Quotes by British Authors - Page 741

I am not you and all my choices have already been made, good and bad.
Conn Iggulden
Throw your arms around the world and hold on tight. But not through fear ...but because of your love.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
A myth is a fixed way of looking at the world which cannot be destroyed because looked at through the myth all evidence supports that myth.
Edward de Bono
If peaceful protesting really worked, the need to peacefully protest would have subsided to almost zero a long time ago! Instead, the thing that has subsided to almost zero are the number of complaints filed against police officers that are actually upheld.
Steven Magee
Suddenly I had to laugh. It was like realising you definitely need to projectile vomit when you thought you had it under control in some imprisoning form of public space.
Olivia Sudjic
One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical.
Douglas Adams
You haven't lost Iraki, you know. I don't know if it helps to say that. I lost a friend once myself, and I know how it goes.'He'll find his way inside you, and you'll carry him onward. Behind your heartbeat, you'll hear another one, faint and out of step. People will say you are speaking his opinions, or your hair has turned like his.'There are no more facts about him, that part is over. Now is the time for essential things. You'll see visions of him wherever you go. You'll see his eyes so moist, his intentions so blinding, you'll think he is more alive than you. You will look around and wonder if it was you who died.'Gradually you'll grow older than him, and love him as your son. 'In the future, you'll live astride the line separating life from death. You'll become experienced in the wisdom of grief. You won't wait until people die to grieve for them. You'll give them their grief while they are still alive, for then judgement falls away, and there remains only the miracle of being.'
Rana Dasgupta
Is she always like this?" "No, usually worse.
Steve Voake
A journey of observation must leave as much as possible to chance. Random movement is the best plan for maximum observation
Tahir Shah
It’s amazing how long we put up with things we detest for the sake of a quiet life.
Tami Egonu
Pritchard tutted. "Justice? Justice is even more problematic than truth. It's an emergent property of a very complicated system.
M.R. Carey
Theodore had an apparently inexhaustible fund of knowledge about everything, but he imparted this knowledge with a sort of meticulous diffidence that made you feel he was not so much teaching you something new, as reminding you of something which you were already aware of, but which had, for some reason or other, slipped your mind.
Gerald Durrell
There's always something coming. Good or bad, it's going to force you to grow.
Robert Tew
The heart has a heart of its own.
Morrissey
In the summer,on fine evenings, I love to drive late andalone in the scented forests, and when I havereached a dark part stop, and sit quite still, listeningto the nightingales repeating their little tune overand over aga^n after interludes of gurgling, or ifthere are no nightingales, listening to the marvelloussilence, and letting its blessedness descend intomy very souL The nightingales in the forestsabout here all sing the same tune, and in the samekey of (E flat).
Elizabeth von Arnim
The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.
W.H. Auden
They are a brilliant device for shape-shifting as we can slip into the skin of authors from other times, other cultural backgrounds, brilliant minds who give us a new perspective on life and the world - something we all need from time to time. - Cornelia Funke
Jen Campbell
In Hindu parlance he had 'realised the Self'; that is to say, he had realised by direct experience that nothing existed apart from an indivisible and universal consciousness which was experienced in its unmanifest form as beingness or awareness and in its manifest form as the appearance of the universe.
David Godman
If you you write with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can.
Neil Gaiman
Water!' cried Marie.'Vinegar!' recommended the bell-boy.'Eu-de-Cologne!' said Bill.'Pepper!' said Lord Tidmouth.Mary had another suggestion.'Give her air!'So had the bell-boy.'Slap her hands!'Lord Tidmouth went further.'Sit on her head!' he advised.
P.G. Wodehouse
Dedication note: To everyone, you are beautiful, and don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise.
Sam Crescent
There are the people of the day, and the creatures of the night. And it's important to remember that the creatures of the night aren't simply the people of the day staying up late because they think that makes them cool and interesting. It takes more than heavy mascara and a pale complexion to cross the divide.
Terry Pratchett
The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.
Winston S. Churchill
Alltami (n.)The ancient art of being able to balance the hot and cold shower taps.
Douglas Adams
There has never been a more important time to vote for the Green Party!
Steven Magee
If thou rememberest that thou art going to heaven, thou wilt not sleep on the road. If thou thinkest that hell is behind thee, and the devil pursuing thee, thou wilt not loiter.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.
J.B. Priestley
Then he asked if I didn’t like things changing. And I said I wouldn’t mind things changing if I became an astronaut, for example, which is one of the biggest changes you can imagine, apart from becoming a girl or dying.
Mark Haddon
How could any Lord have made this world?... there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for this world to commit... No happiness lasted.
Virginia Woolf
Have you ever seen anything quite as pathetic?" said Malfoy. "And he’s supposed to be our teacher!"Harry and Ron both made furious moves toward Malfoy, but Hermione got there first - SMACK!She had slapped Malfoy across the face with all the strength she could muster. Malfoy staggered. Harry, Ron, Crabbe, and Goyle stood flabbergasted as Hermione raised her hand
J.K. Rowling
Yer a wizard, Harry!
J.K. Rowling
Jesus never asked me to give to an organization the kind of exclusive devotion he demands from his disciples. Over and over, Jesus calls people to himself - out of the church, the culture, the economy, and the family.
Michael Spencer
Artists don't create society, they reflect it
Ben Elton
We heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don't heal by forming a secret society of one - by assessing about the only other 'one' we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment.
Jeanette Winterson
Good folk, I have no coin,To take were to purloin:I have no copper in my purse,I have no silver either,And all my gold is on the furzeThat shakes in windy weatherAbove the rusy heather.
Christina Rossetti
Curiosity takes ignorance seriously, and is confident enough to admit when it does not know. It is aware of not knowing, and it sets out to do something about it
Alain de Botton
I have been heartbroken once and it has affected all of my relationships from there on. But now I look at it as an occupational hazard. If you are in the meat market at some point you are gonna get mad cow disease.
Dominic Monaghan
Most of the vegetables in the allotments had died back but one, tended by a Jamaican man, was full of squash. They lay among the dying leaves, rimmed with frost, huge, orange and alien, half hidden by the mist. They reminded her of the fairy stories she’d read as a young child, of white horses and gold carriages that turned into mice and pumpkins on the stroke of midnight.
Sanjida Kay
We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond and on these faces there are no smiles.
Hilaire Belloc
You know the worst thing about oral sex? The view.
Maureen Lipman
What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.
Thomas Henry Huxley
They say Aslan is on the move- perhaps has already landed."And now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different. Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don't understand but in the dream it feels as if it has some enormous meaning- either a terrifying one which turns the whole dream into a nightmare or else a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words, which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you could get into that dream again. It was like that now. At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in its inside. Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer.
C.S. Lewis
Years later Lazar would recall questioning his mother as to who the people who shared his meals were. "Some are our relations," was the response, "But all of them are our people.
katheryn spink
Cricket to us was more than play,It was a worship in the summer sun.
Edmund Blunden
Broken people are so beautiful. They have to put themselves back together every day.
Robert Tew
You have to wait together - for a week, for a year, for a lifetime, before the final intimate conversation may be attained ... and exhausted. So that ... That in effect was love.
Ford Madox Ford
The sound a box of Lego makes is the noise of a child's mind working, looking for the right piece. Shake it, and it's almost creativity in aural form.
Grayson Perry
Never underestimate the significance of the little things done out of a large heart of love.
Elizabeth George
No one is polite to writers.
Marcus Berkmann
And it's what you never will write," said the Controller. "Because, if it were really like Othello nobody could understand it, however new it might be. And if were new, it couldn't possibly be like Othello.
Aldous Huxley
For the movement was without scruples; she rolled towards her goal unconcernedly and deposed the corpses of the drowned in the windings of her course. Her course had many twists and windings; such was the law of her being. And whosoever could not follow her crooked course was washed on to the bank, for such was her law. The motives of the individual did not matter to her. His conscience did not matter to her, neither did she care what went on in his head and his heart. The Party knew only one crime: to swerve from the course laid out; and only one punishment: death. Death was no mystery in the movement; there was nothing exalted about it: it was the logical solution to political divergences
Arthur Koestler
I remembered back to leo's burial and holding your hand. I was eleven and you were six, your hand soft and small in mine. As the vicar said 'in sure and certain hope of the resurrection of eternal life' you turned to me, 'I don't want sure and certain hope I want sure and certain Bee.
Rosamund Lupton
Perhaps that's the whole point about infidelity, I suggested, not that one has sex but that by doing so one puts at risk someone else's happiness?
Patrick McGrath
Bessie asked if I would have a book: the word book acted as a transient stimulus, and I begged her to fetch Gulliver’s Travels from the library.  This book I had again and again perused with delight. 
Charlotte Brontë
Part of what makes him (laid-back Tim Hudson)an ace is that he would never acknowledge that he is an ace.
Joe Simpson
I am human and I need to be loved,just like everybody else does.
Morrissey
This heated (environmental) debate is fundamentally about numbers. How much energy could each source deliver, at what economic and social cost, and with what risks? But actual numbers are rarely mentioned. In public debates, people just say “Nuclear is a money pit” or “We have a huge amount of wave and wind.” The trouble with this sort of language is that it’s not sufficient to know that something is huge: we need to know how the one “huge” compares with another “huge,” namely our huge energy consumption. To make this comparison, we need numbers, not adjectives.
David Mackay
Jesus is in the tempest. His love wraps the night about itself as a mantle, but to the eye of faith the sable robe is scarce a disguise.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
So long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible, and about which we can do nothing; but when we begin to think of it subjectively, we feel responsible for our time, and the notion of punctuality arises.
W.H. Auden
As the faculty of writing has chiefly been a masculine endowment the reproach of making the world miserable has always been thrown upon the women.
Samuel Johnson