Quotes by British Authors - Page 745

There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.
Beatrix Potter
There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write.
William Makepeace Thackeray
I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard, and shows the bare bones beneath.
Wilkie Collins
He says nothing but I know he is listening. Words are the only medicine I have.‘You make sense of a world that is senseless. You gave me space boots so that I could walk on other planets. Without you, I’m lost. There’s no left, no right. No tomorrow, only miles of yesterdays. It doesn’t matter what happens now because I’ve found you. That’s why I’m here. Because of you. You who I love. My best friend. My brother.
Sally Gardner
Cause nobody's the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves - except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends. Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineering of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark.Azide Smith, How to be Both
Zadie Smith
He thought: How difficult it is to explain yourself to yourself. Sometimes there only is, and no knowing.
Aidan Chambers
Right. So if the eyes are shining, you know you're doing it. If the eyes are not shining, you get to ask a question. And this is the question: who am I being that my players' eyes are not shining? We can do that with our children, too. Who am I being, that my children's eyes are not shining? That's a totally different world.
Benjamin Zander
She quickly interpreted him into her mythology but if, at first, he was a herbivorous lion, later he became a unicorn devouring raw meat.
Angela Carter
It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.
Terry Pratchett
I got mixed up with some oddness in my youth, and the long and short of it is that I can't shuffle off this mortal coil until I have read the ten most boring classics.
Jasper Fforde
You've sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good.
Anthony Burgess
Watching movies simply is a promiscuous experience. The voracity it breeds! That quantity of quiddity compressed and quickened and sent at you! It's a little bit mad, isn't it, to hold a faithful flame for the one you've picked, when no such choice is required of you? The sane response to a rainbow is not to pick your favourite colour.
Antonia Quirke
I think people would be happier if they admitted things more often. In a sense we are all prisoners of some memory, or fear, or disappointment - we are all defined by something we can’t change.
Simon Van Booy
A miss for pleasure and a wife for breed.
John Gay
Perhaps the best function of parenthood is to teach the young creature to love with safety so that it may be able to venture unafraid when later emotion comes the thwarting of the instinct to love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed. To disapprove to condemn-the human soul shrivels under barren righteousness.
Freya Stark
Who's Johnnie Walker?""It's a drink. For grown-ups.""Is it nice?""Makes you drunk.""What's it like being drunk?" "Like being awake and asleep at the same time.""Sounds nice." "It was meant to sound terrible," he said looking down his glasses at her. "You get sick and stagger around. People actually vomit sometimes.
Tom Rachman
[It] is hardly possible to maintain seriously that the evil done by science is not altogether outweighed by the good. For example, if ten million lives were lost in every war, the net effect of science would still have been to increase the average length of life.
G H Hardy
In this life at least,Our fate is rarely epic.Maybe just as well,Impervious heroes we are not…
Scott Hastie
...A secure future seemed mapped out for me. Too secure, too mapped out. If I carried on in medicine, I realized I'd have a pretty good idea exactly what I'd be doing ten, twenty and even thirty years from that moment. It struck me like a halibut from the North Sea that that was not the way my life should go at all. What was the point of working on through the age of sixty-five and taking a chance on a better reincarnation next time?
Graham Chapman
There is the potential for your beliefs to be infinite and limitless.
Steven Redhead
Children can feel, but they cannot analyse their feelings; and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know not how to express the result of the process in words.
Charlotte Brontë
Much of his time at Oxford passed by his own account under a dark cloud of listlessness and depression. He was dismayed by the undergraduates' relentless snobbery and unremitting emphasis on money.
Hilary Spurling
Only fiction has the power to cross the mental barricades, to make strangers intelligible to each other, because it moves people's hearts as well as engaging their minds.
Ian Leslie
You wanted hearts and flowers,” he murmurs.I blink at him, not quite believing what I’m seeing.“You have my heart.” And he waves toward the room.“And here are the flowers,” I whisper, completing his sentence. “Christian, it’s lovely.
E.L. James
Never allow yourself to believe you should be silent.
Samantha Shannon
Jealousy is only hurt ego. Revenge is meaningless. Life is abstract. There is no point other than pleasure.
Chloe Thurlow
In his entire output, I can find only one piece of genuine unfairness: a thuggish attack on the poetry of WH Auden, whom he regarded as a dupe of the Communist Party. But even this was softened in some later essays. The truth is that he disliked Auden's homosexuality, and could not get over his prejudice. But much of the interest of Orwell lies in the fact that he was born prejudiced, so to speak, against Jews and the coloured peoples of the empire, and against the poor and uneducated, and against women and intellectuals—and managed, in a transparent and unique way, to educate himself out of this fog of bigotry (though he never did get over his aversion to 'pansies').
Christopher Hitchens
Some men will never be heroes, some heroes will never be men, he thought, with urgent acknowledgements to Joseph Conrad.
John le Carré
The first kiss is never just a kiss but a beautiful place you get to go only once.
Colin Tegerdine
Look, why don't you go talk to Ron about all this?" Harry asked."Well, I would, but he's always asleep when I go and see him!" said Lavender fretfully."Is he?" said Harry, surprised, for he had found Ron perfectly alert every time he had been up to the hospital wing.
J.K. Rowling
But to live in ignorance on such a point was impossible.
Jane Austen
Think'st thou heaven is such a glorious thing?I tell thee, 'tis not so fair as thouOr any man that breathes on earth.
Christopher Marlowe
One candle is like a smile. One little light can start a whole fire. Smile at someone today.
Gail Thackray
Life is difficult and those who make us laugh are angels.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Those who pay their bills on time are soon forgotten. It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.
Gyles Brandreth
Lord Vetinari in a meeting: “what people said was what they wanted him to hear. He paid a lot of attention to the spaces outside the words, though. That’s where the things were that they hoped he didn’t know and didn’t want him to find out.
Terry Pratchett
Every woman is a mad ugly bad old witch somewhere in her heart.
Philippa Gregory
That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Reality wasn't as important as people made it out to be; to Jude it was simply the physical state in which he found himself, an environment he had limited control over.
Gemma Malley
The future of wildlife and the habitat that they depend on is being destroyed. It is time to make nature and all the beauty living within it our priority.
Paul Oxton
I think to think. Not to be thought-full, or to reach a point of wisdom or acquire a grace of knowledge. I think for the sensuality of thought.
Ilyas Kassam
Satnav will get us quickly and all-too-predictably from A to B, but the path of life is more interesting when we’re allowed to explore the side streets.
Fennel Hudson
I returned to my existence, the existence I had chosen instead of you.
Jhumpa Lahiri
...[I]f I don't get going soon, the whole impetus may die---and if that happens, well, I really shall consider a long, restful plunge into insanity. Sometimes the abyss yawns very attractively.
Dodie Smith
As the husband is the wife is.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
When a woman is interested in you, she’ll let you know; if not, there’s no aftershave, gift, or line you can spin to make her change her mind.
David Mitchell
Hatred is a curse that only love can cure.
Anthony T.Hincks
True contemplation can only thrive when defended from two opposite exaggerations: quietism on the one hand, and spiritual fuss upon the other. Neither from passivity nor from anxiety has it anything to gain.
Evelyn Underhill
If you fail at the large things it means you have not large ambitions. Concentration, focus - that is all. The aptitudes come, the tools forge themselves.
Ian Fleming
If a book is worth reading it is worth buying.
John Ruskin
But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.
Virginia Woolf
A man without decision can never be said to belong to himself he is as a wave of the sea or a feather in the air which every breeze blows about.
John Foster
You learn eventually that, while there are no villains, there are no heroes either. And until you make the final discovery that there are only human beings, who are therefore all the more fascinating, you are liable to miss something.
Paul Gallico
Time flies when you grow fangs and fur.
Dianna Hardy
And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.
Roald Dahl
Some people come to the edge of the cliff and they look over, then run away in fear. They never realize it's possible to fly, to soar, to be free. They spend their lives crawling along cliff tops without finding the courage.
Michael Dobbs
People don’t change just because you know more about them.
Jasper Fforde
You feel, I suppose, that, in losing Isabella, you lose half yourself: you feel a void in your heart which nothing else can occupy.  Society is becoming irksome; and as for the amusements in which you were wont to share at Bath, the very idea of which without her is abhorrent.  You would not, for instance, now go to a ball for the world.  You feel that you have no longer any friend to whom you can speak with unreserve; on whose regard you can place dependence; or whose counsel, in any difficult, you could rely on.
Jane Austen
Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.''Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit. 'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.' 'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?' 'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.
Margery Williams Bianco
I love you. You’re mine. I’ll kill any bastard who tries to take you from me.
Samantha Young