Quotes by British Authors - Page 153

We can no longer believe that after death, if we have sinned, we shall enter hell. Hell has been acted out here on Earth in the time of Nazi Germany, when even the innocent went in their millions to a hell that beggars the imagination. A profound change in attitude has come about as a result.
Brian W. Aldiss
Assumptions close doors. Intrigue opens them.
Sam Owen
In the next world I could not be worse than I am in this.
Patrick Branwell Brontë
It was as though the man-eater - for no other leopard would have killed the goat and laid it on the track- had said, 'Here, if you want your goat so badly, take it; and as it is now dark and you have a long way to go, we will see which of you lives to reach the village.
Jim Corbett
Here are three separate but similar things: shyness, introversion and social anxiety. You can have one, two or all three of these things simultaneously. A lot of the time people thing they're all the same thing, but that's just not true. Extroverts can be shy, introverts can be bold, and a condition like anxiety can strike whatever kind of social animal you are. Lots of people are shy. Shy is normal. A bit of anxiety is normal. Throw the two together, add some brain-signal error - a NO ENTRY sign on the neural highway from my brain to my mouth perhaps, though no one really knows - and you have me.
Sara Barnard
Genuine surprise is a great help when faced with an unwelcome duty. Of course, when it’s the paying of debts you’re forgetting, that can lead to broken fingers. And worse. I guess it’s a form of lying— lying to oneself. And I’m very good at falsehoods. They often say the best liars half-believe their lies— which makes me the very best because if I repeat a lie often enough I can end up believing it entirely, no half measures involved!
Mark Lawrence
Every author really wants to have letters printed in the paper. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.
P.G. Wodehouse
Music sweeps by me as a messenger carrying a message that is not for me.
George Eliot
He felt, in a way so familiar as to be almost dreary, the chosen victim of the gods, the self-admitted traitor, the one destined for judgment.
Iris Murdoch
That is my rule of life. If fate means you to lose, give him a good fight anyhow. Do you remember Henley's magnificent lines? 'Under the bludgeonings of chanceMy head is bloody, but unbowed.' ? That is my gospel. What do you think of it?
William McFee
Woodget glanced into the dim shadows behind the trees. "What you be hiding fer?" he called."On such a night as this even the greatest may hide and not be ashamed," came the response.
Robin Jarvis
Seek a slower, simpler life.
Fennel Hudson
What’s it gonna be like, dying? To go to sleep and never, never, never wake up.Well, a lot of things it’s not gonna be like. It’s not going to be like being buried alive. It’s not going to be like being in the darkness forever.I tell you what — it’s going to be as if you never had existed at all. Not only you, but everything else as well. That just there was never anything, there’s no one to regret it — and there’s no problem. Well, think about that for a while — it’s kind of a weird feeling when you really think about it, when you really imagine.[The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are ]
Alan W. Watts
What is he to learn? To imitate? Or to avoid? When your friends the bees worry themselves about their sovereign, and become perfectly distracted touching the slightest monarchical movement, are we men to learn the greatness of Tuft-hunting, or the littleness of the Court Circular? I am not clear, Mr. Boffin, but that the hive may be satirical.'At all events, they work,' said Mr. Boffin.Ye-es,' returned Eugene, disparagingly, 'they work; but don't you think they overdo it?
Charles Dickens
The compensation of growing old...was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained - at last! - the power which adds the supreme flavor to existence, - the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.
Virginia Woolf
Live as long as you may the first twenty years are the longest half of your life.
Robert Southey
A slut isn’t a person, it’s in the eye of the beholder. Like beauty, or an annoying eyelash. We decide who a girl is based on something she’s done (or even just rumoured to have done) and then brand her with it as if it’s a permanent part of her identity. Guys, on the other hand, get to wear their relationships and ‘conquests’ like medals or badges of honour, which are much easier to take off, and hurt a lot less.
Laura Bates
She spent the foggy day in endless, aimless walking, for it seemed to her that if she moved quickly enough she would escape the fear that hunted her. It was a vague and shadowy fear of something cruel and stupid that had caught her and would never let her go. She had always known that it was there - hidden under the more of less pleasant surface of things. Always. Ever since she was a child.You could argue about hunger or cold or loneliness, but with that fear you couldn't argue. It went too deep. You were too mysteriously sure of its terror. You could only walk very fast and try to leave it behind you.
Jean Rhys
My spirit is willing to do what is right; and my flesh, I hope, is strong enough to accomplish the will of Heaven
Charlotte Brontë
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
Terry Pratchett
I wasn't particularly worried; running is overrated anyway, and sport only makes you sweaty and smug and wears out the knees.
Jasper Fforde
it was like staring at a whitewashed wall, but without all the emotion
Joe Abercrombie
umm... abit gross it kinda about boyfriend and girlfriend kinda going throw then they break up then they love each other then they make up again and the girl father said u have to come home until 9pm but the girls want more time to be with her boyfriend :)
Jacqueline Wilson
Only one person in 1000 is a bore, and HE is interesting because he is one person in 1000.
Harold Nicolson
The best scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried
Richard Dawkins
Life is, if anything, the art of combination. Of discrimination. Of freely picking one's own personal pattern out of a hundred choices. Not letting it be picked for you—either by the Establishment, or by the Rebels. Conformity of Hip is no better than Conformity of Square.
Sydney J. Harris
History repeats.
Pippa DaCosta
He who laughs last laughs the laughiest.
Louise Rennison
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
Alan W. Watts
Onward Christian soldiers Marching as to war With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
Sabine Baring-Gould
For the next century, no elf is to be banished to the human world. No more Star Wars, no more Harry Potter, no more Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and no more body-doubling for Tom Cruise. Elves shouldn't be treated like shit. We're not Mexicans.
Adam Millard
In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise
W.H. Auden
Tai tapped his left nostril. 'You know what this is, Nakkoo? It's the place where the outside world meets the world inside you.
Salman Rushdie
I found it hard to write the bits where the things that were at first surprising or even shocking became normal incrementally until I couldn't see that they were anything but normal, because everything else had shifted just one centimetre here and one centimetre there, moving at the speed fingernails grow, until finally everything just clicked into exactly the wrong place.
Olivia Sudjic
The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
Walter Bagehot
He only knows a single thing to clasp, that like God can't be split up into pieces: our honesty to one another.
Bryn Hammond
Friendship," said Christopher Robin, "is a very comforting thing to have.
A.A. Milne
There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, " This is new, and therefore better.
John Brunner
Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I can still feel the scar under my fringe now. Reading can be dangerous.)
Diane Setterfield
The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.
Wyndham Lewis
If you are good life is good.
Roald Dahl
Close your eyes and I'll kiss you, Tomorrow I'll miss you.
Paul McCartney
My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.
Virginia Woolf
Death drives desire.
Rosemary A. Johns
Social media is basically standing at a bucket filled with other people’s vomit and you suck the vomit through a straw, and gag and wince at the unbearable taste of other people’s vomit. Yet strangely we continue to suck through the straw as if we’ve never tasted such lovely vomit. And then before you know it you’re old and you’re grey. And that’s the end of you. A lonely death. Your gravestone is marked with the six saddest words: Social Media Drained My Soul AwayAnd they all mourn your loss at a budget funeral service while updating their social media statuses on mobile phones apps. And in years to come nobody remembers any of your updates; even those updates that you deep-down believed were going to bring about world peace. The Digital Age is more disposable than nappies and just as full of shit.
Rupert Dreyfus
Mostly, what people mean by love is laziness.
Amanda Craig
For 3 million you could give everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we could dig a hole so deep we could hand her over to Satan in person. (on Margaret Thatcher)
Frankie Boyle
People who say "no" right away are usually lying. A truthful person is perfectly capable of saying "no" but generally they stop and think about it first. And they add "sorry" or something like that. Maybe they come out with some questions of their own. It's human nature. They say, "Sorry, no, why, what happened?
Lee Child
Volume II: Chapter V What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident. Day by day we are forced to believe this. He whom a scratch has disorganized, he who disappears from apparent life under the influence of the hostile agency at work around us, had the same powers as I—I also am subject to the same laws. In the face of all this we call ourselves lords of the creation, wielders of the elements, masters of life and death, and we allege in excuse of this arrogance, that though the individual is destroyed, man continues for ever.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Then, O King! the God, so saying,Stood, to Pritha's Son displayingAll the splendour, wonder, dreadOf His vast Almighty-head.Out of countless eyes beholding,Out of countless mouths commanding,Countless mystic forms enfoldingIn one Form: supremely standingCountless radiant glories wearing,Countless heavenly weapons bearing,Crowned with garlands of star-clusters,Robed in garb of woven lustres,Breathing from His perfect PresenceBreaths of every subtle essenceOf all heavenly odours; sheddingBlinding brilliance; overspreading-Boundless, beautiful- all spacesWith His all-regarding faces;So He showed! If there should riseSuddenly within the skiesSunburst of a thousand sunsFlooding earth with beams undeemed-of,Then might be that Holy One'sMajesty and radiance dreamed of!
Edwin Arnold
You must not fear that clutching at your dreams will shatter them so they run through your fingers like sand. That way lies a life spent in yearning. But yearning is only a season of dreaming, for dreams, if nurtured, become strong.
Alexia Casale
I had already established, as you know, that it was logically impossible for Kenneth to be distressed by anything that might occur between Ned and myself; but Kenneth, being an artist, has perhaps not studied logic and is unaware of the impossibility.
Sarah Caudwell
The most important question I ask myself as a parent is this. How can I best help my children be fully themselves and happy with who they are in the world, however they show up.
Lehla Eldridge
Theology is just not important in Judaism, or in any other religion, really. There's no orthodoxy, as you have it in the Catholic Church. No complicated creeds to which everybody must subscribe. No infallible pronouncements by a pope. Nobody can tell Jews what to believe. Within reason, you can believe what you like... We have orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy. Right practice rather then right belief. That's all. You Christians make such a fuss about theology, but it's not important in the way you think. It's just poetry, really, ways of talking about the inexpressible.
Hyam Maccoby
He was terribly conscious that he only had one life and with seemed to sad to think that he had wasted it. He could never surmount his immeasurable regret. And that's why I tell you that Byring is right. Even though it only lasts five years, even though he ruins his career, even though this marriage ends in disaster, it will have been worth while. He will have been satisfied. He will have fulfilled himself.
W Somerset Maugham
The obsession with the afterlife is born of a panic at not having memories of a before-life.
Dean Cavanagh
I saw a guy faint at the W. M. Keck Observatory, he stepped out from the tour group and said to me "I'm feeling sick" and then his eyes rolled back and his knees gave way! The group caught him on his way to the ground and he got free emergency medical oxygen for half an hour before being evacuated off the summit by his tour group!!! His friends stated that he was considered the healthiest person in the group while he was gasping for breaths of life on the summit of Mauna Kea! Never saw him again.
Steven Magee
Rita looked as though she would have liked nothing better than to seize the paper umbrella sticking out of Hermione's drink and thrust it up her nose.
J.K. Rowling
When you read," the man whispered, "you discover who you really are. You find traces of yourself, little pieces you didn't know were there.
Malcom McNeill
To be a human being means to be lonely.To go on becoming a person means exploring new modes of resting in our loneliness.
Robert Hobson