Quotes by British Authors - Page 162

Perfection is not something you strive for. Perfection is in the eyes of the beholder. Perfection is a state of grace, of peace of serenity, a moment as fleeting as a smile.
Chloe Thurlow
You think the dead we loved truly ever leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly in times of great trouble?
J.K. Rowling
Harry, we saw Uranus up close!” said Ron, still giggling feebly. “Get it, Harry? We saw Uranus — ha ha ha —
J.K. Rowling
Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Women only nag when they feel unappreciated.
Louis de Bernières
You two are children almost grown. Your hearts have not hardened to the realities of the world. Your dreams have not fallen through your fingers. You still know hope.
Laura Lam
The others moved in like a wake of vultures, ready to devour their prey. she had seen it on television once. 'Scavengers,' Tatinek called them. They swoop in and feed off the carcasses of animals that are too weak to escape - lots of them on battlefields. This looked the same, only the victim wasn't there, just his writing, his typewriter, and bits of dark paper.
F.C. Malby
With characteristic lack of false modesty, John once said to me, "My looks are a rough test of people. If they don't begin to see me beautiful when they have had a chance to learn, I know they're dead inside, and dangerous.
Olaf Stapledon
Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.
William Beveridge
The moment you will be most stiff is when you die - you never get stiffer than that. So you've got to sleep well, eat well and keep moving.
Richard Lloyd Parry
The city blew the windows of my brain wide open. But being in a place so bright, fast and brilliant made you vertiginous with possibility: it didn't necessarily help you grasp those possibilities. I still had no idea what I was going to do. I felt directionless and lost in the crowd. I couldn't yet see how the city worked, but I began to find out.
Hanif Kureishi
Reality is littered with the corpses of unattained dreams and desires.
Steven Redhead
Some things are hard to imagine. Can you conceive of excessive contentment, for example? Or an over pleasant evening? Too much happiness?
Alan Moore
Some say God caught them even before they fell.
Wilfred Owen
Love was the result of having caught a glimpse of another's loneliness.
Nadeem Aslam
Pritchard tutted. "Justice? Justice is even more problematic than truth. It's an emergent property of a very complicated system.
M.R. Carey
Rule No. 1. Make a great product. Rule No. 2. Don't forget rule No.1.
David Hieatt
Though blue sky and the road’s yellow dust and the green of the nearing oasis were all snuffed out, he (newly converted Saul) did not miss them. Light suffused his blinded eyes, his mind.
John Charles Pollock
I want God to be first in my life, so I’m putting Him first in my life today.
Elizabeth George
Among men, sex sometimes results in intimacy; among women, intimacy sometimes results in sex.
Barbara Cartland
Any activity where you let go of fears and doubts and inertia, and move toward a goal you desire brings, if not the goal itself (which may or may not be available to you) but brings you a life full of adventure, dedication, excitement and fulfillment – in other words – satisfaction and happiness.
Martin Gover
No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest. For it is part of education to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.
T.S Eliot
[The wilderness] had caressed him, and—lo!—he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation.
Joseph Conrad
I never speak in silence.
Anthony T.Hincks
The vagina is obliterated from the imagery of femininity in the same way that the signs of independence and vigor in the rest of her body are suppressed.
Germaine Greer
We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat.
Victoria
He'd shot and beaten people because he couldn't talk to them.Violence was the only language nobody could understand. There were no translators.
James Meek
I have known no man of genius who had not to pay in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual for what the gods had given him.
Max Beerbohm
He was being about as protective as a can-opener.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Great men hallow a whole people and lift up all who live in their time.
Sydney Smith
Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.
Robert Macfarlane
We do not now stand in the middle; in every aspect of our life we have, deliberately or by the 'conditioning' of birth, education or environment, allowed ourselves to stand on one bank of the river of life, with some intolerance of those who were foolish enough to choose or be led to stand on the other. Thus we are male or female, old or young, of the East of West. By temperament we are introvert or extrovert, leaders of followers, all for action or striving rather to be. It surely follows that we should be more tolerant of the other fellow, equally right/wrong, and be less swift to judge him with our ignorant, lop-sided view and definite disapproval. In any event, do we have to express an opinion, presume to judge?
Christmas Humphreys
Infinite potential exists for what actions can be taken.
Steven Redhead
He wanted to say: how could you be so nice and yet so dumb? The best thing you could do with the peasents was to leave them alone. Let them get on with it. When people who can read and write start fighting for those who can't, you just end up with another kind of stupidity. If you want to help them, build a big library or something somewhere and leave the door open.
Terry Pratchett
The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
Walter Bagehot
As we encounter each other, we see our diversity — of background, race, ethnicity, belief – and how we handle that diversity will have much to say about whether we will in the end be able to rise successfully to the great challenges we face today.
Dan Smith
Be on your guard against the Pride that repels advice, resents reproof, and refuses to own a fault.
A.L.O.E.
Personal truth differs from one person to the next, so how can truth itself be a constant? At least we can listen to each other in truth.
Jay Woodman
In a world where we seem to be beset by a trend towards 'manualising treatment modalities' the person-centred approach stands and says NO, that is not the way forward.
Richard Bryant-Jefferies
He that would pun would pick a pocket.
Alexander Pope
Though he plunged into work as another man might have plunged into dissipation, to drown the thought of her, you could see that he had no longer any interest in it; he no longer loved it. He attacked it with a fury that had more hate in it than love.
May Sinclair
I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.
G.K. Chesterton
William James used to preach the 'will to believe.' For my part, I should wish to preach the 'will to doubt' ... what is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite.
Bertrand Russell
My heart is like a singing bird.
Christina Georgina Tossetti
When first I set eyes on The Isle of Wight Polar Bear, my world was filled, in that instant, with the magic and wonder of childhood - Suzy Davies, Author, "Snugs The Snow Bear
Suzy Davies
Religion is trust, and that trust arose in the beginning from the impressions made on the mind and heart of man by the order and wisdom of nature, and more particularly, by those regularly recurring events, the return of the sun, the revival of the moon, the order of the seasons, the law of cause and effect, gradually discovered in all things, and traced back in the end to a cause of all causes, by whatever name we choose to call it.
Friedrich Max Müller
Only--but this is rare--When a beloved hand is laid in ours,When, jaded with the rush and glareOf the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,When our world-deafen'd earIs by the tones of a loved voice caress'd--A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.A man becomes aware of his life's flow,And hears its winding murmur; and he seesThe meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
Matthew Arnold
I longed to teach, but I had to wait until the desire had left me before I could really do so.
Idries Shah
At this point, a few words on this term 'horror' are perhaps called for. Some amateurs of this kind of literature engage in endless hairsplitting disputes, centered around this word and its close companion 'terror', as to which' stories may so be categorized and which may not, and whether or not descriptions such as weird or fantasy or macabre are preferable. The designation 'horror', with its connotations of revulsion, satisfies me no more than it does the purists but I believe that it is the only term which embraces all the stories in this collection and which succinctly suggests to the majority of readers what is in store for them. Horror then, in this instance, covers tales of the Supernatural and of physical terror, of ghosts and necromancy and of inhuman violence and all the dark corners and crevices of human belief and behavior that lie in between. ("An Age In Horror" - introduction)
Michel Parry
If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.
Bruce Chatwin
Haldir had gone on and was now climbing to the high flet. As Frodo prepared to follow him, he laid his hand upon the tree beside the ladder: never before had he been so suddenly and so keenly aware of the feel and texture of a tree's skin and of the life within it. He felt a delight in wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter; it was the delight of the living tree itself.
J.R.R. Tolkien
(...) always regretted that good memory often prevents us from thinking for ourselves.
Frank Harris
She came and took away all his miseries, his sorrows !!Then SHewent and left him restlessly numb. He was herpainkiller. SHe, his anesthetic.
Douglas Self
I am perfectly qualified to give you an injection. You're not going to tell me you're afraid of a little prick?""I wouldn't call you that...
Anthony Horowitz
This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.
Virginia Woolf
If I learned anything in this life, I've learned that you can't cling on.
Michael Morpurgo
Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Virginia Woolf
Bonnie saw ropes hanging loose, poles falling away, tree-tops sinking beneath her. As they rose, the sun rose with them. Its warmth turned the dark skin of the fiery balloon midnight blue. They flew straight up. Above them, the sweet, clear music of the lonely pipe called to them. Then the smooth sky puckered into cloth-of-blue and drew aside. They passed straight through...
Pauline Fisk
When love and skill work together expect a masterpiece.
John Ruskin
If nature has taught us anything it is that the impossible is probable
Ilyas Kassam