Quotes by British Authors - Page 143

If you are living in the electrified wireless west, then you are living a very abnormal lifestyle that your genetics has no adaptation to.
Steven Magee
Jane, be still; don't struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation.""I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.
Charlotte Brontë
Have you ever been going somewhere with a crowd and you're certain it's the wrong road and you tell them, but they won't listen, so you just have to plod along in what you know is the wrong direction till somebody more important gets the same idea?
James Hilton
At the W.M. Keck Observatory on the very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea, there was no routine monitoring of mental functioning, blood oxygen levels, blood pressure or heart rate of workers.
Steven Magee
The limits of your language are the limits of your world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Someone needs to put a muzzle on President Trump sooner rather than later.
Steven Magee
It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now--independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one's own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with one's neighbors--are essentially those on which the of an individualist society rests. Collectivism has nothing to put in their place, and in so far as it already has destroyed then it has left a void filled by nothing but the demand for obedience and the compulsion of the individual to what is collectively decided to be good.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Natural science is founded on minute critical views of the general order of events taking place upon our globe, corrected, enlarged, or exalted by experiments, in which the agents concerned are placed under new circumstances, and their diversified properties separately examined. The body of natural science, then, consists of facts; is analogy,—the relation of resemblance of facts by which its different parts are connected, arranged, and employed, either for popular use, or for new speculative improvements.
Humphry Davy
I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.
John Fowles
Beyond the late Fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the details of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then.
George Orwell
Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things.
Terry Pratchett
When I was done raking and bagging, I banged on the door and demanded entry /...let me in by the hair on your chinny, chin-chin/ (a fairytale moment there) Dick opened it and in his posthest voice, said that before he could possibly consider letting me re-cross the threshold he needed to ask me whether I was a good f*cking fairy or a bad f*cking fairy? Grinning, I told him that I was very wicked fairy and if he had a wand about his person that I could have lend of, I would prove it. He said that was the right answer and promptly yanked me inside where he located and presented me with his wand, breathily ordering the sorcerer's apprentice to perform magic with it. Judging by the look on his face afterwards, I knew I'd impressed him with my oral sorcery and I was more than happy with the short-lifting sorcery Shane performed on me as the same time.
Gillibran Brown
C" is for colonies Rightly we boastthat of all the great nationsGreat Britain has most!
Mrs. Ernest Ames
Erica had asked me a million times. 'Madison, are you sure you’re just the child minder? He pays you a lot of money for doing hardly anything.' Pushing aside the blatant insinuation that I was his weekend whore, I’d always told her the absolute truth. He’d never so much as looked at me inappropriately, let alone anything more.
Kyra Lennon
I don't know where I am going, I just know I had to leave. Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.
Ma Jian
Laughter is ever young whereas tragedy except the very highest of all quickly becomes haggard.
Margaret Sackville
A great philosopher once said: 'We are what we Contemplate'And in these modern times when mankind is constantly confronted with images of conflict and world disasters, it seems very important to contemplate the Beautiful. It has become my personal crusade as an artist, to create images which uplift and nurture the human heart; to create that which serves as a reminder of what is Sacred and Beautiful within the drama of Life....Ever since I can remember, my innermost nature has always been to do acts of kindness and to create, from saving lost animals, to organizing charitable events; from mothering my four children to now giving birth to the 'Art of Beauty'.
Ginger Gilmour
Somewhere out in the darkness, a phoenix was singing in a way Harry had never heard before: a stricken lament of terrible beauty.
J.K. Rowling
Face after face contorted in hate, men, women, children. Whatever lies had been voiced against me had clearly gained near-universal acceptance. I knew then that, regardless of what transpired here, my home was now lost to me. It wasn’t just that these people would never accept me, more that I would never forgive their gullibility.
Anthony Ryan
If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as the beginning of individual existence, this skirmish from which one one's spurs, from which one set out on the true quests of life.
Evelyn Waugh
How can anybody say they know how I feel? The only one around here who is me, is ME.
Morrissey
The world out there is nothing more than a load of places with people in ’em. And the people out there are neither more interesting, nor better, nor lower, than us here in Angle Tar. It’s humans, Rue. We’re the same wherever you go, no matter what we surround ourselves with.
Laure Eve
Think of that person you knew when you were a kid, who you always thought you could have loved completely and forever.Well, you could have. It’s the truth, and it’s the saddest and simplest thing. There isn’t just one person for each of us in the world. There aren’t many, but there are always a few people we could have made it with, that maybe we still want to make it with, that press themselves so close to our hearts they leave scars, and then slip through our fingers and disappear from our lives. And it doesn’t make a difference if you’re thirteen or ninety- eight because some things you feel are real, no matter when.
Abigail Tarttelin
Every man has a right to utter what he thinks is truth and every other man has a right to knock him down for it.
Samuel Johnson
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
Pico Iyer
We were all serious readers, sitting on wooden chairs at rows of lecterns, turning the pages, united in mutual love of isolation.
Michael Moorcock
We can say the brotherhood of man, and pretend that we include the sisterhood of women, but we know that we don't. Folklore has it that women only congregate to bitch an absent member of their group, and continue to do so because they are to well aware of the consequences if they stay away. It's meant to be a joke, but like jokes about mothers-in-law it is founded in bitter truth.
Germaine Greer
... but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.
David Mitchell
Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone's life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble.
Nadeem Aslam
It's spider season. Every year, right about now, thousands of the godless eight-legged bastards emerge from the bowels of hell (or the garden, whichever's nearest) with the sole intention of tormenting humankind.
Charlie Brooker
Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous you get knocked down by traffic from both sides.
Margaret Thatcher
The happy man is he who knows his limitations yet bows to no false gods.
Robert W. Service
In words which can still bring tears to the eyes, St. Augustine describes the desolation into which the death of his friend Nebridius plunged him (Confessions IV, 10). Then he draws a moral. This is what comes, he says, of giving one’s heart to anything but God. All human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away.
C.S. Lewis
How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.
Lawrence Durrell
I am one of those servants – butlers usually – who respectfully points out when their master is about to do something stupid: "You should probably only burn the document once the blackmail has been completed, m' lady.
Joe Dunthorne
To stand up for someone was to stitch your fate into the lining of theirs.
Tom Rob Smith
O blessed be the grace that makes advantages of my corruptions, even to contradict and kill themselves (648).
Richard Baxter
A picture can say a thousand words, but a sentence can paint a thousand pictures...
J. Buchanan
I always prefer to believe the best of everybody it saves so much trouble
Rudyard Kipling
In vain we roared;in vain we triedTo rouse her into laughter:Her pensive glances wandered wideFrom orchestra to rafter -"TIER UPON TIER!" she said,and sighed;And silence followed after.
Lewis Carroll
To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius. And easier. Because it's true. It's a new world every heart beat.
Joyce Cary
She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.
George Eliot
Directly above them, framed in the doorway from the Brain Room, stood Albus Dumbledore, his wand aloft, his face white and furious. Harry felt a kind of electric charge surge through every particle of his body - they were saved.
J.K. Rowling
The purpose of bayonet training is to awaken your killer instincts. The killer instinct will make you strong. If the meek ever inherit the earth the strong will take it away from them. The weak exist to be devoured by the strong. Every Marine must pack his own gear. Every Marine must be the instrument of his own salvation.
Stanley Kubrick
Greatness needs courage (above all) and willpower, charisma, intelligence and creativity but it also demands characteristics that we often associate with the least admirable people: reckless risk-taking, brutal determination, sexual thrill-seeking, brazen showmanship, obsession close to fixation and something approaching insanity. In other words, the qualities required for greatness and wickedness, for heroism and monstrosity are not too far distant from each other. The Norwegians alone have a word for this: stormannsgalskap – the madness of great men.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
On the day the Gjallerhorn is blown, it will wake the gods, no matter where they are, no matter how deeply they sleep.Heimdall will blow Gjallerhorn only once, at the end of all things, Ragnarok.
Neil Gaiman
Chromatacia…society…ruled by a colortocracy…social hierarchy based upon one's limited color perception, society is dominated by color. In this world, you are what you can see.
Jasper Fforde
There are a good many books, are there not, my boy?” said Mr. Brownlow, observing the curiosity with which Oliver surveyed the shelves that reached from the floor to the ceiling.“A great number, sir,” replied Oliver; “I never saw so many.”“You shall read them if you behave well,” said the old gentleman kindly; “and you will like that, better than looking at the outsides, - that is, in some cases, because there are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.
Charles Dickens
We rode through a three-thousand-year-old country, saw the ruined capital of the Queen of Sheba and the underground red-rock city of Lalibela, fraternized with a tribe of leaden-skinned troglogytes living among the mountains, scrapped with brigands, outwitted crocodiles, and eventually emerged battered and in rags with a book of adventures and 1,000 feet of film.
Rosita Forbes
Future generations may or may not judge Wittgenstein to be one of the great philosophers. Even if they do not, however, he is sure always to count as one of the great personalities of philosophy. From our perspective it is easy to mistake one for the other; which he is time will tell.
A.C. Grayling
had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins
George Orwell
Tchingis, if you determine this is to be so, who can withstand you? You are poetry after an ugly day, and heal wounds I didn't know I had.
Bryn Hammond
The only politician ever to have entered parliament with honourable intentions, was Guy Fawkes.
Terry Deary
What’s to become of us? We can’t go on like this.”“Yes, we can go on like this,” said Cesare. “We can go on exactly like this for the rest of our lives.
Penelope Fitzgerald
To be sure, this is what generally happens when one eats cake; but 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
How can you care about the image of a landscape, when you show by your deeds that you don't care for the landscape itself?
William Morris
There isn't so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I'd spent the rest of it being afraid of everything.
Nick Hornby
For some people,being mean to others is the point of their lives.
Jacqueline Rayner
Agres look!” Tria pointed Agres looked around “Very clever....” cheeky bastard Tria and Agres now found themselves back on a mountain top oh on not again
Charon Lloyd-Roberts
...The reason why we’re strippers, is invariably more boring, more grounded in nonexistential needs like money—and pragmatic concerns, like money.
Ruth Fowler