Quotes by British Authors - Page 127

You cannot be kind unless you have all the other virtues.
C.S. Lewis
To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world.
Virginia Woolf
Reading off a page is like looking down at a landscape from a balloon – your eye "sees" the story as well as reads it, its layout, its paragraphs and structure, and "remembers" what it just read because it's still there, on the page, simultaneously. If you want to, you can reread any line instantly; or linger; or speed up; or optically "flinch." Reading a series of tweets is more like looking through a narrow window from a train speeding through a landscape full of tunnels and bands of light and dark. Each tweet erases its predecessor.
David Mitchell
Fuck your honour, Kaisheen. You are the smartest man I know, yet you had me travel three days during winter to have my counsel. Are you making a move on the Emperor? If you are, you’ll have my full support and the backing of the Monasteries.
Paul W.S. Bowler
The streak of bleach in my hair is as obvious as ever. Am I really going out in public like this? I push my hair backward and forward a few times - but I can't hide it. Maybe I could walk along with my hand carelessly positioned at my head, as if I'm thinking hard. I attempt a few casual, pensive poses in the mirror."Is your head all right?"I swivel round in shock to see Nathaniel at the open door, wearing a plaid shirt and jeans."Er...fine," I say, my hand still glued to my head. "I was just..."Oh, there's no point. I bring my hand down from my hair and Nathaniel regards the streak for a moment."It looks nice," he says. "Like a badger.""A badger?" I say, affronted. "I don't look like a badger.""Badgers are beautiful creatures," says Nathaniel with a shrug. "I'd rather look like a badger than a stoat.
Sophie Kinsella
The man who wishes to know the "that" which is "thou" may set to work in any one of three ways. He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and, by a process of "dying to self" --- self in reasoning, self in willing, self in feeling --- come at last to knowledge of the self, the kingdom of the self, the kingdom of God that is within. Or else he may begin with the thous existing outside himself, and may try to realize their essential unity with God and, through God, with one another and with his own being. Or, finally (and this is doubtless the best way), he may seek to approach the ultimate That both from within and from without, so that he comes to realize God experimentally as at once the principle of his own thou and of all other thous, animate and inanimate.
Aldous Huxley
Fly the pleasure that bites tomorrow.
George Edward Herbert
Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you'll find an edge to cut you.
Mark Lawrence
It was weird, ’cause there we were in Italy listening to people singing in German. The music was nice, though, and there was this guy dressed up like a parrot. If you’d asked me a year ago to guess what opera was like, I’d never have guessed it had guys dressed as parrots. I might’ve wanted to go and see some sooner if I’d known. It was a sweet story, ’cause he met this girl who was dressed as a parrot too, and they got off together.
J.L. Merrow
Come on you target for faraway laughter. Come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!
Pink Floyd
The first and last weakness of his life, before him again. For a moment he felt himself blinded by his own memories; his own remembrances of the wits and wiles of Marian Halcombe that would steal into his thoughts; the sound of her laughter at his outrageous tales, the shadowed glance of distrust, the way her eyebrows would raise ever so slightly despite her resolution to seem disinterested in his foreign insights. She was the first woman he ventured to have complete equality in matching his tremendous cleverness.
Wilkie Collins
Why are you trying so hard to fit in when you were born to stand out?
Ian Wallace
Sometimes we call what we do not understand primitive, sometimes magic. Each of us has a perspective to which we are attached. We only understand the other in relation to what we already know, but by believing, sympathising, even empathising, sometimes we can see beyond the limits of our knowledge. The alternative is to ignore or to attack.
Christopher Potter
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.
C.S. Lewis
Sometimes when I wake up, I forget that she's gone and then I remember and my heart drops like it does when you miss a step or trip over a kerb.
Annabel Pitcher
Girl going past clinging to a young man's arm. Putting up her face like a duck to the moon. Drinking joy. Green in her eyes. Spinal curvature. No chin, mouth like a frog. Young man like a pug. Gazing down at his sweetie with the face of a saint reading the works of God. Hold on, maiden, you've got him. He's your boy. Look out, Puggy, that isn't a maiden you see before you, it's a work of imagination. Nail him, girlie. Nail him to the contract. Fly laddie, fly off with your darling vision before she turns into a frow, who spends all her life thinking of what the neighbours think.
Joyce Cary
Smile, tip your traditional hat, and enjoy your time by the water.
Fennel Hudson
long middle finger resembling a twig that it could use for probing for grubs. There is a telling example of convergent evolution when an unrelated species (the Long-Fingered Possum from Papua New Guinea) devised a similar strategy to address the same problem. (Douglas was very intrigued by the implications of convergence. What need is there to posit a designer if the operation of random forces, constrained by the reality of the world, produces the same elegant solution, as if there were no choice in the matter?) We monkeys have
Nick Webb
[But] you can't find love if you're not willing to lose it. You can't find happiness if you're not willing to risk being sad. And you can't find the love of your life without risking breaking your heart.....drive in.
Kunal Nayyar
You will find her manners beyond anything I can describe; and your wit and vivacity, I think, must be acceptable to her, especially when tempered with the silence and respect which her rank will inevitably excite.
Jane Austen
What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Power does not always shout its presence, my Lady, and each of the two hundred men armed behind you on this road represent a thousand more ready to die at your command. Every word you speak has the weight of those men.
Jean Gill
Why should human females become sterile in their forties while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?
Aldous Huxley
You teach me now how cruel you've been - cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they'll blight you - they'll damn you. You loved me - what right had you to leave me? What right - answer me - for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will did it. I have no broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you - Oh, God! would you like to lie with your soul in the grave?
Emily Brontë
Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
Samuel Butler
They talk about big skies in the western United States, and they may indeed have them, but you have never seen such lofty clouds, such towering anvils, as in Iowa in July.
Bill Bryson
I must indeed abide the Doom of Men whether I will or nill: the loss and the silence. But I say to you, King of the Numenoreans, not till now have I understood the tale of your people and their fall. As wicked fools I scorned them, but I pity them at last. For if this is indeed, as the Elves say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I was brought up to be honest; the trouble is it gets me nowhere." Liking her better, he smiled and said, "It'll get us to heaven." "Will it?" "If heaven existed." "Do you not believe in heaven, Mr. Fielding, may I ask?" she said, looking at him shyly. "I do not. Yet I believe that honesty gets us there.
E.M. Forster
She lost her illusions in the collapse of her sympathies.
D.H. Lawrence
While the Gods are powerful, we learn little about them. It is only in their day of decadence that a strong light beats into heaven.
E.M. Forster
See, that’s what I want more of. A little spunk!’‘Fuck off!’ I yell, shocking myself with my vulgar language.‘Ooh, yes, carry on, you filthy-mouthed bitch!’I gasp and swing around, finding him grinning from ear to ear. ‘Wanker.’‘Cow.’‘Tosser.’He grins some more. ‘Dog.’‘Shirt-lifter,’ I retort.‘Tart.’I recoil, horrified. ‘I am not a tart!
Jodi Ellen Malpas
It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.
Stephen Fry
For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as do the ordinary people, but to fulfill it in its true potential - the imagination.
Lawrence Durrell
The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
Dorothy Nevill
There pass the careless peopleThat call their souls their own:Here by the road I loiter,How idle and alone.Ah, past the plunge of plummet,In seas I cannot sound,My heart and soul and senses,World without end, are drowned.His folly has not fellowBeneath the blue of dayThat gives to man or womanHis heart and soul away.There flowers no balm to sain himFrom east of earth to westThat's lost for everlastingThe heart out of his breast.Here by the labouring highwayWith empty hands I stroll:Sea-deep, till doomsday morning,Lie lost my heart and soul.
A.E. Housman
Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.
Mina Loy
The smallest issues can become the most important things in life and reality slips away.
David Millar
Hagrid: Harry -- yer a wizard.Harry: I'm a what?
J.K. Rowling
Body and mind like man and wife do not always agree to die together.
Charles Caleb Colton
Clay lies still but blood's a rover Breath's a ware that will not keep Up lad when the journey's over There'll be time enough to sleep.
A.E. Housman
Fake it till you feel it
Gemma Burgess
Men can be teenagers until well into their twenties. That is well known
Alexander McCall Smith
We went our several ways," said Lady Dedlock, "and had little in common even before we agreed to differ. It is to be regretted, I suppose, but it could not be helped.
Charles Dickens
Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.
Charles Dickens
So when people see me walking on the street, they feel like we're old pals. Women pull my cheeks and men clap me on the shoulder; I'm like a petting zoo. But movie stars, on the other hand, are much more untouchable. Those are people that you watch from afar. They're regal lions. I'm a friendly goat.
Kunal Nayyar
You are lucky, Renisenb. You have found the happiness that is inside everybody's own heart. To most women, happiness means coming and going, busied over small affairs. It is care for one's children and laughter and conversation and quarrels with other women and alternate love and anger with a man. It is made up of small things strung together like beads on a string.
Agatha Christie
There is a LIGHT in this world. A healing spirit more powerful than any darkness we may encounter. We sometime lose sight of this force when there is suffering, and too much pain. Then suddenly, the spirit will emerge through the lives of ordinary people who hear a call and answer in extraordinary ways.
Richard Attenborough
Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could n ever manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers . . . shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips.
Salman Rushdie
I have a feeling,’ he said, ‘I have a feeling that we were meant to be together. That we have fought the good fight, side by side, in the past or in the future, I do not know. I am a rational man, but I have learned the value of a good companion, and from the moment I clapped eyes on you, I knew I trusted you as well as I do myself. Yes, I want you with me.
Neil Gaiman
The word of sin is Restriction. O man! refuse not thy wife, if she will! O lover, if thou wilt, depart! There is no bond that can unite the divided but love: all else is a curse. Accursed! Accursed be it to the aeons! Hell.
Aleister Crowley
What was really unfair about the whole thing was that Oma Kristel hadn't so much exploded as spontaneously combusted. But Gossip is Baron Münchhausen's little sister, and never lets the truth get in the way of a good story.
Helen Grant
Oh, I can't help quoting you, because everything that you said rings true.
Morrissey
Sorry. But it isn’t for us to change how things are. I’m just an administrator. You’re just a teacher.”“Oh, I hope I don’t teach. Because look what we did: we saved the zoo animals and the nice children and we damned the afflicted and the blacks. You know what I do every day in that classroom? I do everything in my power to make sure those poor souls won’t learn the obvious lesson.”“If I were you,” said Tom, “I should stick to reading, writing and arithmetic.”“But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don’t show him that he counts for something?
Chris Cleave
Some of us don’t trust others unless there’s a reason to trust them.I prefer to trust others until they give me a reason not to.
Steven Aitchison
Shooting Willoughby carrying Marianne up the path. ... Male strength -- the desire to be cradled again? ... I'd love someone to pick me up and carry me off. Frightening. Lindsay assures me I'd start to fidget after a while. She's such a comfort.
Emma Thompson
We have not been created out of nothing, but from primeval "ur-matter," atoms formed billions of years ago that have for a brief while been gathered into collections that think they are us.
Frank Close
You should have told her differently,' said Hermione, still with that maddeningly patient air. 'You should have said it was really annoying, but I'd made you promise to come along to the Three Broomsticks, and you really didn't want to go, you'd much rather spend the whole day with her, but unfortunately you thought you really ought to meet me and would she please, please come along with you, and hopefully you'd be able to get away more quickly? And it might have been a good idea to mention how ugly you think I am too,' Hermione added as an afterthought.'But I don't think you're ugly,' said Harry, bemused.Hermione laughed.
J.K. Rowling
I grew up in an era that was a golden age of the blockbuster, when something we might call a family film could have universal appeal. That's something I want to see again. In terms of the tone of the film, it looks at where we are as a people and has a universality about human experience.
Christopher J. Nolan
What I think is a different matter. Maybe I think some rather curious things—but until thinking's got you somewhere it's no use talking about it.
Agatha Christie
It is customary, in England at least, for Coroners' courts to give the verdict 'Suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed'. This insult automatically puts the victim in the wrong and reassures Society that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Have you ever noticed that Socialist governments have a particular horror of the individual's suicide? It is a direct criticism of their basic tenets.
Nanavira Thera