Quotes by British Authors - Page 78

Stood in firelight, sweltering. Bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night.Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else.Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.Was Rorschach.Does that answer your Questions, Doctor?
Alan Moore
Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.
Brian W. Aldiss
Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.
George Eliot
The presence of hundreds of books had finally convinced Hermione that what they were doing was right.
J.K. Rowling
The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.
Jeanette Winterson
The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn't need to be reformed -- it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.
Ken Robinson
A jewelled garden the envy of Aladdin's cave spilled across the courtyard.
Felix Long
I really feel that we're not giving children enough credit for distinguishing what's right and what's wrong. I, for one, devoured fairy tales as a little girl. I certainly didn't believe that kissing frogs would lead me to a prince, or that eating a mysterious apple would poison me, or that with the magical "Bibbity-Bobbity-Boo" I would get a beautiful dress and a pumpkin carriage. I also don't believe that looking in a mirror and saying "Candyman, Candyman, Candyman" will make some awful serial killer come after me. I believe that many children recognize Harry Potter for what it is, fantasy literature. I'm sure there will always be some that take it too far, but that's the case with everything. I believe it's much better to engage in dialog with children to explain the difference between fantasy and reality. Then they are better equipped to deal with people who might have taken it too far.
J.K. Rowling
The history of every major galactic civilisation tends to pass through three distinct and recognisable phases, those of Survival, Enquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterised by the question How can we eat?, the second by the question Why do we eat?, and the third but the question Where shall we have lunch?
Douglas Adams
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
Bertrand Russell
When you’re a child the world forbears you, allows you your flights of imagination, your feelings of specialness. But sooner or later the privileges are withdrawn, and all you’re left with is a stunned bitterness at the realisation that you’re just the same as everybody else.
Michael Marshall Smith
Officially, it is no more possible to be a little bit OCD than it is to be a little bit pregnant or a little bit dead.
David Adam
At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.
P.G. Wodehouse
Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.
C.S. Lewis
You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.
Neil Gaiman
It seems that all eukaryotic cells either have, or once had (and then lost) mitochondria. In other words, possession of mitochondria is a sine qua non of the eukaryotic condition
Nick Lane
The significance of [the fine-structure constant] goes far beyond atomic physics, however. It is the smallness of 1/137 compared to unity that enables us to treat the coupling between the electromagnetic field and a charged particle such as an electron as a small perturbation, a fact of great computational importance. [Forces of Nature]
Paul Davies
Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.
Bertrand Russell
If God wanted us in the ocean, he wouldn’t have made the land.
Lauren Child
Life, just like the stars, the planets and the galaxies, is just a temporary structure on the long road from order to disorder. But that doesn't make us insignificant, because we are the Cosmos made conscious. Life is the means by which the universe understands itself. And for me, our true significance lies in our ability to understand and explore this beautiful universe.
Brian Cox
I will not glory, even in my orthodoxy, for even that can be a snare if I make a god of it... Let us rejoice in Him in all His fulness and in Him alone.
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.
Samuel Butler
It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
Doris Lessing
Friendship is a strong and habitual inclination in two persons to promote the good and happiness in another.
Eustace Budgell
I can always forgive where I understand.
Jude Morgan
All day long you sit and sew,Stitch life down for fear it grow,Stitch life down for fear we guessAt the hidden ugliness.Dusty voice that throbs with heat,Hoping with your steel-thin beatTo put stitches in my mind,Make it tidy, make it kind,You shall not: I'll keep it freeThough you turn earth, sky and seaTo a patchwork quilt to keepYour mind snug and warm in sleep!
Edith Sitwell
The speech of God’s beautiful woman is a fountain of life to those around her.
Elizabeth George
Inspired To Be The Best
Benjamin Greene
Stupid cupid keeps on calling me, but I see nothing in his eyes. I miss my babe
George Michael
This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.
Zadie Smith
(...) always regretted that good memory often prevents us from thinking for ourselves.
Frank Harris
Atlas said, 'Must my future be so heavy?' Hera said, 'That is your present, Atlas. Your future hardens every day, but it is not fixed.' 'How can I escape my fate?' 'You must choose your destiny.
Jeanette Winterson
My name's Sean, Jem. I'm Sean.
J.A. Belfield
What we ask is to be human individuals, however peculiar and unexpected. It is no good saying: "You are a little girl and therefore you ought to like dolls"; if the answer is, "But I don't," there is no more to be said.
Dorothy L. Sayers
You see, because [Norfolk is] stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it's not on the way to anywhere. People going north and south, they bypass it altogether. For that reason, it's a peaceful corner of England, rather nice. But it's also something of a lost corner.'Someone claimed after the lesson that Miss Emily had said Norfolk was England's 'lost corner' because that was were all the lost property found in the country ended up.Ruth said one evening, looking out at the sunset, that 'when we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, and we were free to travel the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.
Kazuo Ishiguro
The assumption that being gay or black necessarily harms the self-worth of all who fit this category has a patronizing dimension, because it neglects consideration of the agency that persons exercise in respect of imposed identity.
Michael Kenny
All a man can betray is his conscience.
Joseph Conrad
If we seek solace in the prisons of the distant pastSecurity in human systems we're told will always always lastEmotions are the sail and blind faith is the mastWithout the breath of real freedom we're getting nowhere
Sting
Nothing. That's why it's funny. It's so bad I just think it's funny,' Renee says, tilting her head back so the chips don't fall out of her mouth.‘Do you really?’‘If I don’t laugh about it what else will I do?’She doesn’t actually laugh though. She falls back, throws chips into the air and tries to catch them in her mouth
Dawn O'Porter
One is nearer God's heart in a garden Than anywhere else on earth.
Dorothy Frances Gurney
...reason rationalizes reality for him (Dr. Nathan) as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects about which we should not be reasonable.
J.G. Ballard
Entering by the carré, a piece of mirror- glass, set in an oaken cabinet, repeated my image. It said I was changed: my cheeks and lips were sodden white, my eyes were glassy, and my eyelids swollen and purple.On rejoining my companions, I knew they all looked at me - my heart seemed discovered to them: I believed myself self-betrayed. Hideously certain did it seem that the very youngest of the school must guess why and for whom I despaired.
Charlotte Brontë
To me, re-reading my favorite books is like spending time with my best friends.I’d never be satisfied to limit myself to just one experience each with my favorite people.
C.S. Lewis
Politics is not a good location or a vocation for anyone lazy thin-skinned or lacking a sense of humour.
John Bailey
Red sky at night, the city's alight.
Terry Pratchett
Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.
Jeanette Winterson
To know just what has do be done then to do it comprises the whole philosophy of practical life.
Sir William Osier
A traditionalist’s values are gleaned from all that is good in the past.
Fennel Hudson
The Girl was gone, buried in the past. She never wanted to hear that name again. She was a woman for better for worse. Whatever the future might bring she could face it as a woman, Ned Ridley's woman.
Catherine Cookson
A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well.
G.K. Chesterton
Only the present exists. The past is gone, and the future has not yet happened. There is only ever time present.
Fennel Hudson
It is men who face the biggest problems in the future adjusting to their new and complicated role.
Anna Ford
A steady recognition that the evils which prevent the fullness of moral development are precisely the elements which are also the source of the power that gives existence to whatever moral accomplishments we see about us may eventually lead us to a tolerance we grant to the internal-combustion engine: it is noisy and smelly, and occasionally, it refuses to start, but it is what gets us to wherever we get.We must somehow learn to understand and so to tolerate- not destroy- the free society.
Michael Polanyi
This book was written using 100% recycled words.
Terry Pratchett
Driving your car through deep pools of flood water is a great way of making your car unreliable. Smart people turn around and avoid it.
Steven Magee
Occasionally we all do wrong things from right motives. Only time can prove us right or wrong. The past is the past. Nothing can change it now, and who is to say that it was all wrong, anyway?
Mary Balogh
Silence is the door to Oran Mor. Close your eyes. Quieten your thoughts. And listen. Listen in particular to the sound of the waves. Let the Great Song sing in you. In an hour I will ring a bell. When you hear it, make a sound that resonates with the waves. Let it flow and develop, calling on all you have heard in the silence.
Alan McCluskey
Clever men are impressed in their differences from their fellows. Wise men are conscious of their resemblance to them.
R.H. Tawney
The Chamber Of Secrets had been opened.Enemies of the heir, beware.
J.K. Rowling
Once more, he was immersing himself in books, reaching the end of long articles, even going back over paragraphs to make sure he'd grasped things. How much more satisfying it was than all that skimming, all that jumping around. At present, he was working his way, deliciously, through a book on Mendel, the father of genetics. A man who might not have spend seven years watching peas, if he'd had the internet.
Julie Highmore