Quotes by British Authors - Page 123

People who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t
Stephen Fry
Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty.
Julian Barnes
We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.
Neil Gaiman
Also I didn't habe 20/20 vision whch you needed to be a pilot. But I said you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.
Mark Haddon
THE ELITES AND THE LESSERS, ONE LOOKS DOWN UPON THE OTHER.IF YOU'RE A ROAMER, YOU'RE NO LONGER PART OF THE ELITES.BECOMING A NEW-LESSER MAY SAVE YOU. IF ONLY FOR A LITTLE WHILE. THREE ISLANDS TWO COLLIDE THE THIRD IS A MYSTERY.
Charon Lloyd-Roberts
There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
Ian McEwan
Locking away appetite, anger, the fullness of life, anorexia helps cover up whatever struggles inside. With its controlling bouts of bingeing and starvation, of trance and half-life, it becomes a shield to fend off despair and longing and what most of use would see as ordinary responsible behavior.
Carol Lee
But why," he said with animation, "do the English not read their own great literature?"Victor laughed triumphantly, and said, "Because at school they are made to hate it.
Olaf Stapledon
A novel must show how the world truly is, how characters genuinely think, how events actually occur. A novel should somehow reveal the true source of our actions.
Kevin Hood
I'm living so far beyond my means that we may almost be said to be living apart.
Saki
She knew, now, why her father had not spoken of the last war, nor Alistair of his. It was hardly fair on the living.
Chris Cleave
...I experienced a sudden ache -- part desolation, part panic -- to observe the speed with which this mate, this familiar, was transforming herself into a separate person.
Ian McEwan
Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?
Douglas Adams
In some ways, discovering that our physical universe is formed in a completely different way to what we thought is a bit like someone in a Star Trek Holodeck program suddenly seeing a bit of the actual spaceship and questioning their own sense of ‘what is real?
Richard Gentle
Don't worry. Chivalry has practically no appeal for me whatsoever. -- Neville Fletcher
Georgette Heyer
I've never listened to music lying down. Listening's reading if you close your eyes.Music's a wood you walk through.
David Mitchell
The more doubtful the political outlook the fiercer will be the dogmas which men create and contend for.
John Buchan
There you go, Harry!” Ron shouted over the noise. “You weren’t being thick after all — you were showing moral fiber!
J.K. Rowling
What Douglas had once seen as the attractive over-confidence of youth, now looked more like unyielding selfishness.
Len Deighton
Excellence in any pursuit is the late ripe fruit of toil.
W. M. L. Jay
It requires a deliberate mental effort to turn biology the right way up again, and remind ourselves that the replicators come first, in importance as well as in history.
Richard Dawkins
Economists often talk about the 80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the “work” will be done by 20 percent of the participants. In most societies, 20 percent of criminals commit 80 percent of crimes. Twenty percent of motorists cause 80 percent of all accidents. Twenty percent of beer drinkers drink 80 percent of all beer. When it comes to epidemics, though, this disproportionality becomes even more extreme: a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work.
Malcolm Gladwell
What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
Henry Havelock Ellis
Mistakes happen and life is full of twists and turns, but you mustn’t let any set backs hold you back from moving forward. Life is too short to dwell on things that have gone wrong.
Emily Williams
And trade is art, and art's philosophy,In Paris.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
You can't put off being young until you retire.
Philip Larkin
NASA astronauts have only managed to live continuously on the International Space Station (ISS) for a year and Biosphere 2 on Earth failed at two years of uninterrupted human habitation. Both cases required extracting the sickened people from the toxic environments. At this point it is ludicrous to talk about a permanent manned base on Mars.
Steven Magee
All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer.
Stephanie Lennox
Ladies sheltering behind men, men sheltering behind servants - the whole system's wrong, and she must challenge it.
E.M. Forster
The total absence of humour in the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
Alfred North Whitehead
The nails from a suicide's coffin, and the skull of the parricide, were of course no trouble; for Vesquit never traveled without these household requisites.
Aleister Crowley
Stories are a communal currency of humanity.
Tahir Shah
Find your truth and make your existence real as you choose it. Your creation is your own greatest gift. (Neings of Light via Joules)
Jay Woodman
The price the Virgin demanded was purity, and the way the educators of Catholic children have interpreted this for nearly two thousand years is sexual chastity. Impurity, we were taught, follows from many sins, but all are secondary to the principal impulse of the devil in the soul--lust.
Marina Warner
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.
J.M. Barrie
[The Edwardian era] was a time of booming trade, of great prosperity and wealth in which the pageant of London Society took place year after year in a setting of traditional dignity and beauty. The great houses—Devonshire, Dorchester, Grosvenor, Stafford and Lansdowne House—had not yet been converted into museums, hotels and flats, and there we danced through the long summer nights till dawn. The great country-houses still flourished in their glory, and on their lawns in the green shade of trees the art of human intercourse was exquisitely practised by men and women not yet enslaved by household cares and chores who still had time to read, to talk, to listen and to think.
Violet Bonham Carter
Nothing that is good can become stuck – and if it is stuck, it can’t be any good!
Silvia Hartmann
Many people have the ambition to succeed they may even have a special aptitude for their job. And yet they do not move ahead. Why? Perhaps they think that since they can master the job there is no need to master themselves.
John Stevenson
Because, visible through the slashed covers, the bone-deep wounds that crisscross the couple’s bodies pump blood. Some of the flaps of skin resulting from glancing blows are like gills, breathing. Yet even as the cries die away, he carries on.
Mark Kirkbride
I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.
Jane Austen
But deciding not to have children is a very, very hard decision for a woman to make: the atmosphere is worryingly inconducive to saying, "I choose not to," or "it all sounds a bit vile, tbh." We call these women "selfish" The inference of the word "childless" is negative: one of lack, and loss. We think of nonmothers as rangy lone wolves--rattling around, as dangerous as teenage boys or men. We make women feel that their narrative has ground to a halt in their thirities if they don't "finish things" properly and have children.
Caitlin Moran
You will never get the best out of anyone professionally unless you understand what motivates and makes them tick personally - as a human being
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Known unto God are all His works from the beginning of the world” (Acts 15:18). From the beginning God purposed to glorify Himself “in the Church by Christ Jesus, throughout all ages, world without end” (Eph. 3:21). To this end, He created the world, and formed man. His all-wise plan was not defeated when man fell, for in the Lamb “slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8) we behold the Fall anticipated. Now will God’s purpose be thwarted by the wickedness of men since the Fall, as is clear from the words of the psalmist, “Surely the wrath of man shall praise Thee: the remainder of wrath shalt Thou restrain” (Ps. 76:10).
Arthur W. Pink
And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Why it's simply impassible!Alice: Why, don't you mean impos
Lewis Carroll
They bewailed innocence maltreated, goodness persecuted, love bleeding, meekness about to die; but my heart has a deeper and more bitter cause to mourn. My sins were the scourges which lacerated those blessed shoulders, and crowned with thorn those bleeding brows: my sins cried “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” and laid the cross upon His gracious shoulders. His being led forth to die is sorrow enough for one eternity: but my having been His murderer, is more, infinitely more, grief than one poor fountain of tears can express.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
When we think we lead we most are led.
Lord Byron
Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.
Ernest Gellner
Let’s take this figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. Does the feminist kill other people’s joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or negated under public signs of joy? Does bad feeling enter the room when somebody expresses anger about things, or could anger be the moment when the bad feelings that circulate through objects get brought to the surface in a certain way?
Sara Ahmed
Because he believed in himself, he believed what he did was important. Or maybe it was the other way around.
Johnny Rich
The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.
Charles Dickens
Teachers're always using that "in your own words." I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It's their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily? How're you s'posed to say Kapellmeister if you can't say Kapellmeister?
David Mitchell
The problem: If you've an antique for sale, then, sad to relate, the world isn't your oyster. It's not that easy. Even if somebody gives you the National Gallery, your options are still very, very limited. Okay, you can sell the Old Masters, set up a trust, buy your favorite brewery. But that's strictly it. You're limited by honesty on one hand and law - that hobble of sanity - on the other.
Jonathan Gash
You hear with your ears, but you listen with an open mind.
Anthony T.Hincks
Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
Rebecca West
Learn from the past, log the lessons from the past, butleave the past!
Elizabeth George
April is the cruelest month, breedinglilacs out of the dead land, mixingmemory and desire, stirringdull roots with spring rain.
T.S Eliot
Work on what is real rather than worry about what is unreal.
Elizabeth George
I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, in-built, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women.
Hilary Mantel
Sentimentalist” is the abuse with which people counter the accusation that they are cruel, thereby implying that to be sentimental is worse than to be cruel, which it isn’t.
Brigid Brophy