Quotes by British Authors - Page 744

Fools that will laugh on earth, most weep in hell.
Christopher Marlowe
Too many of our preferences reflect nasty behaviours and states of mind that were genetically adaptive in the ancestral environment. Instead, wouldn't it be better if we rewrote our own corrupt code?
David Pearce
We have to do a better job at the work of anthropology if we hope to maintain our role in the public discourse.
Christopher W. Brooks
I would be quite content to go to their children's bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to 'respect' their belief that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant, or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations. And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition - which is that they in turn leave me alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing.
Christopher Hitchens
Poor sleepers should endeavor to compose themselves. Tampering with empty space, stirring up echoes in pitch-black pits of darkness is scarcely sedative.("Out Of The Deep")
Walter de la Mare
There's no money in poetry but then there's no poetry in money either.
Robert Graves
(on the word "fuck")'Oh, come on, Mum,' I sighed at her protest. 'It's just an old Anglo-Saxon word for the female organ which has been adopted by an inherently misogynist language as a negative epithet. It's the same as "fuck", it basically means the same as copulate, but the latter is perfectly acceptable. Why? Because copulate has its roots in Latin and Latin reminds us that we are a sophisticated, learned species, not the rutting animals that these prehistoric grunts would have us appear to be, and isn't that really the issue here? We don't want to admit that we are essentially animals? We want to distinguish ourselves from the fauna with grand conceits and elaborate language; become angels worthy of salvation, not dumb creatures consigned to an earthly, terminal end. It's just a word, Mum; a sound meaning a thing; and your disgust is just denial of a greater horror: that our consciousness is not an indication of our specialness but the terrifying key to knowing how truly insignificant we are.'She told me to got fuck myself.
Simon Pegg
There is no better way to know us Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.
Ted Hughes
Being a billionaire helps when you live in a slum and have to eat scraps of food and drink dirty water.
Anthony T.Hincks
Anger and worry are the enemies of clear thought.
Madeleine Brent
The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.
Margaret Thatcher
I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to
J.R.R. Tolkien
I tried that too, you know. After ... my family was murdered, and I was waiting for justice, I tried to hide inside a bottle. But some men, Tony, [..] are not small enough to fit into a bottle.
Aleksandr Voinov
Written up in marker on a factory sign:I struggle with the feeling that my life isn't mine
Coldplay
Who are we aligning ourselves with? Are we aligning ourselves with the presence of God as it is abused, broken, bleeding, and mocked and scorned even now in this world? Do we take that one step down, risking insecurity, violence, guilt by association, to stand beside those who are both victim and accused, and public sinner – criminal and despised in society?
Megan McKenna
This was supposed to be yesterday. I was sitting on the Cardiff/London train, supposedly about to write this very column, and realising something quite terrible. My head was entirely empty. A vast echoing void. Bigger on the inside, but with nothing in it. You could drop a pebble in my brain and wait for an hour to hear it land. No actually, you couldn't - that would be aggressive and unhelpful, so keep your damn pebbles to yourself.
Steven Moffat
We've had our ups and downs since then, but that's what families have, ups and downs.
Neil Gaiman
Even his conversation was, as it were, a spoken part.
T.H. White
I'm not going anywhere!" said Harry fiercely. "One of my best friends is Muggle-born; she'll be first in line if the Chamber really has been opened...
J.K. Rowling
If you write in the Old World, and against it, your work must die, go missing, be veiled, before it can live the life for which it was destined in the New World.
Patrick Nowell-Smith
the government tends to act like a corporation treating the public as its consumers rather than its citizens
Fairclough Norman
And I know I’ve lost.Everything is lost.Everything is over.“As the newly appointed President of this fair planet of ours,” the Mayor says, holding out his hands as if to show me the world for the first time,” let me be the very first to welcome you to its new capital city.”“Todd?” Viola whispers, her eyes closed.I hold her tightly to me.“I’m sorry,” I whisper to her. “I’m so sorry.”We’ve run right into a trap.We’ve run right off the end of the world.“Welcome,” says the Mayor,” to the New Prentisstown.
Patrick Ness
We are no longer the knights who say Ni! We are now the knights who say ekki-ekki-ekki-pitang-zoom-boing!
Graham Chapman
Houses built on bridges are scandals. A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape, an unspace to link One-place-town to Another-place-town over a river or a road or a tangle of railway tracks or a quarry, or to attach an island to another island or to the continent from which it strains. The dream of a bridge is of a woman standing at one side of a gorge and stepping out as if her job is to die, but when her foot falls it meets the ground right on the other side. A bridge is just better than no bridge but its horizon is gaplessness, and the fact of itself should still shame it. But someone had built on this bridge, drawn attention to its matter and failure. An arrogance that thrilled me.
China Miéville
Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
John Berger
If not now, when?
Steve Backley
The moor has always been part of my life. It’s like a muse: the colours of the heather and the sky; how you can see the savagery of the wind in the way the dwarf pine trees are bent double, the bleak lines of the landscape in winter when everything save the moss and the grass are dead, stones like bones, poking through a thin skin of bilberry bushes, rushes reflected in black bog water.
Sanjida Kay
Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal.
Thomas Hardy
Memories come back, pressing in on you, like ghost faces in the darkness pushing up the glass, trying to get into the lit room.
Julia Green
Why is the measure of love loss?
Jeanette Winterson
My father was a slave to capitalist ideology. He didn't know what he was doing.""You mean you went to an expensive school?
Ian Rankin
How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back! She said not to me but to the chaplain, 'I am at peace with God.' She smiled, but not at me. Poi si torno all' eterna fontana.
C.S. Lewis
He who gives back at first repulse and without striking the second blow, despairs success, has never been, is not, and never will be, a hero in love, war or business. - Frederick Tudor
Gavin Weightman
Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.
Edward Gibbon
There’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork, greatest of Discworld c
Terry Pratchett
I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Far rather would she that he were dead! She could not sit beside him when he stared so and did not see her and made everything terrible; sky and tree, children playing, dragging carts, blowing whistles, falling down; all were terrible. And he would not kill himself; and she could tell no one. "Septimus has been working too hard"––that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought. She could tell nobody, not even Septimus now, and looking back, she saw him sitting in his shabby overcoat alone, on the seat, hunched up, staring. And it was cowardly for a man to say he would kill himself, but Septimus had fought; he was brave; he was not Septimus now. She put on her lace collar. She put on her new hat and he never noticed; and he was happy without her. Nothing could make her happy without him! Nothing! He was selfish. So men are.
Virginia Woolf
There is no magic herb that makes a brave man. Courage is knowing that what you do is necessary. Don't doubt yourself, Shadow. There is more valor in your heart than you realize.
Elizabeth Alder
Faith begins as an experiment and ends as an experience.
William Ralph Inge
My God, Justin, do you hate him so?""Bah!" said his Grace..."does one hate an adder? Because it is venomous and loathsome one crushes it underfoot, as I shall crush this Comte.
Georgette Heyer
Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.
Anna Freud
When someone leaves you, apart from missing them, apart from the fact that the whole little world you've created together collapses, and that everything you see or do reminds you of them, the worst is the thought that they tried you out and, in the end, the whole sum of parts adds up to you got stamped REJECT by the one you love. How can you not be left with the personal confidence of a passed over British Rail sandwich?
Helen Fielding
He had seen the whole Universe stretching to infinity around him—everything. And with it had come the clear and extraordinary knowledge that he was the most important thing in it. Having a conceited ego is one thing. Actually being told by a machine is another.
Douglas Adams
It was also a room full of books and made of books. There was no actual furniture; this is to say, the desk and chairs were shaped out of books. It looked as though many of them were frequently referred to, because they lay open with other books used as bookmarks.
Terry Pratchett
Why am I the only one who thinks she’s messing with us? - Egg
Jamie Scallion
No star is ever lost we once have seen,We always may be what we might have beenSince Good, though only thought,Has life and breath -God's life - can always be redeemed from death.And evil in its nature is decay,And any hour may blot it all away.The hope that lost in some far distance seems,May be the truer life, and this the dream.
Adelaide Anne Procter
Each of our five senses contains an art.
Lawrence Durrell
Still, who could say what men ever were looking for? They looked for what they found; they knew what pleased them only when they saw it.
Henry James
My grandfather used to wear a black hat and coat. You are my children. You are my jewels. We old ones invest our future in you.
Diane Samuels
It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.
T.H. White
And so Mort came at last to the river Ankh, greatest of rivers. Even before it entered the city, it was slow and heavy with the silt of the plains, and by the time it got to The Shades even an agnostic could have walked across it. It was hard to drown in the Ankh, but easy to suffocate.
Terry Pratchett
We are tiny flames, Helikaon, and we flicker alone in the great dark for no more than a heartbeat. When we strive for wealth, glory and fame, it is meaningless. The nations we fight for will one day cease to be. Even the mountains we gaze upon will crumble to dust. To truly live we must yearn for that which does not die.
David Gemmell
Maurice watched them argue again. Humans, eh? Think they're lords of creation. Not like us cats. We know we are. Ever see a cat feed a human? Case proven.
Terry Pratchett
Every author however modest keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
Logan Pearsall Smith
A witch who is bored might do ANYTHING.People said things like 'we had to make our own amusements in those days' as if this signified some kind of moral worth, and perhaps it did, but the last thing you wanted a witch to do was get bored and start making her own amusements, because witches sometimes had famously erratic ideas about what was amusing.
Terry Pratchett
Every villain is a hero in his own mind.
Tom Hiddleston
New opinions are always suspected and usually opposed without any other reason but because they are not already common.
John Locke
The cards spoke to a suspicion that many whose work is play can never be free of: that you can only flaunt your triviality for so long before punishment is due.
Helen Oyeyemi
... why I like timetables, because they make sure I don't get lost in time.
Mark Haddon
Es dificilísimo que hasta los más bondadosos, los que más te quieren, se tomen tus intereses verdaderamente en serio, porque suelen aconsejarte desde una vida más segura y más aislada que la tuya, en la que escapar no es una realidad, sino algo con lo que de vez en cuando sueñan.
Rachel Cusk