Quotes by British Authors - Page 778

I've never had a moment when I thought: "Tom, you've made it!", and I don't think I want to, because that feels like you've reached the end; that you've crossed the finish line. But to me there is no end. An achievement is not a finish line; it's a checkpoint on a far greater journey. It's a moment to pause, to take a breath and look back and enjoy what you've experienced and be grateful for it, but then to turn around and look towards the next checkpoint, the next achievement.
Tom Fletcher
People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it.
George Orwell
The Sufis regard systems which treat everyone alike as mechanical and degenerate.
Idries Shah
Crushed again!
W.S. Gilbert
The business and method of mysticism is love.
Evelyn Underhill
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth . . . Then he said, "Let there be light." Which means he made the entire universe in the dark! How fucking good is that? He's brilliant.
Ricky Gervais
He stood up straight and looked the world squarely in the fields and hills. To add weight to his words he stuck the rabbit bone in his hair. He spread his arm out wide. "I will go mad!" he annouced.
Douglas Adams
I had a dove and the sweet dove died; And I have thought it died of grieving: O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied, With a silken thread of my own hand's weaving.
John Keats
Failure is a part of life. Success teaches you nothing, but failure teaches you resilience. It teaches you to pick yourself up and try again.
Sarah Morgan
There is nothing Christ dislikes more than for His people to make a showpiece of Him and not to use Him.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
So,” sneered Fudge, recovering himself, “you intend to take on Dawlish, Shacklebolt, Dolores, and myself single-handed, do you, Dumbledore?”“Merlin’s beard, no,” said Dumbledore, smiling. “Not unless you are foolish enough to force me to.”“He will not be single-handed!” said Professor McGonagall loudly, plunging her hand inside her robes.“Oh yes he will, Minerva!” said Dumbledore sharply. “Hogwarts needs you!
J.K. Rowling
This ploughman dead in battle slept out of doorsMany a frozen night, and merrilyAnswered staid drinkers, good bedmen, and all bores:"At Mrs Greenland's Hawthorn Bush," said he,"I slept." None knew which bush. Above the town,Beyond `The Drover', a hundred spot the downIn Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleepsMore sound in France -that, too, he secret keeps.
Edward Thomas
Look at the kind of people who most object to the childishness and cheapness of celebrity culture. Does one really want to side with such apoplectic and bombastic bores? I should know, I often catch myself being one, and it isn’t pretty. I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each. Monocultures are uninhabitably dull and end as deserts.
Stephen Fry
It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.
Neil Gaiman
Well, maybe it started that way. As a dream, but doesn’t everything. Those buildings. These lights. This whole city. Somebody had to dream about it first. And maybe that is what I did. I dreamed about coming here, but then I did it.
Roald Dahl
Who desired the Great War? No nation benefitted from it. The war brought about the destruction of the Prussian Empire, stripped the British Empire of its ability to hold its colonies, slaughtered the French and starved Germany, inspired a revolution in Russia, and prepared the ground for a more terrible slaughter to come. The great powers didn’t want a war and they certainly didn’t need one. But their people wanted a war. To the surprise of the rulers across the Allies and the Central Powers, the idea of war was seized by the people of every nation.
Matthew De Abaitua
One can only wonder what the motivation is for Mauna Kea astronomers to subject their nighttime support staff to extremely long and fatiguing night shifts when they are easily avoidable.
Steven Magee
More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
Kazuo Ishiguro
The world is a giant zoo. The trouble is, not all of the animals are civilized.
Anthony T.Hincks
It was as if she would never be whole until the secrets of the past were exposed.
Rachel Abbott
Harry lost any sense of where they were: Streetlights above him, yells around him, he was clinging to the sidecar for dear life. Hedwig’s cage, the Firebolt, and his rucksack slipped from beneath his knees —“No — HEDWIG!”The broomstick spun to earth, but he just managed to seize the strap of his rucksack and the top of the cage as the motorbike swung the right way up again. A second’s relief, and then another burst of green light. The owl screeched and fell to the floor of the cage.“No — NO!”The motorbike zoomed forward; Harry glimpsed hooded Death Eaters scattering as Hagrid blasted through their circle. —”But the owl lay motionless and pathetic as a toy on the floor of her cage.
J.K. Rowling
Whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out...
C.S. Lewis
Dreams so often become nightmares. Family can so easily become foes. And people are always more stupid than you give them credit for.
Mike A. Lancaster
There is a succession of experiences which together constitute the educational and developmental ripening of the learner, according to the Sufis. People who think that each gain is the goal itself will freeze at any such stage, and cannot learn through successive and superseding lessons.
Idries Shah
Try never to abandon hope for if you do, hope will surely try to abandon you.
Sally Brampton
When you lack self-esteem, people you encounter can feel it like an invisible barrier separating them from you; conversely, confidence helps people to feel connected to you.
Sam Owen
Life isn't intended as an exercise in taking it easy.
Steven Redhead
Money as the sole ambition has no value.
Habeeb Akande
Martin took the same course, thinking as he went, that perhaps the free and independent citizens, who in their moral elevation, owned the colonel for their master, might render better homage to the goddess, Liberty, in nightly dreams upon the oven of a Russian Serf.
Charles Dickens
He [Winston Churchill] has a future and I have a past so we should be all right.
Jennie Jerome Churchill
You should be kissed and often and by someone who knows how. -Rhett Bulter, Gone with the Wind” ― Margaret Mitchell
Cathy Brockman
Running ain't no bad thing. Leastways if you run in the right direction.
Mark Lawrence
Immediately after his re-election [Cameron] announced: “For too long we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens so long as you obey the law we will leave you alone.” A statement so far to the right that it conceded the political centre ground to Judge Dredd.
Frankie Boyle
The appeal to the 'natural' is one of the most powerful aspects of common-sense thinking but it is a way of understanding social relations which denies history and the possibility of change for the future.
Chris Weedon
It's a mind, it works by metaphor.
Simon J. Townley
Lockwood gave a sudden exclamation; when I looked at him, his eyes were shining. 'On second thoughts, we can scrap my last suggestion,' he said. 'Stuff the mingling. Who wants to do that? Boring. George - this library. Where is it?
Jonathan Stroud
It is impossible to read through the reports in the Communist Press without realizing that they are consciously aimed at a public ignorant of the facts and have no other purpose than to work up prejudice.
George Orwell
The truth." Dumbledore sighed. "It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.
J.K. Rowling
Contrary to what you may think, when O’Sah told me about kytaen, that I’d be meeting one, I didn’t picture a pet or a lackey to follow me. I didn’t think of a prisoner. I… I pictured an ally, a friend, OK?
Giselle Simlett
There was something in the color white that resembled silence. Both were emptied of life.
Elif Shafak
When I was growing up we didn't have a massive house and there were five women running around, so my dad and I had to stick together!
Louis Tomlinson
It's over and can't be helped and that's one consolation as they always say in Turkey when they cut the wrong man's head off.
Charles Dickens
What is there so fearful as the expectation of evil tidings delayed? ... Misery is a more welcome visitant when she comes in her darkest guise and wraps us in perpetual black, for then the heart no longer sickens with disappointed hope.- The Evil Eye
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
He dropped the phone back onto its cradle, began to turn around and felt a sudden ice-cold furrow open up in his side. Strength drained from his legs, and a moment later he sank to his knees. There was warmth now that ran over the initial and persistent cold.Mohammed was confused, and barely noticed the briefcase being removed from his grip. He heard the click of a cell phone opening, and a soft beeping as a number was dialed.'The package is in my possession,' a female voice said, and the phone clicked shut.
R.D. Ronald
What goes up must come down.
Isaac Newton
Those who perpetrate stories must act cruelly.
Johnny Rich
To the dismay of those that stood by, about the body of Saruman a grey mist gathered, and rising very slowly to a great height like smoke from a fire, as a pale shrouded figure it loomed over the Hill. For a moment it wavered, looking to the West; but out of the West came a cold wind, and it bent away, and with a sigh dissolved into nothing.
J.R.R. Tolkien
If you have two shirts, sell one and with the money buy a flower’.
Idries Shah
Listening to Beethoven also is sensuality, but when you have said 'sex' you have said all. A man who can give up sex can give up Beethoven.
Nanavira Thera
Everyone should keep a dream journal, did you know that?
Sophie Kinsella
Well, I am sure, for we do not achieve this by ourselves, but by the strength of StarClan within us.
Erin Hunter
In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider, it is hard to find rules without exception.
George Eliot
Conversations were struck up between strangers, regular diners as well as infrequent customers, as if united by a sense of gratitude at the sheer unlikeliness of it all - a high achievement of industrial civilisation that deserved to remain for everyone, but which has now gone the way of the airship and the ocean liner. Much of the nostalgia concerning railways is partial, even false; not this.[On British railway dining cars]
Simon Bradley
I didn't cry. Real things don't make me cry. Only false or sentimental things can do that. In this respect I'm like most civilised humans.
Glen Duncan
Again, I lay awake, and I cried because of waste.
Morrissey
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no
Cyril Connolly
It’s about needing to feel loved and comforted but feeling unworthy of real love and comfort. It’s about hating having needs and desires. For some of us, needs make us feel greedy and selfish. For some of us, having needs means we can easily get hurt if those needs are not met. For some of us, we don’t believe we deserve to have our needs met. We try to convince ourselves that we don’t need anything by avoiding food, one of our greatest primal needs.
Emma McEvoy
My mind is huge with little stories that I never told you.
Lionel Shriver
An arguing couple spiraling into negativity and teetering on the brink of divorce is actually mathematically equivalent to the beginning of a nuclear war.
Hannah Fry
He thought himself awake when he was already asleep. He saw the stars above his face, whirling on their silent and sleepless axis, and the leaves of the trees rustling against them, and he heard small changes in the grass. These little noises of footsteps and soft-fringed wing-beats and stealthy bellies drawn over the grass blades or rattling against the bracken at first frightened or interested him, so that he moved to see what they were (but never saw), then soothed him, so that he no longer cared to see what they were but trusted them to be themselves, and finally left him altogether as he swam down deeper and deeper, nuzzling into the scented turf, into the warm ground, into the unending waters under the earth.
T.H. White