Quotes by British Authors - Page 164

Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn’t analyze at first and didn't fully grasp (partly because I was far from my family in Washington, who had a very grueling day) until the day itself was nearly over. I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that this was a feeling of exhilaration. Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.
Christopher Hitchens
But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near
Andrew Marvell
I took a deep breath of the syrupy sweetness of summer, suffused with bees and birds, and I thought to myself how beautiful this world can be. How lucky we are to be here, to be part of it, for however long we have.
Jennifer Ryan
Regression in grief must be seen and supported as a means toward adaptation and health.
Lily Pincus
what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'"- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, Ch. 1
Lewis Carroll
It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.
Paul Gallico
I am not worried, Harry," said Dumbledore, his voice a little stronger despite the freezing water. "I am with you.
J.K. Rowling
The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.
G.K. Chesterton
Further, deeper still, those whose true names are for ever hidden from the world picked up the pattern of vibrations in the ether, and something akin to joy stirred in their fathomless minds. Perhaps soon they would be called upon to feed.
Marc Gascoigne
The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness.
Arthur Stanley Eddington
That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!
Thomas Hardy
Your life is not your own. Keep your hands off it.
Arthur Conan Doyle
There is violence in this supposedly tender heart of mine.
Julian Barnes
Occult Theft,--Theft which hides itself even from itself, and is legal, respectable, and cowardly,--corrupts the body and soul of man, to the last fibre of them. And the guilty Thieves of Europe, the real sources of all deadly war in it, are the Capitalists
John Ruskin
Nothing knits man to man like the frequent passage from hand to hand of cash.
Walter Sickert
One’s self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.
George Eliot
All this, I suspect, has been little more than the operation known as the pilgrimage from the cradle to the grave, but I have had a comfortable feeling that, however ordinary my enterprises may have been, they had at any rate the advantage of containing, for me, an element of sustained unfamiliarity. I am one of those persons who begin life by exclaiming they've "never seen anything like this before" and die in the hope that they may say the same of heaven.
Siegfried Sassoon
All life is preoccupied with death. Death is the only certain future. Yet in the face of reason, everyone holds out hope for the highly improbable.
Johnny Rich
For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name.
George Orwell
Most people would rather die than think and many of them do!
Bertrand Russell
We’re all going to keep fighting, Harry. You know that?
J.K. Rowling
If you want to succeed in the world you must make your own opportunities.
John B. Gough
Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.
Julian Barnes
...it only takes one voice, at the right pitch, to start an avalanche.
Dianna Hardy
There must be something ghostly in the air of Christmas — something about the close, muggy atmosphere that draws up the ghosts, like the dampness of the summer rains brings out the frogs and snails.
Jerome K. Jerome
The trouble with Grace, she thought, is that she is so literal. But that was the trouble with most people, when it came down to it; there were very few who enjoyed flights of fantasy, and to have that sort of mind--one which enjoyed dry with and understood the absurd--left one in a shrinking minority.
Alexander McCall Smith
..what moved me was that I had found something I didn't think could exist. And that thing - the thing that I found - was very simple. Most people know all about it and have never really doubted it because their lives have been such as to give them a glimpse of the thing that they were not sure about, which is love, of course: the sheer fact of feeling of love for another, of finding the one person - the only person, it seems - who makes the world make sense. It's like discovering the map that you've been looking for all your life and have never been able to find - the map that makes sense of the journey.
Alexander McCall Smith
Rights are susceptible to subversion, as even granite is susceptible to erosion. My fifth Declaration posits how, in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only “rights,” the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful
David Mitchell
When you want to change anything it is best to simply be the change. Nothing will influence your thinking and your feelings as much as your body becoming the new you.It is simple really, we are accustomed to having our minds or our emotions tell our body how to behave. Sayings like: "I expect it will be a disaster," result in slumping body language. Feelings anxiety cause our body to tense up. But you can work your system the other way around and use your body to influence your thoughts and your feelings.Try this: sit or stand up straight and put a big smile on your face - now, how do you feel?
David Ferrers M Nlp
Everybody has somebody. It could be a friend, a lover, a spouse, a writing partner, or even That One Person You See At The Coffee Shop each day. Sometimes they exist to comfort you. Sometimes they exist to drive you absolutely mad. Be open to either as a form of self-improvement.
Terry Pratchett
On the contrary, she was aware only of a sort of timelessness, as though it was all part of a plan, a predestined design, conceived the day she was born. What was happening to her had been meant to happen, what was going to go on happening. Without any recognizable beginning, it did not seem possible that it could ever have an end.
Rosamunde Pilcher
Go ragged then, but pride makes a poor covers; once one man laughs you're naked.
Geraldine Harris
The ambivalent strategy involves clinging to the care-giver, often with excessive submissiveness, or adopting a role-reversal in which the care-giver is cared for rather than vice versa. Here feelings of anger at the rejection are most conspicuously subjected to defensive exclusion. Although these strategies have the function of maintaining attachment in the face of difficulties, a price has to be paid. The attachment patterns so established are clearly restricted and, if repeated in all relationships, will be maladaptive.
Jeremy Holmes
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.
George Orwell
They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did.
Virginia Woolf
Marvellous!" he repeated, looking up at me. "Look! The beauty--but that is nothing--look at the accuracy, the harmony. And so fragile! And so strong! And so exact! This is Nature--the balance of colossal forces. Every star is so--and every blade of grass stands so--and the mighty Kosmos il perfect equilibrium produces--this. This wonder; this masterpiece of Nature--the great artist.
Joseph Conrad
I suppose it's unfair, tricks of argument that leave wounds, but with this sort of thing that (C.S.) Lewis does, what I feel is a craftsman's joy at the sight of a superior performance.
Joy Davidman
There's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for.
J.R.R. Tolkien
If you were going to be successful in the world of crime, you needed a reputation for honesty.
Terry Pratchett
Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart; My silent heart, lie still and break: Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed For a dream's sake.
Christina Rossetti
Smart people that like good health spend several hours outdoors daily in the shade of trees.
Steven Magee
You were sizzling, like sausages in a frying pan.
Kristina Adams
Religion divides us, while it is our human characteristics that bind us to each other.
Hermann Bondi
This is Maximilien de Robespierre, barrister-at-law: unmarried, personable, a young man with all his life before him. Today against his most deeply held convictions he has followed the course of the law and sentenced a criminal to death. And now he is going to pay for it.
Hilary Mantel
I found a brief piece of by Antonio Vivaldi around this time which became my ‘Pinhead Mood Music’. Called Al Santo Sepolcro (At The Holy Sepulchre), it opens more like a piece of modern orchestral music, and although it it moves toward Vivaldi’s familiar harmonies, there is always the threat that it will fall back into dissonance. The piece progresses in an exquisite agony, poised on a knife edge between beauty and disfigurement, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. Perfect.
Doug Bradley
Love doesn't discriminate and nor should the law. Not in this country, not in this world, not in this lifetime.
Liz Kessler
Well, you can fairly claim the day hasn't been wasted,' owned Cadfael generously, 'if something's been learned.
Ellis Peters
I've just had a really evil idea.""My favourite kind
Joss Stirling
Someone told me once, ‘It’s time to get you a pair of overalls, boy.’ But I don’t believe in summing up nothin’ – I let my experiences speak for themselves – and even if I did, a synopsis should be singular. That’s why every time I go out to work in the fields, I work naked. It lets my neighbors speak of my experiences for me.
M.C. Humphreys
The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth and to have it found out by accident.
Charles Lamb
Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, 'By jove! I'm being humble!', and almost immediately pride—pride at his own humility—will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt—and so on, through as many stages a you please. But don't try this too long, for fear you may awake his sense of humour and proportion, in which case he will merely laugh at you and go to bed.
C.S. Lewis
The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.
Alan Hollinghurst
It felt like one of those movies where a bunch of misfits, each gifted in his own way - one in explosives, another in disguise, another in forgery or karate- are thrown together to achieve a dangerous mission.
Philip Delves Broughton
There is nothing safer than flying - it's crashing that is dangerous.
Theo Cowan
She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.
Thomas Hardy
Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.
C.S. Lewis
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!As tho’ to breathe were life!
Alfred Tennyson
The cross is a crisis point for all societies which seek to produce me in and women of quiescence, men and women who are trained to give unquestioning, uncritical obedience to worldly powers and not to Christ.
Megan McKenna
It is worth remembering that at some point in the very distant past, no human had ever drank milk from a cow.
Michael Petch
A man can't soar too high, when he flies with his own wings.
William Blake