Quotes by British Authors - Page 79

I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home that answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog that growls every morning a parrot that swears all afternoon and a cat that comes home late at night.
Marie Corelli
He has spent weeks on the pristine, frosty shore of Lake Baikal in Siberia. He has drunk himself stupid in the fairy-tale blood brothels of old Dubrovnik, lounged in red-smoke dens in Laos, enjoyed the New York blackout of 1977, and more recently, feasted on Vegas showgirls in the Dean Martin suite at the Bellagio. He has watched Hindu abstainers wash away their sins in the Ganges, danced a midnight tango on a boulevard in Buenos Aires, and bitten into a faux geisha under the shade of a shogun pavilion in Kyoto.
Matt Haig
Idealism + Inaction = Depression
Oli Anderson
When humans work, they frequently become unaware of their own body, their own senses, are surprised to find that their wrists ache or their backs are sore or their friend has left the building. It's as close to an out-of-body experience as can be achieved short of fifty volts, a circle of warding, a pigeon's claw cut from an albino female of purest white feathers, or a lot of mushrooms.
Kate Griffin
Run, John, and work, the law commands,Yet give me neither feet nor hand.Much better new the Gospel brings:It bids me fly and gives me winds.
John Berridge
Like if Leonardo from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started being all bummed out about everything. How were we going to kick arse if our Leonardo was wearing a black eye-band instead of a blue one?
Dougie Poynter
Surrender to your fear so you may triumph over it.
Simon Holt
The great proliferation of museums in the nineteenth century was a product of the marriage of the exhibition as a way of awakening intelligent interest in the visitor with the growth of collections that was associated with empire and middle-class affluence. Attendance at museums was as much associated with moral improvement as with explanation of the human or natural world.
Richard Fortey
No one, from pontiffs to professors, has a monopoly on the truth. In the end, we are all just travelers--not scientists or mystics or any one brand of thinker. By nature, we are scientists and mystics, reductionists and holists, left-brained and right-brained, mixed up creatures trying to catch an occasional glimpse of the truth. The best we can do is to be tolerant of both sides of our nature--knowing that these reflect the twin aspect of the universe--and learn from whatever wisdom is offered.
David Darling
The role of godly parents is to make sure that the hearts and minds of their children are saturated with the Word of God.
Elizabeth George
Although the deepest of snow in living memory lay upon the ground, the sun was shining and Aurelia breathed easiest out of doors. The four walls of any given room could not give her the horizons she longed for - horizons she could measure with her eyes and strive to conquer with her own two legs. She was like a wild animal, Cook always said.
Tracy Rees
The reader who is illuminated is in a real sense the poem.
H. M. Tomlinson
One cannot walk in such regions, consciouslywithout enlargement of thought. There areheights and valleys which, to those who seekthem in a sympathetic spirit, are better" seats of learning " than any school or university in the land ; there are days when the climber seems to rise into a rarer mental as well as visual atmosphere, and to leave far below him the crass cares and prejudices of commonplace life.
Henry Stephens Salt
The shield wall reeks of shit, and all a man wants is to be home, to be anywhere but on this field that prepares for battle, but none of us will turn and run or else we will be despised for ever. We pretend we want to be there, and when the wall at last advances, step by step, and the heart is thumping fast as a bird’s wing beating, the world seems unreal.
Bernard Cornwell
What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them.
Richard Dawkins
When the people of our hills visit an individual for any particular purpose, as for instance to show their gratitude or to express their thanks, it is customary for them not to go on their mission empty handed.A rose, a marigold, or a few petals of either flower, suffices, and the gift is proffered in hands cupped together.
Jim Corbett
Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.
P.G. Wodehouse
Pleasure brings pain, but inner silence brings nothing negative; it is in itself of great value and is a far better way to be than to be in ego states.
Belsebuub
For a split second, Harry thought how absurd it was for Tonks to expect the dummy to hear her talking that quietly through a sheet of glass, when there were buses rumbling along behind her and all the racket of street full of shoppers. Then he reminded himself that dummies could not hear anyway.
J.K. Rowling
When they brought in communism it was for the people, so they killed the people. Now they've brought in capitalism, which is for the rich, so they only kill the rich. This time you and I have nothing to worry about.
Rana Dasgupta
I have heard that all ideas of equality are visionary—that they can never be realized—and I believe it. But surely, though there must be hewers of wood, and drawers of water, they ought to have the absolute necessaries of life.
Charlotte Turner Smith
He was terribly conscious that he only had one life and with seemed to sad to think that he had wasted it. He could never surmount his immeasurable regret. And that's why I tell you that Byring is right. Even though it only lasts five years, even though he ruins his career, even though this marriage ends in disaster, it will have been worth while. He will have been satisfied. He will have fulfilled himself.
W Somerset Maugham
It should not be a surprise to find that s/m fantasy is significant in women's sex lives. Women may be born free but they are born into a system of subordination. We are not born into equality and do not have equality to eroticise. We are not born into power and do not have power to eroticise. We are born into subordination and it is in subordination that we learn our sexual and emotional responses. It would be surprising indeed if any woman reared under male supremacy was able to escape the forces constructing her into a member of an inferior slave class.
Sheila Jeffreys
Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
George Eliot
Shadows are in reality when the sun is shining the most conspicuous thing in a landscape next to the highest lights.
John Ruskin
For at eight o’clock the world came to an end. It was reading time. The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours.
Diane Setterfield
None of us like to think we are silly. But all must acknowledge that they are capable of silliness, from time to time
Jude Morgan
The past was always there, lived inside of you, and it helped to make you who you were. But it had to be placed in perspective. The past could not dominate the future.
Barbara Taylor Bradford
Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.What’s that? You want to know if Anansi looked like a spider? Sure he did, except when he looked like a man.No, he never changed his shape. It’s just a matter of how you tell the story. That’s all.
Neil Gaiman
I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.
Thomas Hardy
If I knew where poems came from, I'd go there.
Michael Langley
Look at your hand. Its structure does not match the structure of assertions, the structure of facts. Your hand is continuous. Assertions and facts are discontinuous.... You lift your index finger half an inch; it passes through a million facts. Look at the way your hand goes on and on, while the clock ticks, and the sun moves a little further across the sky.
Michael Frayn
You have not studied the histories of ancient times, and perhaps know not the life that breathes in them; a soul of beauty and wisdom which had penetrated my heart of hearts.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
There is a simplicity to war. Attacking is the only secret. Dare- and the world yields. How quickly they forget that all it takes to change the course of history... is the will of a single man.
Captain Price
You can only possess beauty through understanding it.
John Ruskin
The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
Edward Gibbon
Did you think of anything when Miss Marcy said Scoatney Hall was being re-opened? I thought of the beginning of Pride and Prejudice – where Mrs. Bennet says 'Netherfield Park is let a last.' And then Mr. Bennet goes over to call on the rich new owner.
Dodie Smith
The sea is a lonely and hostile place, Captain,' Jansen said coldly. 'It is always best not to make enemies of those who might be your friends. You never know when your ships may cross
Jocelyn Murray
Now please don't refer to yourself ass some woman I fuck occasionally because, quite frankly, it makes me mad, and you really wouldn't like me when I"m angry.
E.L. James
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.
Nathaniel Lee
And he knew that at that moment, they understood each other perfectly, and when he told her what he was going to do now, she would not say ‘be careful’ or ‘don’t do it’, but she would accept his decision because she would not have expected anything less of him.
J.K. Rowling
Thank God you have got a Father that can be angry, but that loves you as much when He is angry as when He smiles upon you.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Those bitter sorrows of childhood!-- when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.
George Eliot
The world is already yours - why try to conquer it?
Rasheed Ogunlaru
The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Revenge writing is a female genre. Men who have been left by women or made cuckolds by rivals either lick their wounds in humiliated silence or start the Trojan Wars. Having no other power or public voice, the betrayed woman reaches for her pen.
Frances Wilson
A child is fed with milk and praise.
Mary Lamb
Atheism is without God. It does not assert no God. The atheist does not say that there is no God, but he says 'I know not what you mean by God. I am without the idea of God. The word God to me is a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation. I do not deny God, because I cannot deny that of which I have no conception, and the conception of which by its affirmer is so imperfect that he is unable to define it for me.
Charles Bradlaugh
I don’t want my ‘part’ taken! I haven’t ‘got’ a part! I hate the stupid geometrical figures by which people try to understand the emotions of others, imposing hard straight lines - or ‘sides’ as they call them - onto tender curvaceous human beings who have none.
Frances Partridge
The basic urge toward mysticism is never, in the unaltered man, clear enough to be recognized for what it is.
Idries Shah
Religion is a light bulb, created by man to help him to see in the dark.
Paul Arden
I am just going outside and may be some time." Reportedly the last words of Lawrence Oates according to Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who commanded the ill-fated expedition to the South Pole 1911/12.
Captain Lawrence Edward Grace Oates
How many of us have lately taken the time out to look at the sky; marvel at the clouds; smell the flowers; or smelt the fresh scent of rain; bought a stranger a cup of tea or coffee; given our time to help another; or just taken time out to sit and watch people rush hither and tither; said "I love you"; smiled at a complete stranger; joined in with kids from the street to play a game?Sadly, I would have to say....not many.It's sad....
Anthony T.Hincks
The doctrine of original sin is the doctrine according to which divine forgiveness makes known the accidental nature of human mortality, thus permitting an entirely new anthropological understanding.
James Alison
Importance of the random: keep brushing up against people, books, experiences we don't yet know what to do with.
Alain de Botton
I have found men more kind than I expected and less just.
Samuel Johnson
We have to live without sympathy, don't we? That's impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren't like that really, I mean...one can't be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold...d'you see what I mean?
John le Carré
Christ's death is the Christian's life. Christ's cross is the Christian's title to heaven. Christ "lifted up" and put to shame on Calvary is the ladder by which Christians "enter into the holiest," and are at length landed in glory.
J.C. Ryle
Novels can tell us so much about life. They have the power to enrich our own lives in so many different ways. They're not just for entertaining us, although that would be enough.
Victoria Connelly
My conscious mind must have its roots and origins in the most unfathomable depths of being, yet it feels as if it lived all by itself in this tight little skull.
Alan W. Watts