Quotes by British Authors - Page 755

But fate, as Merlin always taught us, is inexorable. Life is a jest of the Gods, Merlin liked to claim, and there is no justice. You must learn to laugh, he once told me, or else you'll just weep yourself to death.
Bernard Cornwell
He held his fingers to my lips. “Shh, don’t say it, Tyler. Don’t say the words that will fucking break me. Don’t say the words that will tear my world apart.” Dean sighed and gripped his eyes shut before looking back at me again. “Don’t ask me to give up something that has always been a part of me. It will kill me, Tyler. Please. I can’t live without you.
Jaimie Roberts
Long after the traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up.The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.
John N Gray
The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines; it offers magical metamorphoses to the one who opens the door, who passes on what was found there, and to those who hear what the storyteller brings. The faculty of wonder, like curiosity can make things happen; it is time for wishful thinking to have its due.
Marina Warner
You would like to know how I behave when I am experiencing pain, not writing books about it. You need not guess, for I will tell you; I am a great coward... If I knew any way of escape I would crawl through sewers to find it. But what is the good of telling you about my feelings? You know them already; they are the same as yours. I am not arguing that pain is not painful. Pain hurts. That is what the word means. I am only trying to show that the old Christian doctrine of being made 'perfect through suffering' is not incredible. To prove it palatable is beyond my design.
C.S. Lewis
I absolutely think that happiness is a choice. One of the most potent forces in human psychology is the power of habit. Do something, think something, often enough and it will become the only thing you can do or think. Choose to be unhappy and soon that’s all you will be. Live in a swamp and you’ll grow webbed feet.
Nicholas Evans
Even sleep offered no respite from my mental disorders. There was Nightmare Disorder, which is diagnosed when the sufferer dreams of being "pursued or declared a failure." All my nightmares involve someone chasing me down the street while yelling, "You're a failure!
Jon Ronson
If you truly pour your heart into what you believe in, even if it makes you vulnerable, amazing things can and will happen.
Emma Watson
The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.
A.S. Byatt
She told me I couldn't just put on a leather jacket and think I was rock'n'roll, I had to live it."Burt about Bex, Book 1 "Making it
Jamie Scallion
I am not important. If I take a break, no one dies. And this is A Good Thing.
Helen Russell
I gotta look out for my band mates. - Tea
Jamie Scallion
Never say ‘no’ to adventures. Always say ‘yes,’ otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.
Ian Fleming
It's interesting how much you can tell about someone from their friends.
Lindsey Kelk
I cannot for the life of me understand why small children take so long to grow up. I think they do it deliberately, just to annoy me.
Roald Dahl
The body of truth has a much larger data base than the conscience of lies.
Anthony T.Hincks
Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)
Jeanette Winterson
When one's expectations are reduced to zero one really appreciates everything one does have.
Stephen Hawking
When the horror recedes and the world resumes its normal shape, you cannot forget it. You have seen what is "really" there, the empty horror that exists when the consoling illusion of our mundane experience is stripped away, so you can never respond to the world in quite the same way again."from Coleridge: Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread
Karen Armstrong
They say that life is just a blank chain, and precious moments are the beads we hang off it to make it beautiful.
Holly Smale
A witch relied too much on words ever to go back on them.
Terry Pratchett
Shut up, Arthur,' said my mother, and he zipped his mouth shut like an infuriating child.Ginger started to laugh. Not at anything in particular, but just because Ginger was stoned.
Sarah Winman
SENTENCES OF THE KHAJAGANRUDBARI : Heart to heart is an essential means of passing on the secrets of the Path.
Idries Shah
Politeness is good nature regulated by good sense.
Sydney Smith
To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces. The sea air, sunshine, and patience, Watson—all else will come.
Arthur Conan Doyle
For a Man cannot believe a Miracle without relying upon Sense, nor Transubstantiation without renouncing it. So that never were any two things so ill coupled together as the Doctrine of Christianity and that of Transubstantiation, because they draw several ways, and are ready to strangle one another: For the main Evidence of the Christian Doctrine, which is Miracles, is resolved into the certainty of Sense, but this Evidence is clear and point blank against Transubstantiation.
John Tillotson
I'd like to be a truck driver. I think you could run your life that way. It wouldn't be such a bad way of doing it. It would offer a chance to be alone.
Princess Anne of England
Justice is too good for some people and not good enough for the rest.
Norman Douglas
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I foundA hedgehog jammed up against the blades,Killed. It had been in the long grass.I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.Now I had mauled its unobtrusive worldUnmendably. Burial was no help:Next morning I got up and it did not.The first day after a death, the new absenceIs always the same; we should be carefulOf each other, we should be kindWhile there is still time.
Philip Larkin
What's that?" he snarled, staring at the envelope Harry was still clutching in his hand. "If it's another form for me to sign, you've got another -""It's not," said Harry cheerfully. "It's a letter from my godfather.""Godfather?" sputtered Uncle Vernon. "You haven't got a godfather!""Yes, I have," said Harry brightly. "He was my mum and dad's best friend. He's a convicted murderer, but he's broken out of wizard prison and he's on the run. He likes to keep in touch with me, though...keep up with my news...check if I'm happy....
J.K. Rowling
If it pleases Him to bid our patience exercise itself, shall He not do as He wills with His own!
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other but what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred for the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity's to the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon someone who never lived at all.
G.K. Chesterton
During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous 'New Democrat,' you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Anyway, I kept on about it even after most Republicans had consulted the opinion polls and decided it was a losing proposition, and if you look up the transcript of the eventual Senate trial of the president—only the second impeachment hearing in American history—you will see that the last order of business is a request (voted down) by the Senate majority leader to call Carol and me as witnesses. So I can dare to say that at least I saw it through.
Christopher Hitchens
I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.
Graham Greene
But I weren't no quitter No wolf nor bear just gives up when they get beat or hungry. You ever seen a bear jump off a cliff 'cause life handed him a few rough draws? No, you haven't. The wild keeps going till it don't have strength in its muscles and bones. The wild doesn't give up; it's forever, and so was I.
Beth Lewis
We are so outnumbered there's only one thing to do. We must attack.
Sir Andrew Cunningham
To notice is to select, toregard some bits of perception, or some features of the world, as morenoteworthy, more significant, than others. To these we attend, and therest we ignore—for which reason conscious attention is at the same time ignorance despite the fact that it gives us a vividlyclear picture of whatever we choose to notice.
Alan W. Watts
A ghost who has only a lay knowledge of the subject will be able to keep asking the same questions as the lay reader, and will therefore open up the potential readership of the book to a much wider audience.
Robert Harris
Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
My dear friends, from the devil's standpoint there is not the slightest difference between being puffed up with pride in yourself or spending the whole of your time condemning yourself. Either way the devil is very well-pleased. Any concentration upon self in any shape or form is of the devil.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
All is artifice in my world, Constantine. Even me. Especially me. He taught me to be a duchess, to be an impregnable fortress, to be the guardian of my own heart, But he admitted that he could not teach me how or when to allow the fortress to be breached or my heart to be unlocked. It would simply happen, he said. he promised it would, in fact. But how is love to find me, even assuming it is looking?
Mary Balogh
Is it murder to kill a man if the man never existed? To the man it is.
Johnny Rich
It's a curious thing in American life that the most abject nonsense will be excused if the utterer can claim the sanction of religion. A country which forbids an established church by law is prey to any denomination. The best that can be said is that this is pluralism of a kind.
Christopher Hitchens
I know women are taught by other women that they must never admit the full truth to a man. But the highest form of affection is based on full sincerity on both sides. Not being men, these women don't know that in looking back on those he has had tender relations with, a man's heart returns closest to her who was the soul of truth in her conduct. The better class of man, even if caught by airy affectations of dodging and parrying, is not retained by them. A Nemesis attends the woman who plays the game of elusiveness too often, in the utter contempt for her that, sooner or later, her old admirers feel; under which they allow her to go unlamented to her grave.
Thomas Hardy
The problem of architecture as I see it is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human element from the consideration of the form.
Evelyn Waugh
Being your authentic self exudes a quiet confidence.
Sam Owen
Satchmo was raised on steaming pots of red beans and rice, a meal so familiar that he described it as his “birthmark”—indeed, in adulthood, he often signed off letters with “Red beans and ricely yours.
Fiona Ross
Hierarchy and discipline gave shape to the world;that was what he had always believed.Life was made easy by adherence toa rigid structure.But maybe that only really worked when you were at the top of the ladder,when you were doing well.The further down the rungs you went,the more of a victim of circumstances you became and the less it mattered whether or not you were in control.
James Lovegrove
Boys are just boys after all, but sometimes girls really seem to be the turn of a pale wrist, or the sudden jut of a hip, or a clutch of very dark hair falling across a freckled forehead. I'm not saying that's what they really are. I'm just saying sometimes it seems that way, and that those details (a thigh mole, a full face flush, a scar the precise shape and size of a cashew nut) are so many hooks waiting to land you.
Zadie Smith
He sounded pathetic and he knew it, but he had been driven to this humiliation by love. A woman can do that. They have power. We might all say that the oath to our lord is the strong oath that guides our lives, the oath that binds us and rules all the other oaths, but few men would not abandon every oath under the sun for a woman. I have broken oaths. I am not proud of that, but almost every oath I broke was for a woman.
Bernard Cornwell
The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure.
J.K. Rowling
Never ask a question if you don’t know the answer.— Rhett
Rowena Cherry
Don't that make your bosom plim?
Thomas Hardy
A charge to keep I have A God to glorify: A never-dying soul to save And fit it for the sky.
Charles Wesley
The artist tries to show reason in experience and appearance – and lyric is the daily appearance, the commonplace dress, of reason. It shows us the rational. It makes the epic pattern human. It's the footprint on the pathway. In the epic-lyric the individual and particular are no longer isolated but are placed in a historical, social, human pattern. That's why there's a political way of cutting bread or wearing shoes.
Edward Bond
And I write novels!" chimed in the other cop. "Though I haven't had any of them published yet, so I better warn you, I'm in a meeeean mood!
Douglas Adams
You’re overly hostile, and that’s not a good thing. Pulsar, especially, are very controlled in their emotions.’‘So I’ve been told,’ I mutter.‘They’re like water: elegant, neutral in all feeling. You, though, you’re like fire: blazing, belligerent, existing on all feelings – so unsuited to being a Pulsar.’‘Maybe that’s why we clash so much, you and me, because we’re fire on fire.
Giselle Simlett
It is now how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it (the world) exists at all.....
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Who is the third who walks always beside you?When I count, there are only you and I togetherBut when I look ahead up the white roadThere is always another one walking beside youGliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hoodedI do not know whether a man or a woman-But who is that on the other side of you?
T.S Eliot
For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.
Alan W. Watts