Quotes by British Authors - Page 132

We are what we are. If you are different, it's because you are special. Don't let anyone tell you differently.
John Inman
I don't know, Benes. I'm not sure I've ever really understood women for that kind of commitment.' He flipped his beer mat up int the air with his index finger and caught it in his hand.
F.C. Malby
It seems to me that there are three principal scales of time, the present moment, a human lifetime, and the eternal. The problem with modern man is not so much that he situates himself in the future of a human lifetime, since he fears death far too much to do that, but rather than he does not situate himself in any of these three scales of time. Instead, he is forever stuck somewhere in-between, this evening, tomorrow morning, next week, next Christmas, in five years’ time. As a result, he has neither the joy of the present moment, nor the satisfied accomplishments of a human lifetime, nor the perspective and immortality of the eternal.
Neel Burton
Listen to me. Forget all you saw. Leave it. Take your mind from it. It has nothing to do with you. But use it for experience. Now you know what hurt it brings to women when men come into the world. Remember, and make it up to your Mama and to all women...And another thing let it do. There is no room for pride in any man. There is no room for unkindness. There is not room for wit at the expense of others. All men are born the same, and equal. As you saw today, so come Captains and the Kings and the Tinkers and the Tailors. Let the memory direct your dealings with men and women. And be sure to take good care of Mama. Is it?
Richard Llewellyn
I don't have a lot of patience for stories in which women are rescued by men.
Neil Gaiman
How clear, how lovely bright,How beautiful to sight Those beams of morning play;How heaven laughs out with gleeWhere, like a bird set free,Up from the eastern sea Soars the delightful day.To-day I shall be strong,No more shall yield to wrong, Shall squander life no more;Days lost, I know not how,I shall retrieve them now;Now I shall keep the vow I never kept before.Ensanguining the skiesHow heavily it dies Into the west away;Past touch and sight and soundNot further to be found,How hopeless under ground Falls the remorseful day.
A.E. Housman
It never occurred to me to wonder why I, a religion reporter, got the biggest story of the day, though, clearly, whatever else it was, it was a religion story. It wasn't until about twenty years later that a friend who had been managing editor at a Gannett paper said to me: "Rob, don't your realize you were probably the ONLY religion reporter in the whole country who got that story?" I still don't know why I got it. Maybe they figure I was the only one in the newsroom who had any idea what a Sikh was. Or knew how to find them, let alone Hindus, in Orange Country, California
Paul Marshall
Sam and Caine were left standing side by side, bruised and battered, to stare over Penny's sickening corpse, at the face of their mother.
Michael Grant
Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.
Jasper Fforde
The central problem of our age is how to act decisively in the absence of certainty.
Bertrand Russell
Mothers are inscrutable beings to their sons, always. ("The Higgler")
A.E. Coppard
All I was aware of was this hole, this gaping hole where my heart should have been. I read somewhere once that your heart is supposed to be the same size as your clenched fist, but this hole felt far bigger. It seemed to expand over my whole upper body and it felt cold, vacant - the cooling wind seemed to cut right through it. I felt frail and insubstantial, as if the wind could have blown me away.
Maggie O'Farrell
Because I haven't yet learned the simplest and most important thing of all: the world is difficult, and we are all breakable. So just be kind.
Caitlin Moran
The artist like the idiot or clown sits on the edge of the world and a push may send him over it.
Osbert Sitwell
To live without love for others is to live in aridity, to be self-serving and fruitless. To live without understanding is to live without sense or purpose. To live without awareness is to live as the deaf, blind and dumb in a world of vibrant light and sound.
Belsebuub
In fine, that it is not enough to be good, without behaving in such a manner as shall make others acknowledge us to be so.
Eliza Haywood
Rocket Fever Grips Nation's Teenagers' cheers on enthusiastic newsreel, reflecting the nation's sudden reversal in attitude following the successful launch of Explorer-I into Earth orbit. Rather than being strange and threatening, outer space looks set to become the next big distraction after Elvis Presley and Davy Crockett hats. 'More and more teenagers are passing up rock and roll for a rocket role,' commentator Michael Fitzmaurice blithely remarks before very probably wishing he hadn't.
Ken Hollings
You are a pool of clear water where the light plays
Jeanette Winterson
And then I noticed the dandelions.
Melvin Burgess
You do not mean there is danger of peace?", cried Jack.
Patrick O'Brian
Just supposing," he said, "just supposing" --he didn't know what was coming next, so he thought he'd just sit back and listen--"that there was some extraordinary way in which you were very important to me, and that, though you didn't know it, I was very important to you, but it all went for nothing because we only had five miles and I was a stupid idiot at knowing how to say something very important to someone I've only just met and not crash into lorries a the same time, what would you say..." He paused, helplessly, and looked at her."I should do.
Douglas Adams
In the digital domain trust is now important not only because we really need to know how to trust people and whom to trust but because we need others to trust us and have to learn how to help them do so.
David Amerland
We took such care of tomorrow, but died on the way there.
Warsan Shire
My idea of Christmas, whether old-fashioned or modern, is very simple: loving others. Come to think of it, why do we have to wait for Christmas to do that?
Bob Hope
An ‘usband should be plain enough to sit at his settle, and simple-minded enough to accept the stew on his plate, rather than looking round ev’ry corner for a more succulent chop,’ declares Elsie.
Emmanuelle de Maupassant
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is a pity because this week the National Association of Beholders wrote to tell me that I've got a face like a rucksack full of dented bells.
Charlie Brooker
Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex
Charlotte Brontë
Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions they pass no criticisms.
George Eliot
Man, to Lewis, is an immortal subject; pains are his moral remedies, salutary disciplines, willing sacrifices, playing their part in a drama of interchange between God and him.
Jocelyn Gibb
For over a century, an evolving microcosm of Anthropology’s turbulent history has hidden behind the staid façade of the American Museum of Natural History. From an insider’s perspective, the well-known ethnologist Stan Freed engagingly introduces us to an amazing cast of explorers, eccentrics, idealists, pranksters and forbidding intellectual - an unlikely mix that played a key role in establishing the science of Anthropology as we know it today.
Ian Tattersall
Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire.
Samuel Johnson
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
John Berger
If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata--of creatures that worked like machines--would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.
C.S. Lewis
The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.
Christopher Hitchens
Altogether he was one in whom no man would have seen anything to admire, and in whom no woman would have seen anything to dislike.
Thomas Hardy
Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale - to the Jag mobile.
Ben Aaronovitch
Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy's ground...All the same, it is His invention, not ours...All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden...An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula.
C.S. Lewis
Just smile.You'll be glad that you did.
Anthony T.Hincks
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.
George Orwell
Theirs not to make reply,Theirs not to reason why,Theirs but to do and die.Into the valley of DeathRode the six hundred.
Alfred Tennyson
Love rules the court, the camp, the grove, and men below, and the saints above, for love is heaven, and heaven is love.
Walter Scott
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Samuel Johnson
It was Matthews, of course, for whom the verdict was the greatest disaster. Not only had he failed to escape from Bedlam, but the anomalies of the case made it highly unlikely that he would have the chance to appeal again. His family and friends had assembled an impeccable case, most of which had been ignored.
Mike Jay
Come forth into the light of things. Let nature be your teacher.
William Wordsworth
What is sometimes thought to be clever is, significantly often, merely an advanced form of foolishness.
Idries Shah
How wonderful it must be, to be unable to remember things that once caused us distress. Yet we should embrace all our memories, whether joyful or painful. They're all we ever really own in this life.
Isabel Wolff
The pressures and penalties of existence in the modern capitalist system are intense; and they are penalties not for what is consciously chosen, but for ways of life which are forced like strait-jackets on people. At its superficial level, there is a common feeling of being conned by mass communications, extorted by commerce, lied to by politicians and treated like dirt by bureaucrats.
Robert Barltrop
Birds sing even when the world is filled with sadness. I don't know why people can't do the same thing.
Michael Gilbert
Cause they say home is where your heart is set in stone, it's where you go when're you're alone, its were you go to rest your bones. It's not just where you lay your head, it's not just where you make your bead. As long as we're together does it matter where we go?
Gabrielle Aplin
Lunatics are writers whose works write them, Bat." "Not all lunatics are writers, Mrs. Rey-believe me." "But most writers are lunatics, Bat-believe me. The human world is made up of stories, not people.
David Mitchell
Discussions of death and such matters do more to unlock the human tongue than any other subject.
Agatha Christie
Faith is an act of self-consecration in which the will the intellect and the affections all have their place.
William Ralph Inge
What you believe is what you perceive.
Steven Redhead
Mr. Charles Dickens was serializing his novel Oliver Twist; Mr. Draper had just taken the first photograph of the moon, freezing her pale face on cold paper; Mr. Morse had recently announced a way of transmitting messages down metal wires. Had you mentioned magic or Faerie to any of them, they would have smiled at you disdainfully, except, perhaps for Mr. Dickens, at the time a young man, and beardless. He would have looked at you wistfully.
Neil Gaiman
Every day in my consultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not the slightest idea who they really are or what it is that matters to them. The question 'How shall I live?' is not one I can answer on prescription.
Jeanette Winterson
The spells are made up. I have met people who assure me, very seriously, that they are trying to do them, and I can assure them, just as seriously, that they don’t work.
J.K. Rowling
Dakin: The more you read, though, the more you'll see that literature is actually about losers.Scripps: No.Dakin: It's consolation. All literature is consolation.
Alan Bennett
Life is a wonderfully fine thing. Go live it.
Fennel Hudson
In March of 1915, all three of Lord and Lady Chetwynd-Pitt's sons'd been gassed, blown up or machine-gunned in the very same week at the battle of Neuve-Chapelle. All three. Imagine that: On Monday, you've got three sons, by Friday you've got none. Lady Albertina had just, y'know, caved in. Physically, mentally, spiritually, brutally.
David Mitchell
No one, I fancy, would discredit a story that the Archbishop of Canterbury slipped on a banana skin merely because he found that a similar comic mishap had been reported of many people, and especially of elderly gentlemen of dignity.
J.R.R. Tolkien