Quotes by British Authors - Page 786

It’s always better to sit on your dignity in private than to stand on it in public.
Mark Lawrence
Father says hot water can be as stimulating as an alcoholic drink and though I never come by one...I can well believe it.
Dodie Smith
It's Sanjit. It's a Hindu name. It means 'invincible.'""That's great," Lana said."Invincible. I can't be vinced.""That's not even a word," Lana said."Go ahead: try to vince me," Sanjit said.
Michael Grant
O thrush your song is passing sweet But never a song that you have sung Is half so sweet as thrushes sang When my dear love and I were young.
William Morris
I started to think of friends I could lean on for some help, but, as always happened when I attempted this kind of social audit, I realised that far too many of them were abroad, dead, married to people who disapproved of me, or weren't really my friends, now that I came to think of it.
Hugh Laurie
We have annexed the future into our present as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us
J.G. Ballard
Nothing more likely,"said Hannasyde. "I've got to try and rattle him.""It's him that'll do the rattling,"said the Sergeant darkly. "he's the nearest thing to a snake I've seen outside of the Zoo.
Georgette Heyer
We are betrayed by what is false within.
George Meredith
The biggest mistake people make in life is trying to be someone else. They never find themselves, so they never love themselves. Instead they find somebody else who they like a lot and try to be them.
Stephen Lovegrove
Adult males in modern society who feel fulfilled in giving concern and tuition to boys and youths are portrayed as being interested only in boys' bodies (though this may be a small part of the attraction) and are spurned and traduced as sexual monsters. I believe we reap the harvest of ours hysterical and homophobia today in juvenile crime, drug use and delinquency. Consider the ethical training which boys and youths gained through shudo in Japan or in the system in Classical Greece, the tuition in manners, customs and humanity, the degree of civilised values imparted to them, the ideas of loyalty, honour and truthfulness; this highly personalised education with love and sensuality at its centre must be far more effective than any other. We in the West are bigoted fools to dismiss it with such horror.
Colin Spencer
Once it gets off the ground into space, all science fiction is fantasy.
J.G. Ballard
We all make choices, Cossack. Who we are in this world, what we do in it. Generous or selfish. Happy or sad. Good or evil. It's all down to choice.
Anthony Horowitz
Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there is no God.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Perhaps if you address the lady Most politely most politely Flatter and impress the lady Most politely most politely Humbly beg and humbly sue She may deign to look on you.
W.S. Gilbert
Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!
J.R.R. Tolkien
Thence it is possible to arrive by easy stages at the happy notion, not uncommon among 'intellectuals', that taste consists of distaste, and that the loftiest of pleasures is that of feeling displeased; and thus to end by enjoying almost nothing in literature but one's own opinions, while oneself incapable of writing a living sentence.
F.L. Lucas
He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone - one mind less, one world less.
George Orwell
One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Ridcully sighed.'All right, you fellows,' he said. 'No magic at Table, you know the rules. Who's playing silly buggers?'The other senior wizards stared at him.'I, I, I don't think we can play it any more,' said the Bursar, who at the moment was only occasionally bouncing off the sides of sanity, 'I, I, I think we lost some of the pieces...
Terry Pratchett
Sometimes it feels as though happiness is just a word people say to hide the despair of not knowing anything.
Michael Gilbert
In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.
Alan W. Watts
Usually time alters and affects everything, but when someone you love dies time cannot change that, no amount of time will ever change that, so time stops having any meaning.
Rosamund Lupton
I was not sorrowful, but only tiredOf everything that ever I desired.
Ernest Dowson
He went to the church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and for, and patted the children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of homes, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed of any walk, that anything, could give him so much happiness. (p. 119)
Charles Dickens
And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.
P.G. Wodehouse
One glance he gave, one little smile at parting—it was but for a moment; but therein I read, or thought I read, a meaning that kindled in my heart a brighter flame of hope than had ever yet arisen.
Anne Brontë
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
C.S. Lewis
I don't see the use of reading the same thing over and over again,' said Phillip. 'That's only a laborious form of idleness.'But are you under the impression that you have so great a mind that you can understand the most profound writer at a first reading?'I don't want to understand him, I'm not a critic. I'm not interested in him for his sake but for mine.'Why do you read then?'Partly for pleasure, because it's a habit and I'm just as uncomfortable if I don't read as if I don't smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me; I've got out of the book all that's any use to me and I can't get anythning more if I read it a dozen times. ...
W Somerset Maugham
Why can’t she see it? Why can’t she see the hidden monster which lives inside of him? He’s standing there, his back still away from my mum, but he’s showing me that evil. He’s showing me the monster that is just itching to get out. I know what he would do without Mum being there, so I’m so glad that she is, but what I can’t understand is how blind she and my sister are to him. It’s almost as if he can walk on water as far as they’re concerned.
Jaimie Roberts
Januz feels glad to have her in his arms--his wife, who would do anything to protect their son. This is how she presents herself. Like a soldier who would kill for her country. And her country is their son.
Amanda Hodgkinson
Curious creatures we mortals are-how we do not know what we want, or how to get it if we do.
Jude Morgan
The great business of life is to be to do to do without and to depart.
John Morley
The astounding natural beauty of the USA is offset by its extremely poor social security system that is clearly apparent when driving around the country.
Steven Magee
Let us have Wine and Women Mirth and Laughter Sermons and soda-water the day after.
Lord Byron
Had I learned to fiddle I should have done nothing else.
Samuel Johnson
Satan rejected my soul; as low as he goes,he never quite goes this low.
Morrissey
All in a moment Hurlow forgot the beauty of the sounds and smelt fear. He smelt it as an animal smells it, the breath cold in his nostrils. He had read about Pan, a dead god who might safely be patronized while poring over a book in a London lodging, but here and at this hour a god not to be scorned. ("Furze Hollow")
A.M. Burrage
The Duke of Dunstable had one-way pockets. He would walk ten miles in the snow to chisel an orphan out of tuppence.
P.G. Wodehouse
She had not had the relief of amnesia. She had suffered longer, and she had suffered more. Each second was agony in the first weeks. She was like an amputee in the days before anesthesia, half crazed with pain, astounded that the human body could feel so much and not die of it. But slowly, cell by painful cell, she began to mend. There came a time when it was no longer her whole body that burned with pain but only her heart. And then there came a time when even her heart was able, for a time at least, to feel other emotions besides grief.
Diane Setterfield
It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before.
Iris Murdoch
The parents exist to teach the child but also they must learn what the child has to teach them and the child has a very great deal to teach them.
Arnold Bennett
Tea should be taken in solitude.
C.S. Lewis
It is impossible to think big without thinking complex.
Duncan Bannatyne
It is my baby and if I want to bring it out to play again, I will.
J.K. Rowling
The true joy and wonder of life can only be yours if you follow your own intuition aiming to achieve your bliss.
Steven Redhead
O comportamento ritual não só revela realidades práticas e mundanas, é também um teatro vivo da psicologia colectiva e uma das mais ricas expressões da ideologia e crenças - mentalidade - de uma sociedade. Afinal de contas, como os antropólogos notaram, a religião é mais do que um padrão de relações sociais: é uma expressão da capacidade humana para imaginar a estrutura da sociedade. O ritual religioso não é apenas construção cultural: é uma forma de cognição que constrói modelos de realidade e paradigmas de comportamento. E dentro deste processo pelo qual a realidade é definida, o ritual da morte joga um papel central.
Victor Turner
Imagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
W Somerset Maugham
Remember the dignity of your womanhood. Do not appeal do not beg do not grovel. Take courage join hands stand beside us fight with us.
Christabel Pankhurst
I'd Drown For YouI opened my heart to youA complete immersionI offered my soul to youA heavenly diversion
Muse
Elric knew that everything that existed had its opposite. In danger he might find peace. And yet, of course, in peace there was danger. Being an imperfect creature in an imperfect world he would always know paradox. And that was why in paradox there was always a kind of truth. That was why philosophers and soothsayers flourished. In a perfect world there would be no place for them. In an imperfect world the mysteries were always without solution and that was why there was always a great choice of solutions.
Michael Moorcock
I've never had sex," repeated Artemis. "Never wanted to." It was her turn not to look at him as she spoke. "Not with a man or with a woman, or with an animal, though my family joke about it. And I never will. The thought of it disgusts me. But the others - my family - they think that means I haven't got any feelings. That I could never care about anyone, that I don't know what love is, just because I don't-" she shuddered. "But you know what?" she said, turning to him now. "I really loved my dogs. Everyone laughs at me for it, but it's true. The time I spent with them, running, hunting, those were the happiest times of my life. They understood me. They were animals but they understood me far better than anyone in my family ever will. We shared something, we were the same. And they made me kill them.
Marie Phillips
I a stranger and afraid In a world I never made.
A.E. Housman
The two old men were as still as the stone bench on which they sat, as though their lengthy communion with the element had turned them into statues.
Felix Long
Some will say that searching for your dreams is like looking for unicorns in an emerald forest.
Fennel Hudson
In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.
Samuel Butler
Me as a woman liking myself, is an act of social defiance!
Hannah Witton
Don't take anything for granted because chances are it won't be here tomorrow or for that matter, neither may you.Live for the moment and celebrate what life has given you and what you can give it in return.
Anthony T.Hincks
[..] as midnight inevitably came and went without the horsemen of the apocalypse making an appearance, Clara surprised herself by falling into a melancholy.For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling sea-water to retrieve the salt something is gained but something is lost. Though her friends Merlin, Wan-Si, et al. clapped her on the back and congratulated her for exorcizing those fervid dreams of perdition and redemption, Clara quietly mourned the warmer touch she had waited for these nineteen years, the all-enveloping bear hug of the Saviour, the One who was Alpha and Omega, both the beginning and the end; the man who was meant to take her away from all this, from the listless reality of life in a ground-floor flat in Lambeth. What now for Clara? Ryan would find another fad; Darcus need only turn to the other channel; for Hortense another date would of course materialize, along with more leaflets, ever more faith. But Clara was not like Hortense. Yet a residue, left over from the evaporation of Clara's faith, remained. She still wished for a saviour. She still wished for a man to whisk her away, to choose her above others so that she might Walk in white with Him: for [she] was worthy. Revelation 3:4.
Zadie Smith
For that matter, all this, is there a God? Corlis -- I don't care!""Huh," I considered. "I guess I don't either"."Most people don't! All they care about," he added grimly, "is being right".
Lionel Shriver
We stand dead still and we listen to the night. The city drones. An owl hoots and a cat howls and a dog barks and a siren wails.We let the stars shine into us.
David Almond