Quotes by British Authors - Page 96

How do you explain to a child who likes everyone in the world that adult life consists to a great extent of cutting people away?
Miranda Emmerson
It's similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you'd kill it...
Zoë Heller
[One} who does not know when a gift has made him safe is poorer than a slug, even though he may think otherwise himself.
Richard Adams
And I have to say, books haven’t helped much with all this. Because whenever you read anything about love, whenever anyone tries to define it, there’s always a state or an abstract noun, and I try to think of it like that. But actually, love is… Well, it’s just you. And when you go, it’s gone. Nothing abstract about it.
Nick Hornby
Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened & will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue that it is always respected even when it is associated with vice.
Samuel Johnson
Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.
Matthew Arnold
It is only rather recently that science has begun to make peace with its magical roots. Until a few decades ago, it was common for histories of science either to commence decorously with Copernicus's heliocentric theory or to laud the rationalism of Aristotelian antiquity and then to leap across the Middle Ages as an age of ignorance and superstition. One could, with care and diligence, find occasional things to praise in the works of Avicenna, William of Ockham, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon, but these sparse gems had to be thoroughly dusted down and scraped clean of unsightly accretions before being inserted into the corners of a frame fashioned in a much later period.
Philip Ball
You'll never be as good as the next page you write, or as bad as the last one.
D.E.M. Emrys
Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
Anthony Burgess
There is no substitute for the strength that blesses a couple when they work together.
Elizabeth George
It struck him that the true characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.
George Orwell
Just as with swimming or riding a bike, you can't really learn how to fall in love from reading a book not even this one. Sure you can read about the different swimming strokes or the parts of a bicycle; you can learn the theory and physics behind the sport. But to get to the heart of the matter you've got to leap in and learn by doing.
Nicholas Boothman
Tirelessly they flew on and on, and tirelessly she kept pace. She felt a fierce joy possessing her, that she could command these immortal presences. And she rejoiced in her blood and flesh, in the rough pine bark she felt next to her skin, in the beat of her heart and the life of all her senses, and in the hunger she was feeling now, and in the presence of her sweet-voiced bluethroat dæmon, and in the earth below her and the lives of every creature, plant and animal both; and she delighted in being of the same substance as them, and in knowing that when she died her flesh would nourish other lives as they had nourished her.
Philip Pullman
Equality in possessions must be the last result of the utmost refinements of civilization; it is one of the conditions of that system of society towards which, with whatever hope of ultimate success, it is our duty to tend.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
We men of intelligence will learn to harness the insanities of reason. We can't leave the world any longer to the direction of chance. We can't allow dangerous maniacs like Luther, mad about dogma, like Napoleon, mad about himself, to go on casually appearing and turning everything upside down. In the past it didn't so much matter; but our modern machine is too delicate. A few more knocks like the Great War, another Luther or two, and the whole concern will go to pieces. In future, the men of reason must see that the madness of the world's maniacs is canalised into proper channels, is made to do useful work, like a mountain torrent driving a dynamo...
Aldous Huxley
We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until... we have stopped saying "It got lost " and say "I lost it."
Sydney J. Harris
Rumours are like sexually transmitted diseases, both are spread by whores.
Habeeb Akande
Max, for some people there are no victories, just alternate forms of losing.
David Niven
Everybody is waiting for something whether it is in the short or long term.
Steven Redhead
My vigour, vitality, and cheek repel me. I am the kind of woman I would run from.
Nancy Astor the Viscountess Astor
There are no guarantees with love,’ her father said, reading her mind. ‘You can’t hold some of it back, like a deposit, so you can get your money back if something goes wrong. You have to give yourself wholeheartedly, whatever the cost.
Christine Stovell
Love is waiting, just around the corner, over the hill...
Virginia Alison
Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.
Terry Pratchett
Those that are too refined to be simple need to be refined again.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
They both looked at me in a way that was fast becoming familiar: two parts bafflement to one part awe at my talent for making a bad situation worse.
David Bennun
The secret of success is constancy to purpose.
Benjamin Disraeli
One group of riders doped, the others alongside them racing clean. You can work out for yourselves which group was fastest.
David Millar
I may bring other women here, to this place, and I may tell them I love them, and make love to them. But they will be impostors. And I will be a ghost. Because it means I will have lost you. My body, my brain, my lungs, my stomach, my guts, legs, arms will be here but I won't be. I will be out there, looking for you. And if we meet somewhere, at a restaurant, or a party and I'm with someone, I want you to know that they are by my side only because you are not. And she will be beautiful. And I will be laughing and smiling and she will be laughing and smiling, but she will be laughing at a lie. Because all I will have done to that person is lie to them. All I will do to anyone else, forever, from this moment forward, anyone who isn't you, is lie. I have no choice.
Jez Butterworth
Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do which must be done whether you like it or not.
Charles Kingsley
All that I did," she said, "everything I tried to do. All for nothing." Nothing is done entirely for nothing, said the fox of dreams. Nothing is wasted. You are older, and you have made decisions, and you are not the fox you were yesterday. Take what you have learned, and move on.
Neil Gaiman
I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work.
Muriel Spark
Important decisions are better made after a good nights sleep
Steven Aitchison
He talked about the future with such certainty, he might have been talking about the past.
Michael Dobbs
I'm getting a daily email from Microsoft which I have been ignoring that states a hacker is trying to access my account. As far as the Microsoft account goes, the hacker can have it...along with all of the nasty Windows 10 upgrade problems!
Steven Magee
All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
Clive James
Narrative secrets are not the same as human mysteries, a lesson that novelists seem fates to forget, again and again; the former quickly confess themselves, and fall silent, while the true mysteries go on speaking.
James Wood
private philanthropy is no substitution for hard-fought battles over labour laws and social security, in part because philanthropy can be retracted on a whim, while elected officials, at least in theory, have citizens to answer to.
Linsey McGoey
Oh golly, Brer Fox, your forthright assertion—that evolutionary biology disproves the idea of a creator God—jeopardises the teaching of biology in science class, since teaching that would violate the separation of church and state!' Right. You also ought to soft-pedal physiology, since it declares virgin birth impossible
Richard Dawkins
I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works--is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you can't often apply science to literature.
Nick Hornby
What a queer topsy turvy world it was. It used to be the man who went to the wars, the woman who stayed at home. But here the positions were reversed.
Agatha Christie
The resurrection is the revelation to chosen witnesses of the fact that Jesus who died on the cross is indeed king - conqueror of death and sin, Lord and Savior of all. The resurrection is not the reversal of a defeat but the proclamation of a victory. The King reigns from the tree. The reign of God has indeed come upon us, and its sign is not a golden throne but a wooden cross.
Lesslie Newbigin
Worldlings pray to the Lord in times of need, when it serves their turn. They cry to Him in trouble, but forsake Him in prosperity.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
... Angus had a "pretty normal childhood." Bertie had immediately mistrusted him. Nobody had a normal childhood.
Kate Atkinson
Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core.
David Mitchell
Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar.
Saki
The smallest effort is not lost Each wavelet on the ocean tost Aids in the ebb-tide or the flow Each rain-drop makes some floweret blow Each struggle lessens human woe.
Charles Mackay
If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity. The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves.
C.S. Lewis
Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant.
Edward Gibbon
There’s no other way but work, work and work. Read widely, live wildly, plumb the depths of your­self, turn your­self inside out until you find your voice
Claire Meadows
Do we suppose that they can do Him any good or fear, like the chorus in MIlton, that human irreverence can bring about. His glory's diminution? A man can no more diminish God's glory be refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word darkness on the walls of his cell. But God wills our good and our good is to love Him (with that responsive love proper to creatives) and to love Hi we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. If we do not, that only shows that what we are trying to love is nearest approximation to God which our thought and fantasy can attain. Yet the call is not only to prostration and awe; it is to a reflection of the Divine live, a creaturely participation in the Divine attributes which is far beyond our present desires. We are bidden to put on Christ, to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.
C.S. Lewis
No churchmen, I notice. Of course not. What use have they for a world without irrational fear?
Jonathan L. Howard
The Church, like her head, has a glory, but it is concealed from carnal eyes, for the time of her breaking forth in all her splendour is not yet come.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Angels are the powers hidden in the faculties and organs of man
Idries Shah
An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness - much as plums have to be put into a bad pudding to make it palatable.
E.M. Forster
She remained in this attitude, clearly inviting him to touch her. Taking a position of advantage, he rested his right hand on her buttock. He considered a moment then raised his arm and brought his palm upon her, delivering a sharp spank. He felt the acuteness of it on his own skin. He gave her another, watching his hand in the mirror opposite, as it made contact. The slap caused her to flinch, but her heard her sigh also: the timbre of which was now familiar to him. He paused, allowing the sensation of the sting to sink in before giving her more. She remained folded over for him, eager for more of his burning smacks upon her flesh. The peach of her cheeks rippled each time under the impact of his blows.
Emmanuelle de Maupassant
He was not of an age but for all time!
Ben Jonson
When I have come to you, at last (as I have always done), I have come topeace and happiness. I come home, now, like a tired traveller, and findsuch a blessed sense of rest!
Charles Dickens
Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.
Terry Pratchett
Why would you family think about it?""Oh, my mother's the only one that counts, and she likes you very much from what she's seen of you.""So you had me inspected?""No-dash ti all, I seem to be saying all the wrong things today. I was absolutely stunned that first day in court, and I rushed off to my mater, who's an absolute dear, and the kind of person who really understands things, and I said, 'Look here! here's the absolutely one and only woman, and she's being put through a simply ghastly awful business and for God's sake come and hold my hand!' You simply don't know how foul it was.
Dorothy L. Sayers