Quotes by British Authors - Page 154

God has given you a gift, why not open it?!
Habeeb Akande
Walk free from the long shadows cast by small people.
Fennel Hudson
In the Balkans the peasants say that if you long for faraway countries and leave your own land and home to find them, you are born under A LILAC-BLEEDING STAR.
Lesley Blanch
No point worrying about a storm until we smell rain
Suzanne Kelman
New roads new ruts.
G.K. Chesterton
There are days when that dark face is something I can think of as a friend – a primal energy that carries me forward when nothing else will – but more often than not I am face-to-face with a stranger, a companion to something I recognise as myself, sure enough, but one who knows more than I do, thinks less of danger and propriety than I ever have or will, feels a cool and amused contempt for the rules and rituals by which I live, the duties I too readily accept, the compromises I too willingly allow (p. 262)
John Burnside
...if He made us, He must know He is to blame when He has made us weak or evil. And He must understand why we have been so made, and when we throw ourselves into the dust before Him, and pray for help and pardon, surely--surely He will lend an ear!
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.
Aldous Huxley
I am doubtful myself about the undertaking. Part of the attraction of the L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed. Also many of the older legends are purely 'mythological', and nearly all are grim and tragic: a long account of the disasters that destroyed the beauty of the Ancient World, from the darkening of Valinor to the Downfall of Numenor and the flight of Elendil.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite ... Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families ... and you have no idea ... what games goes on!
Charles Dickens
When I was a child I burnt the back of my right hand on a hot iron. I can't recall the pain, but there's an eye-shaped scar as testament to it. As a teenager I used to think it was the all seeing eye of the anti-Christ and that I was the devil incarnate. Or at least a minion. It was my right hand, innit?What I do remember though is my father, or Dad as we called him, abandoning the polite Abbu, telling me not to cry and to be patient because the fires of hell were seventy times hotter than the fire of the iron.
Ruth Ahmed
I consider fantasy the heir of mythology, addressing a real human need to seek out answers to life’s many mysteries. It is a genre that can tell an entertaining and enthralling story on the surface, and yet deliver a potent message underneath, where everything becomes a symbol of something greater.
Dean F. Wilson
Meetings! Meetings! Meetings!Do they ever achieve anything or do they just let a lot of hot air out of an already over inflated balloon?
Anthony T.Hincks
Think you if Laura had been Petrarch's wife He would have written sonnets all his life?
Lord Byron
I remember the lights turning into blurs of blazing fire. I remember the air-conditioning chilling my arms. The smell of coffee smudging into the smell of eucalyptus.
Lucy Christopher
You can't run from feelings, Charity. You have to face them. Otherwise your future will look just like your past.
Elizabeth Jane Howard
The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. IT is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by Friendship God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing. At this feast it is he who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.
C.S. Lewis
The ancients believed in Fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable.
Jeanette Winterson
There are young men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don’t have an academic turn of mind, or that they aren’t lucky enough to have been blessed with a good memory, and yet can recite hundreds of pop lyrics and reel off any amount of information about footballers. Why? Because they are interested in those things. They are curious. If you are hungry for food, you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.
Stephen Fry
My sister Emily first declined. The details of her illness are deep-branded in my memory, but to dwell on them, either in thought or narrative, is not in my power. Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally, she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was, that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the faded eyes, the same service exacted as they had rendered in health. To stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was pain no words can render.
Charlotte Brontë
Dissembling was so large a part of middle-class life that honesty and frankness seemed the most devious stratagem of all. The most outright lie was the closest one came to truth.
J.G. Ballard
Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
Thomas Hardy
Whoever is trying to bring you down is already beneath you.
Habeeb Akande
Misery, after all, loves company.
Bella Forrest
You know you’re dealing with a numpty when her saving grace is that she didn’t help to cover up a murder.
Rosen Trevithick
And another way of explaining it is to say that shit happens, and there's no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into.
Nick Hornby
At evening when the lamp is lit,The tired Human People sitAnd doze, or turn with solemn looksThe speckled pages of their books.Then I, the Dangerous Kitten, prowlAnd in the Shadows softly growl,And roam about the farthest floorWhere Kitten never trod before.And, crouching in the jungle damp,I watch the Human Hunter’s camp,Ready to spring with fearful roarAs soon as I shall hear them snore.And then with stealthy tread I crawlInto the dark and trackless hall,Where 'neath the Hat-tree's shadows deepUmbrellas fold their wings and sleep.A cuckoo calls — and to their densThe People climb like frightened hens,And I'm alone — and no one caresIn Darkest Africa — downstairs.
Oliver Herford
We may seem the weakest and most insignificant of all the Realms, but our strength comes in other ways. We have what no other race has: imagination. Any one of us, even the lowliest, can create worlds within ourselves; we can people them with the most extraordinary creatures, the most amazing inventions, the most incredible things. We can live in those worlds ourselves, if we choose; and in our own worlds, we can be as we want to be. Imagination is as close as we will ever be to godhead, Poison, for in imagination, we can create wonders.
Chris Wooding
Fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time.
J.M. Barrie
People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist.
Diane Setterfield
What's the best place to hide a car? In an airport long-term lot. Like where's the best place to hide a grain of sand? On the beach
Lee Child
One cannot grow without pain. One cannot improve without it. Suffering drives us to achieve great things.
Joe Abercrombie
All sinners would be miserable in heaven.
Emily Brontë
When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.
George Eliot
...There is a duty of solidarity among all us impossible, near-invisible people: a duty, out of sheer cussedness, not to disappear completely, simply to ease the conscience of the rest.
Anna Lyndsey
Eagles, buffalos and deserts vast, it’s no good living in the fucking past.
Mark Jackman
Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.
Samuel Johnson
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors and also to love our enemies probably because they are generally the same people.
G.K. Chesterton
For it is discomfort's own essence to be near a man and to feel him in torture of misery, to feel with him the very pain of the misery, and yet to be unable to help.
Richard Llewellyn
It is not any common earth,Water or wood or air,But Merlin’s Isle of GramaryeThat you and I will fare.
Rudyard Kipling
for fear is all the blind future harrying us and when the scales drop away the fear goes too
Adam Roberts
Life’s more science-fictiony by the day.
David Mitchell
It's easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient.
George Eliot
Names turned over by time, like the plough turning the soil. Bringing up the new while the old were buried in the mud.
Joe Abercrombie
cause when there's life there's still hope
Michael Morpurgo
The greatest joy of a Christian is to give joy to Christ.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Evolution is more about the condition of the heart of a man who does not want to acknowledge God than it is about the facts.
John Yates
A witch who is bored might do ANYTHING.People said things like 'we had to make our own amusements in those days' as if this signified some kind of moral worth, and perhaps it did, but the last thing you wanted a witch to do was get bored and start making her own amusements, because witches sometimes had famously erratic ideas about what was amusing.
Terry Pratchett
The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in the sea... maybe... but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.
D.H. Lawrence
If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love - You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point.
C.S. Lewis
It is not easy to be a pioneer-but oh it is fascinating! I would not trade one moment even the worst moment for all the riches in the world.
Elizabeth Blackwell
In fact, the room was so quiet you might have heard a drop of paint splash.
Jasper Fforde
Speech is the small change of silence.
George Meredith
She had learned the lesson of renunciation and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun.
Thomas Hardy
There is nothing illogical in the desire of the "have-nots" to appropriate the wealth of the "haves"; in fact, it is part and parcel of the law of animal life. The bear robs the hive and the wolf the fold, and when "nature red in tooth and claw" is stretched into its human dimension, there is nothing irrational in Marx's theory that, granted the power, one social class should devour another. But what is irrational is, to assume that by robbing the hive the bear will assume the industry of the bee, or by robbing the fold the wolf will become as pacific as the sheep. It is astonishing that a man of Marx's high intelligence could have believed in ritualistic cannibalism on the social plane; that by wresting the forces of production from the bourgeoisie and centralizing them in the hands of the proletariat, the proletariat would automatically aacquire the skills of the ruling class. And it is equally astonishing that a man of Lenin's mental calibre could have attempted to put this magic into practice.
J.F.C. Fuller
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad hoc plot device.
David Langford
She was stronger alone…
Jane Austen
Happiness ... leads none of us by the same route.
Charles Caleb Colton
When soul meets soul on lovers' lips.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
A false potential can dress itself up as attractive ideas.
Steven Redhead