Quotes by British Authors - Page 149

Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice
Pico Iyer
If I could but know his heart, everything would become easy.
Jane Austen
We owe it to each other to tell stories.
Neil Gaiman
Music is nectar for the soul.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
I may not be free, but I’m not about to surrender the illusion of choice.
Johnny Rich
My word is iron," Kublai said to the guards, as Meng Guang was led away. "Your people will come to know this, in time.
Conn Iggulden
Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.
Terry Pratchett
It must be the full confession by Christendom of Christendom's specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery.
C.S. Lewis
I dislike this whole business of experimentation on animals, unless there's some very good and altogether exceptional reason to this very case. The thing that gets me is that it's not possible for the animals to understand why they are being called upon to suffer. They don't suffer for their own good or benefit at all, and I often wonder how far it's for anyone's. They're given no choice, and there is no central authority responsible for deciding whether what's done is morally justifiable. These experiment animals are just sentient objects; they're useful because they are able to react; sometimes precisely because they're able to feel fear and pain. And they're used as if they were electric light bulbs or boots. What it comes to is that whereas there used to be human and animal slaves, now there are just animal slaves. They have no legal rights or choices in the matter.
Richard Adams
I wake abruptly, my breath jagged and heart racing, my mouth stale, and I know immediately that's it. I'm awake. The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.
Paula Hawkins
Perception is never purely in the present - it has to draw on experience of the past.
Oliver Sacks
The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.
Hilary Mantel - Bring Up the Bodies
The point is , if i'd known all this years earlier, maybe I would have put some thought into how I actually wanted to dress, look and behave because I would have understood that I didn't need to be constrained to playing the part of the platonic, misunderstood friend. Unlike Ryder, I wasn't actually cast in that part by anyone, other than myself.
Hadley Freeman
I am not only not going to be married, at present, but have very little intention of ever marrying at all.
Jane Austen
In the past, I always used to be looking for answers. Today, I know there are only questions. So I just live.
Sarah Brightman
I felt as if something hung there in the back of my mind, waiting to tarnish whatever happiness I might find. Is it safer to be unhappy? Nothing ever wants to take that away.
Storm Constantine
Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it's very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.
Christopher Hitchens
Do not think to swim below. The ocean is already pushing into ears, sinuses, temples, the softness of eyes, and the harpsichord strings behind the kneecaps.
J.M. Ledgard
Energy was the ruling theme of Victorian science, as machines increasingly harnessed the forces of nature to do man's work. The concept is also present in the art and literature of the age, notably in the poems of William Blake. The Romantic movement was much interested in energy and its various transformations.
Jeremy Campbell
There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.
Tom Stoppard
We have no government and no laws, if by law is meant a stereotyped convention supported by force, and not to be altered without the aid of cumbersome machinery.
Olaf Stapledon
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,Old Time is still a-flying;And this same flower that smiles today,tTomorrow will be dying.
Robert Herrick
There are many other little refinements too, Mr. Bohlen. You'll see them all when you study the plans carefully. For example, there's a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There'll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose."Where?"In the 'word-memory' section," he said, epexegetically.
Roald Dahl
I have not known him long indeed, but I am much better acquainted with him than I am with any other creature in the world.
Jane Austen
I like the confusion you get between science and religion … that’s where belief lies and art as well.
Damien Hirst
Continuous efforts-not strength or intelligence-is the key to unlocking our potential.
Winston Churchill
The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.
Sydney J. Harris
SNAPE: Sometimes costs are made to be borne.
Jack Thorne
While differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.
Karl R. Popper
And gradually it dawned on him, if a dawning can take place in total blackness, that his life has consisted of a run of rehearsals for a play he had failed to take part in. And that what he needed to do from now on, if there was going to be a now on, was abandon his morbid quest for order and treat himself to a little chaos, on the grounds that while order was demonstrably no substitute for happiness, chaos might open the way to it.
John le Carré
It was absolutely necessary to interrupt him now.
Jane Austen
Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information.
Neil Gaiman
Honor is kind of what you get when you weaponize manners ...
Jasper Fforde
Here was a place where real things were going on. Here was a scene of vital action. Here was a place where anything might happen. Here was a place where something would certainly happen.
Winston S. Churchill
[F]or all its reputation for conservatism, cricket in its history has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for innovation. What game has survived subjection to such extraordinary manipulations, having been prolonged to 10 days (in Durban 70 years ago), truncated to as few as 60 balls (in Hong Kong every year), and remained recognisable in each instance?
Gideon Haigh
Does the road wind up-hill all the way? Yes, to the very end.
Christina Rossetti
I doubt if I have made the best use of all my calamities. Soft, amiable natures they would have refined to saintliness; of strong, evil spirits they would have made demons; as for me, I have only been a woe-struck and selfish woman.
Charlotte Brontë
Happiness cannot be owned.It is in living in the spiritual experience of living every breath, that lets us taste a moment of it.
Mimi Novic
He has little hope that university, when he gets there next year, will be any different. Like right now, all these pupils taking notes as if their life depended on it. All for what? he wants to shout. To get into the top university, so that you can somehow convince yourself you are better than the great unwashed? So that your parents can convince themselves that they are better parents than the great unwashed? So that Mum and Dad’s fourteen-hour days at the office, paying for a fucking private education you never asked for, wasn’t just a pathetic waste of a life?
Tabitha Suzuma
You don't have friends in here, you'll soon come to understand that. You get attached to someone, then you'll just lose them. They'll get shanked or they'll jump or they'll be taken one night.
Alexander Gordon Smith
Things are embarrassing, best to avoid them. But since your death I prefer a naturalist style of conversation. Let's strip it down to what matters. Let's have emotions and beliefs on show without the modest covering of small talk.
Rosamund Lupton
To say someone is a vision is to pay them a great compliment. If you say that they look a sight it is a grave insult.
Teresa Monachino
More pernicious nonsense was never devised by man than treaties of commerce.
Benjamin Disraeli
A species that survives by creating must not limit who can create. More creators means more creations. Equality brings justice to some and wealth to all.
Kevin Ashton
Girls should be taught at school that giving birth to an unnaturally over-sized western baby that no longer fits down the birth canal may lead to a multitude of long term health problems.
Steven Magee
One advantage of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries
A.A. Milne
All that matters is that your perception of reality is what you truly desire.
Steven Redhead
All selling should spring from service
Rasheed Ogunlaru
I think it's wrong that only one percent of the people should own ninety percent of the country.
Sally Wentworth
Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!
Lewis Carroll
... Lyotard suggests that while discourse operates as a system of representation which defines meanings according to their relation to other concepts in that system, figure is the realm of the singular, of that which refuses to, or simply cannot, be captured and systematized by the concept.
Nicholas Gane
I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.
Jeanette Winterson
Mental health is one of the last great taboos.
Stephen Fry
I generally give the title-page a fair chance," Roger said. "Once can't always judge books merely by the cover.
Charles Williams
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
Iris Murdoch
The Fool held his breath. On long nights on the hard flagstones he had dreamed of women like her. Although, if he really thought about it, not much like her; they were better endowed around the chest, their noses weren’t so red and pointed, and their hair tended to flow more. But the Fool’s libido was bright enough to tell the difference between the impossible and the conceivably attainable, and hurriedly cut in some filter circuits.
Terry Pratchett
The author compares rationalism and much of organized religion do a dictator who paves over natural springs in order to dispense water in a more organized fashion. The pushback of the world hungry for wonder may be compared to the break out of those springs from their constraints. Not everything they produce is healthy, but the overreaction of eliminating them is worse.
N.T. Wright
The thing about stone is you don't get to the heart of it. It stares back into you, its secret intact and inviolable.
Barney Norris
The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.
Aldous Huxley
Here we are at last. The Italian proverb says “See Naples and die” but I say, see Naples and live; for there seems a great deal worth living for.
Arthur John Strutt