Quotes by British Authors - Page 111

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
Wilfred Owen
For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories.
Tahir Shah
Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made ...
Robert Browning
I was ripped from my body, I was less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost . . . but still, I was alive.
J.K. Rowling
Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity
T.S Eliot
They lurk in the cold and dark.Hungry and,wicked,they wait for their one chance to devour the weak on Sorry Night.Then the vours feast on a banquet of fear.Your fear.They steal your soul but your body remains.No one knows the difference.
Simon Holt
In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
W.H. Auden
To resist the social pressure now put even on one's leisure time, requires a tougher upbringing and a more obstinate willfulness about going one's own way, than ever before.
Robert Graves
The truth of a thing is the feel of it not the think of it.
Stanley Kubrick
What happens," called out Max, "if you win?""We die anyway, but I become legend" I explained
Philip Palmer
Your heart's Brain has independent thought which can create a life of tranquil bliss.
Steven Redhead
The emotional scars of our mistakes will teach us far more than the joy of our successes
Steven Aitchison
…the known had been so long dwarfed by the unknown that confusion was an easy bedfellow.
Jasper Fforde
He did not himself believe in the supernatural, but the thing happened, and he proposed to tell it as simply as possible. It was stupid of him to say that it shook his faith in mundane affairs, for it was just as mundane as anything else. Indeed the really frightening part about it was the horribly tangible atmosphere in which it took place. None of the outlines wavered in the least. The creature would have been less remarkable if it had been less natural. It seemed to overcome the usual laws without being immune to them. ("The Troll")
T.H. White
She was crude, but loyal. He began to understand her even better than before. A pity she was so old; it was too late to try to make a human being of her.
Elias Canetti
I have said so many times to many people on the spiritual path, 'You must be strong in yourself to help others. People who are in the emotional sea need someone who can pull them out, not someone who gets in with them and gets dragged away by the tidal wave of human emotions. We have to become emotional lifeguards.
Gordon Smith
Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.
C.S. Lewis
To Jana's mind everybody seemed happy to see BAbichka and resisted returning her, like a misplaced package sent to the wrong address. It was as if the recipient opened it up, knowing it should be returned, but wondering who long they could legitimately keep it before being changed with theft.
F.C. Malby
…she had no resources for solitude…
Jane Austen
Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?
E.M. Forster
Well then that's our date confirmed. I am excited! Most girls want to know if I have long term plans to start a family; you want to know if I like 80s rap. I think I'm in love with you. Actually, I'm not you have a foul mouth and terrible taste in men by all accounts.
Lucy Robinson
This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak—the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning.
Joseph Conrad
I am not even an atheist so much as an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful. Reviewing the false claims of religion I do not wish, as some sentimental materialists affect to wish, that they were true. I do not envy believers their faith. I am relieved to think that the whole story is a sinister fairy tale; life would be miserable if what the faithful affirmed was actually true.... There may be people who wish to live their lives under cradle-to-grave divine supervision, a permanent surveillance and monitoring. But I cannot imagine anything more horrible or grotesque.
Christopher Hitchens
I never see problems. I always see challenges. By definition, a problem is something unwelcome or harmful, whereas a challenge is a contest. Contests can be won; and, I love winning.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.
Julian Barnes
Kindness: It's ours to share.
Anthony T.Hincks
Short cuts make long delays.
J.R.R. Tolkien
There wasn't even enough meat to make proper fun of [....] I keep waiting for somebody else to come on TV, maybe a cabinet member, to read the real speech, the one that tells us ... I dunno ... stuff. Seriously, sorority girls have done the Walk of Shame home from frat parties feeling more satisfied.
Stephen Green
I am German, yes, but I am not a Nazi. There is a difference, and one day I hope you understand that.
Caroline Leech
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaPatience: A support for the disappointed.
Idries Shah
He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city, He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans.
Arthur Conan Doyle
The doctor asked me recently how I was feeling within myself, I replied, “absolutely fine doctor, but I’m terribly lonely without myself.
Benny Bellamacina
I had always been warned that American didn't always get sarcasm
Lindsey Kelk
To me, it was clear proof of the existence of supersymmetry, the idea that every particle has a partner. She was mine.
Olivia Sudjic
The uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf. It's almost a law.
H.G.Wells
I looked out across the Ocean, and determined to drown myself.I was up to my chin when the shout came, and I will never forget it. Never. For it seems to me that any hope in life is such a shout; a voice that answers the silent place of despair. It is silence that most needs an answering — when I can no longer speak, hear me.
Jeanette Winterson
This fiddling and drifting and not impressing oneself upon anything – this always refraining and fingering and cutting things up into little jokes and facetiousness – that's what's so annihilating. Yet given little money, little looks, no special gift – what can one do? How could one battle? How could one leap on the back of life and wring its scruff?
Virginia Woolf
As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War—they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.
G.K. Chesterton
Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw.It was its tendency to bend at the knees.
Terry Pratchett
The opposite of busy in today's world is sustained, focused attention. It is deep engagement in activities that really matter to us, or in conversations with those we care about.
Tony Crabbe
Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
Winston S. Churchill
Those were times when brave men who knew and loved their profession couldn't be overlooked.
Thomas Hughes
Ladies and Gentlemen. I should like to inform you on behalf of the nation state of Guyana, that we are going to resign from being a country. We can't make it work. We have tried. We have done our best. It is not possible. The problems are insoluble. From midnight tonight, we shall cease trading. The country is now disbanded. We will voluntarily liquidate ourselves. The nation will disperse quietly, a little shamefaced but so what. We had a go.Different people have suggested different solutions. Do it this way. Try that. Let me have a go. Nothing works. We are at the mercy of the rich countries. A team of management consultants from the United States could not find the answer, and for not finding the answer, we had to pay them an amount that substantially increased our national debt. We give in, gracefully, but we give in."And then he imagined himself, quietly and with dignity, putting his papers in his briefcase, bowing to the hushed assembly, returning to clear out his office and going for a walk with his wife along the sea wall. (The Ventriloquist's Tale
Pauline Melville
We started to collect more and more of these words and concepts, and began to realize what an arbitrarily selective work the Oxford English Dictionary is. It simply doesn’t recognize huge wodges of human experience. Like, for instance, standing in the kitchen wondering what you went in there for. Everybody does it, but because there isn’t—or wasn’t—a word for it, everyone thinks it’s something that only they do and that they are therefore more stupid than other people. It is reassuring to realize that everybody is as stupid as you are and that all we are doing when we are standing in the kitchen wondering what we came in here for is “woking.
Douglas Adams
Evolutionary psychologists suggest that, just as the eye is an evolved organ for seeing, and the wing an evolved organ for flying, so the brain is a collection of organs (or 'modules') for dealing with a set of specialist data-processing needs.
Richard Dawkins
The two women sat by the fire, tilting their glasses and drinking in small peaceful sips. The lamplight shone upon the tidy room and the polished table, lighting topaz in the dandelion wine, spilling pools of crimson through the flanks of the bottle of plum gin. It shone on the contented drinkers, and threw their large, close-at-hand shadows upon the wall. When Mrs Leak smoothed her apron the shadow solemnified the gesture as though she were moulding an universe. Laura's nose and chin were defined as sharply as the peaks peaks on a holly leaf.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Success from the financial and from the prestige point of view . . . is not enough; what matters even more is . . . adherence to high moral and aesthetic standards." — as quoted in "High Financier" by Niall Ferguson
Siegmund Warburg
For the khan, we will take their cities, their women, and their lands. This is the great raid, the farthest strike in the history of the nation of Genghis. We will not be stopped.
Conn Iggulden
The specious idea that gender differences are due entirely to culture, and have nothing to do with biological or archetypal predispositions, still enjoys wide currency in our society, yet it rests on the discredited tabula rasa theory of human development and is at variance with the overwhelming mass of anthropological and scientific evidence.
Anthony Stevens
If you were lucky, very lucky indeed, there were one or two people in your life who you could tell the unvarnished truth too, shell and egg. And that these people held the essence of you inside them. The rest would be conversations that ended when night fell, or the dinner part ended.
Julia Gregson
...her very kindness was cruel because it was founded not on love but on reason...
W Somerset Maugham
The Captain’s boat inspections were always pretty slapdash, because they mainly just involved him looking at the ropes and planks and barnacles and then nodding to show that he approved of whatever they happened to be doing.
Gideon Defoe
It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.
George Orwell
We are wanderers, place shifters, the cosmic homeless. This is not a modern truth, and Achilles is not some new kind of existentialist hero. It is the oldest truth of all, surviving uncomfortably into the modern world of cities and overkings, diplomacy and accommodation, the power structures and the proliferation of stuff which the Mediterranean world provides.
Adam Nicolson
There is only one religion - it is a way a man dies.
James Runcie
The strange thing about falling in love is, we know what it looks and feels like. But we can’t really explain why it occurs and where all the madness it brings with it comes from.“Or why it just seems to happen like magic between two particular people but not others.”“The appearance of love seems totally irrational, inexplicable and without reason. Yet, when it happens it feels like the only thing that makes any sense. True love, I guess, is when it keeps on making sense after you actually get to know the other person.
Charlie Maclean
When people are free to choose, they choose freedom
Margaret Thatcher
Years and years ago, I read a great interview with Jam and Lewis, the R&B producers, in which they described what it was like to be members of Prince's band. They'd sit down, and Prince would tell them what he wanted them to play, and they'd explain that they couldn't--they weren't quick enough, or good enough. And Prince would push them and push them until they mastered it, and then just when they were feeling pleased with themselves for accomplishing something they didn't know they had the capacity for, he'd tell them the dance steps he needed to accompany the music.This story has stuck with me, I think, because it seems like an encapsulation of the very best and most exciting kind of creative process.
Nick Hornby
It's an irony of our times that men seeking peace must make war.
Mark Lawrence
I never loved anyone else and never desired to. She was my companion, my lover, and my teacher.
Nick Bantock