Quotes by British Authors - Page 139

You are magnificent - a jewel reflecting inwardly and outwardly, the light of the universe. Observe how you respond to beauty everywhere - you bear witness to everything. Be aware that you, yourself, are an inextricable part of the infinite creative intelligence, and be blessed.
Jay Woodman
And pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked.
Jane Austen
I should never make anything of a fisherman. I had not got sufficient imagination
Jerome K. Jerome
Would Turner have slept through such terrific drama? Absolutely not! Anyone in my business who slept through that would be a fool. I don't keep office hours.
Martin Gayford
He sat down on a grassy bank and looked at the city that surrounded him, and thought, one day he would have to go home. And one day he would have to make a home to go back to. He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.
Neil Gaiman
When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.
C.S. Lewis
These question-boundaries ...are ours, not of reality. We are led to them, caged by them not only culturally and intellectually, but quite physically, by the restlessness of our eyes and their limited field and acuity of vision.
John Fowles
It's called publishing. It's how smart people install new ideas into other peoples brains.
Steven Magee
When we have done our best, we should wait the result in peace.
John Lubbock
The struggle you're in today is developing the strength you need for tomorrow. Don´t give up.
Robert Tew
We have one crystal clear reason apart from the blessed happiness of this way of life. It is this: prayer is the core of our day. Take prayer out, and the day would collapse, would be pithless, a straw blown in the wind. But how can you pray--really pray, I mean--with one against who you have a grudge or whom you have been discussing critically with another? Try it. You will find it cannot be done.
Amy Carmichael
We must look for consistency. Where there is a want of it we must suspect deception.
Arthur Conan Doyle
After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism Leninism
Niall Ferguson
There's nothing weak about beauty, child. The only weakness in it is if you think it means anything important.
Charlie Fletcher
I love the relationship that anyone has with music ... because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. ... It's the best part of us probably ...
Nick Hornby
You can make anything by writing
C.S. Lewis
I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.
Nancy Mitford
He felt himself now, as he had often fancied other people, adrift on the stream, and far removed from control of it, a man with no grasp upon circumstances any longer. Old battered man loafing at the doors of public-houses now seemed to be his fellows, and he felt, as he supposed them to feel, a mingling of envy and hatred towards those who passed quickly and certainly to a goal of their own. They, too, saw things very thin and shadowy, and were wafted about by the lightest breath of wind. For the substantial world, with its prospect of avenues leading on and on to the invisible distance, had slipped from him.
Virginia Woolf
As night goes round the Earth always there are hundreds of thousands of people who should be sleeping, lying awake, fearing a bully, fearing a cruel competition, dreading lest they cannot make good, ill of some illness they cannot comprehend, distressed by some irrational quarrel, maddened by some thwarted instinct or some suppressed perverted desire.
H.G.Wells
A true thing, poorly expressed, is a lie.
Stephen Fry
Dare to be an optimist.
Matt Ridley (Author)
It is not great counts God blesses so much as likeness to Jesus.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Whenever you are transplanted, like me, you will understand how very delightful it is to meet with anything at all like what one has left behind.
Jane Austen
Confront the page that taunts you with its whiteness. Face your enemy and fill it with words. You are bigger and stronger than a piece of paper.
Fennel Hudson
I was not descending in a plane, coming Home. I was watching an alien world as it ascended towards me - and one that I could never begin the process of readjusting to, because I knew that I would just as soon be returning to another world, whose normality was as alien to this home as I now was.
Jake Wood
We have to free half of the human race, the women, so that they can help to free the other half."~ Emmeline Pankhurst
Emmeline Pankhurst
A Book “Now” - said a good book unto me -“Open my pages and you shall seeJewels of wisdom and treasures fine,Gold and silver in every line,And you may claim them if you but willOpen my pages and take your fill.“Open my pages and run them o’er,Take what you choose of my golden store.Be you greedy, I shall not care -All that you seize I shall gladly spare;There is never a lock on my treasure doors,Come - here are my jewels, make them yours!“I am just a book on your mantel shelf,But I can be part of your living self;If only you’ll travel my pages through,Then I will travel the world with you.As two wines blended make better wine,Blend your mind with these truths of mine.“I’ll make you fitter to talk with men,I’ll touch with silver the lines you pen,I’ll lead you nearer the truth you seek,I’ll strengthen you when your faith grows weak -This place on your shelf is a prison cell,Let me come into your mind to dwell!
Edgar A. Guest
I have seen enough, too, to know that it is not always the youngest and best who are spared to those that love them; but this should give us comfort rather than sorrow, for Heaven is just, and such things teach us impressively that there is a far brighter world than this, and that the passage to it is speedy.
Charles Dickens
At a certain point you have to leave childish things behind, and one of the childish things is a sense that 'Wow, I can draw' or in my case 'Wow, I can read'... You feel you have what's called a talent, but as you become an adult, if you hope to make things, you have to give up the preoccupation with talent otherwise you'll spend your life painting beautiful pictures of fruit bowls that look like fruit bowls.
Zadie Smith
No, what he didn't like about heroes was that they were usually suicidally gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk.
Terry Pratchett
Sainthood is acceptable only in saints.
Pamela Hansford Johnson
When you fall short of your goals and dreams ask yourself is it your mindset, perspective, expectations, effort, approach, acceptance, company or a blend of these that needs to change.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
The only thing we wanted our young organization to give was an opportunity. We would say to children and to their families: "If you are willing to work hard and make sacrifices and think long term, then Room to Read is the best organization for you. If you're looking for a handout, then you should look elsewhere.
John Wood
Nature is a volume of which God is the author.
William Wordsworth
I was moved beyond words. The train ride over the mountains from lake Titticaca to Cusco reminded me of Africa where I grew up; and 4 days walking on the Inca Trail, then more in the jungle, just magnificent - time, space, and splendour. Our planet is superb!
Jay Woodman
In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
Richard Dawkins
And trust dies from ifs and buts
Aidan Chambers
I have a pretty good handle on my anxiety. I basically treat myself like a nervy horse: lots of exercise, lots of sleep, lots of interesting work to keep my mind occupied, and generally avoiding being ridden hard by strangers.
Caitlin Moran
Grief, it seemed, drove Voldemort out...though Dumbledore, of course, would have said that it was love.
J.K. Rowling
The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penelogical theories. Cram criminals together and see what happens, You get concentrated criminality, crime in the midst of punishment.
Anthony Burgess
The DSM-IV-TR is a 943-page textbook published by the American Psychiatric Association that sells for $99...There are currently 374 mental disorders. I bought the book...and leafed through it...I closed the manual. "I wonder if I've got any of the 374 mental disorders," I thought. I opened the manual again. And instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones.
Jon Ronson
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order
Virginia Woolf
I don't consider myself as a bad person, on the whole I consider myself a good person, I'm good to my parents. I treat my girl right ,,, take her out and buy her stuff. And I go to church every Sunday, But I've decided that just once I wanna do a really bad thing. I mean a really seriously bad thing. 'cause, ya know, like, we're put on this earth with free will. We can choose to do this or that. We can choose to be good or bad. But sometimes I think most people are good and not bad only because they're scared they might go to jail or hell or someplace. Some guy once said: "Anything done out of fear has no moral value." Well, I think that's right. I figure the only way you can be truly good is if you've tried been good, and you've tried being bad, and being good feels better.
Alan Moore
The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world.To all of them the logical structure is common.(Like the two youths, their two horses and their lilies in the story. They are all in a certain sense one.)
Ludwig Wittgenstein
From 1929 to 1933, [age 25-29] I lived almost continuously in Berlin, with only occasional visits to other parts of Germany and to England. Already, during that time, I had made up my mind that I would one day write about the people I’d met and the experiences I was having. So I kept a detailed diary, which in due course provided raw material for all my Berlin stories. [from preface]
Christopher Isherwood
There's always someone's father, someone's mother, someone's wife, someone's son. This is the problem with killing and eating people. One of the problems.
Glen Duncan
Beyond our utmost wants His love and power can bless To praying souls he always grants More than they can express.
John Newton
Good writing is always new.
A.S. Byatt
Reported sightings of UFOs are tailing off. With public interest declining and subscriptions dwindling, NICAP and APRO start to compete with each other over membership. The open-minded middle ground is stretched to breaking point, caught between the hardware of scientific detail and the extreme fantasies of contact.
Ken Hollings
Life's a one way ticket
Colin Tegerdine
No one ever tells you that: that there’s no method. Writing’s a lawless place.
Naomi Wood
His only real financial failure came at the age of thirteen, when in an uncharacteristic error of judgement he invested £200,000 of his own savings in wooden socks, an invention that never caught on as he had hoped.
Mark Jackman
The Brigadier had no wish to shake hands with the improbable young man in the ridiculous frock-coat.
Peter Grimwade
Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness.
C.S. Lewis
My sorrow may bear involuntary witness against you at the judgement Throne; but my angry thoughts or my reproaches never will, I know!
Charles Dickens
The table next to the sink is for flashcards. I saw a Monty Python skit called, "every sperm is sacred," and it gave me the idea that, "every piss is sacred." Meaning, WHY NOT LOOK AT FLASHCARDS WHILE VOIDING?
Peter Rogers
I don't think it had ever occurred to me that man's supremacy is not primarily due to his brain, as most of the books would have one think. It is due to the brain's capacity to make use of the information conveyed to it by a narrow band of visible light rays. His civilization, all that he had achieved or might achieve, hung upon his ability to perceive that range of vibrations from red to violet. Without that, he was lost.
John Wyndham
#ToTheGirls2016 Value yourself, your voice, your body, your opinions, your dreams, your pride, your ego. You have a RIGHT to take up space.
Abigail Tarttelin
...they knew each other as much as they knew themselves, and their intimacy, rather like too many suitcases, was a matter of perpetual concern; together they moved slowly, clumsily, effecting lugubrious compromises, attending to delicate shifts of mood, repairing breaches. As individuals they didn't easily take offense; but together they managed to offend each other in surprising, unexpected ways; then the offender - it had happened twice since their arrival - became irritated by the cloying susceptibilities of the other, and they would continue to explore the twisting alleyways and sudden squares in silence, and with each step the city would recede as they locked tighter into each other's presence.
Ian McEwan
no-one would want to go through a traumatic experience but when you’ve survived something life-shattering and risen above it, you achieve a kind of serenity.
Jane Wilson-Howarth