Quotes by British Authors - Page 133

The Suitors Ball is fast approaching and it's a nasty reminder that my suitor will be chosen shortly. I feel sorry for the poor unfortunate guy, whichever one of them it happens to be.
Siobhan Davis
I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.
Margaret Thatcher
But one day he said to me:‘I’ve got it now. It’s reading isn’t it?’‘I’m sorry?’‘You read a lot, don’t you? That’s where it all comes from. Reading. Yeah, reading.’The next time I saw him he had a Herman Hesse novel in his hands. I never saw him again without a book somewhere on his person. When I heard, some years later, that he had got into Cambridge I thought to myself, I know how that happened. He decided one day to read.
Stephen Fry
Skinny jeans were only good if you had skinny genes.
Matt Dunn
At certain rare moments, a library is a kind of mind.
David Mitchell
If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
T.S Eliot
I don't just want to ban The Bomb. I want to ban all bombs, whatever, and all bombers, whoever, and all bombings, whyever. There have to be better ways of saying no and making changes.
Aidan Chambers
The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?" "You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers," said the Controller sarcastically. "You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to.
Aldous Huxley
As a romantic ideal, turbulent, impoverished India could still weave its spell, and the key to it all - the colours, the moods, the scents, the subtle, mysterious light, the poetry, the heightened expectations, the kind of beauty that made your heart miss a beat - well, that remained the monsoon.
Alexander Frater
...for in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.
Evelyn Waugh
A lady is as young as the gentleman she feels," said Roy and cackled happily.
M.C. Beaton
Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.
Virginia Woolf
But for each high, there's a low. Periods of such despair and listlessness that you don't ever see a way of getting out of it. Everything's bad. Nothing's ever going to be all right again. There's no reason to get out of bed in the morning. You don't want to talk to anybody, and when you do you end up pissing them off. You can't remember what it's like to be happy.
McFly
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.
Charlotte Brontë
I don't like straight lines: men make them.
Richard Adams
If God annihilates or deflects or creates a unit of matter, He has created a new situation at that point. Immediately nature domiciles this new situation, makes it at home in her realm, adapts all other events to it. It finds itself conforming to all the laws. If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born
C.S. Lewis
We all love best not those who offend us least, nor those who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.
Samuel Butler
During a very busy life I have often been asked "How did you manage to it all?" The answer is very simple: it is because I did everything promptly.
Sir Richard Tangye
If wine is the enemy of religion, I shall devour the enemy of religion.
Idries Shah
Hold on to your periwigs, I'm going to start you off with a whirlwind tour of the history of Stuart Britain; a time that encompassed the vast majority of the seventeenth century and the first fourteen years of the eighteenth.
Andrea Zuvich
If I was president of the Slime Committee, I'd make it easier to come clean about shit. If coming clean is what you're supposed to do, then it should be made more fucken accessible, I say.
D.B.C. Pierre
They say I am a reformer. They say wrong: for I have long since given up any such chimerical idea, as that of being able to make men happier who are wicked and miserable by prescription. Withdrawing, therefore, from any such Utopian and hopeless attempt, I believed the best thing I could do was, to relieve, where I could, individual distress, and to lighten the chains that villany often imposes on simplicity under the name of law. In this I have done some good, and what else ought a man to do on this earth?
Charlotte Turner Smith
There is a huge trapdoor waiting to open under anyone who is critical of so-called 'popular culture' or (to redefine this subject) anyone who is uneasy about the systematic, massified cretinization of the major media. If you denounce the excess coverage, you are yourself adding to the excess. If you show even a slight knowledge of the topic, you betray an interest in something that you wish to denounce as unimportant or irrelevant. Some writers try to have this both ways, by making their columns both 'relevant' and 'contemporary' while still manifesting their self-evident superiority. Thus—I paraphrase only slightly—'Even as we all obsess about Paris Hilton, the people of Darfur continue to die.' A pundit like (say) Bob Herbert would be utterly lost if he could not pull off such an apparently pleasing and brilliant 'irony.
Christopher Hitchens
I'm not interested in the reviews by critics over the age of 15.
Mark A. Cooper
People who expect too much are always disappointed. You would do well to remember that, my boy.
Charmian Hussey
My mother is not evil, Faith reminded herself. She is just a perfectly sensible snake, protecting her eggs and making her way in the world as best she can.
Frances Hardinge
The stuff you bring back from dreams is free.
Neil Gaiman
You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin – to the bitter end. And you can trust us to keep any secret of yours – closer than you yourself keep it. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word. We are your friends, Frodo. Anyway: there it is. We know most of what Gandalf has told you. We know a good deal about the ring. We are horribly afraid–but we are coming with you; or following you like hounds.
J.R.R. Tolkien
When you steal from the library, you are preventing anyone else from reading that book, and the very notion makes me want to drop you in the Void.
Piers Anthony
In the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are six foot two or taller. Among my CEO sample, almost a third were six foot two or taller.
Malcolm Gladwell
It appears your son was 85 percent curry!
Danny Wallace
All evil begins with this belief: that another’s existence is less precious than mine.
Tony Hendra
For the only slavery is desire, and he who learns to let go, to climb the wind-swept hills of self-becoming, naked of all possessions and desire, will drink the mountain air of freedom, and find the peace that lies not in the satisfaction but in the controlling of desire.
Christmas Humphreys
Where there is laughter there is always more health than sickness.
Phyllis Bottome
Every physical response, every psychological change and every mental transformation starts with the mind.
David Amerland
Change is scientific, ‘progress’ is ethical. Change is indubitable whereas progress is a matter of controversy.
Bertrand Russell
Music is energy, emotion, expression, escapism, enlightenment. Music is so much more than just entertainment.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Man is to be understood only in his relation to God.
C.S. Lewis
There is a dangerous willful ignorance in governments to the adverse health effects of the various forms of electromagnetic radiation.
Steven Magee
Let children alone... the education of habit is successful in so far as it enables the mother to let her children alone, not teasing them with perpetual commands and directions - a running fire of Do and Don’t ; but letting them go their own way and grow, having first secured that they will go the right way and grow to fruitful purpose.
Charlotte M. Mason
The free man never thinks of escape.
Jeanette Winterson
Opinion is usually something which people have when they lack comprehensive information.
Idries Shah
Pet names are a persistant remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.
Joseph Conrad
I'd rather die fighting over great poets than over gods.
Salman Rushdie
Brave is the thief who carries a lamp in his hand.
Idries Shah
A man's sexual aim, he had often said to himself, is to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature that is the opposite of these; to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal.
Kingsley Amis
Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.
A.E. Housman
When they killed him, Mother wouldn't hold her peace, so they slit her throat. I was stupid then, being only nine, and I fought to save them both. But the thorns held me tight. I've learned to appreciate thorns since. The thorns taught me the game. They let me understand what all those grim and serious men who've fought the Hundred War have yet to learn. You can only win the game when you understand that it IS a game. Let a man play chess, and tell him that every pawn is his friend. Let him think both bishops holy. Let him remember happy days in the shadows of his castles. Let him love his queen. Watch him loose them all.
Mark Lawrence
For the writer under Actually Existing Socialism describing sex is a simple matter: he simply does not do it (the describing, I mean, not the sex).
Philip Sington
We both loved the birds and animals and plants. We both felt far happier out of doors. I felt a peace in nature that I could never find in the human world, as you know.
Tracy Rees
Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.
P.G. Wodehouse
She said that the mummy and the daddy took their daughter up onto the moor. They had a picnic. They’d brought all of her favourite food – cheese sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off and strawberry-pink cupcakes – and when the little girl had finished eating, she looked around for her mummy and the daddy. But they’d gone. They’d left Evelyn on the moor by herself.
Sanjida Kay
Fire will save the Clan," she murmured, and Fireheart remembered the mysterious prophecy that he had heard from his earliest days in ThunderClan. "You never understood, did you?" Bluestar went on. "Not even when I gave you your apprentice name, Firepaw. And I doubted it myself, when fire raged through our camp. Yet I see the truth now. Fireheart, you are the fire who will save ThunderClan.
Erin Hunter
There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.
Anthony Powell
She went indoors in that peculiar state of misery which is not exactly grief, and which especially attends the dawnings of reason in the latter days of an ill-judged, transient love. To be conscious that the end of the dream is approaching, and yet has not absolutely come, is one of the most wearisome as well as the most curious stages along the course between the beginning of a passion and its end.
Thomas Hardy
When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
Thomas Hardy
It’s like my whole life my left ring finger has been lacking something, and finally it feels complete.
Anna Bell
I took my line straight away. I knew I was staking everything, but I jumped there and then. "We're on absolutely the biggest thing that has ever been invented," I said, and put the accent on "we." "If you want to keep me out of this, you'll have to do it with a gun. I'm coming down to be your fourth labourer to-morrow.
H.G.Wells
I closed my eyes, adding dark to dark, and the wanting unfurled like the sails of a phantom ship. This could be my universe. This nowhere world, circumscribed by skin and breath, where nothing mattered but two bodies moving together. The past and the future rendered irrelevant by the beauty of the now, the sum of the self transmuted into a moment. Oh, was there ever a more seductive definition of madness?
Alexis Hall