Quotes by British Authors - Page 94

Be not the first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside,” is a safe rule for those who would always retain the good opinion of that all-powerful, but somewhat unintelligent, incubus, “the average person,” but the pioneer, the guide, is necessary. That is, if the world is to move forward.
Jerome K. Jerome
Tessa distinguished absolutely between pain observed and pain shared. Pain observed is journalistic pain. It’s diplomatic pain. It’s television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set. Those who watch suffering and do nothing about it, in her book, were little better than those who inflicted it. They were the bad Samaritans.
John le Carré
Alan Grant: "There are... far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It's a horrible thought." The Midget (his nurse): "You sound constipated.
Josephine Tey
Today was the introduction, and introductions were important. The girl had to meet the boy in an equal setting – if they met any other way there’d always be a question about whether it was True Love or a more financially motivated desire that awakened the passions.
F.D. Lee
Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.
Joseph Conrad
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.
D.H. Lawrence
Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it.
Neil Gaiman
Leadership is an unlimited resource and as such, is a lifelong pursuit of learning. That learning must be to transform 'leader of position' to 'leadership with moral purpose'.
Hilarie Owen
The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the Q letter into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.
Douglas Adams
Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.
David Mitchell
just find your way, like a river settling into its bed, and the sigh of the wind over a lake, light but restful... content with the joy in the arc of an arm throwing a ball for a dog to fetch
Jay Woodman
However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.
Iris Murdoch
She was only saying what I already knew in my heart, but hearing the words spoken made it seem all the more true, all the more terrifying.Words gave concepts power. Once they were released, there was no choice but to understand them, no matter how painful they might be.
Mike A. Lancaster
Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite ... Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families ... and you have no idea ... what games goes on!
Charles Dickens
People make mistakes in life through believing too much, but they have a damned dull time if they believe too little.
James Hilton
Scott glanced at his watch but didn't register what it said. The notion of time had become as absurd as the quietly glowing trees.
R.D. Ronald
Exactly. Since it is morally justifiable, I have only to consider the question of personal risk. Surely a gentleman should not lay much stress upon this, when a lady is in most desperate need of his help?
Arthur Conan Doyle
It comes and goes. People think if you're sick you become fearless and brave, but you don't. Most of the time it's like being stalked by a psycho, like I might get shot any second. But sometimes I forget for hours.''What makes you forget?''People. Doing stuff. When I was with you in the wood, I forgot for a whole afternoon.
Jenny Downham
If you crave for Knowledge, the banquet of Knowledge grows and groans on the board until the finer appetite sickens. If, still putting all your trust in Knowledge, you try to dodge the difficulty by specialising, you produce a brain bulging out inordinately on one side, on the other cut flat down and mostly paralytic at that: and in short so long as I hold that the Creator has an idea of a man, so long shall I be sure that no uneven specialist realises it. The real tragedy of the Library at Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate.... but we may agree that, in reading, it is not quantity so much that tells, as quality and thoroughness of digestion.
Arthur Quiller-Couch
There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
Terry Pratchett
A major assumption that underlies this selection is that it is only within work that is progressive, experimental or avant-garde that staid, old-fashioned images and ideas about gender can be challenged and alternatives imagined. I have never seen a ballet performance that has not disappointed me.
Ramsay Burt
The more genuinely creative [the writer] is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself
Dorothy L. Sayers
Women have rooms inside of us men cannot fathom. It’s where we store the depths of the hurt we’ve been dealt.Where we store the deep love we never want to lose.
Rachel Thompson
Nothing is safe from you. If I were to court a girl who lived on an iceberg in the middle of the ocean, sooner or later— probably sooner— I’d look up to see you swooping overhead on a broomstick. In fact, by now I’d be disappointed in you if I didn’t see you.” “Are you off to the iceberg today?” Sophie retorted.
Diana Wynne Jones
How will the remaining portion of the community like to have the amusements that shall be permitted to them regulated by the religious and moral sentiments of the stricter Calvinists and Methodists? Would they not, with considerable peremptoriness, desire these intrusively pious members of society to mind their own business? This is precisely what should be said to every government and every public, who have the pretension that no person shall enjoy any pleasure which they think wrong.
John Stuart Mill
Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn´t all it´s cracked up to be.
Julian Barnes
Where is the land of Luthany,Where is the tract of Elenore?I am bound therefore.'Pierce thy heart to find the key;With thee takeOnly what none else would keep;Learn to dream when thou dost wake;Learn to wake when thou dost sleep.Learn to water joy with tears,Learn from fears to vanquish fears;To hope, for thou dar'st not despair;Exult, for that thou dar'st not grieve;Plough thou the rock until it bear;Know, for thou else couldst not believe;Lose, that the lost thou may'st receive;Die, for none other way canst live.'When earth and heave lay down their veil,And that apocalypse turns thee pale;When thy seeing blindeth theeTo what thy fellow-mortals see;When their sight to thee is sightless;Their living, death; their light, most lightless;Search no more--Pass the gates of Luthany,Tread the region Elenore!'Where is the land of Luthany?And where the region Elenore?I do faint therefore.'When to the new eyes of theeAll things by immortal power,Near or far,HiddenlyTo each other linked are,That thou canst not stir a flowerWithout troubling of a star;When thy song is shield and mirrorTo the fair snake curled pain,Where thou dar'st affront her terrorThat on her thou may'st attainPersean Conquest; seek no more,O seek no more!Pass the gates of Luthany,Tread the region Elenore!
Francis Thompson
You have to appreciate the readers, without them there are no stories worth telling.
Andrew Lennon
I had been much more in love with my wife than she with me, that was all. Somehow, you were supposed to be ashamed of this, as though love were a perpetual jostling for the roles of pursuer and pursued. As if it didn’t take more courage to admit that someone held your hopes of happiness in their hands. As if it were a choice.
Amanda Craig
Tchingis, if you determine this is to be so, who can withstand you? You are poetry after an ugly day, and heal wounds I didn't know I had.
Bryn Hammond
You've sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good. And I see that clearly - that business about marginal conditionings. Music and the sexual act, literature and art, all must be a source now not of pleasure but of pain.
Anthony Burgess
Power is like being a lady... if you have to tell people you are, you aren't.
Margaret Thatcher
... to be forceful was not the same as being powerful and to be gentle was not the same as being fragile...
Deborah Levy
Our deeds still travel with us from afar and what we have been makes us what we are.
George Eliot
You may not believe in magic but something very strange is happening at this very moment. Your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach. It's not that you are dead or anything dramatic like that, it is simply that you are fading away and I can't even remember your name.
Leonora Carrington
Only five minutes later he noticed a dozen crocuses growing round the foot of an old tree- gold and purple and white. Then came a sound even more delicious than the sound of water. Close beside the path they were following, a bird suddenly chirped from the branch of a tree. It was answered by the chuckle of another bird a little further off. And then, as if that had been a signal, there was chattering and chirruping in every direction, and then a moment of full song, and within five minutes the whole wood was ringing with birds' music, and wherever Edmund's eyes turned he saw birds alighting on branches, or sailing overhead or chasing one another or having their little quarrels or tidying up their feathers with their beaks."Faster! Faster!" said the Witch.There was no trace of the fog now. The sky became bluer and bluer, and now there were white clouds hurrying across it from time to time. In the wide glades there were primroses. A light breeze sprang up which scattered drops of moisture from the swaying branches and carried cool, delicious scents against the faces of the travelers. The trees began to come fully alive. The larches and birches were covered with green, the laburnums with gold. Soon the beech trees had put forth their delicate, transparent leaves. As the travelers walked under them the light also became green. A bee buzzed crossed their path.
C.S. Lewis
. . . still we are none of us perfect . . .
Charlotte Brontë
People who need to bully you are the easiest to push around.
Douglas Adams
PLEASE and THANK YOU...two polite phrases which are slowly disappearing from our vocabulary.
Anthony T.Hincks
You know that when a utility company is going down the fantasy route, they are likely hiding some illegal activity that they are engaging in. Fabricating fictional stories to their government regulator is just one of the many illegal activities that they engage in.
Steven Magee
Although Poets are vain and ambitious, their vanity and ambition are of the purest kind attainable in this world. They are ambitious to be accepted for what they altimately are as revealed in their poetry.
Stephen Spender
Learning is not filling up a box but seeing and imagining what we can create with it.
Jill Telford
If there’s a single idea I emphasize when people ask about writing, it’s that there’s no right way to produce a book. But I do think that whatever you do, you should do regularly, whether it’s waking up at midnight and drinking vodka or waking up at dawn and drinking tea, whether it’s sitting in a monkish study or writing on the back of a flatbed truck. The analogy I like is children’s literature: in a lot of children’s books, there’s a huge institutional structure (Hogwarts, for example) whose presiding safety allows the children’s imagination to run free. The more consistent your habits are – and this ties into having your tools nailed down – the more secure your brain will be to run free and create.
Charles Finch
Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as I start to run?
Jeanette Winterson
Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for your life.
William Blake
And trust dies from ifs and buts
Aidan Chambers
Some things must remain the same in order for the universe to flow properly. One pebble dashed out across the ocean leaves a lifetime of ripples. They call it the butterfly effect.
Louise Mullins
Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men.
Terry Pratchett
It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.
Jacob Bronowski
It should be part of our private ritual to devote a quarter of an hour every day to the enumeration of the good qualities of our friends. When we are not active we fall back idly upon defects even of those whom we most love.
Mark Rutherford
Adrian Mole's father was so angry that so many pepole got divorced nowadays. HE had been unhappilly married for 30 years, why should everybody else get away?
Sue Townsend
The world is as it used to be:“All nations striving strong to makeRed war yet redder. Mad as hattersThey do no more for Christés sakeThan you who are helpless in such matters.“That this is not the judgment-hourFor some of them’s a blessed thing,For if it were they’d have to scourHell’s floor for so much threatening....“Ha, ha. It will be warmer whenI blow the trumpet (if indeedI ever do; for you are men,And rest eternal sorely need).
Thomas Hardy
By Allah, how _thankful_ he is (_yes, madam, one moment, madam_), how _gladdened_ by the thought that Magid, Magid at least, will, in a matter of four hours, be flying east from this place and its demands, its constant cravings, this place where there exists neither patience nor pity, where the people want what they want _now_, right now (_We've been waiting twenty minutes for the vegetables_), expecting their lovers, their children, their friends, and even their gods to arrive at little cost and in little time, just as table ten expect their tandoori prawns. . . .
Zadie Smith
Outside the Apothecary, Hagrid checked Harry's list again. 'Just yer wand left -- oh yeah, an I still haven't got yeh a birthday present.' Harry felt himself go red. 'You don't have to --' 'I know I don't have to. Tell yeh what, I'll get yer animal.
J.K. Rowling
Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at the time, that he may wonder at them; so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed ages that fled.
Charles Mackay
Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza.Poverty: The result of marriage.
Idries Shah
Not all that have fallen are vanquished.
J.R.R. Tolkien
It is a place that 'grows upon you' every day. There seems to be always something to find out in it. There are the most extraordinary alleys and by-ways to walk about in. You can lose your way (what a comfort that is, when you are idle!) twenty times a day, if you like; and turn up again, under the most unexpected and surprising difficulties. It abounds in the strangest contrasts; things that are picturesque, ugly, mean, magnificent, delightful, and offensive, break upon the view at every turn.
Charles Dickens
It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death for free.
Terry Pratchett
My mum always said things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end. If not always in the ways we expect". -Luna lovegood( Harry potter and the order of the phenoix)
J.K. Rowling