Quotes by British Authors - Page 742

I heard a definition once: Happiness is health and a short memory! I wish I'd invented it, because it is very true.
Audrey Hepburn
The important concept of the solar wind is that Space is not empty. It is an energy and particle filled environment that interacts with whatever is in it! Astronomers call this 'Dark Energy'.
Steven Magee
My night shall be remembered for a starThat outshone all the suns of all men's days
Rupert Brooke
I am my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Soon, they actually began to titter on their toes as they glared at me, looking more like an army of angry wasps than ever before. All they needed now were matching yellow and black jumpers and pretend stingers!
Adele Rose
Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.
Nick Harkaway
'Everything is temporary. Nothing lasts. We're born. We die. Life's all about loss and change. Things happen, we learn to adapt or we don't, but we move on in some way or another. Sometimes that's hard and takes longer than we'd like.'
Barbara Elsborg
To be a writer - write! To be an author - publish! To be a bestselling author - never stop writing!
David Maxwell
Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other - good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on.
Mary Balogh
Premature independence is the daughter of conceit.
Idries Shah
Such is the facility with which mankind believe at one and the same time things inconsistent with one another, and so few are those who draw from what they receive as truths, any consequences but those recommended to them by their feelings, that multitudes have held the undoubting belief in an Omnipotent Author of Hell, and have nevertheless identified that being with the one best conception they were able to form of perfect goodness.
John Stuart Mill
Men who’ve made choices always feel they own their destiny. Few ever think to ask who shaped and offered up those choices. Who dangles the carrot they think they’ve chosen to follow.
Mark Lawrence
If you must walk in someone's shadow make sure it's your own
Rasheed Ogunlaru
I half closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd wave, and maybe even call.
Kazuo Ishiguro
It’s the way he had a cup of tea waiting for me when I woke up. It’s the way he turned on his laptop especially for me to look up all my Internet horoscopes and helped me choose the best one. He knows all the crappy, embarrassing bits about me that I normally try to hide from any man for as long as possible… and he loves me anyway.
Sophie Kinsella
Then the truth is this: a good man can only aspire to be worthy of a good woman. She'll always be out of his league in ways he'll never understand. But he'll appreciate what he doesn't understand—if he's smart.
James Anderson
It was a common complaint amongst the Arts students that their library was in dire need of refurbishment. To call the old building shabby chic was being kind. It didn’t have automated stacks or self-service machines like the Management and Sciences library the other side of campus and the carpets and bookcases looked like they were probably the Victorian originals. But on days like this one, where the springtime sunshine streamed in through the high windows and set the dust motes dancing, Harriet sincerely felt that those BSc lot could stuff their vending machines and state of the art study pods. The Old Library was clearly suited for those who had poetry in their souls, rather than numbers in their heads.
Erin Lawless
Words actually failed me. I felt as dumb as my lounge-less friend in the corner. "You injected me with vampire blood?" My words were said slowly, ensuring that I didn't get one wrong or accidentally call Francis a fucking asshat. "You're a vampire?"Francis' expression managed to convey how stupid he thought that question was. "I live underground, and you've never seen me outside. I'm pale in complexion ands obviously hundreds of years old. What did you think I was? Agoraphobic?
Steve McHugh
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
George Eliot
The problem is that I am in the wrong century to burn things. I am the wrong generation to let it go.
Edmund de Waal
Stay encouraged and stay motivated! You are greater than you know.
Kayisha Thomas
Your family will flourish when decisions are guided by the Lord—the head of your household.
Elizabeth George
In this world of numbness and information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed.
Patrick Ness
I have a print - you can buy them at the Victoria and Albert Museum - of a photograph of the village street of Thetford, taken in 1868, in which William Smith is not. The street is empty. There is a grocer's shop and a blacksmith's and a stationary cart and a great spreading tree, but not a single human figure. In fact William Smith - or someone, or several people, dogs too, geese, a man on a horse - passed beneath the tree, went into the grocer's shop, loitered for a moment talking to a friend while the photograph was taken but he is invisible, all of them are invisible. The exposure of the photograph - sixty minutes - was so long that William Smith and everyone else passed through it and away leaving no trace. Not even so much of a mark as those primordial worms that passed through the Cambrian mud of northern Scotland and left the empty tube of their passage in the rock.I like that. I like that very much. A neat image for the relation of man to the physical world. Gone, passed through and away.
Penelope Lively
I am a mediocre being, a bit cunning.
Renée Vivien
Old age is not as honorable as death, but most people seek it.
David Gemmell
In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair...the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.
Dorothy L. Sayers
The sad fact is, there are 7.220.400.641 people on the planet, but right now I haven't got a single one to talk to.
Holly Smale
It’s not a bad lesson to learn in the bleaker months: how you view a storm is a question of perspective; provided you find the right rock to watch it from, it could be the most incredible thing you’ll ever witness.
Dan Stevens
The man of pleasure by a vain attempt to be more happy than any man can be is often more miserable than most men.
Charles Caleb Colton
How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?
Logan Pearsall Smith
It was a heavenly summer, the summer in which France fell and the British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from Dunkirk. Leaves were never such an intense and iridescent green; sunlight glinted on flower-studded meadows as the Germans encircled the Maginot Line and overran not only France but Belgium and Holland. Birdsong filled the air in the lull between bursts of gunfire and accompanied the fleeing refugees who blocked the roads. It was as though the weather was preparing a glorious requiem for the death of Europe.
Eva Ibbotson
Who is apt on occasion to assign a multitude of reasons when one will do? This is a sure sign of weakness in argument.
Harriet Martineau
You are a leader. It is time to lead. You must inspire, you must plan, you must make the world a better place.
Gemma Malley
When you're sad, my Little Star, go out of doors. It's always better underneath the open sky.
Eva Ibbotson
The proper time to influence the character of a child is about 100 years before he is born.
Dean William R. Inge
Ah, but it is an interesting thing, that these things can so seldom be proved. If I were to perform some piece of, hrmf, magic for you, here in this room, you would claim a thousand ways it could have been done. Indeed, those ways might be exceedingly unlikely, but you would cling to them rather than accept the, mmn, the chance that magic, the eternal inexplicable, might be the true agent, and if you were strong enough in yourself, unafraid, unthreatened, here in your own chambers, well perhaps there would be no magic worked at all. It is a subjective force, you see, whereas the physical laws of the artificers are objective. A gear-train will turn without faith, but magic may not. And so, when your people demand, mmn, proof, there is none, but when you have forgotten and dismissed it, then magic creeps back into the gaps where you do not look for it.
Adrian Tchaikovsky
You are too timid for me. You care too much about what other people think. But you know what? Because you are so desperate to win the approval of others, you'll never get rid of their criticisms, no matter how hard you try. You say you want to travel the path, but you don't want to sacrifice anything to that end. Money, fame, power, lavishness, or carnal pleasure - whatever it is that one holds most dear in life, one should dispose of that first.
Elif Shafak
We need the slower and more lasting stimulus of solitary reading as a relief from the pressure on eye, ear and nerves of the torrent of information and entertainment pouring from ever-open electronic jaws. It could end by stupefying us.
Storm Jameson
I have not betrayed Julia.
George Orwell
It is well for the unfortunate to be resigned, but for the guilty there is no peace. The agonies of remorse poison the luxury there is otherwise sometimes found in indulging the excess of grief.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The sweetest joy the wildest woe is love.
Francis Bailey
If you were a bird, and lived on high,You'd lean on the wind when the wind came by,You'd say to the wind when it took you away:"That's where I wanted to go today!
A.A. Milne
Quinn came forward and Sam pulled him aside. His old friend looked tortured and sad.“What’s up, brah?” Sam asked.Quinn couldn’t speak. He was choked with emotion. “Dude . . .”“You want to stay in town.”“My crews . . . my boats and all . . .”Sam put a hand on his shoulder. “Quinn, I’m glad you found something so important to do. Something you really like.”“Yeah, but . . .”Sam pulled him into a brief hug. “You and me, we’re still friends, man. But you have responsibilities.
Michael Grant
Do not tell your secrets to everyone in this headquarters, Earth. We have surveyed it well. There was nobody to whom to entrust secrets.
Idries Shah
If you want to be with somebody who gets you, you prefer collusion to desire, safety to excitement (sometimes good things to prefer but not always the things most wanted). The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as adults, to the grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers of the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be, among many other things our most violent form of nostalgia.
Adam Phillips
We can't all be stars because someone has to sit on the curb and clap as I go by.
Sebastian Horsley
From the intrinsic evidence of His creation the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician .
Sir James Jeans
The mistake you make, don't you see,is in thinking one can live in a corrupt society without being corrupt oneself. After all, what do you achieve by refusing to make money? You're trying to behave as though one could stand right outside our economic system. But one can't. One's got to change the system, or one changes nothing. One can't put things right in a hole-and-corner way, if you take my meaning.
George Orwell
O Woman! in our hours of ease Uncertain coy and hard to please And variable as the shade By the light quivering aspen made When pain and anguish wring the brow A ministering angel thou!
Walter Scott
But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.
Charles Darwin
1. You left a multipack of Mars Bars on top of your wardrobe. Can I have one? Dad x2. I had three. Hope that's OK. Dad x3. I'm just going to have one more. Dad x4. Harriet, your Dad's made himself sick on an entire multipack of Mars Bars again. Please don't leave sweets where we can find them. A x
Holly Smale
Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified.
Virginia Woolf
Like all lawyers, I was delighted by gratitude. It happened so rarely.
C.J. Sansom
Nobody can see pain. They have no frame of reference for pain that's happening to someone else. They can only see inactivity - which they interpret as laziness.
Elizabeth Haynes
It was a perfect spring day. The air was sweet and gentle and the sky stretched high, an intense blue. Harold was certain that the last time he had peered through the net drapes of Fossebridge Road (his home), the trees and hedges were dark bones and spindles against the skyline; yet now that he was out, and on his feet, it was as if everywhere he looked, the fields, gardens, trees, and hedgerows and exploded with growth. A canopy of sticky young leaves clung to the branches above him. There were startling yellow clouds of forsythia, trails of purple aubrietia; a young willow shook in a fountain of silver. The first of the potato shoots fingered through the soil, and already tiny buds hung from the gooseberry and currant shrubs like the earrings Maureen used to wear. The abundance of new life was enough to make him giddy.
Rachel Joyce
Disbelief is easy, Kane. It’s faith that takes courage, and character.
Michael Marshall Smith
What have I always believed?That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right.
Terry Pratchett
Why do I prefer boys? Because of their shape and their voices and their smell and the way they move. And boys can be so romantic. I can put them into my myth and fall in love with them.
Christopher Isherwood
As for the fact that Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle apeared to be going their different ways when they were usually inseparable, these things happened as people got older--Ron and Hermione, Harry reflected sadly, were living proof.
J.K. Rowling