Quotes by British Authors - Page 104

You know I'm not a man with whom you can have inconsequential conversations. I cannot split myself into two, one your friend and the other the king's servant.
Hilary Mantel
He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.
Virginia Woolf
Mr. Attlee is a very modest man. But then he has much to be modest about.
Winston Churchill
Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.
Graham Greene
It is reasonable to think that if you spend your days indoors under artificial lights, staring at a screen, sitting in computer electromagnetic interference (EMI) fields and exposed to radio waves, that you may eventually develop a strange form of radiation sickness.
Steven Magee
Sunshine is delicious rain is refreshing wind braces us up snow is exhilarating there is really no such thing as bad weather only different kinds of good weather.
John Ruskin
It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.
Samuel Johnson
For with any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation. There comes a certain point in such conditions when only three things are possible: first a perpetuation of Satanic pride, secondly tears, and third laughter.
G.K. Chesterton
She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon. You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood. She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here.
Neil Gaiman
The idea of parts of the body public fighting each other was like the idea of a man's punching himself in the face. It was a physical blasphemy that suited this era as an index of how far it had all gone.
Paul Cornell
What is hell? Hell is oneself. Hell is alone, the other figures in it Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.
T.S Eliot
When I go to hell, I mean to carry a bribe: for look you, good gifts evermore make way for the worst persons.
John Webster
You have to create your self-belief by going to your core to find the probable reasons for the negativity in you, and then demolish them.
Steve Backley
Self-awareness is the most overrated trick in the book. More than ambition, more than free will, more than getting on to the property ladder early. Right now I should be at the Little Hills, you probably just call them the Hills, right?
David Louden
What better place to kill time than a library?
Diane Setterfield
Sufism," according to the Sufi, "is an adventure in living, necessary adventure.
Idries Shah
If we die for them, Harry, I'm going to KILL YOU!
J.K. Rowling
Being nearly four years old, she was certainly a child: and children are human (if one allows the term "human" a wide sense): but she had not altogether ceased to be a baby: and babies are of course not human--they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes: the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates. In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind.It is true that they look human--but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys.Subconsciously, too, every one recognizes they are animals--why else do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling the human, as they would at a praying mantis? If the baby was only a less-developed man, there would be nothing funny in it, surely.
Richard Hughes
To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.
Henry James
You gain inner peace when you become comfortable with the reality of death.
Steven Magee
Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.
Benjamin Disraeli
I did not realise that when money becomes the core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life or the mind will not be counted as good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left.
Jeanette Winterson
We all know that scientific words need an obscure classical origin to make them sound impressvie to those who wouldn't know an idiopathic craniofacial erythema if it hit them in the face.
Mark Forsyth
Many people believe they are attracted by God or by Nature when they are only repelled by Man.
Dean William R. Inge
Hope itself is like a star- not to be seen in the sunshine of prosperity, and only to be discovered in the night of adversity.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
We could all have been killed -or worse, expelled.
J.K. Rowling
His pride and her beauty had been in direct conflict, and his pride had remained the conqueror.
Emmuska Orczy
Librarians are the coolest people out there doing the hardest job out there on the frontlines. And every time I get to encounter or work with librarians, I'm always impressed by their sheer awesomeness.
Neil Gaiman
It is important for a woman to have the duplicity to make good use of whatever gifts she might have, however valueless they might seem... You have to have the inner strength to pursue your goal, and not care how many enemies you make along the road. It is not easy.
Anne O'Brien
In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets... Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, "Here comes one who will augment our loves." For in this love "to divide is not to take away.
C.S. Lewis
Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty shell, insensitive shell?
Mary Balogh
Dumbledore raised his finger for silence, a silence which fell as though he had struck Uncle Vernon dumb.
J.K. Rowling
But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.
C.S. Lewis
the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors... For from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.
Lawrence Durrell
If, from time to time, you give up expectation, you will be able to perceive what it is you are getting.
Idries Shah
Knowing about God is crucially important for the living of our lives. As it would be cruel to an Amazonian tribesmen to fly him to London, put him down without explanation in Trafalgar Square and leave him, as one who knew nothing of English or England, to fend for himself, so we are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is and who runs it .The world becomes a strange, mad, painful place, and life in it a disappointing and unpleasant business, for those who do not know about God. Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfold, as it were , with no sense of direction, and no understanding of what surrounds you. This way you can waste your life and lose your soul.
J.I. Packer
The same principles that make a spiral galaxy also create the structure of a seashell and unfurling of a fern. This is why ancient spiritual people used natural symbols to convey universal concepts.
Belsebuub
Our terminal decline into old age and death stems from the fine print of the contract that we signed with our mitochondria two billion years ago.
Nick Lane
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
Rudyard Kipling
Fiona fixed a slice of bread to the toasting fork and held it out to the flames. So began the ritual. Hot butter melted off the slices of toast and dribbled onto their fingers.
Alex Nye
Bookshop Customer: 'Who wrote the bible?'Customer's friend: 'Jesus.
Jen Campbell
But of all the instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is that we have before us: the habit of exhaustively describing a social sickness, and then propounding a social drug.
G.K. Chesterton
I am grateful, and would thank the Gods(if there were any to thank) that I have finally mastered this art of forgetting--of murdering the memory.
Caryl Phillips
Wives?" she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, "None active," as if wives were volcanoes.
John le Carré
Writing is like baking cupcakes, you're trying to make something from the raw. Like with cupcakes it's flour and eggs and stuff, and with books it's ideas and words. The end result is the same though, you want people to eat them up.
Emma Shortt
Eating, drinking, dying - three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference.
Aldous Huxley
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them
William Lawrence Bragg
Tiffany knew what the problem was immediately. She'd seen it before, atbirthday parties. Her brother was suffering from tragic sweetdeprivation. Yes, he was surrounded by sweets. But the moment he took anysweet at all, said his sugar-addled brain, that meant he was not takingall the rest. And there were so many sweets he'd never be able to eatthem all. It was too much to cope with. The only solution was to burstinto tears.
Terry Pratchett
I did not deceive you, mon ami. At most, I permitted you to deceive yourself.
Agatha Christie
History has rewritten itself so many times I'm not really sure how it was to begin with -- it's a bit like trying to guess the original color of a wall when it's been repainted eight times.
Jasper Fforde
Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.
Virginia Woolf
A sailor's love for the sea is only matched by his mistress's salty kiss.
Anthony T.Hincks
Well done, my fine fellow out of my womb. What have you gained? Nothing! And oh, what have you lost? Everything!
Jeanette Winterson
Give me love like her'Cause lately I've been waking up alonePaint splattered teardrops on my shirtTold you I'd let you goAnd that I'll fight my cornerMaybe tonight I'll call youAfter my blood turns into alcoholNo I just wanna hold youGive a little time to me or burn this outWe'll play hide and seek to turn this aroundAll I want is the taste that your lips allowMy, my, my, my oh give me love
Ed Sheeran
You can go through life and make new friends every year - every month practically - but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.
Alexander McCall Smith
I have come to the conclusion that the internet claims that fecal matter is in every part of the human body.
Steven Magee
Life is too short to surrender as a matter of course to external influences.
Steven Redhead
The truth of a myth, your Honor, is not its words but its patterns.
David Mitchell
I think we ought to live happily ever after," and she thought he meant it. Sophie knew that living happily ever after with Howl would be a good deal more hair-raising than any storybook made it sound, though she was determined to try. "It should be hair-raising," added Howl. "And you'll exploit me," Sophie said."And then you'll cut up all my suits to teach me.
Diana Wynne Jones
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T.S Eliot