Quotes by British Authors - Page 140

Shall we go?' he murmured, perhaps regretting his decision to show me his army of plastic cartoon figurines.
Jon Ronson
Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.
Hannah Moore
Strolling on the plateau of life, desperate for the mountain, I never thought that I would get this far. It's only art that has carried me through, given me faith in my own existence. But now I am approaching a point in my life where I desire more...
Tracey Emin
The policemen agreed they were living with a most peculiar fellow. One moment he was reading classical literature in the original French and quoting Tennyson, and the next he would be discussing the best way to blow up a train.
Ben Macintyre
The only cure for grief is action.
G. H. Lewes
I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.
George Eliot
Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
Quentin Crisp
I believe Western culture -- rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. -- is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation.
Mark Steyn
I'm a good liar. A great one. And to be a great liar you have to live your lies, to believe them, to the point that when you tell them to yourself enough times, even what's right before your eyes will bend itself to the falsehood.
Mark Lawrence
You'll be happy if you'll remember that men don't change much. Women do. Women adapt themselves, and if you think that means they lose their individuality, you're wrong. Show me a happy marriage and I'll show you a clever woman.
Elizabeth Cadell
We sit in the ruin, each reading a book, or three of us read out of four. Three different voices speak to us. We have taught the children to read again this week. Here, where there is no voice, apart from ours, they are desperate for any other. They will even sing to themselves, sometimes. The boy whistles. He makes his voice croak. He sings the same thing again, but breathing in. A bird echoes the first notes of Vivaldi.
Joanna Walsh
Sam, no!” Edilio snapped.Sam missed a step, then stopped. He looked at Edilio, puzzled.“We’re scattered. And we can’t risk you. You die and the light dies with you.”“Are you out of your mind? You think I’m going to let Drake come in here and take Diana?”“Not you, Sam. Dekka, yes. Orc, yes. He’s out there, too. And send Jack as well. Anyone but you.”Sam looked like he’d been punched. Like someone had knocked the wind out of him. He blinked and started to say something and stopped.“You aren’t replaceable, Sam. Figure it out, okay? It’s going dark and you make light. So this isn’t going to be your battle. Not now. It’s on the rest of us to step up.
Michael Grant
Christmas: the one time of year when you can’t avoid the nuts in your family muesli.
Charles Stross
In my early teens, [my grandfather] would sometimes stomp around his living room, where he used to shave towards mid-day with bowl, brush and open razor, deriding my ignorance and mocking the made-up discipline of sociology, which I at one stage claimed to be studying. 'What is sociology?' he roared derisively, twisting and rolling the silly word on his Hampshire tongue. I knew, alas, that he was quite right.
Peter Hitchens
The donkey which brought you to this door must be dismissed if you want to get through it’.
Idries Shah
You never listen to me anymore. Before, if I was talking to you, you would always listen. But now you have no time to even talk to me.'Yeah... Has Keaty told you not to eat the Stew?''Richard!'I frowned 'What?''You are not listening to me!''… Oh. Well I'm sorry. I've got a lot on my mind.''Not me.''Huh?''I am not on your mind.''Uh... of course you are.''I am not' she poked me in the ribs. 'I think you do not love me anymore.'I looked at her in astonishment '… Are you serious?''Very serious' she said petulantly'But... I mean... do we have to talk about this right now?''Yes. It must be now. Etienne is not here, and maybe soon I will never see you agai...''Francoise!' I hissed. 'Keep it down!''Maybe I should keep it down but maybe I should not. In the dope field, when I would not be quiet, you pushed me to the ground and held me tightly'. She giggled. 'It was very exciting'.
Alex Garland
Ursula Monkton smiled, and the lightnings wreathed and writhed about her. She was power incarnate, standing in the crackling air. She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.
Neil Gaiman
When the two become the oneAnd the inside outside, the outside inSo that the male be not male nor the female femaleThen will you see me.
Wesley Stace
I do not think that a man's rise to power is necessarily the climax of his life or that his loss of office should be equated with his fall.
Isaac Deutscher
How can I have hung round you for five years and not think girls are clever?
J.K. Rowling
You do realize as you grow older that almost nobody knows what they are talking about.
John Cleese
If I want to feel as if I'm being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.
Ned Beauman
That was the problem, wasn't it? You left home. But you never did become an adult. Not really. You just fucked up in different and more complicated ways.
Mark Haddon
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the treesin the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
Douglas Adams
Orthodoxy my Lord said Bishop Warburton in a whisper - "orthodoxy is my doxy - heterodoxy is another man's doxy."
Joseph Priestley
We are condemned to be modern. We can’t escape the facts of our history or of living in an age dominated by instrumental rationality, even as we look for ways out of it... But it has become our historic responsibility to acknowledge the continuing importance of myth, at a level beyond science, in realizing a more organic, holistic relation to the world. A future social ecology would transcend both anti-Enlightenment reaction and [a] reified Enlightenment counter-reaction, which remain only fragmented polarities within bourgeois modernity.
David Watson
My laboratory is interested in the related challenges of understanding the origin of life on the early earth, and constructing synthetic cellular life in the laboratory. Focusing on artificial life frees us to explore novel chemical systems, but what we learn from these systems helps us to understand possible pathways leading to the origin of life. Our basic design for a synthetic cell involves the encapsulation of a spontaneously replicating nucleic acid, which acts as the genetic material, within a spontaneously replicating membrane vesicle, which provides spatial localization. We are using chemical synthesis to make nucleic acids with modified nucleobases and sugar-phosphate backbones.
Jack W. Szostak
Believe it or not, I'm stronger than any belief, stereotype, profile, or idea you have of me. I'm driven and self-made with a perception unique to my own. You'll hate that and say I'm not special. I'll allow you to believe it because deep down, you already know I am. My name's Charles Lee. Bound for greatness. Destined to soar.
Charles Lee
Al: Now, remind me, who's walking who down the aisle again?
Lindsey Kelk
Dor woke again as dawn came. The sun had somehow gotten around to the east, where the land was, and dried off so that it could shine again.
Piers Anthony
The days are numbered for those bums over in England."German Tank commander
Leo McKinstry
Stock was a rationalist and an atheist. Most of the time she saw the world as a big machine where things just played themselves out. Anonymous forces, impersonal powers, action and reaction, cause and effect. It would be comforting to live in a world that had order and purpose in it, which she supposed was why so many people pretended they did.
M.R. Carey
It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Winston Churchill
With every step I took away from her, the movement at my heart and between my legs grew more defined: I felt like a ventriloquist, locking his protesting dolls in to a trunk.
Sarah Waters
I may have spent long enough in your orbit to have absorbed your ferocious conviction that a happy family cannot be a mere myth or that even if it is, better to die trying for the fine if unattainable than sulking in passive, cynical resignation that hell is other people you're related to.
Lionel Shriver
Tony smothered the life that me and Ma had built, a furry mould growing over a sweating slab of cheese.
Kerry Hudson
If we succeed in giving the love of learning, the learning itself is sure to follow.
John Lubbock
You can die of a broken heart -- it's scientific fact -- and my heart has been breaking since that very first day we met. I can feel it now, aching deep behind my rib cage the way it does every time we're together, beating a desperate rhythm: Love me. Love me. Love me.
Abby McDonald
Maybe that's when bad scripts are written, when you choose the theme first. I consider that I've something to say when I've thought of a person, a moment, a single beat of the heart, that I think is true and interesting, and therefore should be seen.
Russell T. Davies
I'll wager that in ten years it will be fashionable again to be a virgin.
Barbara Cartland
Can I ask who you are, sir?""Yeah, I expect so," said Strike, walking past him and ringing the doorbell. Anstis's dinner invitation notwithstanding, he was not feeling sympathetic to the police just now. "Should be just about within your capabilities.
Robert Galbraith
Didn't open the box? What was it last time? Didn't know what it was? And yet we do keep finding each other, don't we? - Cenobite
Clive Barker
I believe in mess, tears, pain, self-abasement, loss of self-respect, nakedness. Not caring doesn’t seem much different from not loving.
Tom Stoppard
The main question to a novel is -- did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not -- story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing.
Sydney Smith
Never laugh at live dragons.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Maybe being a good parent is about improvisation and spontaneity. Maybe it's about genuinely being with your kid. Sometimes though, it is also about being able to catch sick in yours hands.
Keith Stuart
We...advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche.
C.S. Lewis
To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.
Saki
Moreover, it is not just that the early documents are silent about so much of Jesus that came to be recorded in the gospels, but that they view him in a substantially different way -- as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past, 'emptied' then of all his supernatural attributes (Phil.2:7), and certainly not a worker of prodigious miracles which made him famous throughout 'all Syria' (Mt.4:24). I have argued that there is good reason to believe that the Jesus of Paul was constructed largely from musing and reflecting on a supernatural 'Wisdom' figure, amply documented in the earlier Jewish literature, who sought an abode on Earth, but was there rejected, rather than from information concerning a recently deceased historical individual. The influence of the Wisdom literature is undeniable; only assessment of what it amounted to still divides opinion.
George Albert Wells
The Vikings could have been saved if they had borrowed survival strategies from the Inuit, but the only record we have of contact between the two peoples is the remark from a Viking settler that the Inuit bleed a lot when stabbed - an observation that hardly indicates a willingness to learn from their northern neighbors.
Johnjoe McFadden
I never read prefaces, and it is not much good writing things just for people to skip. I wonder other authors have never thought of this.
E Nesbit
Let none of us delude himself by supposing that honesty is always the best policy. It is not.
Dean William R. Inge
Worry denies the power of God and produces no good results. Worry adds no value to your life. Eliminate it with God’s help.
Elizabeth George
Happiness and beauty are the worst things you can have in a life, because you never forget them. They go on and on ambushing you, presumably until you die.
M. John Harrison
This was what my spirit longed to do, to wander in strange lands. It couldn't stand being trapped in one body all the time. It had wanderlust.
Samantha Shannon
What if there is no such thing as other people's wrongness..... ?
Jay Woodman
It is as if Quincey has replaced the sun in my universe and it is around him that I spin.
Kate Cary
What corrupt corporate governments call a terrorist is what many common people call a resistance fighter.
Steven Magee
Glass & peace alike betray proof of fragility under repeated blows.
David Mitchell
When the odds are hopeless, when all seems to be lost, then is the time to be calm, to make a show of authority – at least of indifference
Ian Fleming