Quotes by British Authors - Page 107

There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.
Virginia Woolf
Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.
Salman Rushdie
We only part to meet again.
John Gay
Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest violence.
Lord Francis Jeffrey
And the Spring arose on the garden fair,Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breastRose from the dreams of its wintry rest.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Diversity is a very popular business topic today while the negative side of diversity, discrimination, remains a touchy and sensitive topic. Even in organisations which follow the letter of the law in terms of not discriminating against any individuals, it is common for people to show prejudice and bias...Have the courage to stand out from your colleagues by being very open to and comfortable with all kinds of diversity amongst your colleagues and stakeholders. When you sense someone is being ignored or marginalized spend time with them and bring them into discussions encouraging them to speak up as needed.
Nigel Cumberland
I have stared into the light and you are all my shadows.
Mike Carey
Love, love, love, love is all you can do, even in the face of bitterness, pain, anger, confusion, it's the only thing to keep you steady and stop you biting back.
Jay Woodman
Nobody can stand between you and knowledge if you are fit for it.
Idries Shah
He had a powerful kind of ache inside of him, half joy, half terrible sadness.
J.K. Rowling
I suppose one oughtn’t to marry anybody, unless one’s prepared to make him a full-time job.”“Probably not; though there are a few rare people, I believe, who don’t look on themselves as jobs but as fellow creatures.
Dorothy L. Sayers
What is reading but silent conversation?
Walter Savage Landor
Esteem him! Like him! Cold-hearted Elinor! Oh! worse than cold-hearted! Ashamed of being otherwise. Use those words again, and I will leave the room this moment.
Jane Austen
We all make mistakes. The more you punish yourself for them, the harder it is to live.
Kristina Adams
There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us identify them.
Alain de Botton
I love new clothes. If everyone could just wear new clothes everyday, I reckon depression wouldn’t exist anymore.
Sophie Kinsella
When you're born a light is switched on, a light which shines up through your life. As you get older the light still reaches you, sparkling as it comes up through your memories. And if you're lucky as you travel forward through time, you'll bring the whole of yourself along with you, gathering your skirts and leaving nothing behind, nothing to obscure the light. But if a Bad Thing happens part of you is seared into place, and trapped for ever at that time. The rest of you moves onward, dealing with all the todays and tomorrows, but something, some part of you, is left behind. That part blocks the light, colours the rest of your life, but worse than that, it's alive. Trapped for ever at that moment, and alone in the dark, that part of you is still alive.
Michael Marshall Smith
Innovation is deviance which means that the rebellious personality is a natural resource for practical creativity. As an innovator, you need to reject the old to establish a new, better, status quo. And one of the most powerful sources of newness is the rebel or maverick, mind.
Max McKeown
I dream in fire but work in clay.
Arthur Machen
Hence, when his name was casually mentioned by neighboring yeomen, the listener said, "Ah, Clym Yeobright: what is he doing now?' When the instinctive question about a person is, What is he doing? it is felt that he will not be found to be, like most of us, doing nothing in particular. There is an indefinite sense that he must be invading some region of singularity , good or bad. The devout home is that he is doing well. The secret faith is that he is making a mess of it...So the subject recurred: if he were making a fortune and a name, so much the better for him, if he were making a tragical figure in the world, so much the better for a narrative
Thomas Hardy
For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.
C.S. Lewis
To be able to concentrate for a considerable time is essential to difficult achievement.
Bertrand Russell
How easy it is to judge rightly after one sees what evil comes from judging wrongly.
Elizabeth Gaskell
...when I see you here amidst all this, I realise that I proposed to a very small part of you. I thought I was giving you a home and a position, but here I see that I am taking you away from so much.
Daisy Goodwin
In catalepsy and a dead trance, I studiously held the quick of my nature.
Charlotte Brontë
Now I know what the atom looks like.
Ernest Rutherford
....it seems to me that a pleasurable Contemplation of Beauty has certainly an immeasurably greater value than mere Consciousness of Pleasure.
G.E. Moore
The fire? It has been alive as long as I have. We talk and think together all night long. It’s like a book to me – the only book I ever learned to read; and many an old story it tells me. It’s music, for I should know its voice among a thousand, and there are other voices in its roar. It has its pictures too. You don’t know how many strange faces and different scenes I trace in the red-hot coals. It’s my memory, that fire, and shows me all my life.
Charles Dickens
She had never believed in fate. She still did not. It would be nonsense of freedom of will and choice, and it was through such freedom that we worked our way through life and learned what we needed to learn. But sometimes, it seemed to her, there was something, some sign, to nudge one along in a certain direction. What one chose to do with that nudge was up to that person.
Mary Balogh
Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces.You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing [a recognizably bad person does] can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew.I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the [Nazi] Germans are merely the supreme expression of it.
Iain Pears
And always, in our highly regularised way of life, he is obsessed by thoughts of themorrow. Of all the precepts in the Gospels the one that Christians have most neglected is the commandment to take no thought for the morrow. If a man is prudent, thought for the morrow will lead him to save; if he is imprudent, it will make him apprehensive of being unable to pay his debts. In either case the moment loses its savour. Everything is organised, nothing is spontaneous.
Bertrand Russell
I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.
George Eliot
Small tyrants, threatened by big,sincerely believethey love liberty.
W.H. Auden
He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed.
Neil Gaiman
Worse than madness. Sanity.
William Golding
I dreamed I spoke in another's language,I dreamed I lived in another's skin,I dreamed I was my own beloved,I dreamed I was a tiger's kin.I dreamed that Eden lived inside me,And when I breathed a garden came,I dreamed I knew all of Creation,I dreamed I knew the Creator's name.I dreamed--and this dream was the finest--That all I dreamed was real and true,And we would live in joy forever,You in me, and me in you.
Clive Barker
A federation of all humanity, together with a sufficient measure of social justice, to ensure health, education, and a rough equality of opportunity to most of the children born into the world, would mean such a release and increase of human energy as to open a new phase in human history.
H.G.Wells
This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.
Doris Lessing
The scandal with the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea is how it managed to obtain a construction permit to build a manned telescope in a known biologically toxic environment to workers. How many more people need to die, get injured or develop long term very high altitude sickness that will last a lifetime?
Steven Magee
The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable.
Julian Barnes
As anyone who's ever taken an Ethiopian bus knows, there is an unwritten rule that the windows must remain firmly closed.
Tahir Shah
I hate the thing is called enjoyment: Besides it is a dull employment,It cuts off all that's life and fireFrom that which may be termed desire;Just like the bee whose sting is goneConverts the owner to a drone.
John Wilmot
When we carry out our "religious duties" we are like people digging channels in a waterless land, in order that when at last water comes, it may find them ready.
C.S. Lewis
I help those who can help themselves.
Agatha Christie
Her true hope was that something would happen in the course of her time abroad that would mean she need never take the place. What that 'something' was she had no idea.
Kate Atkinson
A good message will always find a messenger.
Amelia Barr
Memories sharp enough to cut himself on - the smells, the sounds, the feel of the air on his skin, the desperate hope and mad anger.
Joe Abercrombie
We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm--a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.
Charles Darwin
There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind.
Douglas Adams
There is always a solution to every problem! Fishy
Lily Amis
Better to find your own way than to blindly trust the words of others, whoever they are.
Gemma Malley
You have no cause to grumble boy. You made your choice and all this is a consequence of your choice. Whatever now ensues is what you yourself have chosen.
Anthony Burgess
There is desire in the perfect, beauty in the imperfect.Thus I lust over the flawless,and fall amorously forceless to the flawed.
Ilyas Kassam
With the fading of the final notes the saxophone player turns to me. Its baleful, otherworldly gaze bores into my soul. It lowers its instrument to the disc and extends a podgy, grey hand to point at me. It looms closer, its head expanding, arm elongating. A clammy digit brushes the tip of my nose and a tingling numbness spreads over my face like an ice-cold spider web. tA voice like the rustle of dried leaves whispers inside my head: “Forever…” The last syllable stretches, just like my grandfather’s dying breath.tAnd the beady, black orbs are no longer eyes but deep, obsidian pits…
Scott Kaelen
Anything that makes it easier to understand, makes it a little easier to bear.
Rosie Thomas
I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.
Charles Lamb
It is not easy to let someone go, even when they have said unforgivable things to you.
Tracy Chevalier
He wanted to tell the baby that Paris was like a poem in stone.
Simon Van Booy
The only expenditure, and all its outworkings, for which God can be held to be responsible is that which He directs.
Amy Carmichael
The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being- it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. I human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
Graham Greene