Quotes by British Authors - Page 147

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
Hilary Mantel
I favour humans over ideology, but right now the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas, where everyone is either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. We can lead good, ethical lives, but some bad phraseology in a Tweet can overwhelm it all - even though we know that's not how we should define our fellow humans. What's true about our fellow humans is that we are clever and stupid. We are grey areas.And so ... when you see an unfair or an ambiguous shaming unfold, speak up on behalf of the shamed person. A babble of opposing voices - that's democracy.The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people. Let's not turn it into a world where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.
Jon Ronson
The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.
Graham Greene
Don’t be lookin up at no sky for help. Look down here, at us twisted dreamers.
D.B.C. Pierre
Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
A.S. Byatt
It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.
Stephen Fry
The modern tendency towards increasing specialization in all branches of research and scholarship has discouraged comparative studies of the arts; and what we seldom do we generally distrust. But our distrust of analogies was not shared by the sixteenth century, which inherited from antiquity a habit of drawing parallels as a matter of course.
John Shearman
If you crave for Knowledge, the banquet of Knowledge grows and groans on the board until the finer appetite sickens. If, still putting all your trust in Knowledge, you try to dodge the difficulty by specialising, you produce a brain bulging out inordinately on one side, on the other cut flat down and mostly paralytic at that: and in short so long as I hold that the Creator has an idea of a man, so long shall I be sure that no uneven specialist realises it. The real tragedy of the Library at Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate.... but we may agree that, in reading, it is not quantity so much that tells, as quality and thoroughness of digestion.
Arthur Quiller-Couch
It is not difficult for an unwise mother quite unintentionally to centre the heterosexual feelings of a young son upon herself, and it is true that, if this is done, the evil consequences pointed out by Freud will probably ensue. This is, however, much less likely to occur if the mother's sexual life is satisfying to her, for in that case she will not look to her child for a type of emotional satisfaction which ought to be sought only from adults. The parental impulse in its purity is an impulse to care for the young, not to demand affection from them, and if a woman is happy in her sexual life she will abstain spontaneously from all improper demands for emotional response from her child.
Bertrand Russell
Like all great travellers I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen.
Benjamin Disraeli
To speculate without facts is to attempt to enter a house of which one has not the key, by wandering aimlessly round and round, searching the walls and now and then peeping through the windows. Facts are the key.
Julian Huxley
The way I came to miss the end of the world – well, the end of the world I had known for close on thirty years – was sheer accident: like a lot of survival, when you come to think of it.
John Wyndham
Waiting in the reception area, she had flicked through a news magazine that had been lying on the table for clients to read while waiting for their appointment. On the cover there had been a picture of a well-known politician, a man famous for his rudeness and aggression. She had looked at the eyes--the piercing, accusing eyes, and had seen only an impenetrable, defensive anger. Nothing--no forced smiles nor rehearsed protestation of concern, could cancel out the cold selfishness of those eyes.
Alexander McCall Smith
Without relying on any deities, mantras, or mandalas, without having to master the intricacies of any doctrine or philosophy, I vividly understood what it meant to be a fragile, impermanent creature in a fragile, impermanent world. The mindfulness sharpened my attention to everything that was going on within and around me. My body became a tingling, pulsing mass of sensations. At times when I sat outside I felt as though the breeze were blowing through me. The sheen of the grass was more brilliant, the rustling leaves were like a chorus in an endlessly unfolding symphony. At the same time there was a deep stillness and poise at the core of this vital awareness.
Stephen Batchelor
Get in touch with your inner most desire and aspirations, then utilise the power of your heart to create a life of bliss.
Steven Redhead
Mr. Herriton, don’t – please, Mr. Herriton – a dentist. His father’s a dentist.”tPhilip gave a cry of personal disgust and pain. He shuddered all over, and edged away from his companion. A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He thought of Lilia no longer. He was anxious for himself: he feared that Romance might die.
E.M. Forster
It’s easy to talk about how much you love God, but loving others reveals how much you truly do.
Elizabeth George
Kind eyes under all the mascara.
Jojo Moyes
We pimp our precious lives to the infernal gnashing babble - Follow me! Friend me! Like me! But don't ever know me.
Patrick Marber
In each moment you are nurturing or damaging your relationship with yourself.
Sam Owen
Heavy misfortunes have befallen us, but let us only cling closer to what remains, and transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet live. Our circle will be small, but bound close by the ties of affection and mutual misfortune. And when time shall have softened your despair, new and dear objects of care will be born to replace those of whom we have been so cruelly deprived.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
There is nothing to save, now all is lost,but a tiny core of stillness in the heartlike the eye of a violet.
D.H. Lawrence
Toads are to dragons what carrots are to unicorns.
Ness Kingsley
It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.
George Eliot
Removing the faults in a stage-coach may produce a perfect stage-coach but it is unlikely to produce the first motor car.
Edward de Bono
Anger was a weapon to be honed and treasured and used only at the moment yielding most premium.
Terry Pratchett
They were lucky. They'd been given history.
Kate Atkinson
In strange and uncertain times such as those we are living in, sometimes a reasonable person might despair. But hope is unreasonable and love is greater even than this. May we trust the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse.
Robert Fripp
There is a danger there - a very real danger to humanity. Consider, Watson, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our poor world become?
Arthur Conan Doyle
RemedyYour medicine is in you, and you do not observe it. Your ailment is from yourself, and you do not register it.Hazrat Ali
Idries Shah
You really love me?" she asked wistfully."The devil!" he exclaimed, looking over his shoulder. "Did I forget to say it? The thing I came to say?
Mary Balogh
Was once lost always lost really true of chastity?
Thomas Hardy
Blessed are they who have the gift of making friends,for it is one of God's best gifts.
Thomas Hughes
He looked the Prince up and down, like a hangman taking his measurements. 'Of course there will be a revolution,' he said. 'You are making a nation of Cromwells. But we can go beyond Cromwell, I hope. In fifteen years you tyrants and parasites will be gone. We shall have set up a republic, on the purest Roman model.
Hilary Mantel
It has been said that though God cannot alter the past historians can - it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.
Samuel Butler
To watch. To wait. To wonder at a world in chaos,' the girl said. 'And hope one day you fools might learn.
David Hewson
Pour Into My Spirit...spread your arms around meconsole me and keep me close -wield your mighty swordto vanquish all my foes...
Muse
Disseminating knowledge is the human duty, sharing it about so that all can benefit.
Tracy Rees
When a man is once in fashion all he does is right.
Lord Chesterfield
Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.
Charlotte Brontë
Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you.
Matt Haig
...it is crucial to realize that an once of student affairs administration prevention can stave off a pound of lawyers.
Peter F. Lake
You cannot believe everything you hear
Jude Morgan
Mum always says the right thing. She always makes everything better.
Sophie Kinsella
I closed my eyes then but it was too dark to clearly see that vision that my body would conjure out of blood and the inside of skin when light hit it, but I'd seen it so often, examined it so carefully, that it wasn't hard for me to call to mind.
China Miéville
Do You BelieveDo you believethat I have loved yousince the dawn of time?Do you believethat we were destinedto be intertwined?...
Muse
The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.
W.H. Auden
In the deep places he gives thought to music great and terrible; and the echo of that music runs through all the veins of the world in sorrow and in joy; for if joyful is the fountain that rises in the sun, its springs are in the wells of sorrow unfathomed at the foundations of the Earth.
J.R.R. Tolkien
It is not how much we have but how much we enjoy that makes happiness.
Charles Spurgeon
...this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.
Elizabeth Goudge
And now the bad Mommy was here – outside his window. With a little whimper, he ran back to the bed, jumped in, and pulled the covers over his head.Good Mommy was gone now…and bad Mommy had come to eat him up.
Alan Kinross
When a man wants to have an alehouse meltdown, the worst thing you can do is stand in his way
Luke Haines
He says in his defence he never meddled with married women, only with virgins.
Hilary Mantel
To congratulate oneself on one's warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault.
Robert Conquest
He dropped his head and kissed her. He kisses her and it was a kiss of utter certainty, the kind of kiss during which monarchs die and whole continents fall without your even noticing.
Jojo Moyes
I have looked further into space than ever human being did before me. I have observed stars of which the light, it can be proved, must take two million years to reach the
William Herschel
One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness.
Iris Murdoch
And how do you know that these fine begonias are not of equal importance?
Agatha Christie
Patience is the food of understanding.
Idries Shah
We are Craiglockhart's success stories. Look at us. We don't remember, we don't feel, we don't think - at least beyond the confines of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.
Pat Barker