Quotes by British Authors - Page 118

There is a point in the future where even the worst disaster starts to settle into an anecdote.
David Nicholls
Classic of '43. Don't knock it. A Vintage year.
Keith Richards
Then, one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...you give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore.
Neil Gaiman
One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.
P.G. Wodehouse
Other than sports, only war and catastrophe can create this sort of national unity.
Simon Kuper
In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.
Charles Dickens
...and he glanced at the backs of the books, with an awakened curiosity that went below the binding. No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.
Charles Dickens
I am very frustrated by fear of imagination, I don’t think that’s healthy.
J.K. Rowling
You took a life and the theft went unpunished. God didn't strike you down. The sky didn't fall. The morning after, you turned on the faucet and water still came out... It was still good when you raised your arm for a cab and one came towards you out of the flow like magic. You did things that were supposed to end you and found they were only things that changed you. It was a disappointment and a revelation and a bereavement and a new thrilling nudity. It was the basic prosaic obscenity: You kept going.
Glen Duncan
Just about the worst thing an artist can do is to try and be a nice person.
Amanda Craig
Happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.
Jeanette Winterson
You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all.
Thomas Hardy
When teaching children with autism we must be quick to adapt, follow our instinct and go off plan.
Adele Devine
All my instincts are one way, and all the facts are the other, and I much fear that British juries have not yet attained that pitch of intelligence when they will give the preference to my theories over Lestrade's facts.
Arthur Conan Doyle
One day, lad, your eyes will light upon a woman, and you will never forget that glint in her eye, that toss of her head, or sway of her hips. You will dream of her, whether you are asleep of awake. She will possess your mind, and your body will be on fire for her. Nothing will ever erase the linger of her scent in your nostrils, the touch of her hand on your body, the feel of her flesh beneath your fingers.When you find a woman to love, Cnut, your life changes forever.
Helen Hollick
I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?
J.R.R. Tolkien
He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about.
Tom Stoppard
The worst choice you can make, is no choice at all
Nicholas Stoller
Jim looks out the car window with his nose pressed to the glass. Sometimes he pretends to be asleep. Not because he is tired, but because he needs to be quiet.
Rachel Joyce
Singapore is now in the top five. Its income per person even tops oil-rich and scarcely populated Kuwait. Having realized that the country had no natural resources, the government of founding father Lee Kuan Yew directed massive investment in human capital. Kids who were eight or ten or thirteen several decades ago are now some of the most productive citizens of today's economy.A tiny nation-state with no natural resources and a large number of people living in a relatively small physical space has managed to outearn a country with some of the largest oil deposits ever found. That is the power of investing in and nurturing young brains.Education alone may not be enough to guarantee economic success. There are other success factors that matter, like good governance, rule of law, and access to trading routes and partners. But if you were challenged to assemble a prosperous society from scratch, education would be the first building block you'd want to develop.
John Wood
I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.
Kazuo Ishiguro
The marquis stared at Richard, openly amused. "What a refreshing mind you have, young man," he said. "There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?
Neil Gaiman
The first stanza of Eyes In Moonlight Drown, a poem from DeadVerse.With your face framed in a halo of stars,your hair melts into trailing clouds,and your eyes in moonlight drown.A man could lose himselfin those freckled irises,reflecting the galaxies above;surely he could fall into their promiseof eternity, of Heaven, of love.Your lips glisten, part, and beckon,a smile of warm invitation,a suggestion of sweet intensity,a loss of self in addictive agony.For we translate these aestheticsinto something mystical;ideas of fantasy, of fiction,obscuring the clinical truthof chemical reactions,electric sparks, responsesas sure as gravity,measurable yet beyond cold,above philosophy and below truth.
Scott Kaelen
If our minds can hold us back, then they can push us forwards too.
Sally Brampton
On with the dance! let joy be unconfin'd
George Gordon Byron
I turned into Little Red Riding Hood. I made a cake, packed it up and went through the forest until I met the wolves. That's something the story got wrong, wolves don't travel solo, they hunt in packs.
Louise Welsh
Sitting here, literally amongst the dead, reckoning up gains and losses, casting accounts, I have come to see gains that cannot be reckoned in terms of wealth, and losses that are more damaging than loss of a crop... I look at the River and I see the lifeblood of Egypt that has existed before we lived and that will exist after we die... Life and death, Renisenb, are not of such great account.
Agatha Christie
He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence.
William Blake
The newborn has only three demands. They are warmth in the arms of its mother, food from her breasts, and security in the knowledge of her presence. Breatfeeding satisfies all three.
Grantly Dick-Read
The magic, grace, growth and wonder of life is that wisdom follows a fall and defeat not from a win.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
What's that?" he snarled, staring at the envelope Harry was still clutching in his hand. "If it's another form for me to sign, you've got another -""It's not," said Harry cheerfully. "It's a letter from my godfather.""Godfather?" sputtered Uncle Vernon. "You haven't got a godfather!""Yes, I have," said Harry brightly. "He was my mum and dad's best friend. He's a convicted murderer, but he's broken out of wizard prison and he's on the run. He likes to keep in touch with me, though...keep up with my news...check if I'm happy....
J.K. Rowling
The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
Alfred North Whitehead
Men and the pursuit of them are strongly intertwined with my mental health. I would say, in my defensive defense, that the problem with being a serial monogamist is, there isn't anybody random or unimportant: everybody you sleep with really means something, which is to say each of them is on your public record. At some point I wake up thinking, Fuck this! I don't want another man in my bed ever again. What I really want is a cat.
Emma Forrest
A week is an eternity between lovers.
Anthony T.Hincks
He has made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.
H.G.Wells
All the accounts of the burial of Jesus are somber, laced through with the silence of grief, the shock that violence does to one's soul, even experienced vicariously in the body of another who is loved. They are written as though they are dirges, laments hidden in the silences and spaces between the words.
Megan McKenna
Instead of turning away from them (war conditions) in instinctive horror, as people seem to expect, the child may turn towards them with primitive excitement. The real danger is not that the child, caught up all innocently in the whirlpool of war, will be shocked into illness. The danger lies in the fact that the destruction ranging in the outer world may meet the very real aggressiveness ranging in the inside of the child
Anna Freud
When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.
Julian Barnes
What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow.What are brief? today and tomorrow.What are frail? spring blossoms and youth.What are deep? the ocean and truth.
Christina Rossetti
The moment had gone. I carried my secrets still with me, and they were hard, heavy, bitter things.
Susan Hill
I wanted so terribly to be good to him.
Dodie Smith
Enthusiasm is nothing more or less than faith in action.
Henry Chester
Live for each second without hesitation
Elton John
The crash did not cause the Depression: that was part of a far broader malaise. What it did was expose the weaknesses that underpinned the confidence and optimism of the 1920s - poor distribution of income, a weak banking structure and insufficient regulations, the economy's dependence on new consumer goods, the over-extension of industry and the Government's blind belief that promoting business interests would make America uniformly prosperous.
Lucy Moore
My God, these folks don't know how to love -- that's why they love so easily.
D.H. Lawrence
But he also knew this centurion, this man of honour, would change her…by giving her love…and love was the most powerful force in the universe.
Alan Kinross
So let us praise the distinctive pleasures of re-reading: that particular shiver of anticipation as you sink into a beloved, familiar text; the surprise and wonder when a book that had told one tale now turns and tells another; the thrill when a book long closed reveals a new door with which to enter. In our tech-obsessed, speed-obsessed, throw-away culture let us be truly subversive and praise instead the virtues of a long, slow relationship with a printed book unfolding over many years, a relationship that includes its weight in our hands and its dusty presence on our shelves. In an age that prizes novelty, irony, and youth, let us praise familiarity, passion, and knowledge accrued through the passage of time. As we age, as we change, as our lives change around us, we bring different versions of ourselves to each encounter with our most cherished texts. Some books grow better, others wither and fade away, but they never stay static.
Terri Windling
Maybe you are just a liquid dream. Seeping into my soul in the dead of night when everything sleeps apart from my memories from another life, another electric, terrifying, lasciviously greedy time, when your lips touched my body, while mapping the skincape unfolding beneath your breath leaving a ripple of mesmerising carnal pleasures, lingering in my veins...Or maybe you are not...
Virginia Alison
It should be part of our private ritual to devote a quarter of an hour every day to the enumeration of the good qualities of our friends. When we are not active we fall back idly upon defects even of those whom we most love.
Mark Rutherford
Chalmers, thanks to Baudelaire, knew all about Taffreuse Juive, opium, absinthe, negresses, Lesbos and the metamorphoses of the vampire ... Needless to say, Chalmers and myself were both virgins, in every possible meaning of the word.
Christopher Isherwood
Time went on grey, uncloured, like a long journey where she sat unconscious as the landscape unrolled beside her.
D.H. Lawrence
We don't want to give people straight answers. We'd rather they question things for themselves.
Deborah Curtis
The problem with the so-called bloody surveillance state is that it’s hard work trying to track someone’s movements using CCTV – especially if they’re on foot. Part of the problem is that the cameras all belong to different people for different reasons. Westminster Council has a network for traffic violations, the Oxford Street Trading Association has a huge network aimed at shop-lifters and pickpockets, individual shops have their own systems, as do pubs, clubs and buses. When you walk around London it is important to remember that Big Brother may be watching you, or he could be having a piss, or reading the paper or helping redirect traffic around a car accident or maybe he’s just forgotten to turn the bloody thing on.
Ben Aaronovitch
Stories are just lies made to look like truth.
Johnny Rich
The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.
John William Draper
The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.
John Lanchester
Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying
Salman Rushdie
What I saw was just one eyeIn the dawn as I was going:A bird can carry all the skyIn that little button glowing.Never in my life I wentSo deep into the firmament.
Harold Monro
New opinions are always suspected and usually opposed without any other reason but because they are not already common.
John Locke
Don’t want no more rock,” Orc repeated.The bleeding stopped almost immediately.“Does it hurt?” Lana asked. “I mean the rock. I know the hole hurts.”“No. It don’t hurt.” Orc slammed his fist against his opposite arm, hard enough that any human arm would have been shattered. “I barely feel it. Even Drake’s whip, when we was fighting, I barely felt it.”Suddenly he was weeping. Tears rolled from human eyes onto cheeks of flesh and pebbles.“I don’t feel nothing except…” He pointed a thick stone finger at the flesh of his face.“Yeah,” Lana said. Her irritation was gone. Her burden was smaller, maybe, than Orc’s.
Michael Grant