Quotes by British Authors - Page 141

Her cheeks were flushed. She caught hold of the Savage's arm and pressed it, limp, against her side. He looked down at her for a moment, pale, pained, desiring, and ashamed of his desire. He was not worthy, not... Their eyes for a moment met. What treasures hers promised! A queen's ransom of temperament. Hastily he looked away, disengaged his imprisoned arm. He was obscurely terrified lest she should cease to be something he could feel himself unworthy of.
Aldous Huxley
Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.
Anthony Burgess
Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.
Jane Austen
An Unbreakable Vow?" said Ron, looking stunned. "Nah, he can’t have.... Are you sure?""Yes I’m sure," said Harry. "Why, what does it mean?""Well, you can’t break an Unbreakable Vow...""I’d worked that much out for myself, funnily enough.
J.K. Rowling
These are the four that are never content: that have never been filled since the dew began-Jacala's mouth, and the glut of the kite, and the hands of the ape, and the eyes of Man.
Rudyard Kipling
Oh, will you pray? Stop now and pray, lest desire turn to feeling and feeling evaporate.
Amy Carmichael
Dead men are not friends to living men, and give them no gifts.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Unless there is within us that which is above us, we shall soon yield to that which is about us.
P.T. Forsyth
Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.
George Eliot
Psychologists call these fully absorbing experiences flowstates, which were discovered and named by a world-famous psychologistwith the most unpronounceable surname I have ever encountered –Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Ilona Boniwell
The great misfortune of our generation is that the direction which by the amazing progress of the natural sciences has been given to its interests is not one which assists us in comprehending the larger process of which as individuals we form merely a part or in appreciating how we constantly contribute to a common effort without either directing it or submitting to orders of others.
Friedrich A. Hayek
She(Joan of Arc) put her dreams and her sentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put her practicality into her practice. In modern Imperial wars, the case is reversed. Our dreams, our aims are always, we insist, quite practical. It is our practice that is dreamy.
G.K. Chesterton
Master Nathaniel looked at him. The fixed stare, the slightly-open mouth, the rigid motionless body, fettered by a misery too profound for restlessness — how well he knew the state of mind these things expressed! But there must surely be relief in thus allowing the mood to mould the body's attitude to its own s
Hope Mirrlees
If your confidence is based purely on the way you look, you’re setting yourself up for a) years of fretting about how to appear perfect, and b) anxiety / despair as the wrinkles inevitably set in. (Not to mention the fact that the world is FULL of pretty girls – you’re going to have to dig ta little bit deeper if you want to stand out in the crowd.) Base your self-belief on what’s in your heart and mind; you’ll never lose your inner beauty.
Rosie Blythe
America: It's like Britain, only with buttons.
Ringo Starr
If Stuart is a freak... it is because he has had the superhuman strength not to be defeated by this isolation. It is because he has had the almost unbelievable social adroitness to be able to fit in smoothly with an educated, soft-skinned person like myself and not make me frightened half to death. If Stuart's a freak, I salute freaks.
Alexander Masters
Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram into it!
Winston Churchill
Change is the most beneficial power available to you, simply change the things you don't like, replacing them with your true desires.
Steven Redhead
If I am a great man then a good many of the great men of history are frauds.
Bonar Law
As the trees turned red, then white, then naked as pitchforks, Margot and Xiao Chen immersed themselves in several forests' worth of pages, and I watched, tortured, as brick after brick of a new development was laid on the wasteland of Midtown West like slabs of gold bullion.
Carolyn Jess-Cooke
When someone is sleep-Tweeting the sexual thoughts you’re currently having about them while you’re having sex with someone else, miles away, it’s kind of too late.
Stefan Mohamed
Atlas said, 'Must my future be so heavy?' Hera said, 'That is your present, Atlas. Your future hardens every day, but it is not fixed.' 'How can I escape my fate?' 'You must choose your destiny.
Jeanette Winterson
Voice in the nightA voice whispered to me last night: 'There is no such thing as a voice whispering in the night!
Idries Shah
It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if she adored him too much, then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it.
D.H. Lawrence
He could remember all about it now; the pitiful figure he must have cut; the absurd way in which he had gone and done the very thing he had so often agreed with himself in thinking would be the most foolish thing in the world; and had met with exactly the consequences which, in these wise moods, he had always foretold were certain to follow, if he ever did make such a fool of himself.
Elizabeth Gaskell
The legal system has been designed by governments and corporations to protect them from the common people.
Steven Magee
Trying to take away someone’s language is usually the first step in trying to change them.
C. N. Lester
Charles realized that if he were going to apologize to Chrestomanci, he had better do it at once. He turned around to say it. But the folds had already rippled flat and nothing was the same anymore....
Diana Wynne Jones
How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is aquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.
Bertrand Russell
If ever you get invited into someone's home,' my father said (as he had been invited five or six times that morning), 'you go into the sitting-room and you say, “Oh, what an attractive room!" even if you think it's hideous.
Dick Francis
It's not that there are no differences between human and non-human animals, any more than there are no differences between black people and white people, freeborn citizens and slaves, men and women, Jews and gentiles, gays or heterosexuals. The question is rather: are they morally relevant differences? This matters because morally catastrophic consequences can ensue when we latch on to a real but morally irrelevant difference between sentient beings.
David Pearce
Imagination took the reins and Reason slow-paced though surefooted was unequal to a race with so eccentric and flighty a companion.
Fanny Burney
A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.
Anthony Trollope
I find that if you just talk, your mouth comes up with stuff.
Karl Pilkington
On the Day of Judgment , life and death are not determined by the world but by God's wisdom and law
John Bunyan
Grief isn't always a knife-sharp twist in your heart or a dull bludgeon in your stomach, sometimes it's a net, cast suddenly and silently over your soul so that you feel trapped and suffocated by its grasp. I feel the loss in the deepest recesses of myself, hidden parts of my mind and my matter, united in missing someone I will never see again.
Non Pratt
The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-
A.E. Housman
I am the only one of us who brings in any money. the other two cannot make money fortune telling. this is because they only tell the truth, and the truth is not what people want to hear. it is a bad thing and it troubles people, so they do not come back.
Neil Gaiman
Conjugation of the irregular verb “to design”:I create, You interfere, He gets in the way.We cooperate, You obstruct, They conspire.
David K. Brown
If I do not feel a sense of joy in God's creation, if I forget to offer the world back to God with thankfulness, I have advanced very little upon the Way. I have not yet learnt to be truly human. For it is only through thanksgiving that I can become myself.
Kallistos Ware
As we embrace our passions and delve into the mystery of life, we unite with the majestic complexity of nature; and if we follow the signs, this can help us understand who we really are.
Sebastian Pole
She could hear, some way off, her brothers calling to each other in the woods behind the house. She hoped desperately that their game wouldn't bring them any closer, that they wouldn't scare the birds away. Somehow she knew that you didn't get many moments like this in your life: moments when you knew, without any doubt, that you were alive, when you felt the air in your lungs and the wet grass beneath your feet and the cotton on your skin; moments when you were completely in the present, when neither the past nor the future mattered. She tried to slow her breathing, hoping somehow to make this moment last forever.
Neil Gaiman
Helping othersI order you to assist any oppressed person, whether he is a Moslem or not.
Idries Shah
That night, I dream. And when I wake up I remember watching a film with Nannan about a ventriloquist who went mad, his dummy coming to life and speaking for itself. My dream is like the end of the film where the ventriloquist and the dummy are in the madhouse, all these mad devil-faces pressed against the iron bars of the cell door, laughing as the dummy gets up off his chair and walks towards the ventriloquist who screams. The dummy strangles him. I can’t remember in the dream if I was the ventriloquist or the dummy. I’m in a funny mood all day. I don’t say much. I don’t feel like it.
Dean Lilleyman
There has never been a more important time to vote for the Green Party!
Steven Magee
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! YOU'VE READ ABOUT IT IN THE NEWSPAPERS! NOW, SHUDDER AS YOU OBSERVE, BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES, THAT MOST RAREAND RAGIC OF NATURE'S MIS
Alan Moore
Our analyses of the FDA data showed relatively little difference between the effects of antidepressants and the effects of placebos. Indeed, the effects were so small that they did not qualify as clinically significant. The drug companies knew how small the effect of their medications were compared to placebos, and so did the FDA and other regulatory agencies. The companies found various ways to make the data seem more favorable to their products, and the FDA helped them keep their negative data secret. In fact, in some instances, the FDA urged the companies to keep negative data hidden, even when the companies wanted to reveal them. My colleagues and I hadn't really discovered anything new. We had merely revealed their 'dirty little secret'.
Irving Kirsch
That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!
Iris Murdoch
Prue hadn't really been in love with Fabian. Indeed, it was obvious that at times she found him both boring and irritating. But wasn't that what so many marriages were - finding a person boring and irritating and yet loving him? Who could imagine a man who was never boring, or irritating?
Barbara Pym
If solid happiness we prize within our breast this jewel lies And they are fools who roam the world has nothing to bestow From our own selves our bliss must flow And that dear hut-our home.
Nathaniel Cotton
Autumn to winter winter into spring. Spring into summer summer into fall - So rolls the changing year and so we change -Motion so swift we know not that we move.
Dinah Mulock Craik
I’m pretty sure I’m the only author who intends to take the longest possible route to a destination that will always be over the next hill.
Fennel Hudson
Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism.
G.K. Chesterton
Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.
Aldous Huxley
Deception and privileged secrets are common facets of politics.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
She felt powerless to withstand or deny him. He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind, finds it to blow so strongly that it stops the breath.
Thomas Hardy
Feeling important is a vice, not a virtue, however concealed as participation in something noble.
Idries Shah
The conjunction of ruling and dreaming generates tyranny.
Michael Oakeshott
Education is political.
Noel Castree
Shadows fell on them like predators as the light went out.
China Miéville