Quotes by British Authors - Page 148

The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar there is to new ideas.
Edward deBono
Desperation is the best innovator
Tony Cleaver
Do you have a girlfriend?''No,' I said quickly.Deny Honour again. Peter only denied Jesus three times. I must have denied Honour like three thousand times.
Ruth Ahmed
Do not lose hope - what you seek will be found.
Neil Gaiman
Launching a turnaround takes courage. I cannot measure that and so it is not going to be included in my analysis, but behind the moments of change there are always a few people within these societies who have decided to try to make a difference.
Paul Collier
In grief, part of the pain comes from our feeling that we should not suffer so - that it is fundamentally alien to our being, this even though we all suffer, and frequently. Yet we reject suffering as a basic human truth, while greeting joy as integral to our very substance.
Wendy Beckett
On the one hand, Gramma and Grampar never mentioned sex at all. They must have done it, or they wouldn’t have had Auntie Teg and my mother, but I don’t think they did it more than twice. Then there’s the way they talk about sex in school and in church. And there’s no sex, hardly any love stuff at all, in Middle Earth, which always made me think yes, the world would be better off without it.
Jo Walton
Let a clear understanding of your identity In Christ shed light on all the ways you can live out your purpose.
Elizabeth George
Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Every time you see someone's bright-and-shiny, remember: They have their own crappy truths too. Of course they do. And every time you see your own crappy truth and feel despair and think, 'Is this my life?', remember: It's not. Everyone's got a bright-and-shiny, even if it's hard to find sometimes.
Sophie Kinsella
A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living': so too with the biography of that self. And just as lives don't stay still, so life-writing can't be fixed and finalised. Our ideas are shifting about what can be said, our knowledge of human character is changing. The biographer has to pioneer, going 'ahead of the rest of us, like the miner's canary, testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions'. So, 'There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation'. She is talking about the story of Shelley, but she could be talking about her own life-story. (Virginia Woolf, p. 11)
Hermione Lee
We, my dear Mildred, are the observers of life. Let other people get married by all means, the more the merrier. . . . Let Dora marry if she likes. She hasn't your talent for observation.
Barbara Pym
I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...
Aldous Huxley
To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education.
John Ruskin
Wracking sobs rip from the innermost chamber of my heart, and I give into them, allowing them to fully take over. Pain lances me on all sides, and I bury my head in my knees, giving in to the heartache.I cry for my parents.For my lost life.For the threat that Addison poses, scaring me in ways it shouldn’t.For a boy I can’t have and shouldn’t want.For the never-ending gut-wrenching hollow ache in my chest and the soul-crushing loneliness I feel.
Siobhan Davis
Nothing succeeds like success; children who opt out of school have had a continued record of failure, and it would be difficult to blame the children themselves for voting with their feet and playing truant as much as possible. This failure is not necessary; it is imposed on the children by inappropriate methods of teaching which do not take into account the innate patterns of abilities of these children. A return to sanity is long overdue; we must pay close attention to the genetic basis of our children`s abilities.
Hans Jürgen Eysenck
Freud was a genius; geniuses are bright but not necessarily right. What they do do, right or wrong, is to provide images that guide, or compel, the lives of the rest of us. If we are not careful we may accept the inevitability of these images. It seems that great men offer us a portion of reality and, because of their greatness, we take it for the whole.
Peter Redgrove
All joy... emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.
C.S. Lewis
I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
Winston S. Churchill
Christian spirituality combines a sense of the awe and majesty of God with a sense of His intimate presence.
N.T. Wright
Of all funny things, truth is the funniest.
Neel Burton
Control over the production and distribution of oil is the decisive factor in defining who rules whom in the Middle East.
Christopher Hitchens
People who ask you if you’ve ever seen a ghost are always people who believe in ghosts. They’re limbering up to tell their own ghost story. These are always remarkably tedious efforts about feeling as if someone had brushed past them but nobody being there. I always think that if you’re lying anyway you should at least make it interesting.
Frankie Boyle
Champagne and Benzedrine! Never again.
Ian Fleming
These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before the war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality.
Ian McEwan
Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.
Jeanette Winterson
He (Peter) doesn't know if he's looking into the eyes of a madman, or the eyes of a King.
Roma Downey
It came out sparkling like liquid sky.
Laurie Lee
Physicians of the Utmost Fame were called at once but when they came they answered as they took their fees 'There is no cure for this disease.'
Hilaire Belloc
If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years as I could in a day.
Emily Brontë
In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.
George Eliot
I found it hard work now to pray to God, because despair was swallowing me up
John Bunyan
He stared to sea. "I gave up all ideas of practicing medicine. In spite of what I have just said about the wave and the water, in those years in France I am afraid I lived a selfish life. That is, I offered myself every pleasure. I traveled a great deal. I lost some money dabbling in the theatre, but I made much more dabbling on the Bourse. I gained a great many amusing friends, some of whom are now quite famous. But I was never very happy. I suppose I was fortunate. It took me only five years to discover what some rich people never discover — that we all have a certain capacity for happiness and unhappiness. And that the economic hazards of life do not seriously affect it.
John Fowles
The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.
Ian McEwan
A warrior fears the battle he missed. More than any fight he can make his own, he fears the fight that’s gone, that ended without him, that no feat of arms can change.
Mark Lawrence
A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
Alan W. Watts
Progress comes through capacity to learn, and is irresistible.
Idries Shah
There is no disappointment we endure one-half so great as what we are to ourselves.
Philip James Bailey
Grief was like a terrible burden, but at least you could lay it down by the side of the road and walk away from it. Antonia had come only a few paces, but already she could turn and look back and not weep. It wasn't anything to do with forgetting. It was just accepting. Nothing was ever so bad once you had accepted it.
Rosamunde Pilcher
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Your children are not dead. They are just waiting until the world deserves them.
Robert Browning
It is both dangerous and absurd for our world to be a group of communions mutually excommunicate.
Alan W. Watts
There is one thing we know about meaning: that meaning consists in attachment to something bigger than you are.
Sally Brampton
To animals they were just the weather, just part of everything. But humans arose and gave them names, just as people filled the starry sky with heroes and monsters, because this turned them into stories. And humans loved stories, because once you'd turned things into stories, you could change the stories.
Terry Pratchett
Whenever by an unfortunate occurrence of circumstances an opposition is compelled to support the government the support should be given with a kick and not a caress and should be withdrawn at the first available moment.
Randolph Churchill
It is a pity that doing one's best does not always answer.
Charlotte Brontë
Time is Galleons, little brother.
J.K. Rowling
Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive.
Charlotte Brontë
There is only one time of absolute silence. Halfway between the dark of night and the light of morning, all animals and crickets and birds fall into a profound silence as if pressed quiet by the deep quality of the blackest time of night...This silence is how I know it is not yet dawn, nor is it the middle of the night, but it is the place of no-time, when all things sleep most deeply, when their guard is dozing
Alexandra Fuller
I love memory sticks. They seem to me to be magic.
Ruth Rendell
Witch, do this for me,Find me a moonmade of longing.Then cut it sliver thin,and having cut it,hang it highabove my beloved's house,so that she may look uptonightand see it,and seeing it, sigh for meas I sigh for her,moon or no moon.
Clive Barker
The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.
W.H. Auden
Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.
Lionel Shriver
I feel very adventurous. There are so many doors to be opened and I'm not afraid to look behind them.
Elizabeth Taylor
The world is full of wonderful things you haven't seen yet. Don't ever give up on the chance of seeing them.
J.K. Rowling
Breathe deeply, focus your thoughts, and say out loud, “The quest begins here.
Fennel Hudson
Always be wary of people who use quotes. I don't know who said that.' - Murdoc Niccals
Gorillaz
Love may start out as a good feeling, but to love someone long-term is an act of the will.
Elizabeth George
Companies that cannot successfully answer what they do fail to then understand how they can continue to do it in the face of change.
David Amerland
You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read.
Nick Hornby