Quotes by British Authors - Page 15

I come here with no expectations, only to profess, now that I am at liberty to do so, that my heart is and always will be...yours.
Jane Austen
Bob loses saving throw vs. shiny with a penalty of -5. Bob takes 2d8 damage to the credit card.
Charles Stross
Go to any small village anywhere in the world, and see what they remember. Everything. It's all there -- passed on like a precious piece of information, some secret imparted from one who knew to one who yearns to know. Taken good care of.
Alexander McCall Smith
He was looking forward eagerly to seeing her again. He had coped perfectly well on his own, of course, but it was very reassuring to have someone in your life who was always ready to fight for you, and he had missed that comforting feeling,
Ken Follett
Why do I want to run from happiness?
Mary Balogh
Said by Colin the dragon:"It's somewhat bizarre to learn that many of you (humans)think that other humans are somehow different enough to be hated and killed, when in reality you're all all tiresomely similiar in outlook, needs and motivation, and differ only by peculiar habits, generally shaped by geographical circumstance.
Jasper Fforde
And you,You can be meanAnd I,I'll drink all the time'Cause we're lovers,And that is a factYes we're lovers,And that is that
David Bowie
Ruta Skadi was four hundred and sixteen years old, with all the pride and knowledge of an adult witch queen. She was wiser by far than any short-lived human, but she had not the slightest idea of how like a child she seemed beside these ancient beings. Nor did she know how far their awareness spread out beyond her like filamentary tentacles to the remotest corners of universes she had never dreamed of; nor that she saw them as human-formed only because her eyes expected to. If she were to perceive their true form, they would seem more like architecture than organism, like huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling.But they expected nothing else: she was very young.
Philip Pullman
Best that all mischief be undertaken behind a squeaky door
Benny Bellamacina
The imagination of a boy is healthy and the mature imagination of a man is healthy but there is a space of life between in which the soul is in ferment the character undecided the way of life uncertain.
John Keats
I will not talk of my own happiness,' said he, 'great as it is, for I think only of yours. Compared with you, who has the right to be happy?
Jane Austen
I remember that feeling of skin. It'sstrange to remember touch more than thought. But my fingersstill tingle with it.
Lucy Christopher
You have a dress with a décolletage to emphasise your breasts. I suppose the cleavage is the proper focus but what I wanted to do was to fasten my index finger and thumb at the bolts of your collar bone, push out, spreading the web of my hand until it caught against your throat. You asked me if I wanted to strangle you. No, I wanted to fit you, not just in the obvious ways but in so many indentations.
Jeanette Winterson
The continued appeal of anarchism can probably be attributed to its enduring affinity with both the rational and emotional impulses lying deep within us. It is an attitude, a way of life as well as a social philosophy. It presents a telling analysis of existing institutions and practices, and at the same time offers the prospect of a radically transformed society.
Peter Marshall
No, I mean I'm sorry that you've inherited such a miserable, collapsing Old Country. A place where rich Bankers own everything, where you've got to be grateful for a part-time job with no benefits and no retirement plan, where the most health insurance you can afford is being careful and hoping you don't get sick, where --
Cory Doctorow
Every single day an estimated eighteen million men gratuitously waste the future of our country, by needlessly ejaculating one hundred million citizens of our country, which had they been born, would have made us the strongest country on the planet.
Scott Andrews
I suggested in my last sermon that if Oolon Colluphid had tracked down the "God" who had left a message in five mile high letters of fire on the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains, he still wouldn't have found the person who actually created the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – namely, Douglas Adams. Dorothy L. Sayers pressed the idea that "God is like an author" quite hard, and C.S. Lewis practically broke it. It's also been used by Mr Grant Morrison and Mr David Sim. But seriously. You "brights" will understand us Christians much better once you've grasped that when we talk about "God", we are thinking of something much less like a fairy and much more like a Douglas.
Andrew Rilstone
Pay heed, my darlings, and always take the greatest care over the company you keep in life: if death strikes you without warning, you may be stuck with them til the moon turns to blood and wouldn't that be a torment?
Karen Maitland
His attention. Sweet and intense at the same time. Like a barley sugar I could untwist from its plastic and hold in my mouth. A flood of secret pleasure.
Alexis Hall
He used to say the uglier things are the longer they live, and the ugliest things live forever.
Mal Peet
You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.
Charles Buxton
And the supreme mystery was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?
Virginia Woolf
A sturdy hold, but I think there's something up with the material.
Pete Sortwell
Life's greatest tragedy is not that it will someday end, but that most only live to follow directions and sometimes we end up totally lost.
Alex Gaskarth
But life, they said, means life. Dying inside.The Devil was evil, mad, but I was the Devil's wifewhich made me worse. I howled in my cell.If the Devil is gone then how could this be hell?
Carol Ann Duffy
Email is the scourge of our age,' said Silvia. 'Email and cancer.
Olivia Sudjic
It was inevitable, as soon as legends of miracles became attached to the names of the great mystics, that the credulous masses should applaud imposture more than true devotion; the cult of the saints, against which orthodox Islam ineffectually protested, promoted ignorance and superstition, and confounded charlatanry with lofty speculation. To live scandalously, to act impudently, to speak unintelligibly—this was the easy highroad to fame, wealth, and power.
A.J. Arberry
To obtain victory by any means and with any weapon.
Chris Bradford
There are only a few notes. Just variations on a theme.
John Lennon
There must be something wrong with those people who think Audrey Hepburn doesn’t perspire, hiccup or sneeze, because they know that’s not true. I n fact, I hiccup more than most.
Audrey Hepburn
Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.
Isaac Newton
Money can't buy friends but you can get a better class of enemy.
Spike Milligan
Stimulated by the juice, I believe, men have even been known to ride alligators.
P.G. Wodehouse
I just think the world ought to be more sort of organized.''That's just fantasy,' said Twoflower.'I know. That's the trouble.' Rincewind sighed again.
Terry Pratchett
In the pursuit of knowledge, no one should travel alone
C.S. Woolley
This sentence consists of eleven words, twenty-three syllables and seventy-four letters.
Charles Pearson
You can't oversleep if you don't make plans to wake up early.
Elizabeth Jane Howard
The same people who can deny others everything are famous for refusing themselves nothing.
Leigh Hunt
I have called the principle by which each slight variation if useful is preserved by the term of Natural Selection.
Charles Darwin
Language itself is so value-laden as to render value-neutrality almost impossible. Growing up in England I was introduced to the American Revolution by a 'footnote' to colonial history about the 'revolt' of the American colonies. Word choice and the organization of material gave the game away.
Arthur F. Holmes
I dreamt that I was old. And you – you were beside me.Forever young – in your hand, a cup of stars.
Joanne Harris
The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, "I was wrong.
Sydney J. Harris
The downside of my celebrity is that I cannot go anywhere in the world without being recognized. It is not enough for me to wear dark sunglasses and a wig. The wheelchair gives me away.
Stephen Hawking
The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.
Julian Barnes
One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr. Watson - paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty.
Aldous Huxley
I look upon fine phrases as a lover. - John Keats
Beatrice K. Otto
Life can be whatever you wish it to be or become.
Steven Redhead
Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.
John Berger
We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.
C.S. Lewis
She should have died on that day. Perhaps, in a way, she had.
Anne Cassidy
I'll fall.''You wont fall.''I'll fall. I'll fall and I'll die.'As I said it, I could see it happening. The foot stepping on air, pulling the rest of my body with it, tree limbs breaking as I plummeted down. 'No,' he said, his voice assured, 'You'd never do that to me.
Kamila Shamsie
But I saw your aura looking healthy again, then looking sick after a hunt. And you keep getting migraines. You should take better care of yourself,” he added mildly. “Look for ways to not be so tense – long walks, meditation, these things would help.”Alex suddenly felt like Seb was his therapist; he had to resist the urge to shake him.
l.a weatherly
For a second, I see into the future: she's old and grey, she has senile dementia and can't remember my name. The thought pretty much breaks my heart in two.
Liz Kessler
Well, I wasn't going to abuse him. I was only going to ask: Is there any quality which distinguishes his work from that of twenty struggling writers one could name? Of course not. He's a clever, prolific man; so are they. But he began with money and friends; he came from Oxford into the thick of advertised people; his name was mentioned in print six times a week before he had written a dozen articles. This kind of thing will become the rule. Men won't succeed in literature that they may get into society, but will get into society that they may succeed in literature.
George Gissing
Love is the great conqueror of lust.
C.S. Lewis
The Wild Wood is pretty well populated by now; with all the usual lot, good, bad, and indifferent - I name no names. It takes all sorts to make a world
Kenneth Grahame
We should not conclude from this that everything depends on waves of irrational psychology. On the contrary, the state of long-term expectation is often steady, and, even when it is not, the other factors exert their compensating effects. We are merely reminding ourselves that human decisions affecting the future, whether personal or political or economic, cannot depend on strict mathematical expectation, since the basis for making such calculations does not exist; and that it is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance.
John Maynard Keynes
She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.
Jane Austen
I'm sitting here doing nothing but ageing while my guitar gently weeps
George Harrison