Quotes by British Authors - Page 144

There is time enough for everything in the course of the day if you do but one thing once but there is not time enough in the year if you will do two things at a time.
Lord Chesterfield
It’s always better to sit on your dignity in private than to stand on it in public.
Mark Lawrence
People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around.
Terry Pratchett
First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft.
Terry Pratchett
More and more I had come to see the Capped as lacking what seemed to me the essence of humanity, the vital spark of defiance against the rulers of the world.
John Christopher
If you're doing it right... you should feel while you're doing it that you're revealing a little too much of yourself.
Neil Gaiman
Only in war does the madman become sane.
Anthony Ryan
It's the story of the City of Women; of how it came to be, how it flourished, and how it was destroyed by a reckless and irrevocable act of mercy.
Louise Carey
Because there is no challenge, there is no reason to work hard. And with no reason to work hard, we all have become lazy. Lazy people are like cancer. They spread. Before you know it, the entire country is destroyed.
Tahir Shah
Whew,' he said, 'I'm glad that's over, Thomas. I've been feeling awfully bad about it.' It was only too evident that he no longer did.
Graham Greene
The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.
Douglas Adams
The tendency to variation in living beings, which all admitted as a matter of fact; the selective influence of conditions, which no one could deny to be a matter of fact, when his attention was drawn to the evidence; and the occurrence of great geological changes which also was matter of fact; could be used as the only necessary postulates of a theory of the evolution of plants and animals which, even if not at once, competent to explain all the known facts of biological science, could not be shown to be inconsistent with any.
Thomas Henry Huxley
The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.
C.S. Lewis
We all feel inadequate very often. It’s only when it gets chronic that it is disturbing to one’s emotions and can get out of hand and make you pretty damn miserable.
Taylor Caldwell
Nationalist (forces around the world) could now more readily communicate and share their grievances, viewing themselves as similar groups, engaged in a common struggle for greater autonomy against control exerted from London or Paris.
Charles Emmerson
People more often kill those they love than those they hate. Possibly because only the people you love can really make life unendurable to you.
Agatha Christie
... go down to the country, take a house, get interested in local politics, in local scandal, in village gossip. Take an inquisitive and violent interest in your neighbours.
Agatha Christie
Your guardian angel must have been working over time,' Penny laughed shakily. Rose laughed as she put her arms around her sister and hugged her. 'More like the Devil taking care of his own.
Margaret Dickinson
Tell your daughters how you love your body.Tell them how they must love theirs.Tell them to be proud of every bit of themselves—from their tiger stripes to the soft flesh of their thighs,whether there is a little of them or a lot,whether freckles cover their face or not,whether their curves are plentiful or slim,whether their hair is thick, curly, straight, long or short.Tell them how they inheritedtheir ancestors, souls in their smiles,that their eyes carry countriesthat breathed life into history,that the swing of their hipsdoes not determine their destiny.Tell them never to listen when bodies are critiqued.Tell them every woman’s body is beautifulbecause every woman’s soul is unique.
Nikita Gill
Ah, music," he said, wiping his eyes. "A magic beyond all we do here!
J.K. Rowling
A business needs a character and an identity, just like a person and just like a person it needs to have a Voice.
David Amerland
My words will be my legacy, etched in heartfelt honesty upon the pages of time.
Callum McLaughlin
The gristle of the underneath stings in the air of responsibility.
Mark Ryan
The word "education" comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.
Muriel Spark
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin, more even than death.
Bertrand Russell
Slowly gently night creeps up on you, more gentle than light, it helps you realize how much the light hinders you. In the darkness your senses learn when they should quit – in the embrace of the dark everything becomes what it really is. People fear the dark but unlike the light it does not lie to you. In the dark you can go where you long to be.
Neil Gaiman
When it comes down to it, government is simply an abandonment of responsibility on the assumption that there are people, other than ourselves, who really know how to manage things. But the government, run ostensibly for the good of the people, becomes a self-serving corporation. To keep things under control it proliferates laws of ever-increasing complexity and unintelligibility, and hinders productive work by demanding so much accounting on paper that the record of what has been done becomes more important than what has actually been done. The Taoist moral is that people who mistrust themselves and one another are doomed.
Alan W. Watts
I am looking forward to the departure of the corrupt Obama administration in 2017.
Steven Magee
Every word that he had spoken amongst the amassed beauties of Macmaster furnishings had been a link in a love-speech. It was not merely that he had confessed to her as he would have to no other soul in the world - 'To no other soul in the world,' he had said! - his doubts, his misgivings, and his fears; it was that every word he uttered and that came to her, during the lasting of that magic, had sung of passion. If he had uttered the word 'Come', she would have followed him to the bitter ends of the earth; if he had said, 'There is no hope', she would have known the finality of despair. Having said neither, she knew: 'This is our condition; so we must continue!' And she knew, too, that he was telling her that he, like her, was… oh, say, on the side of the angels.
Ford Madox Ford
The angry person is acutely sensitive to all they are owed by the world, and blind to all they have received
Jules Evans
Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
Friedrich A. Hayek
If you're not at the front, you're not in the race.
David Millar
But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the damned,' whereas Dr P. was not fighting, did not know what was lost. But who was more tragic, or who was more damned -- the man who knew it, or the man who did not?
Oliver Sacks
Damson was also old enough to know that you can never rely on other people to act as you would in almost any circumstance.
Josa Young
To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.
G.K. Chesterton
Did nothing in particular and did it very well.
W.S. Gilbert
Superior experience and knowledge will be made available to a man or woman in exact accordance with his worth, capacity and earning of it
Idries Shah
He howled in despair as his body was enveloped by a terrifying and sickening darkness.
Alan Kinross
Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.
C.S. Lewis
At the end of the day,” he continued, “although many believe in fate, it’s those who go through life with independent thought alone who are the strongest.
Adele Rose
My second wife - I was still young then - she left me, and I made the mistake of winning her back. It took me years to lose her again after that. She was a good woman. It is not easy to lose a good woman. If one must marry it is better to marry a bad woman.
Graham Greene
Calling resists privatization by insisting on the totality of faith. Calling resists politicization by demanding a tension with every human allegiance and association. Calling resists polarization by requiring an attitude toward, and action in, society that is inevitably transforming because it is constantly engaged. Grand Christian movements will rise and fall. Grand campaigns will be mounted and grand coalitions assembled. But all together such coordinated efforts will never match the influence of untold numbers of followers of Christ living out their callings faithfully across the vastness and complexity of modern society.
Os Guinness
If a man happen to take it into his head to assassinate with his own hands, or with the sword of justice, those whom he calls heretics, that is, people who think, or perhaps only speak, differently upon a subject which neither party understands, he will be as much inclined to do this at one time as at another. Fanaticism never sleeps: it is never glutted: it is never stopped by philanthropy; for it makes a merit of trampling on philanthropy: it is never stopped by conscience; for it has pressed conscience into its service. Avarice, lust, and vengeance, have piety, benevolence, honour; fanaticism has nothing to oppose it.
Jeremy Bentham
Trust, like the lubricant in an engine, is noticed only when it is gone and the motor has seized up.
David Hurst
I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the Time Machine. The fact is, the Time Traveler was one of those men who are too clever to be believed: you never felt that you saw all round him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness. Had Filby shown the model and explained the matter in the Time Traveller's words, we should have shown him far less skepticism. For we should have perceived his motives; a pork butcher could understand Filby.
H.G.Wells
We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
Thomas Hardy
A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set us a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific text-book, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact.
George Orwell
The dwarfs can turn lead into gold...It reached the pointy ears of the dwarfs.-Can we?-Damned if I know. I can't.-Yeah, but if you could, you wouldn't say. I wouldn't say, if I could.-Can you?-No!-Ah-ha!
Terry Pratchett
I couldn't see killing myself if I had a book that was only half-read: Fountainhead, Catcher in the Rye, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, One Hundred Years of Solitude? No. I figured that those who killed themselves first had to finish whatever book they were reading...if it were any good, that is. Of course, there's always the occasional book that makes you want to throw yourself off a bridge just for having wasted your time reading it. But I usually finished those ones, too.
Michael Anthony
There is an unequivocal question in every layer of a dawn's beautiful rise that asks: "What are you going to do with this one glorious day?
Melanie Gow
Life's generally artless, but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind yor back, and before you know it you're in a final act of a lousy movie. A lousy horror-movine, usually...
Glen Duncan
Prayer is a salve for every sore, even the sorest, a remedy for every malady, even the most grievous.
Matthew Henry
For rigorous teachers seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire, Show'd me the high, white star of Truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire. Even now their whispers pierce the gloom: What dost thou in this living tomb?
Matthew Arnold
You may not believe in magic but something very strange is happening at this very moment. Your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach. It's not that you are dead or anything dramatic like that, it is simply that you are fading away and I can't even remember your name.
Leonora Carrington
That is a terrible plan.""Hiccup's plans are always t-terrible.""Hey! You're still here, aren't you?
Cressida Cowell
Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.
Graham Greene
It wasn't that I stopped caring about life, but that I've stopped being able to care.
Ruby Elliot
[T]he imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.
George Orwell
Those who can’t, try: those who can, don’t have to.
Idries Shah
...perhaps great sins start as simple weakness, and the consistent placing of self before others.
Anne Perry