Quotes by British Authors - Page 779

Hecate smelt the odour of death as clearly as she might smell the wonderful, scented fragrance of blooming flowers in springtime or the delicious smell of dinner wafting down the hallway.
Adele Rose
Across the rectory's east lawn, through a blizzard of flying leaves, something long and thin was flapping in the wind. A ragged figure in a white nightgown hanging lifelessly from the trees.
Cash Peters
For a moment or two before the spell took effect, he was aware of all the sounds around him: rain splashing on metal and leather, and running down canvas; horses shuffling and snorting; Englishmen singing and Scotsmen playing bagpipes; two Welsh soldiers arguing over the proper interpretation of a Bible passage; the Scottish captain, John Kincaid, entertaining the American savages and teaching them to drink tea (presumably with the idea that once a man had learnt to drink tea, the other habits and qualities that make up a Briton would naturally follow).Then silence. Men and horses began to disappear, few by few at first, and then more quickly – hundreds, thousands of them vanishing from sight. Great gaps appeared among the close-packed soldiers. A little further to the east an entire regiment was gone, leaving a hole the size of Hanover-square. Where, moments before, all had been life, conversation and activity, there was now nothing but the rain and the twilight and the waving stalks of rye. Strange wiped his mouth because he felt sick.
Susanna Clarke
my good qualities are under your protection, and you are to exaggerate them as much as possible; and, in return, it belongs to me to find occasion for teasing and quarreling with you as often as may be...
Jane Austen
People said there had to be a Supreme Being because otherwise how could the universe exist, eh?And of course there clearly had to be, said Koomi, a Supreme Being. But since the universe was a bit of a mess, it was obvious that the Supreme Being hadn't in fact made it. If he had made it he would, being Supreme, have made a better job of it, with far better thought given, taking an example at random, to things like the design of the common nostril. Or, to put it another way, the existence of a badly put-together watch proved the existence of a blind watchmaker. You only had to look around to see that there was room for improvement practically everywhere. This suggested that the Universe had probably been put together in a bit of a rush by an underling while the Supreme Being wasn't looking, in the same way that Boy Scouts' Association minutes are done on office photocopiers all over the country.So, reasoned Koomi, it was not a good idea to address any prayers to a Supreme Being. It would only attract his attention and might cause trouble.
Terry Pratchett
He came away with an exasperated sense of failure. He denounced parliamentary government root and branch that night. Parliament was doomed. The fact that it had not listened to Rud was only one little conclusive fact in a long indictment. "It has become a series of empty forms," he said. "All over the world, always, the sawdust of reality is running out of the shapes of quasi-public things. Not one British citizen in a thousand watches what is done in Parliament; not one in a thousand Americans follows the discourses of Congress. Interest has gone. Every election in the past thirty years has been fought on gross misunderstandings.
H.G.Wells
Never stop. Never stop fighting. Never stop dreaming. And don't be afraid of wearing your heart on your sleeve - in declaring the films that you love, the films that you want to make, the life that you've had, and the lives you can help reflect in cinema. For myself, for a long time... maybe I felt inauthentic or something, I felt like my voice wasn't worth hearing, and I think everyone's voice is worth hearing. So if you've got something to say, say it from the rooftops.
Tom Hiddleston
Maybe friendship was loving someone even when you didn't always understand them.
Sarah Morgan
His only mistake, naturally enough, was to keep his attention on the bloke with the saw. He should have been watching the naked girls. Amazing how finely balanced that choice can be.
Mark Huntley-James
It was then that we connected. His sound bounced through my head and out my eyes, painting my world with new shades of color. I still remember the smile that unnoticeably took my face as I inched for another touch.
Charles Lee
Calculation never made a hero.
John Henry Cardinal Newman
Humans have too many rights and not enough responsibilities.-Aras
Karen Traviss
After All This Time? Always" - Snape
Jk Rowling
Ye sacred nine
Alexander Pope
In time of war the first casualty is truth.
Boake Carter
Mercy reflects the presence of the Lord in your heart and your life.
Elizabeth George
A library is thought in cold storage.
Lord Samuel
You would hate people if you were like me… If you weren’t wanted.
Agatha Christie
Making love was a game of echoes. We had shared memories so many times that when I made love to her, I knew exactly how it felt to be Purslane. I could taste and feel her other lovers and she could taste and feel mine, each experience reaching away like a reflection in a hall of mirrors, diminishing into a kind of carnal background radiation, a sea of sensuous experience. I had been a girl once, then a thousand men and women and all their lovers. The stasis field locked on. The Synchromesh took hold. I hurtled into my own future, while my ship ate space and time.- "House of Suns" by Alastair Reynolds
Alastair Reynolds
Here's one prophecy the writer can make - you'll never be rich and you'll probably be poor.
Chloe Thurlow
It took me ages to grow into being a woman, into being happy with it.
Helena Bonham Carter
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But a half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.
Neil Gaiman
The bowler approached the wicket at a lope, a trot, and then a run. He suddenly exploded in a flurry of arms and legs, out of which flew a ball.
Douglas Adams
An explosion in space makes no sound at all.
Rosamund Lupton
Friendship is a union of spirits a marriage of hearts and the bond there of virtue.
Samuel Johnson
I write because I love to play with language.
W.H. Auden
Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing.
Virginia Woolf
We are the same people as we were at three six ten or twenty years old. More noticeably so perhaps at six or seven because we were not pretending so much then.
Agatha Christie
Neuroscience is fast developing the technical and conceptual wherewithal to reveal in fine, bare detail the neurobiological substrates of the mind. Perhaps it will despoil a sacred myth - the myth of selfhood and souls. And, if so, we may be wandering innocently into the opening phase of a dangerous game. Our ethics and systems of justice, our entire moral order, are founded on the notion of society as a collective of individual selves - autonomous, introspective, accountable agents. If this self-reflective, moral agent is revealed to be illusory, then what?
Paul Broks
The long-lived gene as an evolutionary unit is not any particular physical structure but the textual archival information that is copied on down the generations. [I]t is widely distributed in space among different individuals, and widely distributed in time over many generations. [A] successful gene will be one that does well in the environments provided by these other genes that it is likely to meet in lots of different bodies.
Richard Dawkins
That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.
Jhumpa Lahiri
When weary with the long day’s care,And earthly change from pain to pain,And lost, and ready to despair,Thy kind voice calls me back againO my true friend, I am not loneWhile thou canst speak with such a tone!So hopeless is the world without,The world within I doubly prize;Thy world where guile and hate and doubtAnd cold suspicion never rise;Where thou and I and LibertyHave undisputed sovereignty.What matters it that all aroundDanger and grief and darkness lie,If but within our bosom’s boundWe hold a bright unsullied sky,Warm with ten thousand mingled raysOf suns that know no winter days?Reason indeed may oft complainFor Nature’s sad reality,And tell the suffering heart how vainIts cherished dreams must always be;And Truth may rudely trample downThe flowers of Fancy newly blown.But thou art ever there to bringThe hovering visions back and breatheNew glories o’er the blighted springAnd call a lovelier life from death,And whisper with a voice divineOf real worlds as bright as thine.I trust not to thy phantom bliss,Yet still in evening’s quiet hourWith never-failing thankfulness Iwelcome thee, benignant power,Sure solacer of human caresAnd brighter hope when hope despairs.
Emily Brontë
...It is necessary for the average citizen, if he wishes to make a living, to avoid incurring the hostility of certain big men. And these big men have an outlook - religious, moral, and political - with which they expect their employees to agree, at least outwardly.
Bertrand Russell
Carlyle! Not just another nameless entity.
Anthony T.Hincks
It is one of my decided opinions that married people ought to have no one, be the tie ever so close and dear, living permanently with them, to break the sacred duality — no, let me say the unity of their home.
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
I needed somewhere that wasn't bad. I wanted to be light and happy like you, and I wanted never for you to see the dark. I was scared I would infect you with terrible feelings and pictures in my head of walking out in front of the traffic and - No. That's not for you, see? Not for you to hear. I needed you to be my sunlight, Bessi,' and here George paused and her words became very small, 'I lost mine, I lost it.
Diana Evans
What frightened me most was, I could no longer believe in my own life as a story. Everyone needs a story, a part to play in order to avoid the realization that life is without significance. How else do any of us survive? It’s what makes life bearable, even interesting. When it becomes neither, people say you’ve lost the plot. Or just lost it.
Amanda Craig
I wish you couldn't figure me out, but you'd always want to know what I was about
Kate Nash
Enemy?’ Horus laughed. ‘When did they become the enemy? They are men like us.’ He glared up at the night sky, threw back his head and screamed a curse at the stars. Then his voice fell to a whisper. Loken was close enough to hear his words.‘Why have you tasked me with this, father? Why have you forsaken me? Why? It is too hard. It is too much. Why did you leave me to do this on my own?
Dan Abnett
Patience is a garment which has never worn out.
Idries Shah
You and me,” he echoed, tilting my face up to his. I stared back into his eyes. They were clear of sleep and nightmares now. “Always.” I told him, my lips curving into a smile. That had been his line once, now it was mine. “Always,” Balik murmured against my jawbone the words grazing my skin as I arched my neck backwards. “You and me, always.” His whisper mingled with the kisses he brushed along my throat. I closed my eyes and drifted away with him.
Melanie Cusick-Jones
If you are not extreme, then people will take shortcuts because they don't fear you.
Marco Pierre White
We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.
George Eliot
Certainly this is a duty not a sin. "Cleanliness is indeed next to godliness."
John Wesley
No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.
George Eliot
Books should be tried by a judge and jury as though they were crimes.
Samuel Butler
People who would refuse to share their bread shared their insanity instead.-Three Daughters of Eve
Elif Shafak
Insanity, thy name is woman
Virginia Alison
She had learned the lesson of renunciation and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun.
Thomas Hardy
Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.
Arthur C. Clarke
It is right that we should stand by and act on our principles; but not right to hold them in obstinate blindness, or retain them when proved to be erroneous.
Michael Faraday
The biggest criminals that I have met in life are working for the government. They make mass murderers look like amateurs.
Steven Magee
Comfort and security are all well and good, but not at the cost of liberty, love and lustiness. The Bohemian knows that money, property and status have little to do with the content of one’s character, and that professional success and widespread celebration have little to do with talent. Of value to the Bohemian is spiritual integrity and creative freedom. The Bohemian would sooner live in poverty than submit to an undesirable job.
Robert Wringham
The only people who fear death are the ones who haven't lived.
Gemma Malley
You can exist without your soul, you know, as long as your brain and heart are still working. But you’ll have no sense of self anymore, no memory, no . . . anything. There’s no chance at all of recovery. You’ll just — exist. As an empty shell. And your soul is gone forever . . . lost.
J.K. Rowling
The deal with multiculturalism is that the only culture you're allowed to disapprove of is your own.
Martin Amis
Do not throw me out. Please.
Diane Samuels
End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path. One that we all must take.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Facing your fears robs them of their power
Mark Burnett
Why was I still traveling? Was it purely because it was better than turning around and going home, where I would have to make grown-up choices about my future? Or was I waiting to happen across a place that would tell me to stay?
Pete Spurrier