Quotes by British Authors - Page 146

...begged them as we read our literary texts, only to listen. To wrench open - it takes an effort of will - the portcullis to their teenage hearts for just a couple of hours once a week, to humbly admit another, and better - a Yeats or Shakespeare, a Crazy Jane or Hamlet - and to welcome them, to allow for those tiny spots of time some vibration in the jelly of being, that makes, once it has settled, a subtle new mould... Otherwise, I would observe tartly...you are merely going to become a product of your family, the few friends you might make and the few lovers you may garner...nothing more than a function of your upbringing - a type. Whereas, if you will only read, and listen, you will admit a multiplicity of voices and points of view, consider them with some humility, allow them gracious entrance however strident or discordant some of them may sound, then you will grow and change, and each of these voices will become a constituent part of who you become, an atom of growing being. It is literature and only literature than can do this.
Rick Gekoski
And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, in dimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.
Pico Iyer
I get my share of mud flung my way, but the secret is to dance in the rain and the mud will wash away.
Philip Catshill
Christianity does NOT replace the technical. When he tells you to feed the hungry and doesn't give you lessons in cookery. If you want to learn THAT, you must go to a cook rather than a Christian.
C.S. Lewis
A small child being dragged to bed peered curiously at me as it passed, then waved. We waved back, not being entirely sure how else to respond to small creatures like that.
Kate Griffin
My heart was still beating, I was still breathing, but was living something more?
Molly Looby
Almost everything that I've ever worried about has never happened ..
Ian Tucker
When there are two PhD's in a developing country one is Head of State and the other is in exile.
Lord Samuel
I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously revived, great and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.
Charlotte Brontë
Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?
Jane Austen
There is no greater evil than killing. I don't care whether they call it war or justice. Life is precious.
Brian Jacques
You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.
Jeanette Winterson
When we think of love,we always think of red,but when I think of love,I think of you instead.
Anthony T.Hincks
Upon seeing the third and final table I realized that most of the people listed would most likely be dead, or come out of these qualifying races with severed limbs of as Revaarn liked to say 'Loose a limb no problem, it'll be amputated and replaced with a robotic one.
Charon Lloyd-Roberts
Where is Wood?" said Harry, suddenly realizing he wasn't there."Still in the showers," said Fred. "We think he's trying to drown himself.
J.K. Rowling
We must love one another or die
W.H. Auden
Cooking is an art and patience a virtue... Careful shopping, freshingredients and an unhurried approach are nearly all you need. There is one more thing - love. Love for food and love for those you invite to your table. With a combination of these things you can be an artist - not perhaps in the representational style of a Dutch master, but rather more like Gauguin, the naïve, or Van Gogh,the impressionist. Plates or pictures of sunshine taste of happiness and love.
Keith Floyd
As a corollary to the proposition that all institutions must be subordinated to the law of equal freedom, we cannot choose but admit the right of the citizen to adopt a condition of voluntary outlawry. If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state—to relinquish its protection, and to refuse paying towards its support. It is self-evident that in so behaving he in no way trenches upon the liberty of others; for his position is a passive one; and whilst passive he cannot become an aggressor. It is equally selfevident that he cannot be compelled to continue one of a political corporation, without a breach of the moral law, seeing that citizenship involves payment of taxes; and the taking away of a man’s property against his will, is an infringement of his rights.
Herbert Spencer
They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game
R.D. Laing
As I stare at it,I can feel little invisible strings,silently tugging me toward it. I have to touch it. I have to wear it. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
Sophie Kinsella
And when I saw you kissing that girlMy heart, it shattered and my eyes, they wateredAnd when I tried to speak, I stuttered
Kate Nash
As long as the postponement lasts he will be in a false position. He will be silent when he ought to speak and laugh when he ought to be silent.
C.S. Lewis
I have wanted only one thing to make me happy. That thing is everything.
Sebastian Horsley
Pleasure is a reciprocal no one feels it who does not at the same time give it. To be pleased one must please.
Lord Chesterfield
I'm not afraid of death. Death's afraid of me.
Lee Child
There's nothing like a good, long sleep to allow unpleasantness to recede into the past.
David Michie
Religion lives not in dogma, but utterly within the virtues of love and self-sacrifice. Without those, there is no future I can bear to stand, nor hope for the continuance of God's creation. It is not blasphemy to say that the work of Jesus the redeemer was and is to break the chains of the realms of darkness. And set free the creature from the power of sin.
Warren Ellis
Escape the repetitive whirl wind that life can become through complacency.
Steven Redhead
Universe consists of frozen light.
David Bohm
The rising wave of nostalgia and an increasing interest in heritage sites and historic buildings is perhaps not only a sense of yearning for a lost Singapore, but also the recognition that neither 1959 nor 1965 marked Year One (...) In all the campaigns and features on Singapore's 50th anniversary that I've come across, the Kranji War Memorial was never mentioned. It just doesn't fit the slender narrative. That's such a shame because the cemetery is a fitting, dignified tribute to thousands of Singapore heroes, both local and foreign.
Neil Humphreys
Although I am unconvinced that I desire life, I am not yet ready to embrace death.
Charles Stross
Strange that men, from age to age, should consent to hold their lives at the breath of another, merely that each in his turn may have a power of acting the tyrant according to the law! Oh, God! give me poverty! Shower upon me all the imaginary hardships of human life! I will receive them with all thankfulness. Turn me a prey to the wild beasts of the desert, so I be never again the victim of man, dressed in the gore-dripping robes of authority! Suffer me at least to call life, the pursuits of life, my own! Let me hold it at the mercy of the elements, of the hunger of the beasts, or the revenge of barbarians, but not of the cold-blooded prudence of monopolists and kings!
William Godwin
...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues.
Alain de Botton
Odd, though, all these dealings of mine with myself. First I’ve agreed a principle withmyself, now I’m making out a case to myself, and debating my own feelings andintentions with myself. Who is this self, this phantom internal partner, with whom I’mentering into all these arrangements? (I ask myself.)
Michael Frayn
There was never any reason to believe in any innate superiority of the male except his superior muscle.
Bertrand Russell
The sea, the majestic sea, breaks everything, crushes everything, cleans everything, takes everything...from me
Corinne Bailey Rae
In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
John Maynard Keynes
But I weren't no quitter No wolf nor bear just gives up when they get beat or hungry. You ever seen a bear jump off a cliff 'cause life handed him a few rough draws? No, you haven't. The wild keeps going till it don't have strength in its muscles and bones. The wild doesn't give up; it's forever, and so was I.
Beth Lewis
New York is made up of millions of different people, and they all come here looking for something
Lindsey Kelk
A dove carries peace on its wings.
Anthony T.Hincks
Barbara wanted to go to tea at Dorchester as much as she wanted to give birth to octuplets.
Elizabeth George
To feel attached is to feel safe and secure. By contrast, an insecurely attached person may have a mixture of feelings towards their attachment figure: intense love and dependency, fear of rejection, irritability and vigilance. One may theorise that their lack of security has aroused a simultaneous wish to be close and the angry determination to punish their attachment figure for the minutest sign of abandonment. It is though the insecurely attached person is saying to themselves: 'cling as hard as you can to people - they are likely to abandon you; hang on to them and hurt them if they show signs of going away, then they may be less likely to do so'. This particular pattern of insecure attachment is known as 'ambivalent insecurity'.
Jeremy Holmes
Our power of being happy lies a good deal in ourselves, I believe.
Charlotte Brontë
It was at the outskirts of the world that the Old Things accumulated, like driftwood round the edges of the sea. ("The Troll")
T.H. White
One of the things I've always liked about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things, and look at things from angles you'd never have thought about before.
Jo Walton
Why do they call them daytime dramas, anyway? Shouldn't they be bedtime dramas? All anyone ever talks about is getting someone into bed! Plus if you're at home watching, you're probably watching in bed. And if you're like me, after an hour or two of watching all those sexy goings-on you forget the silly story entirely and fall asleep. Just like it's bedtime!
Elizabeth Jane Howard
I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.
Daphne du Maurier
Give me a fucking pre-med you fuckers, I'm a personal friend of Sir Lancelot Spratt.
Vivian Mackerrell
Old enough to remember the arrival of 'Have a nice day', Patrick could only look with alarm on the hyperinflation of 'Have a great one'. Where would this Weimar of bullying cheerfulness end? 'You have a profound and meaningful day now.
Edward St. Aubyn
There’s always music. Everywhere.
Fox Benwell
Martin Luther spent two hours a day in prayer. John Wesley spent two hours a day in prayer. According to a recent poll taken on both sides of the Atlantic, the average church leader, pastor, priest, evangelist, teacher today spends four minutes a day in prayer and you wonder why the church is powerless.
R.T. Kendall
If I could go back and say one thing to my younger self it would be: YOU ARE NOT FAT.
Jennifer Saunders
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
Virginia Woolf
Being snappy is a symptom of an argument we forgot to have some way back.
Alain de Botton
My feeling is that a good teacher can get results using any method, and that a bad teacher can wreck any method.
Keith Johnstone
Believe nothing. Try everything.
Sally Brampton
If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort.
Mark Fisher
You can live your whole life not realizing that what you're looking for is right in front of you.
David Nicholls
This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love.
Robert Graves
In the end it was worth it.
Anthony T.Hincks