Quotes by British Authors - Page 101

The problem is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a sizeable proportion of which are continually clogging up the civil, commercial, and criminal courts in all areas of the Galaxy, and especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this.The previous sentence makes sense. That is not the problem.This is:Change.Read it through again and you'll get it.
Douglas Adams
Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Royal Academy, or the old masters may be supposed to have on a Browning or a Tennyson. Indeed it seems to me that an exact homology exists between painting and poetry on the one hand and modem chemistry and modem algebra on the other. In poetry and algebra we have the pure idea elaborated and expressed through the vehicle of language, in painting and chemistry the idea enveloped in matter, depending in part on manual processes and the resources of art for its due manifestation.
James Joseph Sylvester
There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped' growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.
Graham Greene
As incredible as it seemed, time kept moving forward for the rest of the world.The rest of the world that wasn't waiting.
Patrick Ness
We seem to live in a world where you have to walk around grinning like a loon. I can’t understand all the fuss about Mona Lisa painting, everyone wondering why she’s not smiling, if she’s depressed or heartbroken. No, she was just normal!Emotions are always extreme these days: you either have to be crying with laughter or crying in pain. No wonder water levels are rising. It’s not global warming, it’s all the tears from crying.
Karl Pilkington
Why do we calculate our forces, and consult with flesh and blood to our grievous wounding? Jehovah has power enough without borrowing from our puny arm.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.
Jasper Fforde
Never give a woman flowers to say I love you . Tell her how much you love her and you will wake up looking at the flowers beside her bed.
Colin Tegerdine
To be honest one must be inconsistent.
H.G.Wells
For he was drinking too much. Not uncontrollably nor offensively, but still he seldom seemed to have a glass out of his hand.
Rosamunde Pilcher
My advice about acting? Speak clearly don't bump into people and if you must have motivation think of your pay packet on Friday.
Noël Coward
Did you ever dream you had a friend, Alec? Someone to last your whole life and you his. I suppose such a thing can’t really happen outside sleep.
E.M. Forster
It's entirely possible to get to know someone without actually seeing them in person. In fact, it's better like that because none of the superficial stuff gets in the way. You really get to know a person. And it's easier to express yourself when you're writing things down. At least it is for me. I like to order my thoughts, and delete them if they don't make any sense. You can't do that in real life.
Cat Clarke
Loving isn't about selecting only the good parts. It's about taking the whole and loving the lot.
Santa Montefiore
Reality is only a dream, based on values and well worn principles, whereas the dream goes on forever.
Ian Thomas Curtis
I knew revenge like the ghost of an old friend." ~ #1001
Pippa DaCosta
There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be...
John Lennon
O what we ben! And what we come to!
Russell Hoban
What do you think the world is if not just an endless parade of madness? To make war is madness. To seek power is madness." She laughed louder, throwing her arms wide. "And madness is glorious!
Anthony Ryan
He had the compassion of a vivisectionist.
Storm Constantine
I think they ought to know. You do them a disservice by not confiding something this important to them.”“I didn’t want —”“— to worry or frighten them?” said Dumbledore, surveying Harry over the top of his half-moon spectacles. “Or perhaps, to confess that you yourself are worried and frightened? You need your friends, Harry. As you so rightly said, Sirius would not have wanted you to shut yourself away.
J.K. Rowling
But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the design.
W Somerset Maugham
Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.
Virginia Woolf
Dear God, Lisa, give me back my peace of mind!
Sara Craven
(When told that he is a drunk) My dear, you are ugly; but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.
Sir Winston Churchill
Christ the Lord is risen today Sons of men and angels say. Raise your joys and triumphs high Sing ye heavens and earth reply.
Charles Wesley
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and doleUnequal laws unto a savage race,That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
Alfred Tennyson
The dream is to keep surprising yourself, never mind the audience.
Tom Hiddleston
When you are in your twenties, if even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.
Julian Barnes
Preachers love only their own voices.
John Berger
A person who is worth nothing must introduce you to a person worth next-to-nothing, and that person to another, and so on and so forth until finally you can step across the threshold, almost one of the family.
Michel Faber
the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the “nursery,” as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.
J.R.R. Tolkien
..."I Love You."...Means the same to me now as it did when I first said it to you.
Anthony T.Hincks
It’s a terrible person who listens to what we say rather than what we mean
F.D. Lee
I don’t know why Kate was trying to impress him, as far as I could see the guy had all the allure and social grace of a psychotic slug with halitosis and a bad head cold.
Sharon Sant
Thus it looks in the last analysis as if the soul which serves God in spirit and in truth enjoys a very unusual kind of peace: not the satisfying inward rest which we would have expected, nor the outward rest of having everything in order and nothing left out, but a rest which consists in contentment at having sacrificed both to the will of God.
Dom Hubert Van Zeller
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I reflected how easy it is for a man to reduce women of a certain age to imbecility. All he has to do is give an impersonation of desire, or better still, of secret knowledge, for a woman to feel herself a source of power.
Anita Brookner
Like the sundial, my paint box counts no hours but sunny ones.
Arthur Rackham
To generalize is to be an idiot," said Blake. Perhaps he went too far. But to generalize is to be a finite mind. Generalities are the lenses with which our intellects have to manage.
C.S. Lewis
There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.
C.S. Lewis
All life is a jest, Imhotep - and it is death who laughs last. Do you not hear it at every feast? Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die.
Agatha Christie
I’ll be off exploring, searching for those out-of-bounds places where dreams exist.
Fennel Hudson
She sleeps. And now she wakes each day a little less. And, each day, takes less and less nourishment, as if grudging the least moment of wakefulness, for, from the movement under her eyelids, and the somnolent gestures of her hands and feet, it seems as if her dreams grow more urgent and intense, as if the life she lives in the closed world of dreams is now about to possess her utterly, as if her small, increasingly reluctant wakenings were an interpretation of some more vital existence, so she is loath to spend even those necessary moments of wakefulness with us, wakings strange as her sleepings. Her marvellous fate - a sleep more lifelike than the living, a dream which consumes the world.'And, sir,' concluded Fevvers, in a voice that now took on the sombre, majestic tones of a great organ, 'we do believe . . . her dream will be the coming century.'And, oh, God . . . how frequently she weeps!
Angela Carter
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
Bertrand Russell
No matter how hard I tried, I was incapable of giving more importance to a hypothetical, post-mortem existence than to this very life here and now.Moreover, the Buddhist teachings and practices that had the most impact upon me did so precisely because they heightened my sense of being fully alive in and responsive to this world.
Stephen Batchelor
If Sean's voice is layers of wood, and Mina Ma's is the voice a copper pot, then Mathew Mercer's is the voice of a wild animal. I suddenly think of a movie Ammara and I loved when we were little, and I think of Scar, the lion who murdered his brother to become king. That kind of voice.
Sangu Mandanna
To the Dark Lord,I know I will be dead long before you read this but I want you to know that it was I who discovered your secret. I have stolen the real Horcrux and intend to destroy it as soon as I can. I face death in the hope that when you meet your match, you will be mortal once more.R.A.B
J.K. Rowling
An hour later we were walking past rows of busy beach huts and weaving between sunbathers and Frisbee games. I was surprised that people weren't taking more notice of us. Everyone looked so strange to me that I couldn't believe I didn't look equally strange to them.
Alex Garland
They all had darkened eyes, eyes that seemed to have a hunger behind them. Borne out of the private convulsions only secret passions can provoke.
Guy Mankowski
The consumer is not a moron. She's your wife.
David Ogilvy
We have two bits of evidence about the Somebody [behind the Moral Law]. One is the universe He has made. If we used that as our only clue, then I think we should have to conclude that He was a great artist (for the universe is a very beautiful place), but also that He is quite merciless and no friend to man (for the universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place). The other bit of evidence is that Moral Law which He has put into our minds. And this is a better bit of evidence than the other, because it is inside information. You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.
C.S. Lewis
You may kill for yourselves, and your mates,and your cubs as they need, and you can;But kill not for pleasure of killing, andSEVEN TIMES NEVER KILL MAN.
Rudyard Kipling
Fashion is life-enhancing and I think it's a lovely, generous thing to do for other people
Vivienne Westwood
He slammed his cup down. Coffee splashed over the rim and puddled around the base. “What on earth gave you the idea I want space? I want you here. With me. All the time. I want to come home and hear the shower running and get excited because I know you’re in it. I want to struggle every morning to get up and go to the gym because I hate the idea of leaving your warm body behind in bed. I want to hear a key turn in the lock and feel contented knowing you’re home. I don’t want fucking space, Harper.” Harper laughed. “What’s funn
Scarlett Cole
Elizabeth was so sweet this afternoon trying to show P.B. his sitting room. He became absorbed in some jungle prints along the passage and would not come. The corners of her mouth went down after the third attempt & putting both hands on his shoulders she said angelically: ‘Bertie do listen to me.’ He kissed her and came at once.
William Shawcross
No one loves me, - no one cares for me, but you, mother.
Elizabeth Gaskell
Belief sloshes around in the firmament like lumps of clay spiralling into a potter's wheel. That's how gods get created, for example. They clearly must be created by their own believers, because a brief resume of the lives of most gods suggests that their origins certainly couldn't be divine. They tend to do exactly the things people would do if only they could, especially when it comes to nymphs, golden showers, and the smiting of your enemies.
Terry Pratchett
Who would care if I became pregnant, who would be scandalized? Aunty Eva, Anwar's flatmates. Omar would never know unless I wrote to him. Uncle Saleh was across the world. A few years back, getting pregnant would have shocked Khartoum society, given my father a heart attack, dealt a blow ti my mother's marriage, and mild, modern Omar, instead of beating me, would called me a slut. And now nothing, no one. This empty space was called freedom.
Leila Aboulela
Maxims of Ptahhotep spoke a lot of sense; 'Do not be arrogant because of your knowledge, but confer with the ignorant man as with the learned. Good speech is more hidden than malachite, yet it is found in the possession of women slaves at the millstones.' Now THAT I’ll give the green light to. The opinions, eloquence and articulacy of the man or woman on the street can often be as invaluable as precious stones.
Karl Wiggins