Quotes by British Authors - Page 125

It tells him what to say. I know it sounds ridiculous,” muttered Hugh.“How can a book tell a man what to say?
Terry Pratchett
Purification in Shinto lifts the burden from the shoulders of the individual and washes it away.
Stuart D.B. Picken
It is particularly important to note that, in a democracy, education has never been concerned only with supplying the needs of the economy or ensuring effective socialisation; it also has strong traditions of preparing for citizenship, extending possibilities for learning and promoting social progress.
Gaby Weiner
There is a certain seductiveness about what is dead. It will retain all those admirable qualities of life with none of that tiresome messiness associated with live things. Crap and complaints and the need for affection. You can auction it, museum it, collect it. It’s much safer to be a collector of curios, because if you are curious, you have to sit and sit and see what happens. You have to wait on the beach until it gets cold, and you have to invest in a glass-bottomed boat, which is more expensive than a fishing rod, and puts you in the path of the elements. The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.
Jeanette Winterson
Courage ought to have eyes as well as arms.
H. G. Bohn
Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?
Virginia Woolf
Life is short. The sooner that a man begins to enjoy his wealth the better.
Samuel Johnson
For I dance And drink and sing,Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing.If thought is lifeAnd strength and breathAnd the wantOf thought is deathThen am IA happy flyIf I liveOr if I die
William Blake
Coming back to Karachi is like stepping into the sea again after months on land. How easily you float, how peaceful is the sense of being borne along, and how familiar the sound of the water lapping against your limbs.
Kamila Shamsie
High altitude astronomy is a strange world of oxygen starvation, sleep deprivation and radiation sickness.
Steven Magee
You can never be really sure of how much you believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life or death to you.
C.S. Lewis
Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps a patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine.
Edmund de Waal
Science is a river with two sources, the practical source and the theoretical source.
Alfred North Whitehead
Evolution has geared the human stress response to last about thirty seconds. It's enough time to facilitate fight or flight. Evolution has not adapted our brains or bodies to handle weeks or months of prolonged stress.
David Amerland
Pray for God’s grace to nurture on the inside what He calls us to live out on the outside.
Elizabeth George
Avoid the mindless chaos that pervades vast swathes of society.
Steven Redhead
I hold that a strongly marked personality can influence descendants for generations.
Beatrix Potter
What is this life so full of care,We don't have time to stand and stare.
W.H. Davies
There's pride and then there's stupidity.
Robert Galbraith
it is the people who control the Government, not the Government the people.
Winston S. Churchill
I took the sing from your song. I made a bed where you don't belong.
Ben Howard
Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!
William Golding
A ghost who has only a lay knowledge of the subject will be able to keep asking the same questions as the lay reader, and will therefore open up the potential readership of the book to a much wider audience.
Robert Harris
Friendship is love without his wings!
Lord Byron
Everything I am seems to be inside my awareness, rather than my awareness being inside of me.
Jay Woodman
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
It is no good to think that other people are out to serve our interests.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
No relationship is perfect. No matter how much love there is, there's a strong chance you're going to hit rocky times at some point. Life is unpredictable. It can throw out the unexpected and the challenging. Coping with that requires trust and honesty.
Sarah Morgan
Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
Alan W. Watts
He blamed every fucker available excepting, of course, the one who was actually to blame, the one sitting in his saddle and getting colder, hungrier, and more lost with every unpleasant moment. ‘Shit!’ he roared at nothing.
Joe Abercrombie
Thank goodness I was never sent to school it would have rubbed off some of the originality.
Beatrix Potter
He wanted to be stopped, to be dragged back, to be sent back home... But he was home. Hogwarts was the first and best home he had known. He and Voldemort and Snape, the abandoned boys, had all found home here...
J.K. Rowling
Numbers and more numbers...the future of mankind has come down to decimals. I guess you will figure that out, eventually.
Anthony T.Hincks
Two worst things as can happen to a child is never to have his own way - or always to have it.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
This isn't normal. This isn't how normal people think. Fuck off, world- what the hell is normal anyway?
Elizabeth Haynes
[Life] has been passing since the day he was born, and everything he puts off, chooses not to do or say because he is hoarding experience for his real, adult life isn't a thing safeguarded but a treasure risked. The world is full of things put off for the wrong reasons, which can suddenly become impossible without warning. They hang in the air like ghosts, their mouths and eyes sewn up forever. They will never be able to speak, but if it was you who put them there, you will always be forced to see them.
Barney Norris
-Paint-My girlfriend is so besotted that she can't take her eyes off me. After we've turned out the light she puts on her night-vision goggles, and watched me as I sleep. Quite often I am woken by her sighing and involuntary yelps of happiness. This has been going on for years, and is showing no sign of abating. Once I asked her to stop all this infra-red activity, but it didn't really work; I'd wake up to find her covering me in luminous paint, and softly whispering, 'Sometimes I wonder if you know how much I love you.
Dan Rhodes
We’re to be married. Does it matter if I permit it?”“To me it does, yes,” says Merek. “And I imagine you, like me, appreciate the illusion of having a choice, even when illusion is all it is.
Melinda Salisbury
Jeese, I thought, fear choking me. I was being targeted by a ‘tangoed’ psychopath!
Adele Rose
I flung open the door. I got a momentary flash of about a hundred and fifteen cats of all sizes and colours scrapping in the middle of the room, and then they all shot past me with a rush and out of the front door; and all that was left of the mobscene was the head of a whacking big fish, lying on the carpet and staring up at me in a rather austere sort of way, as if it wanted a written explanation and apology.
P.G. Wodehouse
I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity.The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain.
Pico Iyer
If one has to submit it is wasteful not to do so with the best grace possible.
Winston Churchill
It's snowing still," said Eeyore gloomily."So it is.""And freezing.""Is it?""Yes," said Eeyore. "However," he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately.
A.A. Milne
No one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: …there’s a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet." JG Ballard, 2004
J.G. Ballard
Passion is not such an emotion as a destiny.
Jeanette Winterson
With him everything is a test, affection is measured, that given weighed against that which has been received, and the balance, more often than not, disappointing him.
S.J. Watson
They all went indoors with their new friends, and found rooms so small as none but those who invite from the heart could think capable of accommodating so many.
Jane Austen
Change the status quo or become it
Terence Mauri
I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.
John Locke
He is a good and a great man; but he forgets, pitilessly, the feelings and claims of little people, in pursuing his own large views. It is better, therefore, for the insignificant to keep out of his way, lest, in his progress, he should trample them down.
Charlotte Brontë
HELP!”I race to the square, crossing it, looking all around, listenin
Patrick Ness
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.
G.K. Chesterton
You have many fine qualities that I admire. But you are out of time. You should have been born a century ago, when values such as yours meant something.
Jasper Fforde
I will never take what is never given, but I will receive to what is given.
Michael Jones
To aim at the best and to remain essentially ourselves is one and the same thing.
Janet Erskine Stuart
Solace is what we must look for when the mind cannot bear the pain, the loss or the suffering that eventually touches every life and every endeavour; when longing does not come to fruition in a form we can recognize, when people we know and love disappear, when hope must take a different form than the one we have shaped for it.
David Whyte
If someone is determined to kill himself, nothing will stop him.
Dorothy Simpson
I thought how you can never tell just by looking at them what they were thinking or what was happening In their lives. Even when you got daft people or drunk people on buses, people that went on stupid and shouted rubbish or tried to tell you all about themselves, you could never really tell about them either... I knew if somebody looked at me, they'd know nothing about me, either.
David Almond
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I foundA hedgehog jammed up against the blades,Killed. It had been in the long grass.I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.Now I had mauled its unobtrusive worldUnmendably. Burial was no help:Next morning I got up and it did not.The first day after a death, the new absenceIs always the same; we should be carefulOf each other, we should be kindWhile there is still time.
Philip Larkin
There's no point having wishes if you don't at least try to do them
Sally Nicholls