Quotes by British Authors - Page 14

The plane touches down on very rough ground: its wheelbarrow wheels bounce and one set of wings rises alarmingly while the other dips. Now the Masai and the plane are converging. It's a magnificent shot: the Masai run, run, run, run; because of the optics it is dreamlike. The little plane bounces, shudders, slews and finally makes lasting contact with the ground. At exactly the right moment, as the plane comes to a halt, the Masai warriors, in a highly agitated state, reach the plane, and the camera closes on the pilot, whose face as he removes his leather flying helmet and goggles, appears just above the bobbing red ochre composition of plaited hair and fat-shone bodies. It is Mel Gibson, with a grave expression, which can't quite suppress his unruly Aussieness.
Justin Cartwright
For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.
Tom Stoppard
Behaviour comes from a life of indoctrination.
Steven Redhead
-make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being...
Aldous Huxley
History is the devil's scripture.
Lord Byron
You upped the ante with the wrong vampire, Caitlin.
Lindsay J. Pryor
Jenny retained a flimsy essence of the truth. It was a quiet knowing she'd always hold in her heart...''Broken Mirror by Oliver Rixon
Oliver Rixon
Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed.
William Blake
Train your subconscious to be positive by using the heart intelligence.
Steven Redhead
I leaned back and glimpsed the stars, the same stories again but written in the sky.
Wesley Stace
On the one hand maybe I’ve remained infantile, while on the other I matured quickly, because at a young age I was very aware of suffering and fear.
Audrey Hepburn
The world has enough women who know how to be smart. It needs women who are willing to be simple. The world has enough women who know how to be brilliant. It needs some who will be brave. The world has enough women who are popular. It needs more who are pure. We need women, and men, too, who would rather be morally right than socially correct.
Peter Marshall
Handling a dead body is not a repugnant or frightening experience and, somehow, it helps to accept the fact that the soul of that person has gone if you treat the body with reverence and respect before it is finally disposed of by cremation or burial.
Jennifer Worth
I went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen: A Chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green. And the gates of this Chapel were shut, And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door; So I turn'd to the Garden of Love, That so many sweet flowers bore. And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be: And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys & desires.
William Blake
People think that at the top there isn't much room. They tend to think of it as an Everest. My message is that there is tons of room at the top.
Margaret Thatcher
Even the best-laid plans turn to hell when exposed to reality.
Michael Anthony
She had always wanted to do every thing, and had made more progress in both drawing and music than many might have done with so little labour as she ever would submit to... She was not much deceived as to her own skill either as an artist or a musician, but she was not unwilling to have others deceived, or sorry to know her reputation for accomplishment often higher than it deserved.
Jane Austen
The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.
T.S Eliot
That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.
Jacob Bronowski
Feel so fucking angry; don't want to be reminded of you, But when I left my shit in your kitchen, I said goodbye to your bedroom it smelled of you
Amy Winehouse
Once in a golden hour I cast to earth a seed. Up there came a flower, The people said, a weed.
Alfred Tennyson
The readiest way which God takes to draw a man to himself is, to afflict him in that he loves most, and with good reason; and to cause this affliction to arise from some good action done with a single eye; because nothing can more clearly show him the emptiness of what is most lovely and desirable in all the world.
John Wesley
I love you. I love you. I send this message through my fingers and into his, up his arm and into his heart. Hear me. I love you. And I'm sorry to leave you.
Jenny Downham
Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear
Joseph Conrad
As it is?
Harold Pinter
Thunder and blood and night must usurp our parts, to complete and make up the catastrophe of this great piece.
E.R. Eddison
O love, O fire! once he drewWith one long kiss my whole soul throughMy lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.
Alfred Tennyson
When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.
Winston S. Churchill
The weekend break had begun with the usual resentment and had continued with half-repressed ill humour. It was, of course, his fault. He had been more ready to hurt his wife's feelings and deprive his daughter than inconvenience a pub bar full of strangers. He wished there could be one memory of his dead child which wasn't tainted with guilt and regret.
P.D. James
A sound mind in a sound body is a short but full description of a happy state in this world.
John Locke
and then the chosen lie would pass into the permanent records and become truth
George Orwell
I think it is a wise person who does not answer the door to uninvited police officers. Who knows what kind of crazy person could be standing there with a loaded gun!
Steven Magee
To find a friend one must close one eye. To keep him ... two.
Norman Douglas
In a surreal gift from the universe, time both stands still and flies past you in that singular moment when you find out someone you once loved is gone.
Rachel Thompson
It’s so difficult to describe depression to someone who’s never been there, because it’s not sadness. I know sadness. Sadness is to cry and to feel. But it’s that cold absence of feeling— that really hollowed-out feeling.
J.K. Rowling
Governments can do both great and stupid things.
Katherine Rundell
He [Old Mr. Turveydrop] was a fat old gentleman with a false complexion, false teeth, false whiskers, and a wig. He had a fur collar, and he had a padded breast to his coat, which only wanted a star or a broad blue ribbon to be complete. He was pinched in, and swelled out, and got up, and strapped down, as much as he could possibly bear.
Charles Dickens
His eyes were the same colour as the sea in a postcard someone sends you when they love you, but not enough to stay.
Warsan Shire
[My father] loved me tenderly and shyly from a distance, and later on took a naive pride in seeing my name in print.
Arthur Koestler
She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did.
Neil Gaiman
Ye may kill for yourselves, and your mates, and your cubs as they need, and ye can;But kill not for pleasure of killing, and seven times never kill Man!
Rudyard Kipling
I'm never going to complain about receiving free early copies of books, because clearly there's nothing to complain about, but it does introduce a rogue element into one's otherwise carefully plotted reading schedule. ...Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarly deflected from your chosen path.
Nick Hornby
If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies — Tolkien didn’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology. Go and read outside of your comfort zone, go and learn stuff.
Neil Gaiman
But there was nothing. No village or town as far as her eyes could strain. Nowhere for her saviours to come from and take her to; just fields and trees and the weeping arc of the river Greave all the way to the horizon. Just like in the books, Greaveburn was all there was; building and building until streets were foundations, roofs were floors, constantly climbing away from itself. now that Abrasia saw it, her dream of escape crumbled completely like an ancient map in her fingers. The horizon was the world's edge and there was nothing beyond it but mist and falling.Greaveburn stood alone on this little circle of earth, the river running around and into itself like a snake eating its tail. And Abrasia was doomed to watch the sun and stars trade places for all eternity.
Craig Hallam
Leopards don't change their spots
Anna Jacobs
Doing things God’s way is always a matter of the heart.
Elizabeth George
The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.
George Orwell
Rosamond, accustomed from her childhood to an extravagant household, thought that good housekeeping consisted simply in ordering the best of everything––nothing else 'answered;' and Lydgate supposed that 'if things were done at all, they must be done properly'–he did not see how they were to live otherwise. If each head of household expenditure had been mentioned to him beforehand, he would have probably observed that 'it could hardly come to much,' and if any one had suggested a saving on a particular article–for example, the substitution of cheap fish for dear–it would have appeared to him simply a penny-wise, mean notion.
George Eliot
I would wish that people would accept people for who they are, not be judgemental, allow people to live their lives and enjoy themselves and that would be my wish for people.
John Barrowman
It is strange how easy it is to remember pain.
Eric Lomax
You have now learned to see That cats are much like you and me And other people whom we find Possessed of various types of mind.
T.S Eliot
You don't need to put on make-up to make you look pretty. All you need to do is put on a smile and that will make you pretty in anyone's book.
Anthony T.Hincks
If philosophy gets you lost in the labyrinth of symbols that distance us from reality, then it is part of the problem; if it motivates positive action that can create a better world, philosophy is usually a gift.
Oli Anderson
What I have to tell you is this: I am resolved that dancing is to be my path. I know that to be a dancer is to be considered in our world little more than a prostitute. But you cannot imagine what is happening here in Berlin. It is different back home, but in Europe dance is being reborn as something more than cheap entertainment by loose women.
Wendy Buonaventura
It wouldn't do to go mixing up the present and the past, and cutting bits out of one to fit into the other.
E Nesbit
The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.
D.H. Lawrence
There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well.The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and everyday confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense.
Jane Austen
A woman means by unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others a man means not giving trouble to others. Thus each sex regards the other as basically selfish.
C.S. Lewis
The most fundamental exercise is self-observation, which is the catalyst for inner change, it will give self-knowledge and a clear mind and perception. Without it, the attempt to reach enlightenment and awaken consciousness is destined to fail.
Belsebuub
As the sun rules the day and the moon governs the night, so too, we are connected by: the air that we breathe, light that we see and the darkness that follows. Life is too short to waste it on disagreements. Surely, we can all agree to disagree. So let us find a common ground, form a union and spread joy, happiness and freedom around the world for the benefit of you, me and the future generations to come.
Raymond Beresford Hamilton