Quotes by British Authors - Page 74

In the room of holding out an example for imitation, [the nobility] give only a warning to the lower classes of the people, who are taught to despise the boasted pre-eminence of birth, when attached to the meanest actions and most unwarrantable pursuits; and from hence proceeds all the licentiousness and spirit of equality that causes general disturbance.
Eliza Parsons
You haven't told her?" Cass shouted. "You're the worst boyfriend ever!
Jayde Scott
The words come at my call but who calls whom?
Jeanette Winterson
There is a blessing in losing the one we love. It's the blessing of self-transformation. You don't have to who you were anymore. You've struggled. And now you can change. It doesn't mean that bits of that person won't cling to you, they will throughout your life, but they are now subsumed into something greater. That person has given you, in fact, the most important blessing, which is they gave you the blessing of transforming your soul into something better, something more beautiful.
Emma Forrest
Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.
Graham Greene
This was not a fairy-tale castle and there was no such thing as a fairy-tale ending, but sometimes you could threaten to kick the handsome prince in the ham-and-eggs.
Terry Pratchett
Use your little grey cells mon ami" (Hercule Poirot in 'The Mysterious Affair At Styles')
Agatha Christie
Was this what the city would look like when knowledge was no longer enough? When the desire to turn inward, surrendering entirely to one's own private world of nonresistance, overwhelmed, like creeping ivy, our desire to know worlds beyond it?
Olivia Sudjic
Our perception of space-time can be thought of in terms of event coordinates relative to our current state of consciousness.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
A national debt if it is not excessive will be to us a national blessing.
Alexander Hamilton
He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands.
John Fowles
When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.
C.S. Lewis
Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.
Frederic Raphael
Here lies the body of Colonel Cornell’s. The rest of the fellow, I fancy, in hell is.
Mark Hodder
...I will not allow books to prove any thing.""But how shall we prove any thing?""We never shall.
Jane Austen
When people wind you up, just remind them what happens to a piece of elastic.
Anthony T.Hincks
Even your little sorrows you may roll upon God, for He counteth the hairs of your head.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I only want to catch you,” Michael explained. “I won’t hurt you.” “No! No!” the star crackled desperately. “That’s wrong! I’m supposed to die!” “But I could save you if you’d let me catch you,” Michael told it gently.“No!” cried the star. “I’d rather die!
Diana Wynne Jones
Capture the positive perspective of life.
Steven Redhead
… one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back – that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a One Way Street.
Agatha Christie
Love me as I am, sweet one, for I shall never be better.
Elizabeth Gaskell
We each have our own language.Our own way of thinking, of talking to ourselves, of making sense of the world and putting it in order. A narration style that is ours and ours alone. That's why some of us connect and some of us don't. Because even though we can only live in our own heads, sometimes - every now and then - we meet a person we can talk to without speaking at all: whose story we can read, without even trying.
Holly Smale
I know what it's like to lose kits, Oakheart, I wouldn't wish that kind of grief on any cat.
Erin Hunter
Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world.
Michael Denton
... he couldn't, as a respectable master in an English public school, have taken us to a brothel. Yet how I wish he had! His introduction to sexual experience would, I feel sure, have been a masterpiece of tact; it might well have speeded up our development by a good five years.
Christopher Isherwood
Never allow others to create your world because if you do, they will always make it too small.
Christopher Robinson
It was a wonderful experience. She mistrusted his very slumbers--and she seemed to think I could tell her why! Thus a poor mortal seduced by the charm of an apparition might have tried to wring from another ghost the tremendous secret of the claim the other world holds over a disembodied soul astray amongst the passions of this earth. The very ground on which I stood seemed to melt under my feet. And it was so simple too; but if the spirits evoked by our fears and our unrest have ever to vouch for each other's constancy before the forlorn magicians that we are, then I--I alone of us dwellers in the flesh--have shuddered in the hopeless chill of such a task.
Joseph Conrad
Her steel blue eyes captivated him at first glance and along with the alluring scent of jasmine surrounding her presence, he lost all sense of time and rhythm, and barely remembered the ensuing conversation. Thinking he had died and gone to heaven, the only thing that stuck in his memory, as they found themselves pressed urgently against the wall of her hotel room, was her name; Ginny.
Virginia Alison
She gave me the jabs and said I was covered for every worst-case scenario, including being bitten by a dirty chimp. I told her this is why we have over-population problems. Why are idiots who annoy dirty chimps being protected?
Karl Pilkington
I think, honestly, the film industry is eating up comics characters at such a fast pace, and spewing them out as so much unspeakable, stench-y, crap. I mean, I think people are going to get pretty sick of the comics product of superhero, per se. Super-heroism seems to be so visceral for these times. Nobody needs a big clunky guy to throw cars about. You know, we’ve got drunks in town here that can do that. We don’t need that kind of superhero. What we need is a super-sage. We need a genuine group of wise people. We need to become wise. That’s the job of tomorrow; becoming wise, and integrated, and understanding.
Melinda Gebbie
The thin girl was gulping down one of Richard's bananas in what was, Richard reflected, the least erotic display of banana-eating he had ever seen.
Neil Gaiman
Having studied the toxic biological effects of wireless radio frequency (RF) radiation, I find it amazing that women will willfully strap on two radio frequency antennas to their breasts in the form of an underwired bra. The wireless industry knows the underwired bra as a dipole antenna or doublet.
Steven Magee
Define excellence vividly, quantitatively. Paint a picture for your most talented employees of what excellence looks like. Keep everyone pushing and pushing toward the right-hand edge of the bell curve.
Marcus Buckingham
of seatbelts as an opportunity to take up drunk-driving.
John Lanchester
I was camped at the same site as her: Broughton Farm. She came over to my tent and showed me her blisters. She asked me whether I knew the reason why a blister can keep on producing fluid ad infinitum. I said that I had always wondered the same thing about mucus. One of the reasons we are together is because we have similar interests.
Joe Dunthorne
Lysander saw that they were displaying all the timeworn and conventional feints and poor disguises of lovers meeting in a public place and hoping the real nature of their relationship would be invisible.
William Boyd
Respect yourself and others will come to respect you. That is true about all of us, but especially true about women. That is the meaning of honour.
Abdulrazak Gurnah
The uncomfortable, as well as the miraculous, fact about the human mind is how it varies from individual to individual. The process of treatment can therefore be long and complicated. Finding the right balance of drugs, whether lithium salts, anti-psychotics, SSRIs or other kinds of treatment can be a very hit or miss heuristic process requiring great patience and classy, caring doctoring. Some patients would rather reject the chemical path and look for ways of using diet, exercise and talk-therapy. For some the condition is so bad that ECT is indicated. One of my best friends regularly goes to a clinic for doses of electroconvulsive therapy, a treatment looked on by many as a kind of horrific torture that isn’t even understood by those who administer it. This friend of mine is just about one of the most intelligent people I have ever met and she says, “I know. It ought to be wrong. But it works. It makes me feel better. I sometimes forget my own name, but it makes me happier. It’s the only thing that works.” For her. Lord knows, I’m not a doctor, and I don’t understand the brain or the mind anything like enough to presume to judge or know better than any other semi-informed individual, but if it works for her…. well then, it works for her. Which is not to say that it will work for you, for me or for others.
Stephen Fry
See? Reading you all night has strengthened me. That’s what God’s love does. If you’re beginning to feel uncomfortable now, it’s because the changes in you are already beginning to happen and one day you’ll be glad to say, Deliver me from meaninglessness.
Ian McEwan
Some people are born to lift heavy weights some are born to juggle golden balls.
Max Beerbohm
A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and who you are depends largely on what book you happen to be reading at the moment.
Jessica Mitford
We must choose our allegiances carefully, for there is no going back on them.
Jayne Castel
Human history seems to me to be one long story of people sweeping down—or up, I suppose—replacing other people in the process.
Alexander McCall Smith
What I adore is supreme professionalism. I’m bored by writers who can write only when it’s raining.
Noël Coward
…everything may be done in a right way or a wrong; the right way is to do it as well as we can, as in God’s sight; the wrong is to do it in a self-seeking spirit, which either leads us to neglect it to follow out some device of our own before and after the doing.
Elizabeth Gaskell
Their bodies lay flatly on the rocks, and their eyes regarded him with evil interest: but it does not appear that Mr. Fison was afraid, or that he realized that he was in any danger. Possibly his confidence is to be ascribed to the limpness of their attitudes. But he was horrified, of course, and intensely excited and indignant at such revolting creatures preying upon human flesh. He thought they had chanced upon a drowned body. He shouted to them, with the idea of driving them off, and, finding they did not budge, cast about him, picked up a big rounded lump of rock, and flung it at one.And then, slowly uncoiling their tentacles, they all began moving towards him - creeping at first deliberately, and making a soft purring sound to each other.
H.G.Wells
This is the crux of being a Creative Mother. It is more than how many jumpers you have knitted, or having an exhibition in a fancy gallery, or a bookshelf of your own books. It is about the act of living authentically whilst honoring your mother self and creative self. About saying yes to life, every part of your life, and finding how to weave them all together.
Lucy H. Pearce
Putting pen to paper without first deciding the route and pace at which to scribe is like setting off on a bicycle without first checking the tyres.
Fennel Hudson
Luck ever attends the bold and constructive thinker: the apple, for instance, fell from the tree precisely when Newton's mind was groping after the law of gravity, and as Diva stepped into her grocer's to begin her morning's shopping (for she had been occupied with roses ever since breakfast) the attendant was at the telephone at the back of the shop. He spoke in a lucid telephone-voice."We've only two of the big tins of corned beef," he said; and there was a pause, during which, to a psychic, Diva's ears might have seemed to grow as pointed with attention as a satyr's. But she could only hear little hollow quacks from the other end."Tongue as well. Very good. I'll send them up at once," he added, and came forward into the shop."Good morning," said Diva. Her voice was tremulous with anxiety and investigation. "Got any big tins of corned beef? The ones that contain six pounds.""Very sorry, ma'am. We've only got two, and they've just been ordered.""A small pot of ginger then, please," said Diva recklessly. "Will you send it round immediately?""Yes, ma'am. The boy's just going out."That was luck. Diva hurried into the street, and was absorbed by the headlines of the news outside the stationer's. This was a favourite place for observation, for you appeared to be quite taken up by the topics of the day, and kept an oblique eye on the true object of your scrutiny...
E.F. Benson
I dispute the right of conservatives to be automatically complacent on these points. My own Marxist group took a consistently anti-Moscow line throughout the 'Cold War,' and was firm in its belief that that Soviet Union and its European empire could not last. Very few people believed that this was the case: The best known anti-Communist to advance the proposition was the great Robert Conquest, but he himself insists that part of the credit for such prescience goes to Orwell. More recently, a very exact prefiguration of the collapse of the USSR was offered by two German Marxists, one of them from the West (Hans Magnus Enzensberger) and one from the East (Rudolf Bahro, the accuracy of whose prediction was almost uncanny). I have never met an American conservative who has even heard of, let alone read, either of these authors.
Christopher Hitchens
Show me that I m everywhere and get me home for tea.
George Harrison
You are a child of the universeCome to choose how to live here.You are a child of the universeLoved beyond measure.
Jay Woodman
Out of all the things you would expect when facing a dragon, silence was not on the list. Roaring? Certainly! Snarling? Why, yes - of course! Fire-breathing? Couldn’t possibly do without it. Wouldn’t feel right if it wasn’t there.But silence?No. Definitely not.It was as out of place as a potter at a blacksmith’s.
Ness Kingsley
So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.
Iris Murdoch
It is commonplace observation that women are forever trying to straighten their hair if it is curly and curl it if it is straight, bind their breasts if they are large and pad them if they are small, darken their hair if it is light and lighten it if it is dark. Not all these measures are dictated by the fantom of fashion. They all reflect dissatisfaction with the body as it is, and an insistent desire that it be otherwise, not natural but controlled, fabricated. Many of the devices adopted by women are not cosmetic or ornamental, but disguise of the actual, arising from fear and distaste.
Germaine Greer
The best of what we are lies in what we hope to be
A.C. Grayling
Before anything else I was a woman who was capable of passion and who had a great need and a great desire for love.
Philippa Gregory
Sorry. But it isn’t for us to change how things are. I’m just an administrator. You’re just a teacher.”“Oh, I hope I don’t teach. Because look what we did: we saved the zoo animals and the nice children and we damned the afflicted and the blacks. You know what I do every day in that classroom? I do everything in my power to make sure those poor souls won’t learn the obvious lesson.”“If I were you,” said Tom, “I should stick to reading, writing and arithmetic.”“But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don’t show him that he counts for something?
Chris Cleave
Finally, I’d say to anyone who wants to tell these tales, don’t be afraid to be superstitious. If you have a lucky pen, use it. If you speak with more force and wit when wearing one red sock and one blue one, dress like that. When I’m at work I’m highly superstitious. My own superstition has to do with the voice in which the story comes out. I believe that every story is attended by its own sprite, whose voice we embody when we tell the tale, and that we tell it more successfully if we approach the sprite with a certain degree of respect and courtesy. These sprites are both old and young, male and female, sentimental and cynical, sceptical and credulous, and so on, and what’s more, they’re completely amoral: like the air-spirits who helped Strong Hans escape from the cave, the story-sprites are willing to serve whoever has the ring, whoever is telling the tale. To the accusation that this is nonsense, that all you need to tell a story is a human imagination, I reply, ‘Of course, and this is the way my imagination works.
Philip Pullman
Like bubbles on the sea of matter borne, they rise, they break, and to that sea return.
Alexander Pope