Quotes by British Authors - Page 13

You are a wise man, Major, and I will consider your advice with great care—and humility." He finished his tea and rose from the table to go to his room. "But I must ask you, do you really understand what it means to be in love with an unsuitable woman?" "My dear boy," said the Major. "Is there really any other kind?
Helen Simonson
Some men are too dull to feel what might happen. Others torture themselves with maybes and populate their dreams with horrors more terrible than their worst enemy could inflict upon them.
Mark Lawrence
The authority of the Church was thrown over by the authority of the state. Twenty years only have passed, and the authority of the state is already thrown over by the authority of conscience. ... I fear for those yet unborn, that they are already betrayed. Robbed of the truth we can inherit, they will know their sins as only misery, and their forgiveness they will not know at all because they do not know God. Then at last men will be free of God. Then they will be slaves indeed.
Lucy Beckett
I gotta look out for my band mates. - Tea
Jamie Scallion
Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
Lionel Shriver
When a man becomes a Christian, he becomes industrious, trustworthy and prosperous. Now, if that man when he gets all he can and saves all he can, does not give all he can, I have more hope for Judas Iscariot than for that man!
John Wesley
Too fair to worship too divine to love.
Henry Hart Milman
Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.
Agatha Christie
Let it all go, one foot in the grave and one bag packed. We shall go to our end in the warm glow of the past, burning up the memories, all the clutter given back.
Peter R. Pouncey
Sim sighed. "like Ross always said: Wish in one hand,shit in the other,and see which hand fills up first.
Keith Gray
Writer Brigid Brophy exposes [their motives] with great precision:"Whenever people say 'We mustn't be sentimental,' you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add 'We must be realistic,' they mean they are going to make money out of it. These slogans have a long history. After being used to justify slave traders, ruthless industrialists, and contractors who had found that the most economically 'realistic' method of cleaning a chimney was to force a small child to climb it, they have now been passed on, like an heirloom, to the factory farmers. 'We mustn't be sentimental' tries to persuade us that factory farming isn't, in fact, cruel. It implies that the whole problem had been invented by our sloppy imaginations.
Peter Cox
Don't get your panties in such a twist... and give me back mine.
E.L. James
He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James."No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader.
George Eliot
When you've been everywhere, tried it all and done it all, what's left is the exploration of self, intellectually and sexually, through curiosity and erotica.
Chloe Thurlow
Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge fitter to bruise than to polish.
Anne Bradstreet
Grey hoped the Church would yet be able to save England from the fate of Tyre or Carthage, the great trading nations
Thomas Hughes
There is a psychospiritual disease of the soul that originates within ourselves and that has the potential to destroy our species or to wake us up, depending on whether or not we recognize what it is revealing to us.
Paul Levy
I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature, should be completed.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
You're so... You're too... You're..." He faltered, then took a deep breath. "I have no words for you, Sita. You leave me speechless."I smiled and pinched his buttock so he twitched. "Speechless? Gods, I've broken you. I never would have deemed it possible to render you speechless.
Erica Dakin
Marian was suddenly overcome by an appalling crippling panic. She was very frightened at the idea of arriving. But it was more than that. She feared the rocks and the cliffs and the grotesque dolmen and the ancient secret things. Her two companions seemed no longer reassuring but dreadfully alien and even sinister. She felt, for the first time in her life, completely isolated and in danger. She became in an instant almost faint with terror.She said, as a cry for help, ‘I’m feeling terribly nervous’.‘I know you are,’ said Scottow.(…)Marian was appalled at the sudden quietness. But the insane panic had left her. She was frightened now in an ordinary way, sick in her stomach, shy, tongue-tied, horribly aware of the onset of a new world.
Iris Murdoch
They stamped their own pattern of lovers onto the fabric of Paris.
Emma Calin
Antisemitism is unique among religious hatreds. It is a racist conspiracy theory fashioned for the needs of messianic and brutal rulers, as dictators from the Tsars to the Islamists via the Nazis have shown. Many other alleged religious 'hatreds' are not hatreds in the true sense. If I criticise Islamic, Orthodox Jewish or Catholic attitudes towards women, for instance, and I'm accused of being a bigot, I shrug and say it is not bigoted to oppose bigotry.
Nick Cohen
In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day.
Neil Gaiman
It's a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.
Tracy Chevalier
Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation.
Aldous Huxley
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.
Emily Brontë
Their laughter was like the stridulation of the ghosts of grasshoppers.
John Collier
What, indeed, is a New Yorker? Is he Jew or Irish? Is he English or German? Is he Russian or Polish? He may be something of all these, and yet he is wholly none of them. Something has been added to him which he had not had before. he is endowed with a briskness and an invention often alien to his blood. He is quicker in his movement, less trammeled in his judgement...The change he undergoes is unmistakeable, New York, indeed, resembles a magic cauldron. Those who are cast into it are born again.
Charles Whibley
Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.
Lewis Carroll
Black as night, sweet as sin.
Neil Gaiman
Outside the bus the smell of sulphur hit Bond with sickening force. It was a horrible smell, from somewhere down in the stomach of the world.
Ian Fleming
The silence of the storm weighs heavilyOn their strained spirits: sometimes one will saySome trivial thing as though to ward awayMysterious powers, that imminently lieIn wait, with the strong exorcising graceOf everyday's futility. DesireBecomes upon a sudden a crystal fire,Defined and hard: If he could kiss her face,Could kiss her hair! As if by chance, her handBrushes on his ... Ah, can she understand?Or is she pedestalled above the touchOf his desire? He wonders: dare he seekFrom her that little, that infinitely much?And suddenly she kissed him on the cheek.
Aldous Huxley
Monsieur Foinet got up and made as if to go, but he changed his mind, and, stopping, put his hand on Philip's shoulder."But if you were going to ask me my advice, I should say: take your courage in both hands and try your luck at something else. It sounds very hard, but let me tell you this: I would give all I have in the world if someone had given me that advice when I was your age and I had taken it."Philip looked up at him with surprise. The master forced his lips into a smile, but his eyes remained grave and sad."It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it's too late. It does not improve the temper."He gave a little laugh as he said the last words and quickly walked out of the room.
W Somerset Maugham
I want to know what's wrong with loving someone for life? Even when they're dead? What exactly is wrong with that? Why should I put him away, out of my mind? Like he's out of fashion. Does no one love for ever any more? Is no one built for the long road?
Josephine Hart
I am sad, like the hot dust on the streetsAnd the music of fresh fallen leavesCaught in a sliding summer breeze.
Scott Hastie
I want him to live if HE wants to live. If he doesn't, then by forcing him to carry on, you, me..... we become just another shitty bunch of people taking away his choices.
Jojo Moyes
M'sieur, I am as a slave to my wife." He kissed the tips of his fingers. "I am as the dirt beneath her feet." He clasped his hands. "I must bestow on her all that she desires, or die!""Pray make use of my sword, " invited his Grace. "It is in the corner behind you.
Georgette Heyer
In short, to enter the lists of literature is wilfully to expose yourself to the arrows of neglect, ridicule, envy, and disappointment. Whether you write well or ill, be assured that you will not escape from blame...
Matthew Lewis
Why have a dream then squander it by not taking steps to achieve it.
Steven Redhead
If Vorbis was right, and there was a kind of light that made darkness visible, then down there was its opposite, the darkness where no light could ever reach: darkness that blackened light, He thought of blind Didactylos and his empty lantern.
Terry Pratchett
Wouldst thou both eat they cake and have it?
George Edward Herbert
the perhaps rather prosaic truth that law is an imperfect yet indispensable vehicle by which both to conserve and transform society
Raymond Wacks
They call it poetry, what she feels with her mouth closed. By his.
Douglas Self
Everyone's afraid of what they don't understand," Ringil said quietly.
Richard K. Morgan
We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.
John Henry Newman
From the hills in the early dawn,Small, thin, mist-wreathed, she came upon him;Hair sodden to the brow,Eyes like agates,Lips apart, tongue flicking at words frozen in her head.Gliding to his feet, She caught his hand and said'come help me, mister, or she'll be dead.
Catherine Cookson
What plagues people is not those who don't love them, but those who do.
Michael Gilbert
Faith is above all openness an act of trust in the unknown.
Alan Watts
However difficult death is for us to accept, we must... how would we learn to appreciate each moment if it were not precious? If life were forever?
Michelle Harrison
This was all very well: Columbanus's success indicates the appeal of his mission. But his activities, for the first time, brought the nature of Celtic monasticism firmly to the attention of the Church authorities -- to western bishops in general, and to the Bishop of Rome in particular. The Irish monks were not heretical. But they were plainly unorthodox. They did not look right, to begin with. They had the wrong tonsure. Rome, as was natural, had 'the tonsure of St Peter', that is, a shaven crown. Easterners had the tonsure of St Paul, totally shaven; and if they wished to take up an appointment in the West they had to wait until their rim grew before being invested. But the Celts looked like nothing on earth: they had their hair long at the back and, on the shaven front part, a half-circle of hair from one ear to the other, leaving a band across the forehead.
Paul Johnson
I understood that if ever one wanted to live with someone you cooked for them and they came running. But then it is my idea of hell these days, living with someone. The idea of sharing your life with someone is just utterly ghastly. I know why people do it, but it's never a good idea.
Nigel Slater
We shouldn't live as if [other worlds] mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.
Philip Pullman
I have wrought my simple planIf I give one hour of joyTo the boy who’s half a man,Or the man who’s half a boy.
Arthur Conan Doyle
'Time to live dangerously. We're having pancakes.'
Barbara Elsborg
I think people should take mythology much more seriously, because it tells us an awful lot about the history of the human race. We tend to dismiss it as 'fairy tales,' when it isn't. Fairy tales in themselves are about fundamentals of human nature. And they keep being reinvented in different ways. Fantasy acknowledges that, whereas a lot of modern literature is trying to distance itself from 'story,' never mind anything else. Which is why a lot of books are read by the critics, then people buy them, put them on their shelves, and don't really read them much, because they're not very interesting!
Jan Siegel
I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.
John Fowles
It is so beautiful but home is home, and home is best.
Michael Morpurgo
I still hear the world spinning.
Kamila Shamsie
And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall.
D.H. Lawrence
Q: I want to be an author when I grow up. Am I insane?"Neil Gaiman: "Yes. Growing up is highly overrated. Just be an au
Neil Gaiman