Quotes by British Authors - Page 9

Always let your talent do the talking. Never your tantrums.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Upon my soul!' Tietjens said to himself, 'that girl down there is the only intelligent living soul I've met for years.' A little pronounced in manner sometimes; faulty in reasoning naturally, but quite intelligent, with a touch of wrong accent now and then. But if she was wanted anywhere, there she'd be! Of good stock, of course: on both sides! But positively, she and Sylvia were the only two human beings he had met for years whom he could respect: the one for sheer efficiency in killing; the other for having the constructive desire and knowing how to set about it. Kill or cure! The two functions of man. If you wanted something killed you'd go to Sylvia Tietjens in sure faith that she would kill it: emotion, hope, ideal; kill it quick and sure. If you wanted something kept alive you'd go to Valentine: she's find something to do for it. . . . The two types of mind: remorseless enemy, sure screen, dagger ... sheath!Perhaps the future of the world then was to women? Why not? He hand't in years met a man that he hadn't to talk down to - as you talk down to a child, as he had talked down to General Campion or to Mr. Waterhouse ... as he always talked down to Macmaster. All good fellows in their way ...
Ford Madox Ford
The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if they had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought --to call it by a prouder name than it deserved-- had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until --you know the little tug -- the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating.
Virginia Woolf
I looked at my little family all smiling and quite happy at the thought that Charlie had tried to maim or kill Mr. Lomax - or at least blow up his van - and I realized then that I was the only normal one.
Nina Stibbe
The discovery in art is often gradual, a process of minor discoveries riddled with uncertainties and the potential for making that which is discovered vanish before your eyes, like a mirage.
Geoff Dyer
Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.
Bertrand Russell
Confidence, even when under pressure, has a way of turning an impossible situation into just another challenge to be met.
David Amerland
Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe.
Friedrich A. Hayek
But what minutes! Count them by sensation and not by calendars and each moment is a day.
Benjamin Disraeli
For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top of St Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet
Virginia Woolf
The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were both justified by an appeal to the emancipation of women, and the discourse of feminism was specifically invoked.
Nina Power
Stop fighting yourself and accept where you are in life. Let this time in your life motivate you to let go of all of the things that are holding you back.
Robert Tew
Writing is like scrambling up a hill on all fours; you arrive halfway up, and you are committed - you want to reach the summit, yet you must stop, to gather your strength and will. When you have climbed to the summit, you stop, catch your breath, and take in the vista. You wonder how you made it. Then, you make your decent, somewhat subdued, all the while planning your next ascent, your next attempt to touch the sky. The memory of your climb leaves you with one impression - the idea that it gets easier, over time.
Suzy Davies
Ours was not going to be a clone of the usual expeditions, oozing with sleekness. It was clear from the start that oddity was our advantage.
Tahir Shah
...as young and as ancient as Spring....
J.R.R. Tolkien
Running along the bank was a white rabbit wearing a waistcoat and looking worriedly at a clock. Appearing and disappearing at various points on both banks was a dark blue British police telephone booth, out of which a perplexed-looking man holding a screwdriver would periodically emerge. A group of dwarf bandits could be seen disappearing into a hole in the sky. "Time travelers," said Nobodaddy in a voice of gentle disgust. "They're everywhere these days.
Salman Rushdie
If you're brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from UnLondon to Parisn't, or No York, or Helsunki, or Lost Angeles, or Sans Francisco, or Hong Gone, or Romeless.
China Miéville
I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.
Jeanette Winterson
They want us dead,' said Bond calmly. 'So we have to stay alive.
Ian Fleming
Let's pretend for just one moment that could actually happen. You close your eyes and I'll close mine and let's dream the same dream across the Atlantic, lighting up the darkness between us. Can you see it, Stu? Can you see us up there, shining in all the black?
Annabel Pitcher
There is, I believe, no person, however insignificant in the world, but, if an account of his life and adventures were committed to paper, would be entertaining in some degree: the follies of our own life, and those we are liable to be drawn into by others, will constantly afford matter for serious reflection.
Henry Spencer Ashbee
Besides(..), it's a poor woman whose ambition is only to be loved.
Sarah Perry
It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, to absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
Charlotte Brontë
to bar communication between intellectuals, who are always our best hope of peace, is particularly self-defeating and inane. It declares, inter alia, that we have a) made up our minds about what we think, b) closed our minds to what others think, and c) chosen to go on hearing nothing with which we happen to disagree.
Howard Jacobson
We should all know more, live nearer to God, and grow in grace, if we were more alone. Meditation chews the cud and extracts the real nutriment from the mental food gathered elsewhere.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I wanted to join Footlights,” he says. “I wanted to be a writer-performer like the Pythons. In fact I wanted to be John Cleese and it took me some time to realise that the job was in fact taken.
Douglas Adams
I’ll be blasted’, he said, ‘if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I’ll write, from this day forward, to please myself
Virginia Woolf
It's very kind of you to take us in," said the vicar, smiling. "We're so sorry if we've put you out at all." "Not at all!" I said, lying through my teeth.
Victoria Twead
Music is the soundtrack to every good and bad time we will ever have.
Alex Gaskarth
Poor little girl. Poor little girl," Nan says, and at first I think she is speaking of the baby, perhaps it is a girl after all. But then I realize she is speaking of me, a girl of thirteen years, whose own mother has said that they can let her die as long as a son and heir is born.
Philippa Gregory
This good fellowship - camaraderie - usually occurring through the similarity of pursuits is unfortunately seldom super-added to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labors but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstances permit its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death - that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, besides which the passion usually called by the name is as evanescent as steam.
Thomas Hardy
The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth,
Lewis Carroll
We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.
T.S Eliot
To talk of humans as 'transcendent' is not to ascribe to them spiritual properties. It is, rather, to recognize that as subjects we have the ability to transform our selves, our natures, our world—an ability denied to any other physical being.
Kenan Malik
When you think on the powerful truths of Scripture, God uses His Word to change your way of thinking.
Elizabeth George
Father Hobbe, his cassock skirts hitched up to his waist, was fighting with a quarterstaff, ramming the pole into French faces. ‘In the name of the Father,’ he shouted, and a Frenchman reeled back with a pulped eye, ‘and of the Son,’ Father Hobbe snarled as he broke a man’s nose, ‘and of the Holy Ghost!
Bernard Cornwell
I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt.
Jane Austen
When penciling in your future, always use a pen
Benny Bellamacina
A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
Alain de Botton
There are dreams which belong only partly in the unconscious; these are the dreams we remember on waking so vividly that we deliberately continue them, and so fall asleep again and wake and sleep and the dream goes on without interruption, with a thread of logic the pure dream doesn't possess.
Graham Greene
A hoverfly is held in a sunbeam, an insect in amber.
Rob Cowen
It was quiet in the cell. Rubashov heard only the creaking of his steps on the tiles. Six and a half steps to the door, whence they must come to fetch him, six and a half steps to the window, behind which night was falling. Soon it would be over. But when he asked himself, For what actually are you dying? he found no answer.It was a mistake in the system; perhaps it lay in the precept which until now he had held to be uncontestable, in whose name he had sacrificed others and was himself being sacrificed: in the precept, that the end justifies the means. It was this sentence which had killed the great fraternity of the Revolution and made them run amuck. What had he once written in his diary? "We have thrown overboard all conventions, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic; we are sailing without ethical ballast.
Arthur Koestler
The last words Albus Dumbledore spoke to the pair of us?' Harry is the best hope we have. Trust him.
J.K. Rowling
The way to make your dreams come true is to absolutely believe in them.
Helen M. Barry
Well done, my fine fellow out of my womb. What have you gained? Nothing! And oh, what have you lost? Everything!
Jeanette Winterson
Those who say ‘I am ready to learn’, or ‘I am not ready to learn’ are as often mistaken as they are correct in their surmise.
Idries Shah
No matter how few possessions you own or how little money you have, loving wildlife and nature will make you rich beyond measure.
Paul Oxton
It is essential to our health and happiness that we dedicate ourselves to some kind of mission or purpose that transcends the mundane hustle and bustle of daily living.
Oli Anderson
There is nothing dreary or doubtful about (the life). It is meant to be continually joyful...We are called to a settled happiness in the Lord whose joy is our strength.
Amy Carmichael
Life was complicated, I thought. Not just the living but dealing with the realities and the instinct for order that other people have, that I didn't always grasp.
Peter Akinti
His whole effort, therefore, will be to get the man’s mind off the subject of his own value altogether. He would rather the man thought himself a great architect or a great poet and then forgot about it, than that he should spend much time and pains trying to think himself a bad one. Your efforts to instil either vain glory or false modesty into the patient will therefore be met from the Enemy’s side with the obvious reminder that a man is not usually called upon to have an opinion of his own talents at all, since he can very well go on improving them to the best of his ability without deciding on his own precise niche in the temple of Fame...The Enemy will also try to render real in the patient’s mind...the doctrine that they did not create themselves, that their talents were given them, and that they might as well be proud of the colour of their hair...Even of his sins the Enemy does not want him to think too much: once they are repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better the Enemy is pleased
C.S. Lewis
You can tell a lot about a person's priorities in life by reading their will.
Steven Magee
Rebels usually have something to complain about, and if they don't they make it up. All too often the really disadvantaged are in no position to rebel; they just suffer quietly.
Paul Collier
Come live with me and be my Love, And we will all the pleasures prove
Christopher Marlowe
...And if reading could banish the idea for even half an hour, it was something gained.
Jane Austen
Respect is more valuable then the amount of times guys flirt with you.It's better to have one trustworthy real man then any amount of boys interested in you. The "cool" guys may not notice or date you but the right one will marry you.
Rachel Hamilton
My family says they are proud of me. Of course, I would rather hear this than the contrary, but I cannot say that I am proud of myself, so I find that I cannot 'talk about it'.
Jake Wood
As Harry and Ron rounded the clump of trees behind which Harry had first heard the dragons roar, a witch leapt out from behind them.It was Rita Skeeter. She was wearing acid-green robes today; the Quick-Quotes Quill in her hand blended perfectly against them."Congratulations, Harry!' she said beaming at him. "I wonder if you could give me a quick word? How you felt facing that dragon? How do you feel now about the fairness of the scoring?""Yeah, you can have a word," said Harry savagely. "Goodbye!
J.K. Rowling
Look, daddy, Mel gave me a pet!” The boy said excitedly. “He’s called Incy.”Hunter looked down and inhaled sharply at the sight of a large spider in Adam’s little hand. His eyes snapped up to Mel, who was sitting silent and serene in the middle of the floor, obviously pleased with her present.“A spider?” Hunter asked with exasperation. “Fine. Why don’t you get Mel to teach it tricks.
K.S. Marsden
No doubt he must very soon realize that his own faith is in direct opposition to the assumptions on which all the conversation of his new friends is based. I don't think that matters much provided that you can persuade him to postpone any open acknowledge of the fact, and this, with the aid of shame, pride, modesty and vanity, will be easy to do. As long as the postponement lasts he will be in a false position. He will be silent when he ought to speak and laugh when he ought to be silent.
C.S. Lewis