Quotes by British Authors - Page 121

Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.
Charles Stross
The usual fiction – that the war would involve precision targeting and the careful avoidance of civilian deaths – was stated by Tony Blair at the beginning of the war. After similar bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia and Iraq, Blair was by now acting as virtual White House spokesperson, providing the pretence of an 'international coalition' in what was clearly a US war. This role was more important than Britain's military contribution, which in the early days of the bombing campaign was token and probably of no military value. The British army did later prove useful, however, when it was...
Mark Curtis
You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope...I have loved none but you.
Jane Austen
Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?
Virginia Woolf
Tis of the tears which stars weep sweet with joy.
Francis Bailey
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
George Orwell
...the sole test of music is its power to exalt the soul.
Aleister Crowley
When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.
Harry Burns
I'm allergic to family occasions. Sometimes I think we'd do better as dandelion seeds-no family, no history, just floating off into the world, each on our own piece of fluff.
Sophie Kinsella
Shall I be'her'?
Colin Clark
I—I didn't think—""That," said Professor McGonagall, "is obvious.
J.K. Rowling
When you find yourself wanting to turn your children, or pupils, or even your neighbours, into people exactly like yourself, remember that God probably never meant them to be that. You and they are different organs, intended to do different things.
C.S. Lewis
The children seemed to cast their Precursors like shadows about the house, sometimes tangibly, in the sound of a voice, sometimes by suggestion, because it was striking the hour for their return from a walk, sometimes mysteriously, because inside the shell of their mother's head the children were painted like angels on the roof of a chapel.
Enid Bagnold
For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with his elegant quickness...For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins.For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against adversary.For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin & glaring eyes.
Christopher Smart
A piece of information can change a person. I'd hate to change the way I'm supposed to live the future.
Samantha Young
The hard part is putting one word after another.
Jo Linsdell
He still smelled of limes. It made saliva come into her mouth. It made her feel that before she had been sleepy, and now she was awake.
Monica Ali
Lettie shrugged. “Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.
Neil Gaiman
Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
John Berger
She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.
J.B. Priestley
The fact is that five years ago I was, as near as possible, a different person to what I am tonight. I, as I am now, didn't exist at all. Will the same thing happen in the next five years? I hope so.
Siegfried Sassoon
The main things are the plain things, and the plain things are the main things.
Alistair Begg
Graveyards were the one place Belladonna never saw ghosts.
Helen Stringer
If you always make the right decision, the safe decision,the one most people make, you will be the same as everyone else.
Paul Arden
The king's "only interest in government was a pious but simpleminded desire for reproachment
Dan Jones
If the requirements of world-structure are so inexorable, what scope is there for a free providence in distributing pleasures and pains? If pains are the natural rubs of a world-structure bearing on sentient creatures, what need have we to view them as instruments of a disciplinary providence?
Jocelyn Gibb
The two seasons; deepest winter from above and nascent spring from below, created a juxtaposition that drew the scene into the land of legend sitting only a heartbeat away behind a translucent river of time.
Felix Long
Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn
Bertrand Russell
I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted?
Neil Gaiman
If you don't want me to attend the patient I'll go.''But she can't see a doctor now.''Why not?''She isn't well.
P.G. Wodehouse
There is no need to put your heart in a bottle, then you will die.- Ty from Stolen
Lucy Christopher
People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.
A.A. Milne
BLAKE: I’ve come to learn that people are going to hate you and like you, no matter what. I’d rather be around people I want to be around.
Sam Crescent
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.
Jeanette Winterson
I believed, from the solitary and thoughtful way in which my mother murmured her song, that she was alone. And I went softly into the room. She was sitting by the fire, suckling an infant, whose tiny hand she held against her neck. Her eyes were looking down upon its face, and she sat singing to it. I was so far right, that she had no other companion. I spoke to her, and she started, and cried out. But seeing me, she called me her dear Davy, her own boy! and coming half across the room to meet me, kneeled down upon the ground and kissed me, and laid my head down on her bosom near the little creature that was nestling there, and put its hand up to my lips. I wish I had died. I wish I had died then, with that feeling in my Heart! I should have been more fit for Heaven than I ever have been since.
Charles Dickens
How doe we define the energy of thought versus the energy of action.
Meg Rosoff
Gratitude is the best food and fuel to start anything that you need to do - it will nourish and sustain you...and others too. Hankering will leave you hungry - or with with heart, head or belly ache - and tends to have or leave a sour or bitter taste too.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people and greatly assists the circulation of their blood.
Logan Pearsall Smith
My name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.
J.R.R. Tolkien
You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage.
Terry Pratchett
So what was it then exactly, this truth-telling? ... It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive. It was about finding a language. And it was about being true to the fact, the one thing only followed from the other, that many things in life —of so many more than we think—can never be explained at all.
Graham Swift
It had not hurt his hands at all and the sudden release of energy, twinned with Dom's fall, gave him a sudden lunatic rush of euphoria.
Adam Nevill
The educated man, habitually, almost without noticing it, sees the present as something that grows out of a long perspective of centuries. In my the minds of my RAF hearers this perspective simply did not exist. It seemed to me that they did not really believe that we have any reliable knowledge of historic man. But this was often curiously combined with a conviction that we knew a great deal about Prehistoric Man: doubtless because Prehistoric Man is labelled "Science" (which is reliable) whereas Napoleon or Julius Caesar is labelled as "History" (which is not.
C.S. Lewis
I didn't hear you come in. I was away with the ghosts of my beautiful youth.
Eva Rice
Aim to live the life that gives you the most of what you want.
Steven Redhead
We must each find our separate meaning in the persuasion of our days until we meet in the meaning of the world.
Christopher Fry
Watchfulness is the path of immortality:Unwatchfulness is the path of death.Those who are watchful never die:Those who do not watch are already as dead.Those who with a clear mind have seen this truth,Those who are wise and ever watchful,They feel the joy of watchfulness,The joy of the path of the great.And those who in high thought and in deep contemplationWith ever living power advance on the path,They in the end reach NIRVANA,The peace supreme and infinite joy.~ Buddha
Juan Mascaró
I just take the train from platform nine and three-quarters," - Harry Potter
J.K. Rowling
I want to sling a stone, a small rock into a pool, see it ripple. I want to shake a tree, create a small storm..
Suzy Davies
It isn't where you're born in this world, it's what you do.
Winston Graham
Nothing of worthy or weight can be achieved with half a mind with a faint heart and with a lame endeavor.
Isaac Barrow
There is a tide in the affairs of women Which taken at the flood leads - God knows where.
Lord Byron
One thing I will say, they often take it better than a man. Pain, that is. Probably the residue of tolerance from when they were all bloody witches and got stoned or burned or drowned for it, eh lad? Never tell your mother I said that, by the way.
Sarah Hall
For our path in life...is stony and rugged now, and it rests with us to smooth it. We must fight our way onward. We must be brave. There are obstacles to be met, and we must meet, and crush them!
Charles Dickens
All animals except man know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it.
Samuel Butler
Any marriage happy or unhappy is infinitely more interesting and significant than any romance however passionate.
W.H. Auden
When I worked at the W. M. Keck Observatory on the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea, we would routinely be engulfed in cold clouds of helium and nitrogen gas as we discharged it into the video camera systems daily. The management team never warned us that we were in a hazardous oxygen deprived environment during this activity that was known for its ability to adversely affect physical and mental health, and possibly bring on death by asphyxiation.
Steven Magee
To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head - and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself.
Alan Moore
When in doubt as to what you should do, err on the side of 'giving.
Tony Cleaver
Ferranti's thoughts had been his. As before he had understood his remorse so now he understood the mental chains that had imprisoned him. The poor wretch could not move. Misery had become apathy and apathy had brought the inevitable paralysis of the will.
Elizabeth Goudge