Quotes by British Authors - Page 776

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
John Keats
It is good people who make good places.
Anna Sewell
We wander in our thousands over theface of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond theseas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to methat for each of us going home must be like going to render an account.
Joseph Conrad
Watching me, judging me, smelling the crippling failure oozing from my skin, my desperation clawing and all-consuming panic drenching me as I gape in horror at the world and wonder why everyone is smiling and looking at me with secret knowledge of my aching shame.
Sarah Kane
My love for you is immeasurableMy respect for you immenseYou're ageless, timeless, lace and finenessYou're beauty and eleganceYou're a rhapsody, a comedyYou're a symphony and a playYou're every love song ever writtenBut honey what do you see in me?You're in my heart, you're in my soulYou'll be my breath should I grow oldYou are my lover, you're my best friendYou're in my soul
Rod Stewart
Writers cannot choose their own mood: with them it is not always hide-tide, nor --thank Heaven!--always Storm.
Charlotte Brontë
You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change.
Neil Gaiman
He thought that it was all over, finished, done with. Andrew had never yet had reason to observe the first tiny bubble of fermenting yeast, in which was contained an inevitable, alchemical transformation.
J.K. Rowling
The first premises of the Party...were two rooms above a corner junk shop, up two flights of rickety stairs. 'One felt' said a veteran member forty five years later in the Socialist Standard, that one was entering 'the heart of deep red revolution'.
Robert Barltrop
Shyness is only the effect of a sense of inferiority in some way or other. If I could persuade myself that my manners were perfectly easy and graceful, I should not be shy
Jane Austen
I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, in-built, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women.
Hilary Mantel
It is when I find my soul is lost and lustfully wandering betwixt heaven and hell, and in that moment of spiritual bliss when the chances of recovering from falling into the sexual abyss are zero...I find the odds extremely appealing....
Virginia Alison
Look at their arts, their power of turning stone into lifelike figures, and above all, the way in which they can transfer their thoughts to white leaves, so that others, many many years hence, can read them and know all that was passing, and what men thought and did in the long bygone. Truly it is marvelous.
G.A. Henty
My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.
Evelyn Waugh
Its was one of those events which at a crucial stage in one's development arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one's ability and beyond, so that thereafter one has a new standard by which to judge oneself.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Songs remain. They last...A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's the power of songs.
Neil Gaiman
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
C.S. Lewis
Here’s another example that some overworked mothers might find inspiring. We saw in Chapter 2 that being the one who producesthe sperm doesn’t dictate, by universal principle, that parenting is out of the portfolio. However, in the case of the rat (as with mostmammals), the balance of trade-offs make it more adaptive for males to leave parenting to the mothers. This might tempt us to take it forgranted that males, by virtue of their sex, therefore lack the capacity to care for pups. We might well assume that, through sexual selection, they lost or never acquired the biological capacity to parent: that it isn’t “in” their genes, hormones, or neural circuits. That it isn’t in their male nature. But bear in mind that one reliable feature of a male rat’s developmental system is a female rat that does the child care. So what happens when a scientist, under controlled laboratory conditions, simulates a first-wave feminist rodent movement by placing males in cages with pups but no females? Before too long you will see the male “mothering” the infant, in much the same way that females do. Feminism: 1. Sexual selection: nil.
Cordelia Fine
It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can't relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don't know if there is one.
George Harrison
Company, you see - company is - is - it's a very different thing from solitude - an't it?
Charles Dickens
At a time when she was engaged to Stilton Cheesewright, I remember recording in the archives that she was tall and willowy with a terrific profile and luxuriant platinum blond-hair, the sort of girl who might, as far as looks were concerned, have been the star unit of the harem of one of the better-class sultans.
P.G. Wodehouse
I like being on my own. I mean, I'm sure a Pack’s best for some dogs, but I've walked alone since I left my Pup Pack. I can look after myself.
Erin Hunter
Running alone can allow you to hit the mute button on the world... and take full advantage of exercise's stress-busting benefits. 'Running alone can be a meditative experience where you get to really think and concentrate or completely clear your mind and zone out,' a psychotherapist Michelle Maidenberg says, ... 'You have to practise letting go of the inner chatter that can get in the way of what you want to accomplish,' sports psychologist Cindra Kamphoff says, 'And that's something you have to do on your own.
Sara Maitland
The choir sang and the old man sang and Drake couldn't sing, and suddenly he began to cry because of the music, because of the sound of the boys' voices, because of what they might turn into.
Sarah Winman
Hello, Harry!” she said.“Er — my name’s Barny,” said Harry, flummoxed.“Oh, have you changed that too?” she asked brightly.“How did you know — ?”“Oh, just your expression,” she said.Like her father, Luna was wearing bright yellow robes, which she had accessorized with a large sunflower in her hair. Once you got over the brightness of it all, the general effect was quite pleasant. At least there were no radishes dangling from her ears.
J.K. Rowling
For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet one the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow, and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer master, but an animal among animals; under the Martian heel.
H.G.Wells
That is the trouble...You are a crowd of bits of boys all in the thing for what you will get. Demands, you call them. Well, I am against demands of any kind. You cannot reason with demand, and where there is no reason, there is no sense. As for your support, whatever you call it, some long word, what is the use of it?
Richard Llewellyn
A wise man does not step betwixt the beast and his meat
David Mitchell
The inner story, though the same in essence for all, is always single and unique in each human being, never before lived and never to be repeated.
Helen M. Luke
Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
Edith Sitwell
I wake and in those first fuddled moments forget you’re not here. I must have been dreaming about you – a tense, erotic dream. I reach out in bed to the place your body should be. It’s cold and there is no hollow. Even the bed is forgetting you.
A.J. Waines
You are important to this earth. If you were meant to journey alone, you would not have friends...
Virginia Alison
Consistency is contrary to nature contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
Aldous Huxley
Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear.
Dinah Mulock Craik
I know that no matter how lonely I get, I'll never be truly alone again. Our loved ones don't leave us. They just move out of sight for a while, and wait...in the shades.
Darren Shan
We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.
E.M. Forster
Advertising is legalized lying.
H.G.Wells
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
George Orwell
I tell them stars have never hurt me, I wish I could say the same about people.
Terry Pratchett
There is much in this vision that will remind you of your mystics; yet between them and us there is far more difference than similarity, in respect both of the matter and the manner of our thought. For while they are confident that the cosmos is perfect, we are sure only that it is very beautiful. While they pass to their conclusion without the aid of intellect, we have used that staff every step of the way. Thus, even when in respect of conclusions we agree with your mystics rather than your plodding intellectuals, in respect of method we applaud most your intellectuals; for they scorned to deceive themselves with comfortable fantasies.
Olaf Stapledon
...but [I] had sworn on the very day of my demobilization never to be under anyone’s orders for the rest of my life. Somehow I must live by writing.
Robert Graves
I was still young and the whole world of beauty was opening before me, my own officious obstructions were often swept aside and, startled into self-forgetfulness, I again tasted Joy. ... One thing, however, I learned, which has since saved me from many popular confusions of mind. I came to know by experience that it is not a disguise of sexual desire. ... I repeatedly followed that path - to the end. And at the end one found pleasure; which immediately resulted in the discovery that pleasure (whether that pleasure or any other) was not what you had been looking for. No moral question was involved; I was at this time as nearly nonmoral on that subject as a human creature can be. The frustration did not consist in finding a "lower" pleasure instead of a "higher." It was the irrelevance of the conclusion that marred it. ... You might as well offer a mutton chop to a man who is dying of thirst as offer sexual pleasure to the desire I am speaking of. ... Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.
C.S. Lewis
In a world where people are too languid to make something of themselves out of effort, I sell them hope. What they do with it is up to them. Invariably they drink it and then hurl it down a gutter, but that’s their choice and their freedom. I won’t judge them.
E.A.A. Wilson
Whereas fanatic is usually a pejorative word, a Fan is someone who has roots somewhere.
Simon Kuper
He who knows himself best esteems himself least.
H. G. Bohn
That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans.
C.S. Lewis
Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
C.S. Lewis
Heisenberg and Bohr and Einstein strike me as being like gifted retriever dogs. Off they go, not just for an afternoon, but for ten years; they come back exhausted and triumphant and drop at your feet... a vole. It's a remarkable thing in its way, a vole—intricate, beautiful really, marvellous. But does it... Does it help? Does it move the matt
Sebastian Faulks
...I applied her rule to my life; after all, we are all searching for them, the rules. We pick them up from the strangest places, and if they appear to work once we can live a whole lifetime by them, regardless of the unhappiness and difficulty they may later bring.
Rachel Joyce
There is also the basic inequality of being born either with a natural talent or without one. Clever or stupid. No matter how much you try to argue against it, Dora, we are not born equal. All we can ever strive for is the equality of opportunity for those who have the ability to make the most of it.
Sally Wentworth
A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.
Samuel Butler
Everyone has secrets, Lou,” she says. “Everyone should be allowed their secrets. You can never know everything about a person. You’d go mad trying to.
Sarah Pinborough
NASA has decades of experience in studying the effects of Sick Building Syndrome (SBS) and their experiments show that continuous habitation of an alien environment in Space results in sickness in less than a year in astronauts and a similar environment on Earth produces ill health in humans in just two years.
Steven Magee
I wondered what sort of woman loved a man like that.
Jon Ronson
Now piercèd is her virgin zone;She feels the foe within it.She hears a broken amorous groan,The panting lover's fainting moan,Just in the happy minute.
John Wilmot
The streak of bleach in my hair is as obvious as ever. Am I really going out in public like this? I push my hair backward and forward a few times - but I can't hide it. Maybe I could walk along with my hand carelessly positioned at my head, as if I'm thinking hard. I attempt a few casual, pensive poses in the mirror."Is your head all right?"I swivel round in shock to see Nathaniel at the open door, wearing a plaid shirt and jeans."Er...fine," I say, my hand still glued to my head. "I was just..."Oh, there's no point. I bring my hand down from my hair and Nathaniel regards the streak for a moment."It looks nice," he says. "Like a badger.""A badger?" I say, affronted. "I don't look like a badger.""Badgers are beautiful creatures," says Nathaniel with a shrug. "I'd rather look like a badger than a stoat.
Sophie Kinsella
I really don't know what "I love you" means.I think it means "Don't leave me here alone.
Neil Gaiman
Her fear was infectious, and though I was too young to truly know terror, I felt it in my heart and trembled.
Darren Shan
It is only when you meet someoneof a different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your ownbeliefs really are.
George Orwell
I suppose I was lucky enough to be educated at a time when teachers still thought children could handle knowledge. They trusted us. Then there came a time when they decided that because not every kid in the class could understand or remember those things they wouldn't teach them anymore because it wasn't fair on the less good ones. So they withheld knowledge. Then I suppose the next lot of teachers didn't have the knowledge to withhold.
Sebastian Faulks