Quotes by British Authors - Page 122

I don't mind admitting that I, too, have watched Hilton undergoing the sexual act. I phrase it as crudely as that because it was one of the least erotic such sequences I have ever seen. She seemed to know what was expected of her and to manifest some hard-won expertise, but I could almost have believed that she was drugged. At no point did her facial expression match even the simulacrum of lovemaking.
Christopher Hitchens
The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy it lasts when all other pleasures fade.
Anthony Trollope
Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class life-style will never write anything but crap.
Derek Raymond
Sometimes I think that we're the aliens.
Anthony T.Hincks
Oh, to awake from dreaming!
Virginia Woolf
All of yesterday's ballers are today's road sweepers.
Habeeb Akande
Your highness, when I said that you are like a stream of bat's piss, I only mean that you shine out like a shaft of gold when all around it is dark
Graham Chapman
Funding for the Special Operations Network comes directly from the government. Most work is centralized, but all of the SpecOps divisions have local representatives to keep a watchful eye on any provincial problems. They are administered by local commanders, who liaise with the national offices for information exchange, guidance and policy decisions. Like any other big government department, it looks good on paper but is an utter shambles. Petty infighting and political agendas, arrogance and sheer bloody-mindedness almost guarantees that the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing.
Jasper Fforde
See, loving heart, how He delights in you. When you lean your head on His bosom, you not only receive, but you give Him joy; when you gaze with love upon His all-glorious face, you not only obtain comfort, but impart delight.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
The true object of human life is play.
G.K. Chesterton
If fate means you to lose give him a good fight anyhow.
William McFee
People care more about being thought to have good taste than about being thought either good clever or amiable.
Samuel Butler
The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion.
Alexander Hamilton
In November, when our nation remembers her fallen soldiers and honours the lost youth of my generation, the Prime Minister, government leaders and the hollow men of business affix paper poppies to their lapels and afford the dead of war two minutes' silence. Afterwards, they speak golden platitudes about the struggle and the heroism of that time. Yet the words they speak are meaningless because they have surrendered the values my generation built after the horrors of the Second World War.
Harry Leslie Smith
...is impossible to specify what [consciousness] is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.
Stuart Sutherland
Choices are made before explanations, whether or not we care to know it.
L.S. Hilton
Literature itself is a species of code. You line up symbols and create a simulacrum of life.
Marcel Theroux
He let the curtain drop and the terrible light that had played on his features went off to play somewhere more healthy.
Douglas Adams
For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my 'race,' unless I was permitted to put 'human.' The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put 'white,' which is not even a color let alone a 'race,' and I sternly declined to put 'Caucasian,' which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you 'black.
Christopher Hitchens
This world is all vanity. It is a tempest hurling us from one sorrow to another.
Jocelyn Murray
Make life a wonder to behold.
Steven Redhead
Maybe he'd never come acrross anybody as well versed at objectifying body parts as I was. In my defense, this was an occupational hazard; one of the tricks of my trade was the ability to work with whatever was at hand. Over the years I'd learned to pinpoint my focus to the width of a pubic hair if there was nothing else to work with. (...) Before my eyes -or, more precisely, in my mind- Rasher became Lovely Bum Man.
Aiden Shaw
What wonderful things dreams are! They can make you be anything you want and take you anyplace in the world.
Harry Bernstein
I will not be threatened. Do you understand me?’ He leaned closer again, his lips less than a couple of inches from hers. ‘Now try saying it without trembling.
Lindsay J. Pryor
A state which savagely represses or persecutes sections of its people cannot in my view be regarded as observing the rule of law, even if the transport of the persecuted minority to the concentration camp or the compulsory exposure of female children on the mountainside is the subject of detailed laws duly enacted and scrupulously observed.
Tom Bingham
Reluctant to return to the empty rooms of Bluebell Cottage, Olivia ate fish and chips on the harbor wall, dangling her legs over the side just like she used to as a little girl, even though it made her mam anxious.The breeze nipped at the back of her neck and whipped up a fine sea spray that settled on her hands, leaving sparkling salt crystals as it dried. Fairy dust, she used to call it. She breathed in the fresh air and absorbed the view: tangerine sky and dove-gray sea, ripples on the surface of both, like dragon scales. She savored the sharp tang of vinegar on her tongue, letting her thoughts wander as the sun slowly melted into the sea, turning it to liquid gold.
Hazel Gaynor
They ordered punch. They drank it. It was hot rum punch. The pen falters when it attempts to treat of the excellence thereof; the sober vocabulary, the sparse epithet of this narrative, are inadequate to the task; and pompous term, jewelled, exotic phrases rise to the excited fancy. It warmed the blood and cleared the head; it filled the soul with well-being; it disposed the mind at once to utter wit, and to appreciate the wit of others; it had the vagueness of music and the precision of mathematics. Only one of its qualities was comparable to anything else; it had the warmth of a good heart; but its taste, its smell, its feel, were not to be described in words.
W Somerset Maugham
My interest in Sufism began when I was a college student. At the time, I was a rebellious young woman who liked to wrap several shawls of ‘-isms’ around her shoulders: I was a leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, anarcho-pacifist…I wasn’t interested in any religion and the difference between ‘religiosity’ and ‘spirituality’ was lost to me. Having spent some time of my childhood with a loving grandmother with many superstitions and beliefs, I had a sense the world was not composed of solely material things and there was more to life than I could see. But the truth is, I wasn’t interested in understanding the world. I only wanted to change it.
Elif Shafak
A half knowledge of another's life mostly does injustice to the life unknown.
Thomas Hardy
Is the writer cruel that makes his characters suffer only to bring them to triumph or tragedy in the end?
Johnny Rich
You know, people ask me. They say 'Dan, three years later do you really want to be drawing cat whiskers on your face?' but they don't understand. The cat whiskers, they come from within.
Dan Howell
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
Samuel Butler
Chaos is complexity viewed through a reductionist filter.
Silvia Hartmann
Five years of someone's life is too much to lose over a throwaway comment.
Clare Mackintosh
and vinegar that makes them sour—and camomile that makes them bitter—and—and barley-sugar and such things that make children sweet-tempered. I only wish people knew that: then they wouldn’t be so stingy about it, you know—
Lewis Carroll
We make our decisions, and then our decisions turn around and make us.
F.W. Boreham
When the world came to, it came, not to its senses, but to its madness.
Helen O'Reilly
In a spornographic age it’s no longer enough for the male body to be presented to us by consumerism as merely attractive, or desiring to be desired, as it was in the early days of nakedly narcissistic male metrosexuality. This masculine coquettish-ness, pleasing as it is, no longer offers an intense enough image. Or provokes enough lust. It’s just not very shocking or arousing any more. In fact, it’s just too… normal. To get our attention these days the sporting male body has to promise us nothing less than an immaculately groomed, waxed and pumped gang-bang in the showers.
Mark Simpson
The history of ancient Greece showed that, in a democracy, emotion dominates reason to a greater extent than in any other political system, thus giving freer rein to the passions which sweep a state into war and prevent it getting out—at any point short of the exhaustion and destruction of one or other of the opposing sides. Democracy is a system which puts a brake on preparation for war, aggressive or defensive, but it is not one that conduces to the limitation of warfare or the prospects of a good peace. No political system more easily becomes out of control when passions are aroused. These defects have been multiplied in modern democracies, since their great extension of size and their vast electorate produce a much larger volume of emotional pressure.
B.H. Liddell Hart
The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.
W.H. Auden
God I have been - God I am. But quite frankly, sometimes it is all just a little too much for one small cat.
Paul Gallico
Meticulousness is the better part of serendipity.
Reginald Hill
We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow. Our wiser sons, no doubt will think us so.
Alexander Pope
In a sane world I should be a great man; as things are, in this curious establishment, I am nothing at all; to all intents and purposes I don't exist. I am just a Vox et preaterea nihil.
Aldous Huxley
I’ve learned that being alone and being lonely are not the same thing. Once I was surrounded by people and lonely for it, but now I’m alone and I’ve never been so content.
Melinda Salisbury
Being in Harry Potter is like being in the Mafia. Once you are in, you are never really out.
Daniel Radcliffe
You, Jane, I must have you for my own--entirely my own.
Charlotte Brontë
The truth is, he was so glad at being free from his long enchantment that all dangers seemed a game in comparison. But the rest found it an eerie journey.
C.S. Lewis
Here I am going to say something which may come as a bit of a shock. God doesn't necessarily want us to be happy. He wants us to be lovable. Worthy of love. Able to be loved by Him. We don't start off being all that lovable, if we're honest. What makes people hard to love? Isn't it what is commonly called selfishness? Selfish people are hard to love because so little love comes out of them.
William Nicholson
I like to think of this little [newspaper] column as a brassière, or do I mean brasserie? Brazier, possibly. All three! A column that lifts, separates, supports, serves excellent cappuccino and crackles merrily with sweet-smelling old chestnuts.
Stephen Fry
It is generally recognized that women are better than men at languages, personal relations and multitasking, but less good at map-reading and spatial awareness. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that women might be less good at mathematics and physics. It is not politically correct to say such things....But it cannot be denied that there are differences between men and women. Of course, these are differences between the averages only. There are wide variations about the mean.
Stephen Hawking
But…but you can’t treat religion as a sort of buffet, can you? I mean, you can’t say yes please, I’ll have some of the Celestial Paradise and a helping of the Divine Plan but go easy on the kneeling and none of the Prohibition of Images, they give me wind. Its table d´hôte or nothing, otherwise…well, it would be silly.
Terry Pratchett
Angling is an innocent cruelty.
George Parker
Learn the techniques to open the Power of Your Heart, giving access to the infinite potential possibilities that truly exist for you.
Steven Redhead
If naturalists go to heaven (about which there is considerable ecclesiastical doubt), I hope that I will be furnished with a troop of kakapo to amuse me in the evening instead of television.
Gerald Durrell
I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Am I really admitting that my sister is determined to marry a man she has only seen once and doesn't much like the look of? It is half real and half pretense - and I have an idea that it is a game most girls play when they meet an eligible young men. They just...wonder.
Dodie Smith
We pledge to fight 'blue-sky thinking wherever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day.
Gavin Pretor-Pinney
Prayer is only another name for good, clean, direct thinking. When you pray, think well what you are saying, and make your thoughts into things that are solid. In that manner, your prayer will have strength, and that strength shall become part of you, mind, body, and spirit.
Richard Llewellyn
It’s not the quality of the answers that changes our lives, it’s the quality of the question
Steven Aitchison