Quotes by British Authors - Page 137

A friendship forged in the fires of adversity is a strong as one that has weathered the test of time.
Lindsey Kelk
The voice of a donkey braying in the neighbouring meadow seemed like the mocking laughter of demons.
P.G. Wodehouse
Imagine how many suicide victims would still be with us, if only the right person said the right thing at the right time.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
I used to think I had all the time in the world to do everything I wanted. But what's the use of having all the time in the world if you're always wasting it on things that don't mean a thing?
Mike Gayle
So life isn't exciting?" continued Gary. "Great. Give me boredom. At least I know where I'm going to eat and sleep tonight. I'll still have a job on Monday. Yeah?" He turned and looked at Richard.Richard nodded, hesitantly. "Yeah.
Neil Gaiman
Dust is not a constant. There’s not a fixed quantity that has always been the same. Conscious beings make Dust—they renew it all the time, by thinking and feeling and reflecting, by gaining wisdom and passing it on. And if you help everyone else in your worlds to do that, by helping them to learn and understand about themselves and each other and the way everything works, and by showing them how to be kind instead of cruel, and patient instead of hasty, and cheerful instead of surly, and above all how to keep their minds open and free and curious…Then they will renew enough to replace what is lost through one window. So there could be one left open.
Philip Pullman
Jazz was about the spaces between notes. It was about what happened when you listened to the thing inside you. The gaps and the cracks. Because that was where life really happened, when you were brave enough to free-fall.
Rachel Joyce
Love is a dangerous thing. It comes in disguise to change our life... Lust is the deceiver. Lust wrenches our lives until nothing matters except the one we think we love, and under that deceptive spell we kill for them, give all for them, and then, when we have what we have wanted, we discover that it is all an illusion and nothing is there. Lust is a voyage to nowhere, to an empty land, but some men just love such voyages and never care about the destination. Love is a voyage too, a voyage with no destination except death, but a voyage of bliss.
Bernard Cornwell
He: What’s the matter with you?Me: Nothing.Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say surprised in the way that they are forever surprised, "but there was nothing the matter with her.
Jeanette Winterson
Follow your heart’s intuition by pursuing the things you truly love.
Steven Redhead
Love in a night shall live and die,Love in a day shall wing and fly;Love in the Spring shall last an hour,Easily fade a spring-tide flower.
Aleister Crowley
Life is indeed a gamble, the ultimate game of chance, based purely upon having the ability to make the right choices at the right time. You never win or lose in life if you realise it is all just for the experience. Learn to create your own destiny, don't wait to see what fate throws your way.
Steven Redhead
All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.
Terry Eagleton
Well, that's just what I'm talking about. All Maslow would need to do is rub against your legs and start purring, and you'd immediately forget all this Hitler/Card nonsense. No one does PR like a cat. Why do you think I'm so desperate to hire him?
Manny Rayner
Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you're ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can. Then, perhaps, you will come back to it when you're older, and you will find the book has changed because you have changed as well, and the book is wiser, or more foolish, because you are wiser or more foolish than you were as a child.
Neil Gaiman
What day is it?"It's today," squeaked Piglet.My favorite day," said Pooh.
A.A. Milne
Lockwood gave a sudden exclamation; when I looked at him, his eyes were shining. 'On second thoughts, we can scrap my last suggestion,' he said. 'Stuff the mingling. Who wants to do that? Boring. George - this library. Where is it?
Jonathan Stroud
I call education, not that which smothers a woman with accomplishments, but that which tends to consolidate a firm and regular system of character; that which tends to form a friend, a companion, and a wife. I call education not that which is made up of the shreds and patches of useless arts, but that which inculcates principles, polishes taste, regulates temper, cultivates reason, subdues the passions, directs the feelings, habituates to reflection, trains to self-denial, and, more especially, that which refers all actions, feelings, sentiments, tastes, and passions, to the love and fear of God.
Hannah More
Will wrestled with his conscience, grappled it to the ground and sat on it until he couldn't hear a squeak out of it.
Nick Hornby
Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.
Lewis Carroll
What I am going to propose is that you write a novel.As you know, the practical advantages of being able to write out your thoughts fluently are very great. For one thing, when you are used to writing them out, they present themselves, one after another. When you are not used to writing them out, they mill around among themselves usually and you see nothing but heads and tails of them when you sit down to get them on paper. I know from my own experience that the first two or three hours of every exam I ever took were spent simply getting my pen warmed up, and by then it was too late.
Ted Hughes
Forget "six degrees of separation" today it's "six degrees of CONNECTION.
Morag Barrett
While the light remains,' said Carde, speaking slowly in his high deliberate voice, 'only do not forsake the joy of life. If you shall have given all your kisses, you will give too few. And as leaves fall from withered wreaths which you may see spread upon the cups and floating there, so for us, who now as lovers hope for so much, perhaps tomorrow's day will close the doom.
Iris Murdoch
And make no mistake, my friend, your pointless life will end; but before you go, can you look at the truth?
Morrissey
I wish I had a boyfriend. I wish he lived in the wardrobe on a coat hanger. Whenever I wanted, I could get him out and he'd look at me the way boys do in films, as if I'm beautiful.
Jenny Downham
The truth is, that one doesn't really know anything about anybody. Not even the people who are nearest to you...''Isn't that going a little too far--exaggerating too much?''I don't think it is. When you think of people, it is in the image you have made of them for yourself.
Agatha Christie
In theory at any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy . It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were officers and NCOs, but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; not titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society.
George Orwell
To take a side against Rushdie, or to be neutral and evasive about him in the name of some vaguely sensitive ecumenical conscience, is to stand against those who try to incubate a Reformation in the Muslim world.
Christopher Hitchens
...but he is a man, hence cannot see how tiresome it is to have explained at length what one has already fully understood.
Diane Setterfield
She raised her head when she heard my step, and her gaze met my own, over the matron's dipping shoulder, and her eyes grew bright. I knew then how hard it had been to keep, not just from Millbank but from her. I felt that little quickening. It was just as I imagine a woman must feel, when the baby within her gives its first kick. Does it matter if I feel that, that is so small, and silent, and secret?
Sarah Waters
Though there had yet to be a victor in this great war that had begun almost three years ago, Maurice had written to her that they had, all of them, on all sides, lost their freedom. Freedom to think hopefully of the future.
Jacqueline Winspear
An Abyss is a deep and terrible chasm. What’s a chasm? A deep gash in the rocks.
Diane Samuels
The sinner I was expecting was guilty of pride, lust and spiritual despair, not merely of sloth and ineptitude. This was the diary of a nobody. So I nearly censored January to June 1933 in the interests of Grandpa's glamour as a Gothic personage. But in truth this is what we should be exposed to - the awful knowledge that when they're not breaking the commandments, the anti-heroes are mending their tobacco pipes and listening to the wireless.
Lorna Sage
You've got to know what your magic is. How else will you fully share your gifts with others and enrich the world for these precious years that you live?
Rasheed Ogunlaru
There is one thing, Emma, which a man can always do if he chooses, and that is his duty; not by manoeuvring and finessing, but by vigour and resolution. - Mr. Knightley
Jane Austen
God waits only the separation of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward. Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over, and death is so certain an entrance to happiness -- to glory?
Charlotte Brontë
Believers are each other's mirrors.
Elif Shafak
For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not – Heaven help us – all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit?
Virginia Woolf
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Stephen Hunt
Too much time is wasted fighting one self and life itself. Peace and fulfilment emerge the moment you embrace both.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
I would like to have nothing to do with you for hours on end and then come back and find you, come back with things I’ve thought and found all on my own— on my own, not through you.
Helen Oyeyemi
The truth was that I didn't know my own mind. Just as you might move into a house and in the scatterbrained days of unpacking leave a broom in some corner, where it remains until someone uses it and then returns it to that corner, now knowing that it was there by casual chance, until slowly that corner becomes its hallowed place, where you can always find the broom - just as all traditions begin as accidents, how the borders of countries are formed, how we marry, how we make friends and children - so, until Oxford, had I lived, within a sequence of non decisions, and yet with the same misdirected conviction of intentionality with which humans infuse their errors and felicities alike.
Charles Finch
I'm kind of an evangelical atheist.
Brian Eno
I'd missed this so much, this simple pleasure. The sensation of a heavy shaft sliding over my tongue, pushing deeper and deeper into me until my lips bumped against my hand.
Josephine Myles
Inside our mind there is hidden place that contains the mind within the mind. There, you will find another version of yourself that may be your true self. We do not find that self by travelling, by searching. We find that self by sitting still, being quiet and looking inside. Ask yourself: who am I? And your true self will answer.
Chloe Thurlow
Meditation is like hearing a voice on the telephone: there might be slight delays if the line is not perfect, but it is otherwise direct and requires no effort other than listening
Sumangali Morhall
I suppose you’re young,’ she conceded, managing once again to make youth sound like impetigo
Tyne O'Connell
Akil, humans have these wonderful little things we like to cling onto, called souls. The jury’s still out as to whether demons have them, I sincerely doubt you do." ~ Muse.
Pippa DaCosta
You can't stay here any more. My fears have been irrational and they've forced me to make unwise decisions and accept the unacceptable.
Dorothy Koomson
Freedom is the willingness and ability to choose your own path and experience your life as your true self.
Beth Kempton
For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.
John Fowles
We had a dream that we would always be best friends. When we were born, for some it was the end. Now it seems there may not be tomorrow. But despite the horror and the sorrow, I love our world. I want us all to live. Now Rosa, you've asked me to forgive. One day, if mom survives this bitter night, then we shall meet again, and I will say, I loved you Rosa. Don't you see? But we are different, you dream of everlasting love. Not me. Because what really matters is to live. And if we do, there will be nothing to forgive. But I'll forgive you anyway.
Ginger and Rosa
Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.
Meg Rosoff
I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that 'issue' I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity.
Christopher Hitchens
I cannot go any further without mentioning my favourite biscuit of all time, now sadly, tragically, extinct. The oaty, crumbly, demerara notes of the long-forgotten Abbey Crunch will remain forever on my lips. I loved the biscuit as much as anything I have ever eaten, and often, in moments of solitude, I still think about its warm, buttery, sugary self.
Nigel Slater
There is a time and place for electromagnetic shielding and I regard it as a last resort due to the long term biological problems that I have observed with it over the years in plant growth experiments.
Steven Magee
And without understanding, could each properly love the other?
Anita Brookner
What is magic?There is the wizard's explanation... wizards talk about candles, circles, planets, stars, bananas, chants, runes and the importance of having at least four good meals every day.
Terry Pratchett
Jealousy is a strange transformer of characters.
Arthur Conan Doyle
There is something improbably about the silence in the [subway] carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation's economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies.
Alain de Botton