Quotes by British Authors - Page 156

The Poison Maiden has conceived by him, and is plumb ready to enter the divine category of mother, only one last fiend clubs her to death. The final clinch of male romanticism is that each man kills the thing he loves; whether she be Catharine in A Farewell to Arms, or the Grecian Urn, the 'tension that she be perfect' means that she must die, leavinf the hero's status as a great lover unchallenged. The pattern is still commonplace: the hero cannot marry. The sexual exploit must be conquest, not cohabitation and mutual tolerance.
Germaine Greer
He'd been let down so oftenHis brow was on the floorBut then they foundA small hole in the groundAnd let him down some more
David Thewlis
But at least it made one realize that life still held infinite possibilities for change.
Barbara Pym
Some say art is our highest form of hope. . . . Perhaps it's our only hope.
Roma Tearne
It is difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many paths laid down, and not fall into one of the grooves
Ludwig Wittgenstein
There's also a lot of random stuff about poetry, flowers and lute music, plus kissing and cuddling (lots of this), wearing similar outfits, talking incessantly about the current object of devotion, and generally losing one's faculties.
Joanne Harris
My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.
Evelyn Waugh
But you can't be too careful of these strange new ideas and new things. You must not tamper with them. If you try to understand them, they may entangle and get hold of you, and then where will you be? Hide your mind from them, and hide them from your mind. Stick to the plain common sense of life. There will always be a tomorrow rather like today. At least so far there always has been a fairly similar tomorrow. Once or twice lately there have been jolts... Try not to notice these jolts. 'It is no good meeting trouble halfway.
H.G.Wells
The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
Alfred North Whitehead
Curiosity is a descending stair…that leads to only who-knows-where.
Jasper Fforde
‎I have panicked unnecessarily in all four corners of the globe.
Jon Ronson
Doing nothing requires effort. Over time, that effort is greater than the effort necessary to improve, or move somewhere better. The trick is to redirect energy.
Max McKeown
I know [Umbridge] by reputation and I'm sure she's no Death Eater-""She's foul enough to be one...""Yes, but the world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters.
J.K. Rowling
Which way did they go, Peeves?" Filch was saying. "Quick, tell me." "Say 'please.'" "Don't mess with me, Peeves, now where did they go?" "Shan't say nothing if you don't say please," said Peeves in his annoying singsong voice. "All right- PLEASE." "NOTHING! Ha haaa! Told you I wouldn't say nothing if you didn't say please! Ha ha! Haaaaaa!" And they heard the sound of Peeves whooshing away and Filch cursing in rage.
J.K. Rowling
Civilization is a movement - not a condition a voyage - not a harbour.
Arnold Toynbee
Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.
John Ruskin
All we are not stares back at what we are.
W.H. Auden
We have the power to bend all men to our whim, but are forever pushing ourselves further, trying to fly higher… and falling.
Darren Shan
Dragons are among the most ancient spirits. Their origins are not known, but they significantly predate the rise of man. [This author advises the reader never to ask a dragon about the early days of humanity, as they tend to remark that we were much more entertaining as a species before we climbed down from the trees.]
Amy Rae Durreson
What was marriage but sex plus property.
Hanif Kureishi
It's when you sit alone,Or lay in your bed, That we will be watching,Waiting,Until you get scared.Then we will come,A scratch and a chill,For you will feel goosebumps,Look at the windowsill!Did you see a face?Looking in at you,You know that you did,Beware...you'll turn blue.Is that the wind,Howling at the moon,Or is it a werewolf,That's coming for you?So sit in your chair,Or lay in your bed,Because we''ll be there,And you'll be dead!
Anthony T.Hincks
Improving upon nature is the very essence of plant breeding, and so it goes to the heart of one of the central debates of the human condition: the relationship between humanity and nature and the degree to which the human race has a right (or indeed a responsibility) to change plant life for its own ends.
Noël Kingsbury
We all die alone. We shall endure death as once we endured birth. You can’t share either experience.
P.D. James
Failure wasn't an option for those who have success today!
Mary Rodwell
The importance of setting a date, as in choosing a colour, is a matter of selection. Orange may be seen equally well as 'the decline and fall of red' or 'the rise and triumph of yellow'.
Donald Thomas
If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be.
Bill Bryson
We are not such fools as to pay for reading inferior books, when we can read superior books for nothing.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
You can't run away from home without destroying somebody's world.
Neil Gaiman
Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.
Graham Greene
And so the merry party began. It was one of those jolly, happy, bread-crumbling parties where you cough twice before you speak, and then decide not to say it after all.
P.G. Wodehouse
Every other author may aspire to praise the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach.
Samuel Johnson
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
William Wordsworth
Science [is] that wonderfully convenient personification of the opinions, at a certain date, of Professors X, Y, and Z....
Aldous Huxley
Those is seek to profit from the torment of others will eventually pay the piper
Tony Alleyne
If you think you are powerless, then you are
Monica Ali
[God] sees before Him in fact a self-centred, greedy, grumbling, rebellious human animal. But He says "Let us pretend that this is not a mere creature, but our Son. It is like Christ in so far as it is a Man, for He became Man. Let us pretend that it is also like Him in Spirit. Let us treat it as if it were what in fact it is not. Let us pretend in order to make the pretence into a reality." God looks at you as if you were a little Christ: Christ stands beside you to turn you into one. I daresay this idea of a divine makebelieve sounds rather strange at first. But, is it so strange really? Is not that how the higher thing always raises the lower? A mother teaches her baby to talk by talking to it as if it understood long before it really does.
C.S. Lewis
It’s so easy to believe that others deserve their fate, and the fact was that if nobody bothered to help other people then the worst would always happen… She stares out of her window at the busy street, where the British go about their daily business, taking it for granted that they will never be arrested for not voting the right way, praying the right way, dressing the right way or for belonging to a different tribe.
Amanda Craig
A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.
China Miéville
How you see the world may not be how others view it.
Steven Redhead
The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity sluggish and indomitable as a glacier will mitigate the most violent and depress the most exalted revolution.
T.S Eliot
I never trusted anybody at all. I don't know why it was so hard, I just didn't.
Marianne Faithfull
I caught one last glimpse of her face, howling something at me.There were too many vowels in what she said, and they were in an unkind order. ("Substitutions")
Michael Marshall Smith
Forgetting isn’t the key to moving on. Remembering is, because only once we’ve remembered can we forget.
Emma Hart
The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it.
Tahir Shah
Life. It’s about adventure, of having a dream and following it.
Fennel Hudson
It's really going to happen. I really won't ever go back to school. Not ever. I'll never be famous or leave anything worthwhile behind. I'll never go to college or have a job. I won't see my brother grow up. I won't travel, never earn money, never drive, never fall in love or leave home or get my own house.It's really, really true.A thought stabs up, growing from my toes and ripping through me, until it stifles everything else and becomes the only thing I'm thinking. It fills me up like a silent scream.
Jenny Downham
What's life without a little risk?-Sirius Black
J.K. Rowling
You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it's much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter.
Mark Forsyth
Though anger seems a pessimistic response to a situation, it is at root a symptom of hope: the hope that the world can be better than it is. The man who shouts every time he loses his house keys is betraying a beautiful but rash faith in a universe in which keys never go astray. The woman who grows furious every time a politician breaks an election promise reveals a precariously utopian belief that elections do not involve deceit.tThe news shouldn’t eliminate angry responses; but it should help us to be angry for the right reasons, to the right degree, for the right length of time – and as part of a constructive project.tAnd whenever this isn’t possible, then the news should help us with mourning the twisted nature of man and reconciling us to the difficulty of being able to imagine perfection while still not managing to secure it – for a range of stupid but nevertheless unbudgeable reasons.
Alain de Botton
As a manager, I was able to put the USA workplace mental health system to the test. In each of three separate companies there was an employee that was displaying mental health issues and I reported this to the human resources department. The outcome: I was terminated every time. The conclusion: Reporting mental health issues in USA employees will lose you your job!
Steven Magee
...and with it would come that wonderful, unmistakable smell of rain, that smell of dust and water meeting that lingered for a few seconds in the nostrils and then was gone, and would be missed, sometimes for months, before the next time that it caught you and made you stop and say to the person with you, any person: That is the smell of rain, there, right now.
Alexander McCall Smith
Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him and cannot be reasoned out.
Sydney Smith
But all this business about kings and lords, it's against basic human dignity. We're all born equal. It makes me sick.''Never heard you talk like this before, Frederick,' said Nobby.'It's Sergeant Colon to you, Nobby.
Terry Pratchett
I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human. I felt very puny as a human. I thought, 'Fuck that. I want to be a superhuman.
David Bowie
The confrontation lasted about five minutes; then the display died out as quickly as it had begun, and everyone drank his fill of the muddy water. Honor had been satisfied; each group had staked its claim to its own territory.
Arthur C. Clarke
One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able vicariously to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat what's more with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
Aldous Huxley
It is cheap generosity which promises the future in compensation for the present.
J. A. Spender
Ah, if only we were born roaring with laughter and took that emotional template through life with us! Whoever's in charge seriously messed up somewhere. I can only hope that right now, that selfsame Whoever is wryly relating their cock-up to some celestial colleague, who responds: 'Hey, you should put that in a book. LOL!
Steve Cole
That of all people, it should be him; that took her aback. That the heart should settle on somebody like him; that surprised her. But she was so certain about it, so certain.
Alexander McCall Smith
...the more risks you allow children to take, the better they learn to take care of themselves. If you never let them take any risks, then I believe they become very prone to injury. Boys should be allowed to climb tall trees and walk along the tops of high walls and dive into the sea from high rocks... The same with girls. I like the type of child who takes risks. Better by far than the one who never does so.
Roald Dahl