Quotes by British Authors - Page 145

Remember diamonds are created under pressure so hold on, it be your time to shine soon.
Sope Agbelusi
Happyish. Well, happyish isn't so bad.''It's the most we can hope for.
David Nicholls
We are all failures- at least the best of us are.
J.M. Barrie
Most moderately active children – as long as they have full stomachs – cope well with exotic experiences, but parents should get fit for their trip. Young children will expect their parents to be All Powerful so they would be wise to prepare properly and arrive with toned quads or they might not keep up on the slopes.
Jane Wilson-Howarth
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
Thomas Hardy
It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary gray goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys.
Terry Pratchett
He's lost his colour very far from here,Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry
Wilfred Owen
Nice slippers,” Davin grinned. They were green and furry. “Thanks.” I shrugged and looked him over, half expecting to see a new injury. “So what’s up?” He had one hand behind his back.
J.M. Richards
If only the hat had mentioned a house for people who felt a bit queasy, that would have been the one for him.
J.K. Rowling
And if it doesn't go like that?– Then all your problems will be over and you won't have a thing to worry.
Jack Higgins
Persuading everyone to behave decently to each other because the society is so fragile is a worthy goal, but it may be more straightforward just to make the societies less fragile, which means developing their economies.
Paul Collier
I don't know the rules of grammar. If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language.
David Ogilvy
Ludlow put a hand on his arm. "A friend of mine used to say, 'You cannot change the past, but every moment is an opportunity to change your future.
F.E. Higgins
There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth the publishing to find honest men to publish it and to get sensible men to read it.
C. C. Colton
To act without rapacity to use knowledge with wisdom to respect interdependence to operate without hubris and greed are not simply moral imperatives. They are an accurate scientific description of the means of survival.
Barbara Ward
If I could give you information of my life it would be to show how a woman of very ordinary ability has been led by God in strange and unaccustomed paths to do in His service what He has done in her. And if I could tell you all, you would see how God has done all, and I nothing. I have worked hard, very hard, that is all; and I have never refused God anything.
Florence Nightingale
It's when I'm feeling blue that I think of my little color pink.
Anthony T.Hincks
Are you entirely sure of that knot?' asked Morveer. 'There is no place in the plan for a lengthy drop'.'Twenty-eight strides', said Friendly.'What?''The drop'.A brief pause, 'That is not helpful'.
Joe Abercrombie
Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized by a madness which forces them to commit the very acts which makes it certain that what they dread shall happen.
Dame Rebecca West
A bird in The Strand is worth two in Shepherds Bush
Spike Milligan
To the one in the skies, this city must look like a scintillating pattern of speckled glows in all directions, like a firecracker going off amid thick darkness. Right now the urban pattern glowing here is in hues of orange, ginger, and ochre. It is a configuration of sparkles, each dot a light lit by someone awake at this hour. From where the Celestial Gaze is situated, from that high above, all these sporadically lit bulbs must seem in perfect harmony, constantly flickering, as if coding a cryptic message to God.
Elif Shafak
Practically anything can go faster than Disc light, which is lazy and tame, unlike ordinary light. The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no cap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. presumably, he said, these must be some elementary particles - kingons, or possibly queons - that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plan to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed.
Terry Pratchett
A race that rejected the idea of personal sacrifice would surely be erased from time's records before long.
Salman Rushdie
Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that’s what you feel, was one; that’s what I feel, was the other, and then they fought together in her mind, as now. It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach; also it is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions, and turns a nice young man with a profile like a gem’s (Paul’s was exquisite) into a bully with a crowbar (he was swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End Road. Yet, she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this–love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.
Virginia Woolf
Naturally—and why should I not admit this—I have occasionally wondered to myself how things might have turned out in the long run.... I only speculate this now because in the light of subsequent events, it could well be argued that in making my decision...I was perhaps not entirely aware of the full implications of what I was doing. Indeed, it might even be said that this small decision of mine constituted something of a key turning point; that that decision set things on an inevitable course towards what eventually happened. But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.... What would have transpired, one may ask, had one responded slightly differently...? And perhaps—occurring as it did around the same time as these events?
Kazuo Ishiguro
However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative.
Alain de Botton
On the Ning Nang NongWhere the Cows go Bong!And the Monkeys all say Boo!Theres a Nang Nong NingWhere the trees go Ping!And the tea pots Jibber Jabber JooOn the Nong Ning NangAll the Mice go Clang!And you just cant catch em when they do!So its Ning Nang Nong!Cows go Bong!Nong Nang Ning!Trees go Ping!Nong Ning Nang!The mice go Clang!What a noisy place to belong,Is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!
Spike Milligan
Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.
Piers Anthony
The burnt child dreads the fire.
Ben Jonson
You know, sometimes I don't understand what's wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth—and yet sometimes we just don't seem to have the gumption to exploit our intellectual property. We split the atom, and now we have to get French or Korean scientists to help us build nuclear power stations. We perfected the finest cars on earth—and now Rolls-Royce is in the hands of the Germans. Whatever we invent, from the jet engine to the internet, we find that someone else carts it off and makes a killing from it elsewhere.
Boris Johnson
But I got through the review, for all their Latin and French; I did, and if you doubt me, you just look at the end of the great ledger, turn it upside down, and you'll find I've copied out all the fine words they said of you: "careful observer," "strong nervous English," "rising philosopher."Oh! I can nearly say it all off by heart, for many a time when I am frabbed by bad debts, or Osborne's bills, or moidered with accounts, I turn the ledger wrong way up, and smoke a pipe over it, while I read those pieces out of the review which speak about you, lad!
Elizabeth Gaskell
We have a calling: a need to be close to Nature, where she may cleanse our souls and wash away the stresses of yesterday. It is emotional recompense for the cost of living.
Fennel Hudson
Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.
E.M. Forster
Environmental radiation research is the rent I pay for living on this planet.
Steven Magee
Interestingly, this speech by Prospero does not contrast the unreality of the stage with the solid, flesh-and-blood existence of real men and women. On the contrary, it seizes on the flimsiness of dramatic characters as a metaphor for the fleeting, fantasy-ridden quality of actual human lives. It is we who are made of dreams, not just such figments of Shakespeare’s imagination as Ariel and Caliban. The cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of this earth are mere stage scenery after all.
Terry Eagleton
When the human being says:'It is not true...'He may mean:'I don't know about it, so I think it is untrue.'Or:'I don't like it.
Idries Shah
Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.
Richard Dawkins
Becoming drunk is a journey that generally elates him in the early stages—he's good company, expansive, mischievous and fun, the famous old poet, almost as happy listening as talking. But once the destination is met, once established up there on that unsunny plateau, a fully qualified drunk, the nastier muses, the goblins of aggression, paranoia, self-pity take control. The expectation now is that an evening with John will go bad somehow, unless everyone around is prepared to toil at humouring and flattering and hours of frozen-faced listening. No one will be.
Ian McEwan
Winter in the soul is by no means a comfortable season: but there is this comfort, namely, that the Lord makes it.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.
Saki
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.
T.S Eliot
Our life stories are at one and the same time reality, fallacy and fantasy...
Rasheed Ogunlaru
I think people believe in heaven because they don't like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don't like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish.
Mark Haddon
She had locked something away,something deep inside.A truth that she had once known,but chose to forget.And she couldn't break free.So I decided to search for it.I went deep into the recess of her mindand found that secret place.And I broke in..
Christopher J. Nolan
There seemed to be endless obstacles preventing me from living with my eyes open, but as I gradually followed up clue after clue it seemed that the root cause of them all was fear.
Joanna Field
Petra is a brilliant display of man's artistry in turning barren rock into a majestic wonder.
Edward Dawson
Whatever gets you through the night
John Lennon
[Books are] vital to learning. Half the population don't go to football matches but that doesn't make football any less important.
John Sutherland
The service we render others is the rent we pay for our room on earth.
Wilfred Grenfell
When you rise in the morning, form a resolution to make the day a happy one for a fellow creature.
Sydney Smith
But the sons of Men die indeed, and leave the world; wherefore they are called the Guests or the Strangers. Death is their fate, the gift of Illúvatar, which as time wears even the Powers shall envy.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Life is actually a self made web of fate.
Steven Redhead
Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you have not committed.
Anthony Powell
The modern human lives in a cesspool of man-made electromagnetic radiation.
Steven Magee
When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us.
Algernon Blackwood
In fairy tales the evil characters disappear or die, in reality, evil spreads while you wait for your hero on a horse, only to realise the sword to save yourself was always in your hand...
Seja Majeed
When the love-led man had ceased from his labours Bathsheba came and looked him in the face.'Gabriel, will you you stay on with me?' she said, smiling winningly, and not troubling to bring her lips quite together again at the end, because there was going to be another smile soon.'I will,' said Gabriel.And she smiled on him again.
Thomas Hardy
A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things.
Bill Bryson
Situations spin out of control because care was not taken to carefully manage reality through desires.
Steven Redhead
Andrew Davies has said he prefers his authors dead, and I can see there is only a limited usefulness in a live one when it comes to adaptation.
Alan Hollinghurst