Quotes by British Authors - Page 737

A sound from upstairs sends my thought process reeling. It’s just a small noise, perhaps the sound of your feet brushing the crimson carpet in the bedroom? It’s not loud or menacing, but it sends a wave of adrenaline crashing through me. You’re on your way!
Felicity Brandon
This is a world of action and not for moping and droning in.
Charles Dickens
Champagne morning, sleepless grin, setting off and settling in. Today feels good.
Alex Gaskarth
I believe the greatest asset a Head of State can have is the ability to get a good night's sleep.
Harold Wilson
Forgiveness does not wipe away the consequences of the sin. The consequences are borne by somebody.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Don't rely on good principles to sell an inferior product.
David Hieatt
Do you ever look up at the stars and try to contemplate the ends of the universe?
Ruth Ahmed
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.
Winston S. Churchill
And when things get tough, this is what you should do.Make good art.
Neil Gaiman
‎I believe very strongly that when it comes to desire, when it comes to attraction, that things are never black and white, things are very much shades of grey.
Brian Molko
Some of us have to fight. There are great traditions of liberty to defend. I am no partisan man. Where I see the infamy I seek to erase it. Party names mean nothing. The tradition of liberty means all. The common people will let it go, oh yes. They will sell liberty for a quieter life. That is why they must be prodded, prodded-.
Anthony Burgess
New York presented a paradox. While foreigners thought of New York has the symbol of America, many Americans viewed the city with some suspicion as the country's most foreign.
Charles Emmerson
Will you go back?" asked the Lord of the Gallows. "To America?""Nothing to go back for," said Shadow, and as he said it he knew it was a lie."Things wait for you there," said the old man. "But they will wait until you return.
Neil Gaiman
Democracy in America was never the same as Liberty in Europe. In Europe Liberty was a great life-throb. But in America Democracy was always something anti-life. The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln, had always a sacrificial, self-murdering note in their voices. American Democracy was a form of self-murder, always. Or of murdering somebody else... The love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.
D.H. Lawrence
I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.
Philip Pullman
Paparazzi arrived for Hugh [Grant]. We had to stand under a tree and smile for them.Photographer: 'Hugh, could you look less -- um --'Hugh: 'Pained?
Emma Thompson
To burn always with this hard gemlike flame. To maintain this ecstasy is success in life.
Walter Pater
If a guy is put off by you being a feminist, you need to ask yourself how put off you are by someone who doesn't believe in equality for women.
Laura Bates
Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest has failed.
G.K. Chesterton
If they were going to be like that, then I just wished they hadn't actually been German. It was too easy. Too obvious. It was like coming across an Irishman who actually was stupid, a mother-in-law who actually was fat, or an American businessman who actually did have a middle initial and smoked a cigar. You feel as if you are unwillingly performing in a music-hall sketch and wishing you could rewrite the script. If Helmut and Kurt had been Brazilian or Chinese or Latvian or anything else at all, they could then have behaved in exactly the same way and it would have been surprising and intriguing and, more to the point from my perspective, much easier to write about. Writers should not be in the business of propping up stereotypes. I wondered what to do about it, decided that they could simply be Latvians if I wanted, and then at last drifted off peacefully to worrying about my boots.
Douglas Adams
We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. (p.9)
Ken Robinson
They Were all clad in the same uniform of misery and filth. For all of time, for all of eternity
James Riordan
In order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us without our permission. If we wish life to be a system, this may be a nuiseance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential. It may often happen, no doubt, that a drama may be written by somebody else which we like very little. But we should like it still less if the author came before the curtain every hour or so, and forced on us the whole trouble of inventing the next act. A man has control over many things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much hero that there would be no novel.
G.K. Chesterton
Power comes at a price, love," Veliss replied through bared teeth, maintaining the smile she offered to the townsfolk lining the square."What power?""All power. The power to rule, to kill, or, in your case this fine morning, the power to incite the lust of the old goat you're about to meet.""Lust? I have no desire to incite lust in anyone."Veliss turned to her with a quizzical expression, her smile suddenly genuine. "Then I'm afraid you're in for a lifetime of disappointment.
Anthony Ryan
If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him; and it will then be but poor consolation to believe the world equally in the dark. There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost any attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all begin ‘freely’- as light preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have a heart enough to be really in love without encouragement.
Jane Austen
Everyone is the creator of their own perceived illusion of reality.
Steven Redhead
I have had my vision.
Virginia Woolf
To tell you the truth, I'm something of an atheist.
Terry Pratchett
I thought to myself, 'No matter what happens from now on, even if my heart ends up in pieces, this makes it all worth it, this moment.
Sophie Hannah
He supposed he was one of those unfortunates born with a great capacity for suffering.... He opened his eyes a moment and they were dark with fear, for only one race was run as yet and there might be many others.... Then his newborn courage came back to him and he accepted his suffering as the price he must pay for the gift of creation that was his. And suffering, he had discovered, could be the gateway to renewal, than which no more glorious experience can be man's on earth.
Elizabeth Goudge
Taking a chance on a new author, can open your mind to new experiences.
Jonathan Taylor
The most dangerous diminutions of freedom come from those who are convinced of their moral rectitude.
Daniel Hannan
I am sorry to disturb you,' said James politely, 'but these people wished to shoot us.
Evelyn Waugh
O love, O fire! once he drewWith one long kiss my whole soul throughMy lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.
Alfred Tennyson
He could feel the Great Iron War coming to an end now, but he no longer had his finger on the button. The curtains of the world were about to close, and the play of life would soon be over. There would be no applause.
Dean F. Wilson
Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple.""Ah, well, I'm not sure I believe that.
Douglas Adams
Fear has been the original parent of superstition, every new calamity urges trembling mortals to deprecate the wrath of invisible enemies
Edward Gibbon
history has no overall direction or purpose
Damien Keown
I am passionate about the truth. Passion is very different from fundamentalism.
Richard Dawkins
Worry is a form of fear.
Bertrand A. Russell
Trying to force something is the best way to stop it from happening.
Idries Shah
there can be occasions when we suddenly and involuntarily find ourselves loving r=the natural world with a startling intensity, in a burst of emotion which we may not fully understand, and the only word that seems to me to be appropriate for this feeling is joy
Michael McCarthy
The Bodleian above anything else made Oxford what it was . . . There was something incommunicably grand about it, something difficult to understand unless you had spent your evenings there or walked past it on the way to celebrate the boat race, a magic that came from ignoring it a thousand times a day and then noticing its overwhelming beauty when you came out of a tiny alley and it caught you unexpectedly. A library--it didn't sound like much, but it was what made Oxford itself. The greatest library in the world.
Charles Finch
Perhaps second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.
Charles Dickens
There were two classes of charitable people: one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all.
Charles Dickens
Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.
David Lodge
The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.
Angela Carter
You’re his normality. You’re a part of him, and he is a part of you. That’s what makes this frightening, but that’s what makes it right.
Becky Wicks
Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.
A.A. Milne
There is nothing greater than enthusiasm.
Henry Moore
It has made me better loving you... it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It’s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it’s a delightful story.
Henry James
It's OK not to be OK.
Lindsey Kelk
Will you not this day make it your prayer? "Lord, help me to glorify Thee; I am poor, help me to glorify Thee by contentment; I am sick, help me to give Thee honour by patience; I have talents, help me to extol Thee by spending them for Thee; I have time, Lord, help me to redeem it, that I may serve Thee; I have a heart to feel, Lord, let that heart feel no love but Thine, and glow with no flame but affection for Thee; I have a head to think, Lord, help me to think of Thee and for Thee; Thou hast put me in this world for something, Lord, show me what that is, and help me to work out my life-purpose.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
As well as writing, 2004 saw my first attempt at wine making: the elixir of life. Unfortunately, my effort tasted more like the elixir of death.
Craig Briggs
I remained a socialist for several years, even after my rejection of Marxism; and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important than equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.
Karl R. Popper
Antisemitism is unique among religious hatreds. It is a racist conspiracy theory fashioned for the needs of messianic and brutal rulers, as dictators from the Tsars to the Islamists via the Nazis have shown. Many other alleged religious 'hatreds' are not hatreds in the true sense. If I criticise Islamic, Orthodox Jewish or Catholic attitudes towards women, for instance, and I'm accused of being a bigot, I shrug and say it is not bigoted to oppose bigotry.
Nick Cohen
Ideas about our own self-worth are no more real than thoughts about an imaginary chair.
Mark Williams
I didn't simply want children - I probably could have found someone who would have been willing to do the baby thing - I wanted them with her. I longed to see the sparkle of her eyes in the eyes of a child; to have that infectious laugh of hers coming out of a baby's mouth as I tickled them; I wanted to hold a child in my arms and look at it and see her and me, our genes combined to make another human being. When it came to me that that would never happen, I put my fist through the back door. All these little things kept coming to me, all the "I'll nevers", but that was the worst one. I grieved for the children we'd never have almost as much as I'd grieved for her.
Dorothy Koomson
Well that’s open to debate,’ he said. 'It sounds like a recipe for disaster to me, and I hate the thought of you throwing yourself at guys just to try and get laid. Christ, I’d do you myself if I thought it would keep you safe.’‘Now that’s true friendship,’ I said, cracking under the severity of his tone.
Aurelia B. Rowl
Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before--more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.
Charles Dickens