Quotes by British Authors - Page 136

Getting rid of dragons is not at all in my line, but I will do my best to think about it. Personally I have no hopes at all, and wish I was safe back at home.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I think it is just a matter of getting into the mind of the writer,” Vetinari went on, looking at a letter covered with grubby fingerprints and what looked like the remains of someone’s breakfast. He added: “In some cases, I imagine, there is a lot of room.
Terry Pratchett
Strategy is about shaping the future.
Max McKeown
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Tom Stoppard
Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn:It listens, listens. Taller trees beyondListen. The moon at the unruffled pondStares. And you sing, you sing.That star-enchanted song falls through the airFrom lawn to lawn down terraces of sound,Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground;And all the night you sing.My dreams are flowers to which you are a beeAs all night long I listen, and my brainReceives your song, then loses it againIn moonlight on the lawn.Now is your voice a marble high and white,Then like a mist on fields of paradise,Now is a raging fire, then is like ice,Then breaks, and it is dawn.
Harold Monro
The only reason that the devil can read scripture, is that it was written with him in mind.
Anthony T.Hincks
I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean. At any moment you may be strolling peacefully along, and all the time Life's waiting around the corner to fetch you one. You can't tell when you may be going to get it. It's all dashed puzzling. Here was poor old George, as well-meaning a fellow as every stepped, getting swatted all over the ring by the hand of Fate. Why? That's what I asked myself. Just Life, don't you know. That's all there was about it.
P.G. Wodehouse
Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn’t show you your reflection. It showed you your soul—it showed you who you really were.The wizard couldn’t look at it without turning away. The king couldn’t look at it. The courtiers couldn’t look at it. A chestful of treasure was offered to anyone who could look at it for sixty seconds without turning away. And no one could.
Martin Amis
Poetry is a mug's game.
T.S Eliot
Our children's won't learn Kurdish Language fluently if we don't tech them.
Davan Yahya Khalil
There is no such thing as notoriety in the United States these days, let alone infamy. Celebrity is all.
Christopher Hitchens
A week is a long time in the life of a child.
Maxwell Grantly
Murder is only killing in the wrong place.
Pat Barker
A delusion a mockery and a snare.
Lord Denman
Passion is such a stronge emotion that it dominates everything. It's like a strong spice in a meal, or a dominant red in a painting. Your senses are drawn to it at the expense of everything else. Dominic and I were not physical friends, so to speak. But I did love him. We can't help loving the people we do, can we? But the love doesn't have to be physical. You can be equally intimate. It doesn't matter.
James Runcie
The bed we loved in was a spinning world of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seaswhere we would dive for pearls. My lover’s wordswere shooting stars which fell to earth as kisseson these lips; my body now a softer rhymeto his, now echo, assonance; his toucha verb dancing in the centre of a noun.Some nights, I dreamed he’d written me, the beda page beneath his writer’s hands. Romanceand drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -I hold him in the casket of my widow’s headas he held me upon that next best bed.
Carol Ann Duffy
I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn't. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one's aims are, that's the trouble, specially if you're British.
John le Carré
Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
Bertrand Russell
The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
Alan Bennett
He made a pit and digged it. He was cunning in his plans and industrious in his labors. He stooped to the dirty work of digging. He did not fear to soil his own hands. He was willing to work in a ditch if others might fall therein. What mean things men will do to wreak revenge on the godly. They hunt for good men as if they were brute beasts - they that will not give them the fair chase afforded to the hare or the fox, but must secretly entrap them because they can neither run them down nor shoot them down. Our enemies will not meet us to the face for they fear us as much as they pretend to despise us. But let us look on to the end of the scene. The verse says he has fallen into the ditch that he has made. Ah, there he is. Let us laugh at his disappointment. Lo, he is himself the beast. He has hunted his own soul. The chase has brought him a goodly victim. So should it ever be.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
He is worse than the others, I show. He is worst of all of them.Because–Because he knew he was doing wrong. He felt the pain of his actions–But he did not amend them, shows the Sky.The rest are worth as much as their pack animals, I show, but worst is the one who knows better and does nothing.
Patrick Ness
Photos’re better than nothing, but things’re better than photos ’cause the things themselves were part of what was there.
David Mitchell
He looked around at that one room, and the few things in it. He'd always thought retiring would be going back to his life after some nightmare pause. Some stretch of exile in the land of the dead. Now it came to him that all his life worth living had happened while he was holding a sword.Standing alongside his dozen. Laughing with Whirrun, and Brack, and Wonderful. Clasping hands with his crew before the fight, knowing he'd die for them and they for him. The trust, the brotherhood, the love, the knit closer than family. Standing by Threetrees on the walls of Uffrith, roaring their defiance at Bethod's great army. The day he charged at the Cunmur. And at Dunbrec. And in the High Places, even though they lost. The day he earned his name. Even the day he got his brothers killed. Even when he'd stood at the top of the Heroes as the rain came down, watching the Union come, knowing every dragged out moment might be the last.Like Whirrun said - you can't live more than that. Certainly not by fixing a chair.
Joe Abercrombie
He shall never know how I love him
Emily Brontë
Knowledge comes by revelation through the study of the Scriptures
Pedro Okoro
...Here, beast, you shall be the chairman, and mind you call us to order." He leaned forward and dropped the cat on the empty seat.
Winston Graham
I finally found my way to the Really Restricted Section, where they keep the kind of books most scholars aren't even supposed to know exist. I knocked on the closed door, said the proper passwords, and the door opened before me. I walked in, and the ghost of the Head Librarian, a thin, dusty presence, with dark eyes and a disapproving look, appeared before me, blocking my way. (He had been eaten by a book, then brought back by the other books, apparently because they approved of him. Because even though he didn't have much time for people, he loved books.)
Simon R. Green
i had a dream when i was 22 that someday i would go to the region of ice and snow and go on and on till i came to one of the poles of the earth
Ernest Shackleton
It’s a popular fact that 90 percent of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. . . . It is used. One of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary, to turn the unusual into the usual. Otherwise, human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing a stupid grin, saying “Wow,” a lot. Part of the brain exists to stop this from happening.
Terry Pratchett
On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it--that disgusts me
C.S. Lewis
Sensationalism dies quickly, fear is long-lived.
Agatha Christie
Problems are like top trumps. I have a pretty good card: Adulterous Mum. But Jordana's is still better: Tumour Mother.
Joe Dunthorne
Happiness is like time and space--we make and measure it ourselves; it is a fancy--as big, as little, as you please; just a thing of contrasts and comparisons, like health or strength or beauty or any other good--that wouldn't even be noticed but for sad personal experience of its opposite!--or its greater!
George du Maurier
People aren't often asked to make life or death decisions. There are no causes to die for. You can go through life never knowing which of your friends would really come through for you
Bella Pollen
No man likes to acknowledge that he has made a mistake in the choice of his profession, and every man, worthy of the name, will row long against wind and tide before he allows himself to cry out, 'I am baffled!' and submits to be floated passively back to land.
Charlotte Brontë
Unlike a variety of other relationships,friendship requires an acknowledgement by both parties that they are involved or it fails to exist.
Andrew Sullivan
We can't just run away. It's our land. Our people. We have a duty.
Selma Dabbagh
There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified.
Diarmaid MacCulloch
One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn't, of course. It's a small niggling thing.
Josephine Tey
The great thing and the hard thing is to stick to things when you have outlived the first interest and not yet got the second which comes with a sort of mastery.
Janet Erskine Stuart
One of my friends compared me to Bruce Banner, due to my work with radiation and human health. So I looked up Bruce Banner and this is what I found: Banner, a physicist, is sarcastic and seemingly very self-assured when he first appears in Incredible Hulk #1, but is also emotionally withdrawn in most fashions...Banner is considered one of the greatest scientific minds on Earth, possessing "a mind so brilliant it cannot be measured on any known intelligence test." He holds expertise in biology, chemistry, engineering, physiology, and nuclear physics.
Steven Magee
his face, though lined, bore few traces of anxiety. But, perhaps the confidential bachelor clerks in Tellson's Bank were principally occupied with the cares of other people; and perhaps second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.
Charles Dickens
We made love, and then she threw up.
Sarah Kane
Maybe he'd never come across anybody as well versed at objectifying body parts as I was. In my defense, this was an occupational hazard; one of the tricks of my trade was the ability to work with whatever was at hand. Over the years I'd learned to pinpoint my focus to the width of a pubic hair if there was nothing else to work with. (...) Before my eyes -or, more precisely, in my mind- Rasher became Lovely Bum Man.
Aiden Shaw
People like us were born to change the world. It’s filled with shit. It’s filled with people who did the things they did to you. It’s filled with stupid pointlessness and ignorance and so much mundanity, it makes me want to scream. Don’t you feel it too?
Laure Eve
Loving cats wasn’t like loving skiing or comic books or arthouse films: when you walked into a pub, you usually didn’t feel the need to tell people about it, either stylistically or verbally. I didn’t try to hide the fact that I liked cats, it was just that a lot of the time it was hidden, by custom and by nature.” — Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man, by Tom Cox
Tom Cox
The true history of the world must always be the history of the few; and as we measure the Himalaya by the height of Mount Everest, we must take the true measure of India from the poets of the Veda, the sages of the Upanishads, the founders of the Vedanta and Sankhya philosophies, and the authors of the oldest law-books, and not from the millions who are born and die in their villages, and who have never for one moment been roused out of their drowsy dream of life.
Friedrich Max Müller
...and to-morrow looked in my face more steadily than I could look at it
Charles Dickens
There is a simplicity to war. Attacking is the only secret. Dare- and the world yields. How quickly they forget that all it takes to change the course of history... is the will of a single man.
Captain Price
If you think something is missing in your life, it is probably YOU...
Robert Holden
Remember this, - where there is life there is hope. You're alive. Embrace this, because YOU CAN DO ANYTHING while there is breath in your body.
Lola Jaye
The day he moved out was terrible – That evening she went through hell.His absence wasn’t a problemBut the corkscrew had gone as well.
Wendy Cope
A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her . . . but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.
W Somerset Maugham
It is so important to think for yourself.
Jude Morgan
Marx wrote about finance and industry all his life but he only knew two people connected with financial and industrial processes. One was his uncle in Holland, Lion Philips, a successful businessman who created what eventually became the vast Philips Electric Company. Uncle Philips' views on the whole capitalist process would have been well-informed and interesting, had Marx troubled to explore them. But he only once consulted him, on a technical matter of high finance, and though he visited Philips four times, these concerned purely personal mattes of family money. The other knowledgeable man was Engels himself. But Marx declined Engel's invitation to accompany him on a visit to a cotton mill, and so far as we know Marx never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life.
Paul Johnson
The silence of a convent at night is the silence of the grave. Too far removed from the busy world without for external sounds to penetrate the thick walls, whilst within no slamming door, nor wandering foot, nor sacrilegious voice breaks in upon the stillness, the slightest noise strikes upon the ear with a fearful distinctness. ("The Monk's Story")
Catherine Crowe
Katherine of Aragon was speaking out for the women of the country, for the good wives who should not be put aside just because their husbands had taken a fancy to another, for the women who walked the hard road between kitchen, bedroom, church and childbirth. For the women who deserved more than their husband's whim.
Philippa Gregory
The time has come," the walrus said, "to talk of many things: Of shoes and ships - and sealing wax - of cabbages and kings
Lewis Carroll
There was no outlet, my fear was so deep and tangible I couldn't scream. It felt like an actual substance that enveloped my body, my brain, my very being, I receded further and further within myself, a dark hole, my entire body a taut muscle.
James Morris
Enough pain makes a coward of anyone.
Joe Abercrombie