Quotes by British Authors - Page 766

Come on,"he meowed to Greystripe."Let's go home.
Erin Hunter
I don’t sell spells, and I don’t sell tricks. I don’t carry illusions or marked cards or weighted coins. I can not sell you an endless purse or help you win the lottery. I can’t make that girl you’ve got your eye on fall in love with you, and I wouldn’t do it even if I could. I don’t have a psychic hotline to your dead relatives, I don’t know if you’re going to be successful in your career, and I don’t know when you’re going to get married. I can’t get you into Hogwarts or any other kind of magic school, and if you even mention those stupid sparkly vampires I will do something unpleasant to you.
Benedict Jacka
Now fairy stories are at risk too, like the forests. Padraic Column has suggested that artificial lighting dealt them a mortal wound: when people could read and be productive after dark, something fundamental changed, and there was no longer need or space for the ancient oral tradition. The stories were often confined to books, which makes the text static, and they were handed over to children.
Sara Maitland
Don't you think a dream would feel shy if it were seen walking about in the waking world?
C.S. Lewis
Publish a book before you’re too old to read it without glasses.
Fennel Hudson
Was not Hypatia the greatest philosopher of Alexandria, and a true martyr to the old values of learning? She was torn to pieces by a mob of incensed Christians not because she was a woman, but because her learning was so profound, her skills at dialectic so extensive that she reduced all who queried her to embarrassed silence. They could not argue with her, so they murdered her.
Iain Pears
When you live in a glass house,buying curtains for the windows doesn't help.
Anthony T.Hincks
A truly intelligent person is not one who can simply spout wordsand numbers; it is someone who can react ‘intelligently’ to all theopportunities, simulations and problems provided by the environment.Real intelligence means engaging your brain with every aspect of life –you play sport with you brain; you relate to others brain-to-brain;
Tony Buzan
Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
E.M. Forster
Where do you go if you don’t belong anywhere? If I wanted to run away then why come to the city? Because this is the place to hide. This is the place to be invisible. Anyone can be no one here, and I am someone that wants to be no one.
Steven Wilson
The word 'inauthentic' is used by Heidegger to describe the ostrich-like attitude of the man who seeks to escape from his inescapable self-responsibility by becoming an anonymous member of a crowd. This is the normal attitude of nearly everybody. To be 'authentic' a man must be constantly and deliberately aware of his total responsibility for what he is. For example, a judge may disclaim personal responsibility for sentencing people to punishment. He will say that as a judge it is his duty to punish. In other words it is as an anonymous representative of the Judiciary that he punishes, and it is the Judiciary that must take the responsibility. This man is inauthentic. If he wishes to be authentic he must think to himself, whenever he sits on the Bench or draws his salary, 'Why do I punish? Because, as a judge, it is my duty to punish. Why am I a judge? Is it perhaps my duty to be a judge? No. I am a judge because I myself choose to be a judge. I choose to be one who punishes in the name of the Law. Can I, if I really wish, choose not to be a judge? Yes, I am absolutely free at any moment to stop being a judge, if I so choose. If this is so, when a guilty man comes up before me for sentence, do I have any alternative but to punish him? Yes, I can get up, walk out of the courtroom, and resign my job. Then if, instead, I punish him, am I responsible? I am totally responsible.
Nanavira Thera
No one wants to believe they are weak, but we all have weakness inside us. We have strength, too, but there are times when the circumstances in our lives are so overwhelming that we easily succumb to that weakness
Sarah A. Denzil
To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none.
Virginia Woolf
Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live? Why, in that instant, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed?
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
She's not my type,' Carter says.'So what is your type?''Tall, skinny, black hair, blue eyes, freckly nose. Blue tinsel wig and snowflakes optional.''Skinny?' I squeal.'Definitely. Pretending to be shy, sensible and stand-offish when really you're mad about me.''You sure about that?''No, but I'm hoping.
Cathy Cassidy
Ah, cruel parents indeed, who neglect the religious education of their children; more cruel in some respects than Herod; he slew the bodies of children, these murder souls; he murdered the children of others, these murder their own; he employed the agency of his servants, these do the work of slaughter themselves.
John Angell James
The piety, the gentleness, the honesty, the sensitivity, all the qualities she has learned to admire in herself, are invitations to violence; all her life, she has been groomed for the slaughterhouse. And though she is virtuous, she does not know how to do good.
Angela Carter
The silences after his last gasp were sung together by a blackbird. I lay there, my eyes unable to close. His were unable to open. I listed the places where I hurt, and how much. My loins felt ripped. Something inside had torn. There were seven places on my body where he had sunk his fangs into my skin and bitten. He'd dug his nails into my neck, and twisted my head to one side, and clawed my face. I hadn't made a noise. He had made all the noise for both of us. Had it hurt him?
David Mitchell
Men let women down. Over and over again. I'ts what they're programmed to do.
Liz Jensen
If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?
Mary Astell
What a shabby lot of highbrows have turned out tonight," he said, when he saw us. "It makes me ashamed to be one.
Anthony Powell
But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.
E.M. Forster
The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word 'love', and look on things as a man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. 'Thou hast created all things, and for they pleasure they are and were created.' (Rev. 4:11) We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest 'well pleased.' To ask that God's love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: ...What we would here and now call our 'happiness' is not the end God chiefly has in view: but when we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall, in fact, be happy.
C.S. Lewis
He screamed in agony as large black wings erupted from his back - each had four large talons on it.
Alan Kinross
You're not allowed to call them dinosaurs any more," said Yo-less. "It's speciesist. You have to call them pre-petroleum persons.
Terry Pratchett
Acceptance is the truest kinship with humanity.
G.K. Chesterton
In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force
Angela Carter
The actual handbag is neither here nor there-- it's what you keep in it that's the most important thing.
Caitlin Moran
aphorism 90: I am incorrigible. I would have every object of the universe mechanically predictable but myself.
Matt Berry
Saving and pinching to get married, you're losing the best time of your life.
Muriel Spark
But to betray her with battalion... That is against decency, against Nature...And for him, Christopher tietjens, to come down to the level of the men you met here!
Ford Madox Ford
You're saying,' he said, weighing each word, 'that we should send Carrot away to be a duck among humans because Bjorn Stronginthearm is my uncle.
Terry Pratchett
Humans are a terrestrial species biased toward attributing the forces we see around us to familiar forces on land. But the more we look, the more we learn that everything arises from the sea and everything falls away to the sea, and the deep blue home is home to every one of us, whether we are beings of water, air, rock, ice, or soil.
Julia Whitty
True contentment... is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.
G.K. Chesterton
Her thoughts are full of other things just now; and people have such different ways of showing feeling: some by silence, some by words.
Elizabeth Gaskell
But the ground shakes, as if something's trying to push up from below, and I think of other people's mothers shaking out their duvets or even God shaking out the fabric of space-time.
Scarlett Thomas
Polly?' Said Wazzer. 'Yes?''You don't believe in The Duchess, do you? I mean the real Duchess, not your inn.'Polly looked into the small, pinched, intense face. 'Well I mean, they say she's dead, and I prayed to her when I was small, but since you asked I don't exactly, um, believe as-' She gabbled.'She is standing just behind you. Just behind your right shoulder.'In the silence of the wood, Polly turned. 'I can't see her,' she said.'I am happy for you,' said Wazzer, handing her the empty mug.'But I didn't see anything,' said Polly.'No,' said Wazzer. 'But you turned around.
Terry Pratchett
We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form.
Arthur Machen
So the fact tht anyone would ever suggest that Arab women are dominated and demeaned is really quite ludicrous. In this part of the world, She's just Not That Into Him. We're the ones who make a pantomime of the wedding, and play at happily ever after....The men might think they have the upper hand, they may believe they've nabbed themselves a prime piece of arm candy, but we've got his 'potential as a provider' wrapped around our little fingers. Oh yes, we're the smart ones.
Amy Mowafi
April is the crudest month breeding Lilacs out of the dead land mixing Memory and desire stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
T.S Eliot
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy
Julia Gregson
Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life’.
Helen Exley
There is something brittle in me that will break before it bends. Perhaps if the [the enemy] had brought a smaller army I might have had the sense to run. But he overdid it.
Mark Lawrence
In fairy tales the evil characters disappear or die, in reality, evil spreads while you wait for your hero on a horse, only to realise the sword to save yourself was always in your hand...
Seja Majeed
If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be.
Bill Bryson
A child's cry touches a father's heart, and our King is the Father of his people. If we can do no more than cry it will bring omnipotence to our aid. A cry is the native language of a spiritually needy soul; it has done with fine phrases and long orations, and it takes to sobs and moans; and so, indeed, it grasps the most potent of all weapons, for heaven always yields to such artillery.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
DI Cartwright: The cat is booby trapped? DI Quill: Welcome to my world.
Paul Cornell
Handsome is that handsome does.
Henry Fielding
Positive results will come when you start to replace your negative thoughts and habits with positive ones.
Robert Tew
I don’t know why we keep building these fucking dams,” Adams said in a surprisingly forceful British whisper. “Not only do they cause environmental and social disasters, they, with very few exceptions, all fail to do what they were supposed to do in the first place. Look at the Amazon, where they’ve all silted up. What is the reaction to that? They’re going to build another eighty of them. It’s just balmy. We must have beaver genes or something. . . . There’s just this kind of sensational desire to build dams, and maybe that should be looked at and excised from human nature. Maybe the Human Genome Project can locate the beaver/dam-building gene and cut that out.
Douglas Adams
[A] smile is the most becomingornament that any lady can wear.
Susanna Clarke
Two people occupying the same air. Nothing else in common. Just oxygen.
Dawn French
Outside, the sunlight had turned pale lemon, but the studio remained cool. The white walls and white-tiled splashback behind the sink were made more clinical by the metal tables which looked as if they’d originally been intended for use in an operating theatre. Even though they were laid out with brushes and paints rather than forceps and retractors, the effect was equally daunting; both sets of tools could open you up in strange and unexpected ways.
Christine Stovell
So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many exploded convictions, many perished certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Those who like to feel that they are always right and who attach a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is traveling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced.
Aldous Huxley
Love is both wondrous and yet full of peril. Love is a gateway through which hatred - disguised and unrecognized - can pass.
David Gemmell
Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.
Jeanette Winterson
As for man, his days are numbered, whatever he might do, it is but wind.
Andrew R. George
I never wanted to find my birth parents - if one set of parents felt like a misfortune, two sets would be self-destructive...I had no idea that you could like your parents or that they could love you enough to let you be yourself.
Jeanette Winterson
I’m not afraid of the darkness outside. It’s the darkness inside houses I don’t like.
Shelagh Delaney
Nine-nine of every hundred among you probably desire peace, while the balance may hold war a condition to be preferred; but what can be the mental norm of statesmanship where such a minority conquer the peace-lovers?
Eden Phillpotts