Quotes by British Authors - Page 98

Don't be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you've been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I haven't seen it myself. I couldn't prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority -because the scientists say so. Every historical statement in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. None of us could prove them by pure logic as you prove a thing in mathematics. We believe them simply because people who did see them have left writings that tell us about them: in fact, on authority. A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.
C.S. Lewis
Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
E.M. Forster
What is without dispute...is that the readers need [the BookWorld] just as much as we need them—to bring order to their apparent chaos, if nothing else.
Jasper Fforde
KIM: It means something, and when I do it, I don’t want to wake up in the morning, wishing I’d not done it.
Sam Crescent
People perish. Books are immortal.
Robert Harris
There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.
Alan W. Watts
I never need to find time to read. When people say to me, ‘Oh, yeah, I love reading. I would love to read, but I just don’t have time,’ I’m thinking, ‘How can you not have time?’ I read when I’m drying my hair. I read in the bath. I read when I’m sitting in the bathroom. Pretty much anywhere I can do the job one-handed, I read.
J.K. Rowling
Like completing a run, living today begins with preparation, planning, and prayer.
Elizabeth George
You will serve. Either someone else's vision and purpose, or your own.
Alan Froggatt
People say we can't do anything about the way the world is; they say it's set in stone. I say it looks like stone, but it's mostly paint and cardboard.
Katherine Rundell
Clothes are but little loss, if you escape from drowning.
J.R.R. Tolkien
When you walk around feeling quietly upset, frustrated, angry or some other negative emotion, people around you will detect it to some degree or another, even if only subconsciously.
Sam Owen
The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question "Do you see the same truth?" would be "I see nothing and I don't care about the truth; I only want a Friend," no Friendship can arise - though Affection of course may. There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.
C.S. Lewis
He went through the bills with the jaundiced eye of a China trader, asking himself not whether he had been stolen from, but where the theft had occurred. If he couldn’t find it, that would suggest his factor back home in Shanghai was either cleverer or more honest than he had thought, and Crane didn’t think he was particularly honest.
K.J. Charles
...the tongues of men are not much leashed by concerns for accuracy or truth.
Richard K. Morgan
I was worse off than even Alison was; she hated life, I hated mysef. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing left that I could create.
John Fowles
Propping up a seat at the bar we devour chicken wings like life does dreams
David Louden
Because that’s what unfaithfulness is, isn’t it? A cancer that’s always there in the back of your mind, eating away at the foundations of the relationship. It’s happened once, it could happen again, so you’re always looking for telltale signs or symptoms to show that it’s reappeared...
Matt Dunn
Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him.
Aldous Huxley
Jeese, I thought, fear choking me. I was being targeted by a ‘tangoed’ psychopath!
Adele Rose
Saying of the ProphetThe TongueA man slips with his tongue more than with his feet.
Idries Shah
Insects crawled across my skin, legs skittering across my flesh, numbed paths of cold left in their wake. They were the creatures that heralded my ghosts, and I knew them well, yet the revulsion they caused in those moments far exceeded anything I’d felt before.
Hazel Butler
A little girl learns about men through her Father." Sam Cameron
Lesley Pearse
But Ilúvatar knew that Men, being set amid the turmoils of the powers of the world, would stray often, and would not use their gifts in harmony; and he said: 'These too in their time shall find that all that they do redounds at the end only to the glory of my work.
J.R.R. Tolkien
What is the death of a soldier even off duty of an occupying army walking in an occupied territory against the death of a little boy screaming in terror in his father's arms Where is the equivalence
Linda Grant
I suppose that the human mind can only stand so much grief and anguish. After that the fuses blow.
Fynn
A friendliness, as of dwarfs shaking hands, was in the air...
E.M. Forster
The best defence against the atom bomb is not to be there when it goes off.
The British Army Journal
If you assume that it is there, you will generally not be far off the truth.
Idries Shah
There is obviously something wrong with our educational system. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that there might even be something wrong with at least some of our schoolteachers. But heaven help anyone daring to express such heretical views.
J. Paul Getty
Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.
Pico Iyer
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
Sarah Williams
You've sort of made up for it tonight,' said Harry. 'Getting the sword. Finishing off the Horcux. Saving my life.' 'That makes me sound a lot cooler than I was,' Ron mumbled.'Stuff like that always sounds cooler than it really was,' said Harry. 'I've been trying to tell you that for years.'Simultaneously they walked forwards and hugged, Harry gripping the still sopping back of Ron's jacket.
J.K. Rowling
She who saves a single soul, saves the universe.
Lewis Carroll
It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse.
Charles Dickens
Schools are made for the average. The holes are all round, and whatever shape the pegs are they must wedge in somehow. One hasn't time to bother about anything but the average.
W Somerset Maugham
I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next d
Doris Lessing
Shiva and Saleem, victor and victim; understand our rivalry, and you will gain understanding of the age in which you live. (The reverse of this statement is also true.)
Salman Rushdie
Elsa's joke Where do baby apes sleep? In apricots!
Jacqueline Wilson
It is going to be too easy for things to start feeling normal—especially if you are someone who is not directly impacted by his actions. So keep reminding yourself:This is not normal.Write it on a Post-It note and stick it on your refrigerator, hire a skywriter once a month, tattoo it on your ass.Because a Klan-backed misogynist internet troll is going to be delivering the next State of the Union address.And that is not normal.It is fucked up.
John Oliver
So why don’t Americans cheat? Because they think that their system is legitimate. People accept authority when they see that it treats everyone equally, when it is possible to speak up and be heard, and when there are rules in place that assure you that tomorrow you won’t be treated radically different from how you are treated today. Legitimacy is based on fairness, voice and predictability, and the U.S. government, as much as Americans like to grumble about it, does a pretty good job of meeting all three standards. Pg. 293
Malcolm Gladwell
If someone treads on my hand accidentally, while trying to help me, the pain may be no less acute than if he treads on it in contemptuous disregard of my existence or with a malevolent wish to injure me. But I shall generally feel in the second case a kind and degree of resentment that I shall not feel in the first. If someone's actions help me to some benefit I desire, then I am benefited in any case; but if he intended them so to benefit me because of his general goodwill towards me, I shall reasonably feel a gratitude which I should not feel at all if the benefit was an accidental consequence unintended or even regretted by him, of some plan of action with a different aim.
Peter Frederick Strawson
On the whole I try to keep Modesty and Willie in timeless settings, which is why I avoid all the latest slang and in-words. It won't be long before 'brill' sounds as dated as 'super' does now. [Uncle Happy, 1990]
Peter O'Donnell
It is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about. No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house, and clothing are mine forever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me.
Virginia Woolf
Tis enough - Who listens once will listen twice Her heart be sure is not of ice And one refusal no rebuff.
Lord Byron
Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation bywhich a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate. - Screwtape
C.S. Lewis
Granny looked up at the zombie. He was - or, technically, had been - a tall, handsome man. He still was, only now he looked like someone who had walked through a room full of cobwebs.'What's your name, dead man?' she said.
Terry Pratchett
the ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis.
J.G. Ballard
Creativity is, in many respects, a response.
Matthew Syed
Kafka is an ethical, not an aesthetic, writer. There is no conclusion to his books. The Castle was actually unfinished, but what ending could there be to it? And there is some doubt about the proper order of the chapters in The Trial—it does not really seem to matter very much in which order you read them, since the book as a whole does not get you anywhere. (An uncharitable reader might disagree, and say that it throws fresh light on the Judiciary.) In this it is faithful to life as we actually experience it. There is no 'happy ending' or 'tragic ending' or 'comic ending' to life, only a 'dead ending'—and then we start again.We suffer, because we refuse to be reconciled with this lamentable fact; and even though we may say that life is meaningless we continue to think and act as if it had a meaning. Kafka's heroes (or hero, 'K.'—himself and not himself) obstinately persist in making efforts that they understand perfectly well are quite pointless—and this with the most natural air in the world. And, after all, what else can one do? Notice, in The Trial, how the notion of guilt is taken for granted. K. does not question the fact that he is guilty, even though he does not know of what he is guilty—he makes no attempt to discover the charge against him, but only to arrange for his defence. For both Kierkegaard and Heidegger, guilt is fundamental in human existence. (And it is only the Buddha who tells us the charge against us—avijjā.)
Nanavira Thera
Man with his new powers became rich like Midas but all that he touched had gone dead and cold.
C.S. Lewis
Once you face the truth, the knowledge both empowers you and sets you free.
Jay Woodman
Her eyes were full of a hot liquid (she did not think of tears at first) which, without disturbing the firmness of her lips, made the air thick, rolled down her cheeks. She had perfect control of herself-Oh, yes!-in every other way.
Virginia Woolf
When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the denouement.
Henry James
Only hinted at in some of these tales, and clearly stated in others, it is apparent that there was a long and continuing conflict between paganism and Christianity in the early centuries A.D. This may also be the explanation behind other well creation tales, such as the slaying by St Barry of a 'great serpent' in County Roscommon. The saint thrust his crozier at it before it disappeared into Lough Lagan, and where his knee touched the ground, a holy well, Tobar Barry, sprang up. Although the serpent may represent paganism, and the saint's victory is therefore the victory of Christianity over paganism, we cannot entirely ignore the possibility that some of the serpents in similar Irish tales may have been real water monsters, which are still seen from time to time in the lakes of Ireland and Scotland. These eerie, ugly monsters, with their aura of primeval mystery, appropriately symbolize the uncouth savagery which the Christians attributed to all non-Christian beliefs; but that is not to say that the monsters were totally symbolic and did not have a reality of their own.
Colin Bord
I pay very little regard," said Mrs. Grant, "to what any young person says on the subject of marriage. If they profess a disinclination for it, I only set it down that they have not yet seen the right person.
Jane Austen
To her credit, though, Trace didn't lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman's art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use.
Zadie Smith
Although Jesus Christ was Himself the Creative Deity, by whom all things were made, as man He humbled Himself--set aside His divine prerogatives and walked this earth as man -- a perfect demonstration of what God intended man to be--the whole personality yielded to and occupied by God for Himself.
W. Ian Thomas
But how do we know it's really you? I mean, I could put a saucepan on my head and call myself the God of Boiled Dumplings; wouldn't mean I was telling the truth.
K.J. Parker
We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.
Ludwig Wittgenstein