Quotes by British Authors - Page 106

Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?
Sebastian Faulks
The two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies.
Christopher Hitchens
Homeopathy is the safest and more reliable approach to ailments and has withstood the assaults of established medical practice for over 100 years
Yehudi Menuhin
A healthy person that uses medical oxygen to perform their job on a daily basis should expect to eventually become a sick person.
Steven Magee
Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started.
Mary Midgley
It’s hard not to be impatient with the absurdity of the young; they tell us that two and two make four as though it had never occurred to us, and they’re disappointed if we can’t share their surprise when they have discovered that a hen lays an egg. There’s a lot of nonsense in their ranting and raving, but it’s not all nonsense. One ought to sympathize with them; one ought to do one’s best to understand. One has to remember how much has to be forgotten and how much has to be learnt when for the first time one faces life. It’s not very easy to give up one’s ideals, and the brute facts of every day are bitter pills to swallow. The spiritual conflicts of adolescence can be very severe and one can do little to resolve them.
W Somerset Maugham
To come to faith on the basis of experience alone is unwise, though not so foolish as to reject faith altogether because of lack of experience ... the quality of a Christian's experience depends on the quality of his faith, just as the quality of his faith depends in turn on the quality of his understanding of God's truth.
Os Guinness
Open your mind to the infinite possibilities that exist for you. Born through your dreams, crystallised into form by your desires, given impetus by your expectations, then made real through your beliefs.
Steven Redhead
We can't, it seems, live without [capitalism] even as we complain about it.
David Harvey
Dancing is the loftiest the most moving the most beautiful of the arts because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life it is life itself.
Havelock Ellis
Paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly. Because he pays close attention, a Navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb. aircraft at 140 miles per hour on a pitching carrier deck, at night, more safely than the average teenager can cut a bagel.
Paul Graham
... millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Susan Ertz
Why couldn't Rachel be a little more specific about the type of person she was? Goodness knew; if she were a hippie I'd talk to her about her drug experiences, the zodiac, tarot cards. If she were left-wing I'd look miserable, hate Greece, and eat baked beans straight from the tin. If she were the sporty type I'd play her at... chess and backgammon and things.
Martin Amis
Rebels usually have something to complain about, and if they don't they make it up. All too often the really disadvantaged are in no position to rebel; they just suffer quietly.
Paul Collier
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
Douglas Adams
I've been quite a late developer on the clothes front, but I've suddenly realised it is one of life's joys.
Benedict Cumberbatch
Did I do and say these things? Yes, I did. Are there any mitigating circumstances? Not really, unless any circumstances {in other words, context) can be regarded as mitigating. And before you judge, although you have probably already done so, go away and write down the four worst things you have done to a partner, even if - especially if - your partner doesn't know about them. Don't dress things up, or try to explain them; just write them down, in a list, in the plainest language possible. Finished? Ok, so who's the arsehole now?
Nick Hornby
I would just as soon have abused the old village church at home for not being a cathedral.
Joseph Conrad
The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.
David Mitchell
At the departure gate, a drunken airport security woman was handing out box cutters to the passengers.
Warren Ellis
That's the thing about sleepwalking . You can walk, eat, have conversations and even drive cars in perfect safety. The danger comes from waking up too quickly.
Erin Kelly
It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off forever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.
Anthony Burgess
People seem to think that if a man is a Member of Parliament he may do what he pleases. ... Being in Parliament used to be something when I was young, but it won't make a make a gentleman now-a-days. It seems to me that none but brewers, and tallow-chandlers, and lawyers go into Parliament now.
Anthony Trollope
One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten and to leave off fighting at once.
Samuel Butler
There's nothing worth the wear of winning but laughter and the love of friends.
Hilaire Belloc
It's not a case of the glass being half full or half empty; more that we tipped a whole half-pint into an empty pint pot. I had to see how much was there, though, and now I know.
Nick Hornby
What are we doing here? Has something gone wrong?”“Oh no, Ron,” came Fred’s voice, very sarcastically. “No, this is exactly where we wanted to end up.
J.K. Rowling
I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.
Ben Goldacre
I guess whoever built and buried that IED out there in the desert will never know how far that blast traveled. But all things ripple out, cause shrapnel.
Lucy Christopher
For a split second they stared at each other. A fleeting, lasting moment. One person noticing another person out of a whole crowd of strangers.
Alexandra Potter
The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.
C.S. Lewis
Youth is an intoxication without wine, someone says. Life is an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who, disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk. The great thing is to live, to clutch at our existence and race away with it in some great and enthralling pursuit. Above all, I must beware of all ultimate questions- they are too maddeningly unanswerable- let me eschew philosophy and burn Omar.
W.N.P. Barbellion
Thomas Wollaston, in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, complained that Darwin did no seem to know what a species actually was. The British Quarterly, deliberately sitting up trouble, speculated that a time might come when a monkey could propose marriage to a genteel British lady. Perhaps cruelest of all was a cartoon in Punch magazine, depicting a gorilla with a sign on its neck. Deliberately evoking the anti-slavery tract of Darwin's Wedgwood forbears, the sign read:"Am I a Man and a Brother?
Jonathan Clements
I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them.
E. V. Lucas
Brave is doing the right thing, because it is the right thing to do.
Colin Myles
Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.
Martin Amis
We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.
Nick Hornby
(On Charles Dickens) It has been the peculiarity and the marvel of this man’s power, that he has invested his puppets with a charm that has enabled him to dispense with human nature.
Anthony Trollope
In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of "This is me!
Nick Hornby
For this was Christmas, which had always been a time of magic, to him and to all the world.
Susan Cooper
....the perfect beauty of the pattern that each raindrop makes as it joins its puddle.
Jay Woodman
The function of the well-intentioned individual, acting in isolation, is to formulate or disseminate theoretical truths. The function of the well-intentioned individuals in association is to live in accordance with those truths, to demonstrate what happens when theory is translated into practice, to create small-scale working models of the better form of society to which the speculative idealist looks forward.
Aldous Huxley
Impartially, shrewdly, I considered suicide, though not in my worst moments. The bottle of pills. The note: 'No hard feelings, everyone, but I've thought about it and it's just not on, is it? It's nearly on, but not quite. No? Anyway, all the best, C.
Martin Amis
I have been used to consider poetry as "the food of love" said Darcy."Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what isstrong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, Iam convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.
Jane Austen
I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do.
Henry James
Can't stand all these poisonous creatures, all these snakes and insects and fish and things. Wretched things, biting everybody. And then people expect me to tell them what to do about it. I'll tell them what to do. Don't get bitten in the first place. (quoting Dr. Struan Sutherland)
Douglas Adams
Surely it is better, thought Domenica, that forty-five should buy the book and actually read it, than should many thousands, indeed millions, buy it and put it on their shelves, like...Professor Hawking's Brief History of Time. That was a book that had been bought by millions, but had been demonstrated to have been read by only a minute proportion of those who had acquired it. For do we not all have a copy of that on our shelves, and who amongst us can claim to have read beyond the first page, in spite of the pellucid prose of its author and his evident desire to share with us his knowledge of...of whatever it is that the book is about?
Alexander McCall Smith
…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….
A.S. Byatt
I won't regret, because you can grow flowers where dirt used to be.
Kate Nash
Sex is a conversation carried out by other means. If you get on well out of bed half the problems of bed are solved.
Peter Ustinov
Work is a kind of vacuum, an emptiness, where I just switch off everything except the scant intelligence necessary to keep me going. God, the people are awful - great carved monstrosities from the sponge-stone of secondratedness. Hideous.
Philip Larkin
Poetry ennobles the heart and the eyes and unveils the meaning of all things upon which the heart and the eyes dwell. It discovers the secret rays of the universe and restores to us forgotten paradises.
Edith Sitwell
Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
Neil Gaiman
Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.
Jeanette Winterson
I'm sure we all have dreams of leaving at some time in our lives, but when we reach the bottom, most of us go running home.
Deborah Curtis
Evil itself is a dictator, whether it’s dressed up like a pompous little man with a moustache, or a bunch of faceless terrorists, or a fundamentalist state. That’s what the devil is, you know. And it’s precious difficult to combat. Or rather, it’s not so much difficult, as demanding of great courage. Will, and wit.
Chico Kidd
Tthe thing is, Dr. Foster…the truth is, I like Marina.” He eyed the doctor. “And I actually don’t like you very much.”Oh, it was worth it. God, it was worth it. To see the perennially calm face turn pale, only slightly, but still pale; to see him blink away the hurt in his watery, pallid blue eyes.
Amelia Mangan
You can cross the Rubicon in a boat without getting wet, but surely, getting wet is the baptism before you begin that new life on the other side.
Chloe Thurlow
The ball and chain of creativity has no key
Benny Bellamacina