Quotes by British Authors - Page 151

Humans lie without a second thought.
Ciel Phantomhive
God expects you to have the mentality of a conqueror. See yourself as a victor in Christ Jesus, and go about life with a holy swagger!
Pedro Okoro
I should send my bees ashore for you, upon my sacred honour.
Patrick O'Brian
Competition exists to choose who gets the prize when the prize can’t be shared.
Andrew Harvey
Maisie bit her lip. She had learned that sometimes it was best to let words die of their own accord, rather than fight them.
Jacqueline Winspear
Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
Philip Larkin
Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness.
Charles Stross
Where Do You Show Up to Share What You Have to Offer?When You Love What You Do-You Share It Daily
Ninon de Vere De Rosa
Something of God... flows into us from the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself.
C.S. Lewis
You want fantasy? Here's one... There's this species that lives on a planet a few miles above molten rock and a few miles below a vacuum that'd suck the air right out of them. They live in a brief geological period between ice ages, when giant asteroids have temporarily stopped smacking into the surface. As far as they can tell, there's nowhere else in the universe where they could stay alive for ten seconds. And what do they call their fragile little slice of space and time? They call it real life.
Terry Pratchett
The Sufi saying has it: "God, to the bee, is something which has TWO stings!
Idries Shah
I loved my father, but I was not like him. I never needed to believe the best of people. I took them as they were: two-faced, desperate, kind - perhaps all at once. But to Pa, they were all children of god, poor troubled sheep, who only needed love and an even break. He needed the world to back up what his religion told him about people. And when it came down to a choice between reason and faith, he let go of reason.
Marcel Theroux
But between now and then, there was Life; and Bod walked into it with his eyes and his heart wide open.
Neil Gaiman
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.
G.K. Chesterton
Facing a deteriorating economy and a weakening hold over the populace, the Iraqi state under Saddam Hussein opted to revitalize tribal leaders and conservative practices as a means of stabilizing state power; those conservative practices were not an inherent feature of a predominantly Muslim country.
Nadje Al-Ali
The thing people don't understand about an army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising water level because your mad capitaine says so, you are shifted abruptly in the middle of the night into some indefensible position, so you never really sleep, your equipment is defective, the gunners keep causing small unwanted explosions, the crossbowmen are either drunk or praying, the arrows are ordered up but not here yet, and your whole mind is occupied by a seething anxiety that things are going to go badly because il principe, or whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today, is not very good at the basic business of thinking. It didn't take him many winters to get out of fighting and into supply. In Italy, you could always fight in the summer, if you felt like it. If you wanted to go out.
Hilary Mantel
Trauma is a unique phenomenon all on its own, as if it is an entity in and of itself.
Paul Levy
When I think of normality I think of mediocrity
Gillian Anderson
Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them. However, as it is not Achilles but the method of measurement which fails to catch up with the tortoise, so it is not man but his method of thought which fails to find fulfillment in experience.
Alan W. Watts
Seattle? With Caine? In a hotel?I’d either kill him or screw him again.“Fuck.”“Alexa, the speakerphone is on,” Caine’s amused voice sounded from my desk.Oh, balls.
Samantha Young
All remember about my mother," Nibs told them, "is that she often said to my father, 'Oh, how I wish I had a cheque-book of my own!' I don't know what a cheque-book is, but I should just love to give my mother one.
J.M. Barrie
Those who don't know history are destined to be tyrannized by it
Dean Cavanagh
You're still alive. That means you're winning.
Rachel Cotterill
The Lord's mercy often rides to the door of our hearts on the black horse of affliction. Jesus uses the whole range of our experiences to wean us from earth and woo us to Heaven.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
For my own part, my constant prayer is that I may know the worst of my case, whatever the knowledge may cost me. I know that an accurate estimate of my own heart can never be otherwise than lowering to my self-esteem; but God forbid that I should be spared the humiliation which springs from the truth! The sweet red apples of self-esteem are deadly poison; who would wish to be destroyed thereby? The bitter fruits of self-knowledge are always healthful, especially if washed down with the waters of repentance, and sweetened with a draught from the wells of salvation; he who loves his own soul will not despise them.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
The verdict of this court is that the accused are guilty of witchcraft. The maximum penalty the law allows is to be burned to death.However, in view of your previous good background I am disposed to be lenient. I therefore sentence you to be burned alive.
Richard Curtis
Y’know, it’s not that we need equality. Because everyone’s already equal, it’s just that a ton of idiots lost the memo. Indeed, everyone just needs to be TREATED like the equal they already are.
Ellie Rose McKee
He lies down next to me.He says, 'You know - you have a face to die for/''Well, don't die,' I say, "we just met.
Gwendoline Riley
He had called what he felt for Charlotte love and it remained the most profound feeling he had had for any woman. In the pain it had caused him and its lasting after-effects it had more resembled a virus that, even now, he was not He had called what he felt for Charlotte love and it remained the most profound feeling he had had for any woman. In the pain it had caused him and its lasting after-effects it had more resembled a virus that, even now, he was not.
Robert Galbraith
He managed to make his request with the minimum of time given to speculating what she looked like naked, forgiving himself for the instant of fantasy by telling himself it was the curse of being male. In the presence of a beautiful woman, he had always experienced that knee-jerk reaction to being reduced - if only momentarily - to skin, bone, and testosterone.
Elizabeth George
How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?
Virginia Woolf
Reason I know, is only a drug, and, as such, its effects are never permanent. But, like the juice of the poppy, it often gives a temporary relief.
Hope Mirrlees
She quickly interpreted him into her mythology but if, at first, he was a herbivorous lion, later he became a unicorn devouring raw meat.
Angela Carter
To get he had tried,yet his store was still meager.To a wise man he cried,in a voice keen and eager;Pray tell me how I may successfully live?And the wise man replied,"To get you must give."As to giving he said,"What have I to give?"I've scarce enough bread,and of course one must live;But I would partake of Life's bountifulstore. Came the wise man's response;"Then you must give more."The lesson he learned;to get was forgotten,Toward mankind he turnedwith a love new begotten.As he gave of himself in useful living,Then joy crowned his days,for he grew rich in giving.
Arthur William Beer
We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.
Anthony Burgess
(Exchange with Winston Churchill)Churchill explains that having a woman in Parliament was like having one intrude on him in the bathroom, to which the Lady Astor retorted, "Sir, you are not handsome enough to have such fears".
Nancy Astor the Viscountess Astor
And anyway who the devil should I want to murder?""That would be a very good question," said Miss Marple. "I have not yet had the pleasure of sufficient conversation with you to evolve a theory as to that."Mr. Rafter's smile broadened."Conversations with you might be dangerous," he said."Conversations are always dangerous, if you have something to hide," said Miss Marple.
Agatha Christie
Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set on its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog's bollocks. Nothing else comes close.
Stephen Fry
Until our own time, history focussed on man the achiever; the higher the achiever the more likely it was that the woman who slept in his bed would be judged unworthy of his company. Her husband's fans recoiled from the notion that she might have made a significant contribution towards his achievement of greatness. The possibility that a wife might have been closer to their idol than they could ever be, understood him better than they ever could, could not be entertained.
Germaine Greer
Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. I say all this because I want very much to talk about the human side of discovery and progress, and it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most non-scientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve.
Jacob Bronowski
To his eyes all seemed beautiful, but to me a tinge of melancholy lay upon the countryside, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year, Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down upon us as we passed, The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation--sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning heir of the Baskervilles.
Arthur Conan Doyle
I am what I am, an’ I’m not ashamed. 'Never be ashamed,’ my ol’ dad used ter say, ‘there’s some who’ll hold it against you, but they’re not worth botherin’ with.
J.K. Rowling
A grey-suited figure with badly-scuffed shoes was squatted over a woman’s body, obscuring her face and upper torso. A loose, white dress; torn, now mostly red. A pattern of rose petals, drenched in blood. One of her sandals was missing, scarlet streaks and spatters on her jade-green polished toenails and pale, slender ankles.tAnother step took him around the hunched and twitching figure. It ignored him, intent on its work. Then its victim came fully into view … and he saw her ruined face.
Scott Kaelen
As a mother, you need to remember that a loving and compassionate God is one hundred percent aware of your child’s situation.
Elizabeth George
The power of Thought - the magic of the Mind!
Lord Byron
Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about.
N.T. Wright
Our brains are like computers; it's our responsibility to programme them well, daily, and remove the viruses.
Sam Owen
But they also awarded a quite respectable 55th place to Enoch Powell, thereby demonstrating that, for certain sections of the population, being an unpleasant racist constitutes no bar to greatness.
Marc Morris
The brave man is not he who feels no fear For that were stupid and irrational But he whose noble soul its fear subdues And barely dares the danger nature shrinks from.
Joanna Baillie
Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me.
C.S. Lewis
Dying is a dull, dreary affair. my advice is that you have nothing whatever to with it.
W Somerset Maugham
As they embrace, she kisses him full on the mouth. And suddenly sticks her tongue right in. She has done this before, often. It’s one of those drunken long shots which just might, at least theoretically, once in ten thousand tries, throw a relationship right out of its orbit and send it whizzing off on another. Do women ever stop trying? No. But, because they never stop, they learn to be good losers.
Christopher Isherwood
I don’t want my ‘part’ taken! I haven’t ‘got’ a part! I hate the stupid geometrical figures by which people try to understand the emotions of others, imposing hard straight lines - or ‘sides’ as they call them - onto tender curvaceous human beings who have none.
Frances Partridge
Independence Day is a day of truth,It stands for us,Both me and you,It gives us hope,To fight on days,When there are others against us,What more can I say.It gives us glory,Our land to share,With each other,We shall not despair.The land of freedom,Our liberty tall,She shines her torch,For one and all.The fourth of July,Is our special day,It's when we came of age,That's all I'll say.God Bless!
Anthony T.Hincks
I move we get more wine,' Alistair said. 'What does the panel think?'...It was obvious that the entire war could be solved in this way. The trick would be to reach for a corkscrew instead, every time some brass hat ordered artillery.
Chris Cleave
Those days are gone, and good fucking riddance to them; unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it's just a drag, like a cold or having no money. If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.
Nick Hornby
Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.
W Somerset Maugham
It is those who have a deep and real inner life who are best able to deal with the irritating details of outer life.
Evelyn Underhill
It (modernization) is just another jungle closing in.
Evelyn Waugh
Romanticism embodied "a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals.
Isaiah Berlin