Quotes by British Authors - Page 115

I think that a writer should observe the real world before imagining a non-existent one.
Jhumpa Lahiri
When the black thing was at its worst, when the illicit cocktails and the ten-mile runs stopped working, I would feel numb as if dead to the world. I moved unconsciously, with heavy limbs, like a zombie from a horror film. I felt a pain so fierce and persistent deep inside me, I was tempted to take the chopping knife in the kitchen and cut the black thing out I would lie on my bed staring at the ceiling thinking about that knife and using all my limited powers of self-control to stop myself from going downstairs to get it.
Alice Jamieson
Philosophy goes no further than probabilities and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.
James Froude
A woman who was a schoolgirl at Hiroshima asked, “Those scientists who invented the atomic bomb, what did they think would happen if they dropped it?
Jonathan Glover
The price you have to pay to be great at something - is repetition.
Andrew Brown
Hell is just a frame of mind.
Christopher Marlowe
He seemed to be having trouble remembering the steps, for he was pumping my arm and counting under his breath (one, two, three), and his breath smelled like the open maws of the pub cellars that grapes on Whitchurch pavements on delivery day. Beer.
Lorna Sage
I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.
Neil Gaiman
When the sun shines you cannot see the moon," he said. "But when the sun is gone ah,when the sun is gone.
Agatha Christie
I may be permitted, like the doctors, to cure a greater evil by a less, for I shall not fall seriously in love with the young widow, I think, nor she with me - that's certain - but if I find a little pleasure in her society I may surely be allowed to seek it; and if the star of her divinity be bright enough to dim the lustre of Eliza's, so much the better, but I scarcely can think it
Anne Brontë
What shall it profit a male if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his immortal genes?
Richard Dawkins
Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are perhaps the most discussed animal in the universe?
Virginia Woolf
What will has caused, will must be brought to correct.
Jocelyn Gibb
Be thrown into a new life (or at least thrown with sush force against the life of someone who is like squashed his face against the window) forces you to rethink who you are. Or what causes impression for others
Jojo Moyes
Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers.
Philip Kerr
It's always nice being fancied. It's always nice being wanted. Even it it's by the wrong person.
Tabitha Suzuma
If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?
C.S. Lewis
The sylph is a fragment of the earth's soul in faery form.
Brian Froud
Her only shame was that she felt none.
Nicholas Evans
If she was going to remain an engaged lady, then she would make the most of it, and one of the ways to do this would be to enjoy her free time.
Alexander McCall Smith
The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.
G.K. Chesterton
The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof.
Ashley Montagu
Let us then understand at once that change or variety is as much a necessity to the human heart and brain in buildings as in books; that there is no merit, though there is some occasional use, in monotony; and that we must no more expect to derive either pleasure or profit from an architecture whose ornaments are of one pattern, and whose pillars are of one proportion, than we should of a universe in which the clouds were all of one shape, and the trees all of one shape.
John Ruskin
You can change your mind, don't let your mind change you
Benny Bellamacina
Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
Winston S. Churchill
A child's a plaything for an hour.
Mary Lamb
In most gardens they make the beds too soft – so that the flowers are always asleep.
Lewis Carroll
Worry less about what other people think about you, and more about what you think about them.
Fay Weldon
the whole point of the wish business was to see to it that what the client got was exactly what he asked for and exactly what he didn't really want.
Terry Pratchett
Well, it is very odd of you to threaten to throw your friends out of the window, I must say," remarked Juliana.He smiled. "Not at all. It is only my friends that I would throw out of the window.""Dear me!" said Juliana, finding the male sex incomprehensible.-Chapter XIII
Georgette Heyer
I thought I lost you""You will never lose me." Paul kissed the top of her head. "And even if I have to leave, you must know that I will come back to you again. If you'll wait for me?
Caroline Leech
No man in civil society can be exempted from the laws of it: for if any man may do what he thinks fit, and there be no appeal on earth, for redress or security against any harm he shall do; I ask, whether he be not perfectly still in the state of nature, and so can be no part or member of that civil society; unless any one will say, the state of nature and civil society are one and the same thing, which I have never yet found any one so great a patron of anarchy as to affirm.
John Locke
My husband hands me my glass, full to the brim with green-gold wine and I stifle my resentment and attempt to smile at him. I mustn’t lose sight of what we have – two beautiful children; an amazing house that I never, in a million years, thought we’d be able to afford; Gill and Andy, my best friends – and this perfect day. I take a deep breath and feel my shoulders relax. I can smell the faintest trace of heather, drifting down from the moor.
Sanjida Kay
Every family has in fact a sacred character belonging to it, which may indeed be forgotten or disdained; but the family is constituted, and ought therefore to be conducted, with the prospect of the rising generation following that which precedes it, not only to the grave, but to eternity"(Christopher Anderson). Every member of every household is an immortal creature; every one that leaves the circle by death, goes into an eternity of torment or bliss. And, since all the ordinances of God look to another world as their chief and ultimate reference, surely, surely, that institute which is the most powerful of all in the formation of character, must be considered as set up with a special intention to prepare the subjects of it for "glory, honour, immortality, and eternal life.
John Angell James
Don't go to sleep doused in hatred.Instead go to sleep snuggled in love.
Anthony T.Hincks
Romance is very pretty in novels, but the romance of a life is always a melancholy matter. They are most happy who have no story to tell.
Anthony Trollope
People only tell lies when the truth is disagreeable to them, or frightens them, or to cover sin.
Anne Perry
You know the world has gone mad when those who have enlightened, compassionate views and future visions, are accused of borderline insanity, ridiculed and criticised for thinking positively.
Mango Wodzak
I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am. I doubt if I have anything more for my present rule of life than following inclinations which do me and nobody else any harm, and actually give pleasure to those I love best. There, gentlemen, since you wanted to know how I was getting on, I have told you. Much good may it do you! I cannot explain further here. I perceive there is something wrong somewhere in our social formulas: what it is can only be discovered by men or women with greater insight than mine--if, indeed, they ever discover it-- at least in our time. 'For who knoweth what is good for man in this life?--and who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun?
Thomas Hardy
It’s tough, but if you want to survive, sometimes you have to do the seemingly impossible.
Adele Rose
...I will not allow books to prove any thing.""But how shall we prove any thing?""We never shall.
Jane Austen
The terrors of the future will not come from the drab repressions of an encroaching bureaucracy, but from the neon lights of a thousand supermarkets, the sounds of a million automobile accidents and from the public cremation of the dead astronauts as they return to earth.
Christopher Riche Evans
Trees emit a wide variety of electromagentic radiation and it is regarded as healthy to live in a natural area that is surrounded by trees due to these beneficial emissions to human health.
Steven Magee
Knowledge is something which you can use.Belief is something which uses you.
Idries Shah
I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all frighten people and secondly, demoralise them.
Tony Benn
He thought of hanging himself, to pass the time.
Johnny Rich
There comes a moment for all of us when our childhood ceases to be an excuse. In your case, I would say that, as with many English, the moment is somewhat delayed.
John le Carré
Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.
Damien Hirst
When shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes, nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.
Jon Ronson
Shall I make you a cup of tea? He asked. It was the classic response to crisis practiced throughout these islands—in England, Scotland, and elsewhere. Emotional turmoil, danger, even disaster could be faced with far greater equanimity if the kettle was switched on. War has been declared! There’s been a major earthquake! The stock market has collapsed! Oh really? Let me put the kettle on….
Alexander McCall Smith
An ethnic minority can live in peace with an ethnic majority as long as the majority does not use its preponderance to turn the institutions of the state into an instrument of ethnic favoritism or ethnic justice.
Michael Ignatieff
Nations have passed away and left no traces And history gives the naked cause of it - One single simple reason in all cases They fell because their peoples were not fit.
Rudyard Kipling
Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.
Graham Greene
Corporate controlled governments protect the interests of the corporations and not the common people.
Steven Magee
How can I pretend that nothing happened?
Diane Samuels
Book after book, I get hooked, every time the writer talks to me like a friend.
Marc Bolan
Even monkeys fall from trees.
Chris Bradford
The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.
E.M. Forster
The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.
T.S Eliot
It is one of my decided opinions that married people ought to have no one, be the tie ever so close and dear, living permanently with them, to break the sacred duality — no, let me say the unity of their home.
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik