Quotes by British Authors - Page 157

I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances.
Jeanette Winterson
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaBribetSubstitute for law, which is a substitute for justice.
Idries Shah
What is a Communist? One who hath yearnings for equal division of unequal earnings.
Ebenezer Elliott
Hermione turned and beamed at Harry; her eyes, too, were full of tears.‘…then I declare you bonded for life.
J.K. Rowling
In learning you will teach, and in teaching you will learn.
Phil Collins
How can the bird that is born for joySit in a cage and sing?How can a child, when fears annoy,But droop his tender wing,And forget his youthful spring?
William Blake
It is a characteristic of human beings that if they haven’t got a family of their own, they will invent one.
Angela Carter
You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby.But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.
Margery Williams Bianco
Perhaps it is true that all that happens is in accordance with Your will, and thus it is good. But sometimes You leave blood on Your instruments.
Neil Gaiman
Humans make mistakes. They get angry, they do stupid things they're not proud of, and they hurt the people they love the most.
Emma Shevah
Talents too many, not enough of any.
Naomi Wood
If you’re not going to feel how are you going to know what to think? Isn’t it in the nature of feeling to evolve thought?
Glenn Haybittle
When a theological world view dominated, deviance was sin; when the nation-states emerged from the decay of feudalism, most deviance became designated as crime; and in our own scientifically oriented world, various forms of deviance are designated increasingly as medical problems. Thus we view the medical paradigm as the ascending paradigm for deviance designations in our postindustrial society.
Peter Conrad
to live at all is to be bruised
Sarah Perry
The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks—so it sounded.
Virginia Woolf
I think they're being cheap with their lives, that's why. So they seem ravenous for the worst thoughts I can have.
Gwendoline Riley
Life must have its sacred moments and its holy places. We need the infinite, the limitless, the uttermost -- all that can give the heart a deep and strengthening peace.
A. Powell Davies
I reach my object and say, Wander no more. All else is trial and make-believe.
Virginia Woolf
The only incorruptible thing about us.
Henry Fielding
I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought feeling after feeling action after action had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an harrow to the string then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead through to H. I set out on one of them. But now there's an impassable frontier-post across it. So many roads once now so many culs de sac.
C.S. Lewis
Compassion has been advocated by all the great faiths because it has been found to be the safest and surest means of attaining enlightenment.
Karen Armstrong
My mother groaned, my father wept,into the dangerous world I leapt.
William Blake
Where are your clothes? And do not pretend you do not know. I can accept that you may not know if you killed a man, but every girl always knows where her clothes are.
M.R.C. Kasasian
Creativity is, in many respects, a response.
Matthew Syed
And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.
Joseph Conrad
I say, "Well then I don't know if it was real, and that makes me feel like I'm going insane again.""Absolutely it was real. It was a real, partial picture. Because it ended preemptively, things you would have learned about him in the relationship, you are instead learning in the breakup. You have learned that he has a desperate desire for intimacy and then a desperate desire for the cave. He will get lonely there eventually and come back.""To me?"He doesn't pause. "To someone new.""And I'll have to watch another girl?""You will have to, but you will also know what lies ahead for that poor girl.
Emma Forrest
If we start preemptively cutting out parts of who we are because they’re ‘not feminist enough’, then we’ve failed before we’ve begun.
C. N. Lester
Don't torture yourself over the past. Use it as a teacher. Whatever happened to you in the past, has only prepared you for now.
Robert Tew
Can I help you?" he said, in a manner which indicated very clearly that not only did he not wish to help them, but also that he resented the implication that he ought to
Graham Austin-King
Genius has now all-but disappeared from public view; partly because intelligence (which is strongly genetic) is in decline in the West, partly because social institutions no longer recognize or nurture genius, and partly because the modern West is actively hostile to genius.
Bruce Charlton
(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.
Julian Barnes
How do you feel, Georgie?" whispered Mrs. Weasley.George's fingers groped for the side of his head."Saintlike," he murmured."What's wrong with him?" croaked Fred, looking terrified. "Is his mind affected?""Saintlike," repeated George, opening his eyes and looking up at his brother. "You see...I'm HOLEY, Fred, geddit?
J.K. Rowling
A stranger's eyes see clearest.
Charles Reade
School is one long illness with symptoms that switch every five minutes so you think it's getting better or worse. But really it's the same thing for years and years.
Helen Oyeyemi
Quick, someone's coming! Look real!
Terry Pratchett
Why have the English remained to English? Throughout India's history conquerors have come from elsewhere, and all of them --- Turk, Arab, Hun, Mongol, Persian --- have become Indian. If --- when ---this Pakistan happens, those Muslims who leave Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad to go there, They will be leaving their homes. But when the English leave, they'll be going home.
Kamila Shamsie
Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions without an answer are the hardest to cope with in silence. Once asked they do not evaporate and leave the mind to its serener musings. Once asked they gain dimension and texture, trip you on the stairs, wake you at night-time. A black hole sucks up its surroundings and even light never escapes. Better then to ask no questions? Better then to be a contented pig than an unhappy Socrates? Since factory farming is tougher on pigs than it is on philosophers I'll take a chance.
Jeanette Winterson
Jess thought for a moment. 'You know those films where people fight up the top of the Empire State Building or up a mountain or whatever? And there's always that bit when the baddie slips off and the hero tries to save him, but, like, the sleeve of this jacket tears off and goes over and you hear him all the way down. Aaaaaaaaagh. That's what I want to do.' 'You want to watch me plunge to my doom.' 'I'd like to know that I've made the effort. I want to show people the torn sleeve.
Nick Hornby
Sometimes maybe you need an experience. The experience can be a person or it can be a drug. The experience opens a door that was there all the time but you never saw it. Or maybe it blasts you into outer space...All that negative stuff. All the pain...It just floted away from me, I just floated away from it...up and away...
Melvin Burgess
And if he was kind and friendly and funny, and if he told you about places so beautiful that you wanted to go with him to see them, and if he listened to you talk like he actually cared about what you were saying? And if he tried to protect you when other people tried to tell you what to do, as if they owned you? And if he has the handsomest face you've ever seen, no matter if the skin has been damaged, because he's just lovely even so?
Caroline Leech
The succession of thoughts appears in time, but the gap between two of them is outside time. The gap itself is normally unobserved. The chance of enlightenment is missed.
Paul Brunton
There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
Alain de Botton
First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him. Then, the moment he was asleep, cut his throat. The synopsis of the ideal marriage.
J.G. Ballard
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
George Orwell
I'm sure it's not all hot buttered crumpets out there in the breathing world of asphalt and heartbeats.
Jasper Fforde
You are wrong if you think you cannot live without love, Edith.''No, I am not,' she said, slowly. 'I cannot live without it. Oh, I do not mean that I go into a decline, develop odd symptoms, become a caricature. I mean something far more serious than that. I mean that I cannot live well without it. I cannot think or act or speak or write or even dream with any kind of energy in the absence of love. I feel excluded from the living world. I become cold, fish-like, immobile. I implode. My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening.''You are a romantic, Edith,' repeated Mr Neville, with a smile.'It is you who are wrong,' she replied. 'I have been listening to that particular accusation for most of my life. I am not a romantic. I am a domestic animal. I do not sigh and yearn for extravagant displays of passion, for the grand affair, the world well lost for love. I know all that, and know that it leaves you lonely. No, what I crave is the simplicity of routine. An evening walk, arm in arm, in fine weather. A game of cards. Time for idle talk. Preparing a meal together.
Anita Brookner
For there is no friend like a sisterIn calm or stormy weather; To cheer one on the tedious way, To fetch one if one goes astray,To lift one if one totters down, To strengthen whilst one stands
Christina Rossetti
he needed the security of other bodies.
William Boyd
Oh, is that my report, father?' said Mike, with a sort of sickly interest, much as a dog about to be washed might evince in his
P.G. Wodehouse
Religious discrimination is not like racial discrimination. One you choose for yourself, the other God chose for you.
Habeeb Akande
A culture that does not teach prayer soon runs mad with desire.
Laurence Freeman
Fireworks can make us both happy and sad. It just depends if we are talking about fireworks in the sky or fireworks with another.
Anthony T.Hincks
The greatest managers in the world do not have much in common. But despite their differences, these great managers do share one thing: Before they do anything else, they first break all the rules of conventional wisdom.
Marcus Buckingham
God knew our lives would be really bad sometimes. Like maybe we'd be turned into a monster and then our best friend would get killed. So he made up this story about hell, so we could always say, 'Well it could be worse. It could be hell.' And then we'd keep going.
Michael Grant
I think, that if the world were a bit more like ComicCon, it would be a better place.
Matt Smith
For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth".
A.S. Byatt
The journey not the arrival matters.
T.S Eliot
I am passionate about the truth. Passion is very different from fundamentalism.
Richard Dawkins
It is okay to climb as long as you are not afraid, because being afraid is what made you fall
Susan Hill
In my youth, I was always one for the dramatic entrance. Now, in keeping with my character, I gravitate more toward the subtle and refined. Okay, with the occasional feathered serpent thrown in.
Jonathan Stroud