Quotes by British Authors - Page 82

Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time...
Terry Pratchett
Don't look back!" "Why not?" "Because I just did! Run faster!
Terry Pratchett
While 'Rap Trax!' recorded, Neel found some scrap paper and we started writing our first lyrics. Bandying about subject matter and title, we got stuck on the idea of 'cool', so my first rap song became 'Pretty Cool'. It was a symbol of our confidence. We weren't awesome cool or mega cool. We were only... pretty cool.
Nikesh Shukla
A writer is someone who, needing nothing and no one, wants everything and everyone.
Neel Burton
A fundamental truth, is that there is simply no such thing as an inherently boring person or thing. People are only in danger of coming across as such when they either fail to understand their deeper selves or don’t dare or know how to communicate them to others. 
Alain de Botton
How initially 'to get her in the sack' and subsequently to avoid 'her giving you the sack' are not identical dilemmas faced by the male species, but they sure have a bizarre habit of being bedfellows
Alex Morritt
But, Elizabeth, what we have, what is between us, will never be over.
Marie Treanor
My mother is a wonderful, eccentric lady who has no concept whatever of interior monologue. We'll be driving along in the car and she'll suddenly say, 'Ants don't like cucumbers, you know. And roaches don't like cinnamon. Do you want some cheese, Michael? Rembrandt was the Lord of the day.' -Mike Myers
Mitchell Symons
Good plan," Freddy was saying. "Let's get some decent sleep. Tomorrow we can shake our gravy asses into town and do some sluething.
Ali Sparkes
The modern man has become a machine for survival, which is largely the result of work of chemicals and genetic codes.
Lynne McTaggart
My Aunt Dahlia, who runs a woman's paper called Milady's Boudoir, had recently backed me into a corner and made me promise to write her a few words for her "Husbands and Brothers" page on "What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing". I believe in encouraging aunts, when deserving; and, as there are many worse eggs than her knocking about the metrop, I had consented blithely. But I give you my honest word that if I had had the foggiest notion of what I was letting myself in for, not even a nephew's devotion would have kept me from giving her the raspberry. A deuce of a job it had been, taxing the physique to the utmost. I don't wonder now that all these author blokes have bald heads and faces like birds who have suffered.
P.G. Wodehouse
...the years have taught me not to wonder too much at the dark things men do. Strange how it is that men never act crueller than when they're fighting for the sake of an idea. We've been killing since Cain over who stands closer to god. It seems to me that cruelty is just in the way of things. You drive yourself mad if you take it all personal. Those who hurt you don't have the power over you they would like. That's why they do what they do. And I'm not going to give them the power now. But it was a cruel thing that they did, and when they had finished hurting me, a splinter of loneliness seemed to break off and stay inside me forever.
Marcel Theroux
Through darkness diamonds spread their richest light.
John Webster
A foolish German had said that man thought in words. It was totally false; a pernicious doctrine; the thoughts flashed into being in a hundred simultaneous forms, with a thousand associations, and the speaking mind selected one, forming it grossly into the inadequate symbols of words, inadequate because common to disparate situations - admitted to be inadequate for vast regions of expression, since for them there were the parallel languages of music and painting. Words were not called for in many or indeed most forms of thought: Mozart certainly thought in terms of music. He himself at this moment was thinking in terms of scent.
Patrick O'Brian
Suddenly high song awakens me, and I leave all this tedious routine far, far distant; I listen, till all the world is changed, and the beautiful earth becomes more beautiful.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
My mind s a center of divine operations
Thomas Troward
Must not understanding lie open unto wisdom as the pyramids lie open to the stars? (6:2)
Aleister Crowley
When I cannot read, when I cannot think, when I cannot even pray, I can trust.
James Hudson Taylor
Just as the desperate, terminally ill cancer patient often turns to expensive placebos for an imaginary chance at more life, the desperate, terminally alive sad people turn to expensive placebos for a chance to imagine a decent life.
Sarah Perry
Clear your mind of "can't."
Samuel Johnson
Well, evil to some is always good to others.
Jane Austen
Often when she liked a picture she found that she was liking some part of herself, some part of her that was in accord with the picture
Jeanette Winterson
Hatred is like fire-it makes even light rubbish deadly.
George Eliot
I am not your dear; I cannot lie down: send me to school soon, Mrs. Reed, for I hate to live here.
Charlotte Brontë
Huizi would say, never look back to the past. Never regret. Even if there is emptiness ahead, never look back.
Xiaolu Guo
Now, if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object, and will even appear as the rival of that object […] If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolical relation to what will truly satisfy.
C.S. Lewis
Do you not think that God will protect us?”“No,” he said flatly. “My experience is that He rarely attends to the obvious.
Philippa Gregory
The Order of the Divine mind, embodied in the Divine Law, is beautiful. What should a man do but try to reproduce it, so far as possible, in his daily life?
C.S. Lewis
There's a societal push for conformity in all ways. There's less tolerance of difference. And so maybe for some people having a label is better. It can confer a sense of hope and direction. (interview with Allen Frances)
Jon Ronson
The sound of his sleep, the snores and sighs and small noices, is company.
Jackie Kay
There are kinds of solitude that provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure.
Olivia Laing
Logically, this kind of atheism did not prove that there was no God.... On the contrary, Southwell was typical in placing the onus probandi on those who affirmed the existence of God and Holyoake regarded himself as an atheist only in his inability to believe what the churches would have him believe. They were content to show that the Christian concept of the supernatural was meaningless, that the arguments in its favor were illogical, and that the mysteries of the universe, insofar as they were explicable, could be accounted for in material terms.
Edward Royle
This is what labels do. They stick. If people think you're MAD, then everything you do, everything you think will have MAD stamped across it.
Nathan Filer
But despite such energetic mental exercise, the ghosts of time present would intrude and drive his dreams away. It was Ann who had robbed him of his peace, Ann who had once made the present so important and taught him the habit of reality, and when she went there was nothing.
John le Carré
Bash it out now, tart it up later.
Nick Lowe
When I reach my mountain top I will step off and follow the clouds all the way to the top of the world.Once there, I'll probably keep going.Who knows?Perhaps I will meet God along the way.
Anthony T.Hincks
When humanity dies, what happens to all the people?
Anthony T.Hincks
This revolution is for display purposes only.
Banksy
Homo sapiens! The name itself was an irony. They had not been wise at all, but incredibly stupid. Lords of the Earth with their great gray brains, their thinking minds had placed them above all other forms of life. Yet it had not been thought that compelled them to act, but emotion. From the dawn of their evolution they had killed, and conquered, and subdued. They had committed atrocities on others of their kind, ravaged the land, polluted and destroyed, left millions to starve in Third World countries, and finished it all with a nuclear holocaust. The mutants were right. Intelligent creatures did not commit genocide, or murder the environment on which they were dependent.
Louise Lawrence
When I was born, my mother dressed me as a boy because she could not afford to feed any more daughters. By the mystic laws of gender and economics, it ruins a peasant to place half a bowl of figs in front of his daughter, while his son may gorge on the whole tree, burn it for firewood and piss on the stump, and still be reckoned a blessing to his father.
Jeanette Winterson
Not to be greedy is, paradoxically, the highest form of looking after one's true interests.
Idries Shah
We've got to escape from narrowness. We're a movement, not a conspiracy. We've got to radiate contacts, and have as many people aware of us as possible. That's living, modern common sense.
H.G.Wells
Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowlegde of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper; outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of proptiety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives.
Mary Wollstonecraft
You are the creator of your own perceived reality. Don't be a creation of circumstances. Always take full control of your destiny.
Steven Redhead
Don't torture yourself over the past. Use it as a teacher. Whatever happened to you in the past, has only prepared you for now.
Robert Tew
On the girl's brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
Chris Cleave
Wisdom is merely the movement from fighting life to embracing it.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
God has given us many faiths but only one world in which to co-exist. May your work help all of us to cherish our commonalities and feel enlarged by our differences.
Jonathan Sacks
Since the 1970S, financial innova­tions such as the securitisation of mortgage debt and the spreading of investment risks through the creation of derivative markets, all tacitly (and now, as we see, actually) backed by state power, have permitted a huge flow of excess liquidity into all facets of urbanisa­tion and built environment construction worldwide.
David Harvey
Just like the cast of a great movie and the career of great athletes few success stories are a one man show. Build your team and grow.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
YOU FEAR TO DIE?"It's not that I don't want... I mean, I've always...it's just that life is a habit that's hard to break...
Terry Pratchett
Ever since 1945 the federal government has held and indeed increased its importance as the first customer of the American economy. Government spending had been the primary economic stimulant and to increase it had been the goal of hundreds of interest groups; hopes of balanced budgets and cheap, business-like administration always ran aground upon this fact. What was more, the United States was a democracy; whatever the doctrinaire objections to it, and however much rhetoric might be devoted to attacking it, a welfare state slowly advanced because voters wanted it that way. These facts gradually made the old ideal of totally free enterprise, unchecked and uninvaded by the influence of government, unreal.
J.M. Roberts
It seemed so much safer and more comfortable to live in the lives of other people - to observe their joys and sorrows with detachment as if one were watching a film or a play.
Barbara Pym
The world has become jaded. Romance has died, some no longer believe in love, and because of this, they suffer.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Directly above them, framed in the doorway from the Brain Room, stood Albus Dumbledore, his wand aloft, his face white and furious. Harry felt a kind of electric charge surge through every particle of his body - they were saved.
J.K. Rowling
My son, there may be a time when I explain these things to you, because there may be a time when I understand them.
Hanif Kureishi
It seems to me that no matter whether you marry, settle down or live with a bird or not, certain ones simply have your number on them, like bombs in the war; and even if you don’t happen to like them all that much there’s nothing you can do about it — unless you’re prepared to spend a lifetime arguing fate out of existence, which you could probably do if you tried but I’m not the type.—Crust on Its Uppers, p. 87
Derek Raymond
God’s Word is the tool the Holy Spirit uses to change our worldly thinking to heavenly thinking.
Elizabeth George
Then, suddenly again, Christopher Robin, who was still looking at the world, with his chin in his hand, called out "Pooh!" "Yes?" said Pooh. "When I'm--when--Pooh!" "Yes, Christopher Robin?" "I'm not going to do Nothing any more." "Never again?" "Well, not so much. They don't let you." Pooh waited for him to go on, but he was silent again. "Yes, Christopher Robin?" said Pooh helpfully. "Pooh, when I'm--you know--when I'm not doing Nothing, will you come up here sometimes?" "Just me?" "Yes, Pooh." "Will you be here too?" "Yes Pooh, I will be really. I promise I will be Pooh." "That's good," said Pooh. "Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred." Pooh thought for a little. "How old shall I be then?" "Ninety-nine." Pooh nodded. "I promise," he said. Still with his eyes on the world Christopher Robin put out a hand and felt Pooh's paw. "Pooh," said Christopher Robin earnestly, "if I--if I'm not quite--" he stopped and tried again-- "Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won't you?" "Understand what?" "Oh, nothing." He laughed and jumped to his feet. "Come on!" "Where?" said Pooh. "Anywhere." said Christopher Robin.So, they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.
A.A. Milne
My body was a buzzing antenna into which radio waves flooded from the entire cosmos. I was the living switchboard of the universe. My skull was a magnetized globe.
Simon Critchley