Quotes by British Authors - Page 761

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
Douglas Adams
A head full of stars, just not in constellation yet.
Elias Canetti
If one evil thought, if one evil word, if one evil action, deserves eternal damnation, how many hells, my friends, do every one of us deserve, whose whole lives have been one continued rebellion against God!
George Whitefield
Even in an empty room, we are never alone.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.
J.K. Rowling
When you can cross the highwire without falling off, you are in a state of perfect balance, perfect grace. It is the same with obedience. When you submit, submit totally, you enter that same equilibrium, surrender and grace. This is the meaning of erotic.
Chloe Thurlow
There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth the publishing to find honest men to publish it and to get sensible men to read it.
C. C. Colton
The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievements in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It's not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.
Malcolm Gladwell
in the linked arms of Bacchus and Aphrodite.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think.
Terry Pratchett
Nothing has changed, except everything.
David Mitchell
To have all those noble Romans alive before me, and walking in and out for my entertainment, instead of being the stern taskmasters they had been at school, was a most novel and delightful effect.
Charles Dickens
He taught me that language was rubbery, plastic. It wasn't, as I thought, something you just use, but something you can play with. Words were made up of little bits that could be shuffled, turned back to front, remixed. They could be tucked and folded into other words to produce unexpected things. It was like cookery, like alchemy. Language hid more than it revealed.
Mal Peet
When it's gone, you'll know what a gift love was. You'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.
Ian McEwan
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
G.K. Chesterton
Who are you?" the woman said at last."Lyra Silver—""No, where d'you come from? What are you? How do you know things like this?" Wearily Lyra sighed; she had forgotten how roundabout Scholars could be. It was difficult to tell them the truth when a lie would have been so much easier for them to understand.
Philip Pullman
If a woman is interested in her own struggle into identity and power, then she will be interested in other women. The lives of these, and other women, show me what a woman can do even without formal power, education, or rights, in a world dominated by men. They are inspirational examples of the strength of the female spirit.
Philippa Gregory
Feeling good about yourself is not the same thing as doing good. Good policy is more important than good feelings.
Theodore Dalrymple
If you want to know the outcome of a game before the game has even started, you need to control each side.
David Icke
Recklessness is almost a man's revenge on his woman.
D.H. Lawrence
Socrates is a shining example of a man who bravely lived up to his ideals, and, in the end, bravely died for them. Throughout his life, he never lost faith in the mind’s ability to discern and decide, and so to apprehend and master reality. Nor did he ever betray truth and integrity for a pitiable life of self-deception and semi-consciousness. In seeking relentlessly to align mind with matter and thought with fact, he remained faithful both to himself and to the world, with the result that he is still alive in this sentence and millions of others that have been written about him. More than a great philosopher, Socrates was the living embodiment of the dream that philosophy might one day set us free.
Neel Burton
Furious activity is no substitute for analytical thought.
Alastair Pilkington
If you're going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet.
Keith Richards
And when the mood took her to fall for the handsome young lawyer Will Bankhead, she happily threw over the man to whom she was already engaged.
Judith Mackrell
Joy lurks in every mundane thing, just waiting to be found. Love is impervious to reason. And words are wonderful.
Anna Lyndsey
You know how it is -- you get older, you get wiser, you start to ask yourself 'is it any use being able to summon creatures of the nether deeps when I could be watching BBC 4?
Kate Griffin
The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well.
J.K. Rowling
If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.
Marcus Brigstocke
Try jogging when following your heart, it's healthier
Benny Bellamacina
The first day of the rest of my life.
Lee Child
Christmas has become a public affirmation of the power and benignity of the state, to which we all make obeisance in the sybolism of the breath test ceremony.
Auberon Waugh
Divine justice pursued its course; disasters came thick on me: I was forced to pass through the valley of the shadow of death. His chastisements are mighty; and one smote me which has humbled me for ever. You know I was proud of my strength: but what is it now, when I must give it over to foreign guidance, as a child does its weakness? Of late, Jane - only - only of late - I began to see and acknowledge the hand of God in my doom. I began to experience remorse, repentance; the wish for reconcilement to my Maker. I began to pray: very brief prayers they were, but very sincere.
Charlotte Brontë
This is what you have to understand. You grew up, you went to this school and that one, you made these friends and those. It was nothing. The future is a much bigger deal than the past, Adrian, a much bigger deal. Not just because it has babies in it, but because there are better people in it, who are better behaved and more fun to be with, the scenery is better, the weather is better, the rewards and thrills are better. But I really am not sure that you will ever...
Stephen Fry
Diets are essentially training courses in how to feel fat and feel like a failure.
Paul McKenna
The USA is corrupt in many areas with law enforcement and utility companies being two of those.
Steven Magee
Blessed is the man who has the gift of making friends; for it is one of God's best gifts. It involves many things, but above all, the power of going out of oneself, and seeing and appreciating whatever is noble and living in another man.
Thomas Hughes
Esca tossed the slender papyrus roll onto the cot, and set his own hands over Marcus's. "I have not served the Centurion because I was his slave," he said, dropping unconsciously into the speech of his own people. "I have served Marcus, and it was not slave-service...my stomach will be glad when we start on this hunting trail.
Rosemary Sutcliff
We live as best we may in a world of worms.
Jeanette Winterson
We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delinaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. I know, he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.
Diane Setterfield
Vimes, listening with his mouth open, wondered why the hell it was that dwarfs believed that they had no religion and no priests. Being a dwarf was a religion. People went into the dark for the good of the clan, and heard things, and were changed, and came back to tell…And then, fifty years ago, a dwarf tinkering in Ankh-Morpork had found that if you put a simple fine mesh over your lantern flame it'd burn blue in the presence of the gas but wouldn't explode. It was a discovery of immense value to the good of dwarfkind and, as so often happens with such discoveries, almost immediately led to a war."And afterwards there were two kinds of dwarf," said Cheery sadly. "There's the Copperheads, who all use the lamp and the patent gas exploder, and the Schmaltzbergers, who stick to the old ways. Of course we're all dwarfs," she said, "but relations are strained.
Terry Pratchett
Man and wife, realist and dreamer ... n truth they were more than one flesh, they had formed and sustained each other, they had ONE STORY between them and it wasn't at all easy for me or my brother to inhabit it.
Lorna Sage
In good company your thoughts run, in solitude your thought is still; it goes deeper and makes for itself a deeper groove, delves. Delve meansa 'dig with a spade'; it means hard work. In talk your mind can be stretched, widened, exhilarated to heights but it cannot be deepened; you have to deepen it yourself. It needs sturdiness. You will be lonely, you will be depressed; you must expect it; if you were training your body it would ache and be tired. It is worth it. There is a Hindu proverb which says: 'You only grow when you are alone'.
Rumer Godden
A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.
Salman Rushdie
Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride - where there is a real superiority of mind, pride will be always under good regulation.
Jane Austen
God’s beautiful woman spares no effort to provide the best she can for her beloved family.
Elizabeth George
But these people _announced_ their madness . . . they flaunted their insanity, they weren't half mad and half not, curled around a door frame. They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it.
Zadie Smith
I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
Jerome K. Jerome
That eye which sees anything good in the creature is a blind eye; that eye which fancies it can discern anything in man, or anything in anything he can do to win the Divine favor, is as yet stone blind to the Truth of God, and needs to be lanced and cut, and the cataract of pride removed from it!
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Even if ninety-nine percent of what you discover is later proven wrong, it is the one percent that is right that matters.
Steven Magee
Self-respecting people do not care to peep at their reflections in unexpected mirrors or to see themselves as others see them.
Logan Pearsall Smith
If you survive, you've got to live with the guilt, and that's more difficult than looking someone in the eye and pulling the trigger. Trust me. I've done both.
Sara Grant
I was thinking, "So, I’m Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I'll be able to make people read my books now.
Robert Graves
But ne'er the rose without the thorn.
Robert Herrick
If life is fast, live faster.
Max McKeown
If someone lies to you habitually, you can't ever trust them. It erodes relationships.
Gilly Macmillan
R.I.P. Jerry LewisYou made us laugh in life. Now you have a chance to make God and all of his angels laugh too.Take care and I shall see you in the next life.
Anthony T.Hincks
Well, that was the end of me, the real end. Two pound ten every Tuesday and a room of the Gray's Inn Road. Saved, rescued and with my place to hide in - what more did I want? I crept in and hid. The lid of the coffin shut down with a bang. Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only - to be left alone. No more pawings, no more pryings - leave me alone.
Jean Rhys
THE HEAVENSTo the mallet of the Highest MindThe heavens are the smallest possible ball.(Akhlaq-i-Mohsini)
Idries Shah
It's not how we fall. It's how we get back up again.
Patrick Ness
It is better to revel in life than to wallow in it.
Rasheed Ogunlaru