Quotes by British Authors - Page 768

She had always enjoyed the carte blanche accorded to mobsters, aristocrats, circus clowns, and lunatics
Simon Doonan
We have the freedom of choice, to choose what’s right.
Fennel Hudson
no-one would want to go through a traumatic experience but when you’ve survived something life-shattering and risen above it, you achieve a kind of serenity.
Jane Wilson-Howarth
What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Slowly, Jimmy held up his outstretched hands. Men had been arguing for two hundred years about this gesture; would every creature, everywhere in the universe, interpret this as "See--no weapons"? But no one could think of anything better.
Arthur C. Clarke
I have never been able to understand why pigeon-shooting at Hurlingham should be refined and polite while a rat-killing match in Whitechapel is low.
T. H. Huxley
We can have everything we want as long as what we want is a life spent searching for exhausting work that doesn't pay enough, shopping for things we don't need and sticking to a set of social and sexual rules that turn out, once you plough through the layers of trash and adverts, to be as rigid as ever.
Laurie Penny
Begin each day with God. It will change your priorities.
Elizabeth George
If Sean's voice is layers of wood, and Mina Ma's is the voice a copper pot, then Mathew Mercer's is the voice of a wild animal. I suddenly think of a movie Ammara and I loved when we were little, and I think of Scar, the lion who murdered his brother to become king. That kind of voice.
Sangu Mandanna
Cats gravitate to kitchens like rocks gravitate to gravity.
Terry Pratchett
Do you think maybe your writing isn't going anymore because you're unhappy? Because you're not living the life you could? A life worth writing about? You must know that cliche-write what you know-but what do you know, Bree, when you shut the world out?
Holly Bourne
No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away...
Terry Pratchett
One of the Georges," said Psmith, "I forget which, once said that a certain number of hours' sleep a day--I cannot recall for the moment how many--made a man something, which for the time being has slipped my memory. However, there you are. I've given you the main idea of the thing; and a German doctor says that early rising causes insanity.
P.G. Wodehouse
That’s another argument for writing: making something that outlasts you.
Zia Haider Rahman
In suffering we find our truest selves.
Jessie Burton
Touch has a memory.
John Keats
Never interrupt an author when he or she is ‘in the zone’, else you’ll understand the real meaning of ‘writer’s nib’.
Fennel Hudson
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.
T.E. Lawrence
The more alien that you make your environment, the more likely it is that you will be sick.
Steven Magee
I have noticed that even those who assert that everything is predestined and that we can change nothing about it still look both ways before they cross the street
Stephen Hawking
Ah yes, a great victory, this 'sport'. I am sure El Toro appreciates the applause Jumping in the Puddles of Life
Loretta Livingstone
No, no, no, no. Don't get carried away, man. One thaw is not the summer.
Andrea Levy
Change happens internally. That's where books go too. Therein lies the power.
Nina Joshi Ramsey
9 November 1989. A day nobody would forget. She had heard rumours about the wall.
F.C. Malby
Sometimes that’s all it takes. Just one person to turn everything on its head. Remind you of the person you were.
Samantha Towle
Zed : Penguins, such fascinating creatures, but I didn’t know you were studying them. What class is that you’re taking?Sky: The ‘we-stupid-looking-creature-should-stick-together’ class.
Joss Stirling
In the deep places he gives thought to music great and terrible; and the echo of that music runs through all the veins of the world in sorrow and in joy; for if joyful is the fountain that rises in the sun, its springs are in the wells of sorrow unfathomed at the foundations of the Earth.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Stay hungry, stay young, stay foolish, stay curious, and above all, stay humble because just when you think you got all the answers, is the moment when some bitter twist of fate in the universe will remind you that you very much don't.
Tom Hiddleston
These folk are hewers of trees and hunters of beasts; therefore we are their unfriends, and if they will not depart we shall afflict them in all ways that we can.
J.R.R. Tolkien
And I saw you and I thought, she'd be a cosy fit inside my arm.
Bryn Hammond
What would you here, unhappy mortal, and for what cause have you left your own land to enter this, which is forbidden to such as you? Can you show reason why my power should not be laid on you in heavy punishment for your insolence and folly?" Then Beren looking up beheld the eyes of Luthien, and his glance went also to the face of Melian; and it seemed to him that words were put into his mouth. Fear left him, and the pride of the eldest house of Men returned to him; and he said: "My fate, O King, led me hither, through perils such as few even of the Elves would dare. And here I have found what I sought not indeed, but finding I would possess for ever. For it is above all gold and silver, and beyond all jewels. Neither rock, nor steel, nor the fires of Morgoth, nor all the powers of the Elf-kingdoms, shall keep from me the treasure that I desire. For Luthien your daughter is the fairest of all the Children of the World." Then silence fell upon the hall...
J.R.R. Tolkien
After all, that was a main purpose of science: to make things of all kinds happen sooner than they otherwise would.
Robert Aickman
A day of worry is more exhausting than a day of work.
John Lubbock
The night has a thousand eyesAnd the day but oneYet the light of the bright world dies with the dying sun.
Francis William Bourdillon
There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.
Alfred Tennyson
Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind.
Samuel Johnson
What?' He cried, darting at him a look of fury: 'Dare you still implore the Eternal's mercy? Would you feign penitence, and again act an Hypocrite's part? Villain, resign your hopes of pardon. Thus I secure my prey!'As He said this, darting his talons into the Monk's shaven crown, He sprang with him from the rock. The Caves and mountains rang with Ambrosio's shrieks. The Daemon continued to soar aloft, till reaching a dreadful height, He released the sufferer. Headlong fell the Monk through the airy waste; The sharp point of a rock received him; and He rolled from precipice to precipice, till bruised and mangled He rested on the river's banks. Life still existed in his miserable frame: He attempted in vain to raise himself; His broken and dislocated limbs refused to perform their office, nor was He able to quit the spot where He had first fallen. The Sun now rose above the horizon; Its scorching beams darted full upon the head of the expiring Sinner. Myriads of insects were called forth by the warmth; They drank the blood which trickled from Ambrosio's wounds; He had no power to drive them from him, and they fastened upon his sores, darted their stings into his body, covered him with their multitudes, and inflicted on him tortures the most exquisite and insupportable. The Eagles of the rock tore his flesh piecemeal, and dug out his eyeballs with their crooked beaks. A burning thirst tormented him; He heard the river's murmur as it rolled beside him, but strove in vain to drag himself towards the sound. Blind, maimed, helpless, and despairing, venting his rage in blasphemy and curses, execrating his existence, yet dreading the arrival of death destined to yield him up to greater torments, six miserable days did the Villain languish. On the Seventh a violent storm arose: The winds in fury rent up rocks and forests: The sky was now black with clouds, now sheeted with fire: The rain fell in torrents; It swelled the stream; The waves overflowed their banks; They reached the spot where Ambrosio lay, and when they abated carried with them into the river the Corse of the despairing Monk.
Matthew Lewis
Simplicity clarity singleness: these are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy.
Richard Halloway
It's but little good you'll go a-water-ing the last year's crop.
George Eliot
Christmas is a time in which, of all times in the year, the memory of every remediable sorrow, wrong, and trouble in the world around us, should be active with us, not less than our own experiences, for all good.
Charles Dickens
What God expects us to attempt He also enables us to achieve.
Stephen Olford
In no issue of foreign policy could her prevarication and indecisiveness be said to have led to disastrous consequences for her country. On the international stage there was no better survivor. At home her achievement can only be judged with hindsight. A combination of good sense and longevity settled the church, and it was no fault of hers that confessional issues became so divisive forty years after her death. She gave her country pride, and set its commercial development on a course that was eventually to be spectacularly successful; for that she deserves more credit than she is usually given.
David Loades
For present-day politicians there are only political points to be made from such statements, and the larger the sin the larger the outrage, the larger the apology and the larger the potential political gain for sorrow expressed. Through such statements political leaders can gain the benefits of magnanimity without the stain of involvement: the person making the apology had done nothing wrong and all the people who could have received the apology are dead.
Douglas Murray
But you will never realize that an incident which filled but a degree in the circle of your thoughts covered the whole circumference of mine. No person can see exactly what and where another's horizon is.
Thomas Hardy
I liked being with the books: they reminded me of how many ways of thinking existed outside my own - how small and fleeting my pulse was when set alongside those ageing spines.
Joanna Rossiter
But old Christmas smiled as he laid this cruel-seeming spell on the out-door world, for he meant to light up the home with new brightness, to deepen all the richness of in-door colour, and give a keener edge of delight to the warm fragrance of food: he meant to prepare a sweet imprisonment that would strengthen the primitive fellowship of kindred,and make the sunshine of familiar human faces as welcome as the hidden day-star. His kindness fell but hardly on the homeless--fell but hardly on the homes where the hearth was not very warm, and where the food had little fragrance, where the human faces had no sunshine in them,but rather the leaden, blank-eyed gaze of unexpectant want. But the fine old season meant well; and if he has not learnt the secret how to bless men impartially, it is because his father Time, with unrelenting purpose, still hides that secret in his own mighty, slow-beating heart.
George Eliot
Revenge is not redress. Revenge is a wheel, and it turns backwards.
Terry Pratchett
If you're scared, do something.
Elizabeth Wein
A Guardian investigation concluded that between 10,000 and 20,000 people died as an 'indirect' result of the US bombing, that is, through hunger, cold and disease as people were forced to flee the massive aerial assault. An estimate by Professor Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire, suggests that between 3,125 and 3,620 Afghan civilians were killed by US bombing up to July 2002.3
Mark Curtis
Attack and adversity contribute to national cohesion in a way that success and affluence do not
Jan Dalley
She was a Phantom of delightWhen first she gleam'd upon my sight;A lovely Apparition, sentTo be a moment's ornament:Her eyes as stars of twilight fair;Like twilight's, too, her dusky hair;But all things else about her drawnFrom May-time and the cheerful dawn;A dancing shape, an image gay,To haunt, to startle, and waylay.
William Wordsworth
You cannot have a society of angels except in heaven
Michela Wrong
For once a hope was realized. I held in my hand a morsel of real solid joy: not a dream, not an image of the brain, not one of those shadowy chances imagination pictures, and on which humanity starves but cannot live
Charlotte Brontë
She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral.
Virginia Woolf
In the life of Moses, in Hebrew folklore, there is a remarkable passage. Moses finds a shepherd in the desert. He spends the day with the shepherd and helps him milk his ewes, and at the end of the day he sees that the shepherd puts the best milk he has in a wooden bowl, which he places on a flat stone some distance away. So Moses asks him what it is for, and the shepherd replies 'This is God's milk.' Moses is puzzled and asks him what he means. The shepherd says 'I always take the best milk I possess, and I bring it as on offering to God.' Moses, who is far more sophisticated than the shepherd with his naive faith, asks, 'And does God drink it?' 'Yes,' replies the shepherd, 'He does.' Then Moses feels compelled to enlighten the poor shepherd and he explains that God, being pure spirit, does not drink milk. Yet the shepherd is sure that He does, and so they have a short argument, which ends with Moses telling the shepherd to hide behind the bushes to find out whether in fact God does come to drink the milk. Moses then goes out to pray in the desert. The shepherd hides, the night comes, and in the moonlight the shepherd sees a little fox that comes trotting from the desert, looks right, looks left and heads straight towards the milk, which he laps up, and disappears into the desert again. The next morning Moses finds the shepherd quite depressed and downcast. 'What's the matter?' he asks. The shepherd says 'You were right, God is pure spirit, and He doesn't want my milk.' Moses is surprised. He says 'You should be happy. You know more about God than you did before.' 'Yes, I do' says the shepherd, 'but the only thing I could do to express my love for Him has been taken away from me.' Moses sees the point. He retires into the desert and prays hard. In the night in a vision, God speaks to him and says 'Moses, you were wrong. It is true that I am pure spirit. Nevertheless I always accepted with gratitude the milk which the shepherd offered me, as the expression of his love, but since, being pure spirit, I do not need the milk, I shared it with this little fox, who is very fond of milk.
Anthony Bloom
You've got to be smart enough to write and stupid enough not to think about all the things that might go wrong.
Sarah Gilbert
But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.
Graham Greene
But it isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It’s more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of every emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it’s a half-love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.It is possible that in order to keep love, feeling, tenderness alive, it will be necessary to feel these emotions ambiguously, even for what is false and debased, or for what is still an idea, a shadow in the willed imagination only … or if what we feel is pain, then we must feel it, acknowledging that the alternative is death. Better anything than the shrewd, the calculated, the non-committal, the refusal of giving for fear of the consequences …
Doris Lessing
Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust.
Kingsley Amis
Great fear can cast love out.
Olivia Manning