Quotes by British Authors - Page 114

It's very kind of you to take us in," said the vicar, smiling. "We're so sorry if we've put you out at all." "Not at all!" I said, lying through my teeth.
Victoria Twead
In boom times companies have high profits. They increase production to satisfy demand for goods. This leads to excess supply. Companies cut prices to compete for customers. leading to lower profits, lay-offs, and economic depression. Eventually lower prices lead to an increase in demand and profits go back up. The economy is a yo-yo.
Niall Kishtainy
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.
George Orwell
It was not a noisy wind but the kind that suggests something very big and thin fresh from the horror of Infinite Space.
Jessie Douglas Kerruish
The realm of liberation is absolutely incommensurable with the relativities of higher and lower, better and worse, gain and loss, since these are all disadvantages of the ego.
Alan W. Watts
Courage is clearly a readiness to risk self-humiliation.
Nigel Dennis
Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
Henry James
The quickest way to stop noticing something, may be to buy it—just as the quickest way to stop appreciating someone may be to marry him or her.
Alain de Botton
We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.
Stephen Fry
The advertisement is one of the most interesting and difficult of modern literary forms.
Aldous Huxley
Any act would be forgiven him, but the act itself would remain; what he would leave in the world would be the shame and hurt he forced upon others. This could not be.
David Kirk
Lilith opened the shutters and allowed herself to bathe in the bright moonlight, as it shone across the Highland Glen.
Alan Kinross
I'm happily married to Peter senior; we're best friends as well as lovers, which is probably the best recipe for a successful relationship. We live in a lovely part of England.
Carole Mortimer
In the seven years or so that had passed since I had last seen him, Sir Magnus Donners had grown not so much older in appearance, as less like a human being.
Anthony Powell
The act of copulation is like that of picking the nose. It's all right to be doing it yourself but it is a singularly unattractive spectacle for the onlooker.
Roald Dahl
the greatest trick of kings is to fool the poor into thinking we have common cause with the rich simply because we live on the same bog. Then the poor get their heads split open in the battles they fight so the rich can keep their wine cellars well stocked.
Kate Horsley
After all, as Franco would dictate, everyone was going to lose their money at some point. You may as well do so half drunk and at the mercy of a pretty smile.
Christopher Byford
When several creatures, men or animals, have worked together to overcome something offering resistance and have at last succeeded, there follows often a pause, as though they felt the propriety of paying respect to the adversary who has put up so good a fight. The great tree falls, splitting, cracking, rushing down in leaves to the final, shuddering blow along the ground. Then the foresters are silent, and do not at once sit down. After hours, the deep snowdrift has been cleared and the lorry is ready to take the men home out of the cold. But they stand a while, leaning on their spades and only nodding unsmilingly as the car-drivers go through, waving their thanks.
Richard Adams
As a rule of thumb, it was always safer if the Commander-in-Chief formulated a risky plan.
Rowena Cherry
If you want to be unique.Just be yourself.
Anthony T.Hincks
Still round the corner there may wait, A new road or a secret gate.
J.R.R. Tolkien
There is no pattern the human mind can devise that does not exist already within the bounds of nature...Everything we do, see, write, notate, all are an echo of the deep seams of the universe. Music is the invisible world made visible through sound.
Kate Mosse
When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. They seemed to go on the assumption that there is no failure greater than the failure of not trying, and so they continued to try in the face of repeated failures.
John Powell
Those are my bougainvillea—I got Victoria to plant them today, but I don;t know if they will survive. But Right now they have the appearance of survival, which is almost the same thing.
Zadie Smith
Humans, in the day that has been the Earth, have been here for less than a minute. We’re a late-night piss in the toilet, that’s all we are.
Matt Haig
Gerald Middleton was a man of mildly but persistently depressive temperament. Such men are not at their best at breakfast, nor is the week before Christmas their happiest time.
Angus Wilson
Boredom is a pleasing antidote for fear
Daphne du Maurier
[Credit is a system whereby] a person who can't pay, gets another person who can't pay, to guarantee that he can pay.
Charles Dickens
Frodo raised his head, and then stood up. Despair had not left him, but the weakness had passed. He even smiled grimly, feeling now as clearly as a moment before he had felt the opposite, that what he had to do, he had to do, if he could, and that whether Faramir or Aragorn or Elrond or Galadriel or Gandalf or anyone else knew about it was beside the purpose. He took his staff in one hand and the phial in his other. When he saw that the clear light was already welling through his fingers, he thrust it into his bosom and held it against his heart. Then turning from the city of Morgul, now no more than a grey glimmer across a dark gulf, he prepared to take the upward road.
J.R.R. Tolkien
It has been my personal experience that the government engages in a wide range of frauds with the common people.
Steven Magee
They always gives me bath salts," complained Nobby. "And bath soap and bubble bath and herbal bath lumps and tons of bath stuff and I can't think why, 'cos it's not as if I hardly ever has a bath. You'd think they'd take the hint, wouldn't you?
Terry Pratchett
Happiness comes more from loving than being loved and often when our affection seems wounded it is only our vanity bleeding. To love and to be hurt often and to love again - this is the brave and happy life.
J. E. Buckrose
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
Winston S. Churchill
The only real recourse that [Russian] people had against tsarist rule was violence and rebellion. It was once remarked that Russia's constitution was "absolutism moderated by assassination.
Alan Beattie
Give me loveGive me loveGive me peace on earthGive me lightGive me lifeKeep me free from birthGive me hopeHelp me cope, with this heavy loadTrying to, touch and reach you with,heart and soul
George Harrison
To recognize that the Psalms call us to pray and sing at the intersections of the times--of our time and God's time, of the then, and the now, and the not yet--is to understand how those emotions are to be held within the rhythm of a life lived in God's presence.
N.T. Wright
Just as modern motorways have no room for ox-carts or wandering pedestrians, so modern society has little place for lives and ways that are too eccentric.
A.C. Grayling
But you do believe, don’t you," Rose implored him, "you think it’s true?"t"Of course it’s true," the Boy said. "What else could there be?" he went scornfully on. "Why," he said, "it’s the only thing that fits. These atheists, they don’t know nothing. Of course there’s Hell. Flames and damnation," he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, "torments." "And Heaven too," Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on. "Oh, maybe," the Boy said, "maybe.
Graham Greene
There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil - a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.
Jane Austen
The process of recovering from addictiveness happens at a deeper level of consciousness and through feeling our pain without using old addictive fixes. There is no escaping that getting in touch with our original pain is the touchstone to mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.
Christopher Dines
Civilization is always threatened from below, by patterns of belief and emotion that may once have been useful to our ancestors, but that are useful no longer.
Roger Scruton
We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.
Evelyn Waugh
Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.
Jane Austen
Everyone's mind was their own. You absolutely cannot change them.
Lesley Howarth
Good writing like good sex requires discipline.
Chloe Thurlow
How grand, to be a Doctor of whatever and to weigh up and decide people's future.
Sebastian Faulks
...but it's not so much having to repair the damage, it's more the attitude behind the vandalism, Harry. Muggle-baiting might strike some wizards as funny, but it's an expression of something much deeper and nastier...
J.K. Rowling
Peace and happiness are powerful weapons against the Egos.
Belsebuub
Scotch whisky is made from barley and the morning dew on angel's nipples.
Warren Ellis
The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information.
Tim Berners-Lee
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
William Blake
At the time I thought the winner in an argument was the person who put forward the most logical support for his position. Of course, this isn't true. Human history, from gardening disputes to genocide, is full of examples of people with the most decent, well-argued stance ending up with their face in the mud in front of a naked display of power.
Mark Barrowcliffe
Always speak the truth - think before you speak - and write it down afterwards.
Lewis Carroll
Life itself is the best (and the only) timekeeper.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
I was at Gatwick and I was a mess: breathlessly excited, horribly nervous and hoping, praying, that this might be it. That the man who was belted up preparing for touchdown would be the man I would spend the next sixty years picking up from airports, missing him, loving him, feeding him and, all things going well, having a fair bit of sex with him.
Lucy Robinson
In the Blue Room, Cora Cash was trying to concentrate on her book. Cora found most novels hard to sympathise with -- all those plain governesses -- but this one had much to recommend it. The heroine was 'handsome, clever, and rich', rather like Cora herself. Cora knew she was handsome -- wasn't she always referred to in the papers as 'the divine Miss Cash'? She was clever -- she could speak three languages and could handle calculus. And as to rich, well, she was undoubtedly that. Emma Woodhouse was not rich in the way that she, Cora Cash, was rich. Emma Woodhouse did not lie on a lit à la polonaise once owned by Madame du Barry in a room which was, but for the lingering smell of paint, an exact replica of Marie Antoinette's bedchamber at le petit Trianon. Emma Woodhouse went to dances at the Assembly Rooms, not fancy dress spectaculars in specially built ballrooms. But Emma Woodhouse was motherless which meant, thought Cora, that she was handsome, clever, rich and free.
Daisy Goodwin
Far rather would she that he were dead! She could not sit beside him when he stared so and did not see her and made everything terrible; sky and tree, children playing, dragging carts, blowing whistles, falling down; all were terrible. And he would not kill himself; and she could tell no one. "Septimus has been working too hard"––that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought. She could tell nobody, not even Septimus now, and looking back, she saw him sitting in his shabby overcoat alone, on the seat, hunched up, staring. And it was cowardly for a man to say he would kill himself, but Septimus had fought; he was brave; he was not Septimus now. She put on her lace collar. She put on her new hat and he never noticed; and he was happy without her. Nothing could make her happy without him! Nothing! He was selfish. So men are.
Virginia Woolf
Dreams so often become nightmares. Family can so easily become foes. And people are always more stupid than you give them credit for.
Mike A. Lancaster
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly despairingly acutely miserable racked with sorrow but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
Agatha Christie
We inherited these principles and these freedoms and we here highly resolve that we shall pass them on, as we will pass on an undivided Republic purged of racism and slavery, to our descendants. The popgun discharges of a few pathetic sectarians and crackpot revisionists are negligible, and will be drowned by the mounting chorus that demands: 'Mr Jefferson! BUILD UP THAT WALL'.
Christopher Hitchens