture of tenderness and realism. It’s often imagined that it’ll be seductive to convey an air of adoration, to hint that the other strikes us as exceptionally attractive or accomplished. But surprisingly, it is deeply worrying to be obviously adored, because everyone, from the inside, knows very well that they don’t deserve intense acclaim, are often disappointing and sometimes quite simply pitiful.So seduction involves suggesting both that one likes the other person a lot – and yet can see their frailty quite clearly, that one cope with it and forgive it with gentle indulgence. One might, towards the end of the evening drop in a small warm tease that alludes to our understanding of some less than perfect side of them: ‘I suppose you stayed under the duvet feeling a bit sorry for yourself after that?’ we might ask, with a benign smile.Such a gesture implies that we like another person not under a mistaken notion that they are flawless but with a full and unfrightened appreciation of their frailties. That ends up being powerfully seductive because it is, first and foremost, reassuring. It suggests the ideal way that we would like someone to view us within the testing conditions of a real relationship. We crave not admiration, but to be properly known and yet still liked and forgiven.
Alain de Botton
You know what the issue is with this world? Everyone wants some magical solution to their problem and everyone refuses to believe in magic.
Lewis Carroll
Moriarty rarely smiled,and then usually to terrify some poor victim. The first time I heard him laugh, I thought he had been struck by a deadly poison and the stutter escaping through his locked jaws was a death rattle.
Kim Newman
Everything has to be taken on trust truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured.
Tom Stoppard
There's a bunch od huge churchs clustered together, trying to blend in with all the family-themed restaurants, because salvation is as easy as chicken wings, I guess.
Patrick Ness
It is frightfully difficult to know much about the fairies, and almost the only thing for certain is that there are fairies wherever there are children.
J.M. Barrie
The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver - over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself.
Joseph Conrad
Edward lives as if there is no tomorrow, Richard as if he wants no tomorrow, and George as though someone should give it to him for free.
Philippa Gregory
Limitless opportunities abound, governed only by your focus on achieving them.
Steven Redhead
He very soon acquired the reputation of being the best public speaker of his time. He had taken pains to master the art, approaching it with scientific precision. On the morning of a day on which he was giving a speech, he once told Wilkie Collins, he would take a long walk during which he would establish the various headings to be dealt with. Then, in his mind’s eye, he would arrange them as on a cart wheel, with himself as the hub and each heading a spoke. As he dealt with a subject, the relevant imaginary spoke would drop out. When there were no more spokes, the speech was at an end. Close observers of Dickens noticed that while he was speaking he would make a quick action of the finger at the end of each topic, as if he were knocking the spoke away.
Simon Callow
Wainscott, Deepspace Operations Group,’ said the man. ‘Wasn’t here, don’t exist, pleased to meet you.
Toby Frost
Kissing don't last: cookery do !
George Meredith
Beauty is power a smile is its sword.
Charles Reade
When it comes down to it, government is simply an abandonment of responsibility on the assumption that there are people, other than ourselves, who really know how to manage things. But the government, run ostensibly for the good of the people, becomes a self-serving corporation. To keep things under control it proliferates laws of ever-increasing complexity and unintelligibility, and hinders productive work by demanding so much accounting on paper that the record of what has been done becomes more important than what has actually been done. The Taoist moral is that people who mistrust themselves and one another are doomed.
Alan W. Watts
The man who succeeds above his fellows is the one who early in life discerns his object and toward that object habitually directs his powers. Even genius itself is but fine observation strengthened by fixity of purpose.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Did you fall asleep?""No. I couldn't sleep that night.""You were restless?""I was thinking of you."The answer almost unmanned me. Something in the tone, even more than in the words, went straight to my heart. It was only after pausing a little first that I was able to go on.
Wilkie Collins
If we had no winter the spring would not be so pleasant if we did not sometimes taste of adversity prosperity would not be so welcome.
Anne Bradstreet
The thing about the Lexington International Bank ladder was that it was very long, and climbing it was very exhausting, and so Andrew Brown didn't have a lot of time to think about whether he really wanted to get to the top of it—and besides, since so many other people were climbing too, the view from the top must be worth it.So he kept going. He worked hard. He put his heart and mind and soul into it. There was an opening for a position half a rung higher than he already was. With a promotion, he might get two hours a week of a secretary's time. He'd go to more important meetings, with more senior people, and have the opportunity to impress them, and if he did he might be promoted again and then... well, of course eventually he'd be running the whole office. It's important to have a dream: otherwise you might notice where you really are.
Naomi Alderman
Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she counts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly construing a constellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into a country of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.
Angela Carter
I keep my books at the British Museum and at Mudies.
Samuel Butler
Whenever by an unfortunate occurrence of circumstances an opposition is compelled to support the government the support should be given with a kick and not a caress and should be withdrawn at the first available moment.
Randolph Churchill
If mankind's destined to bite the bullet, let's bite it and be damned.
Darren Shan
No one ever seems to wonder what happens if it turns out we hate living on a planet? What if the sky’s too big? What if the air stinks? What if we go hungry?’‘And what if the air tastes of honey? What if there’s so much food we all get too fat? What if the sky is so beautiful we don’t get any work done because we’re all looking at it too much?
Patrick Ness
Creativity is contagious. And so is banality. Criticism is an art in itself. Don’t let the dullness around destroy the creativity within. T.S. Eliot said, “honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.” Good to remember…
Elif Shafak
The ants are bad" The Bear"the ants?"Tahir"Do not be fooled. They look very small, so harm you don't think of then at all. Then years. Then one day you wake up, and your home has fallen down." Osman.
Tahir Shah
Possible then the professor inited a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of omen, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his superiority.
Virginia Woolf
Because she is in God's hands.' But if so, she was in God's hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body and if so, why? If God's goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death is unendurably as before it.
C.S. Lewis
There is one thing which gives radiance to everything. It is the idea of something around the corner.
G.K. Chesterton
Cruel blows of fate call for extreme kindness in the family circle.
Dodie Smith
Love doesn't discriminate and nor should the law. Not in this country, not in this world, not in this lifetime.
Liz Kessler
There is no real religious experience that does not express itself in charity.
C. H. Dodd
Self-education is the only possible education the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child's nature.
Charlotte M. Mason
It's chance, I tell you,' he interrupted, ' as everything is in a man's life.
H.G.Wells
Man was not born to be monogamous. What has changed in the 21st century – at 21 the world surely has come of age – is the understanding that woman is not meant to be monogamous either. Just as love hurts, new love heals.
Chloe Thurlow
I just managed to go around with one of the Great Spells in my head for years without going insane, didn't I?' He considered the last question form all angles.'Yes, you did,' he reassured himself. 'You didn't start talking to trees, even when trees started talking to you.
Terry Pratchett
They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself
George Orwell
In an era when the regular worthy rhythm of life is less eye-catching than doing something extraordinary, I am reassured that I am merely the second sovereign to celebrate a diamond jubilee.
Elizabeth II
Choiceless awareness - at every moment and in all the circumstances of life - is the only effective meditation.
Aldous Huxley
The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal.
C.S. Lewis
The best part of every author is in general to be found in his book I assure you.
Samuel Johnson
What we frankly give forever is our own.
George Granville
A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry WHOM SHE LIKES.
William Makepeace Thackeray
That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you - - is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.
Virginia Woolf
He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
Emily Brontë
Nature is in the process of shutting down corrupt corporations and their government minions.
Steven Magee
I think I’ll feel out of place wherever I go on earth, forever. But that’s fine. I have to make my peace with that.
Laura Marling
Don't be in a hurry about finding your work in the world for yourself—you are not old enough to judge for yourself yet; but just look about you in the place you find yourself in, and try to make things a little better and honester there.
Thomas Hughes
This is how early age people heard music, not through their ears above the cacophony of modern life but directly from the universe into their souls.
Bryan Islip
Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.
David Fleming
Cuddling was for great aunts and teddy bears. Cuddling gave him cramp.
David Nicholls