Quotes by British Authors - Page 165

Maturity/experience: the beguiling texture of stones subjected to years of furious seas.
Alain de Botton
Magic and mystery writing follow the same, time-tested, three-act structure to stage their drama; set the scene, build the suspense, reveal the answer. In magic, these phases are known as the pledge, the turn and the prestige.
Steve Burrows
Anything from Kipling
Rudyard Kipling
The absence of theistic bel
Joseph McCabe
I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.
Virginia Woolf
Reading is important.Books are important.Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)
Neil Gaiman
Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to po or suffering humanity than anything else that has "cast up" in my time or is like to--this art by which even the "poor" can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn't it be acting favourably on the morality of the country?
Jane Welsh Carlyle
Heresy is usually quite sophisticated, actually has a meaning, and is to be taken very seriously. It is therefore to be carefully distinguished from turgid, pretentious, badly-written Bullsgeshichte, to use the technical German theological term.
Carl R. Trueman
Being fed, and having a soft bed, and other people being in charge, seemed the most wonderful prospect in the world at that moment.
J.K. Rowling
Who knows nothing base Fears nothing known.
Owen Meredith
I’m a liar and a cheat and a coward, but I will never, ever, let a friend down. Unless of course not letting them down requires honesty, fair play, or bravery.
Mark Lawrence
Oh ... My twitchy witchy girl I think you are so nice, I give you bowls of porridge And I give you bowls of ice-cream.
Neil Gaiman
So, wonder! I also wonder about you," said Cadfael mildly. "Do you know any human creatures who are not strangers, one to another?
Ellis Peters
She scissored the curls away, and - toms, grow easily sentimental over their haircuts, but I remember this sensation very vividly - it was not like she was cutting hair, it was as if I had a pair of wings beneath my shoulder-blades, that the flesh had all grown over, and she was slicing free...
Sarah Waters
It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
Zadie Smith
The more you give the less your poor
Benny Bellamacina
She realised with every inch of her being that she wanted Freya; she was in love with Freya. Her mind, with its perfectly rational arguments, had list the battle with her heart. She felt it. It was real. The conflict was torture.
Kiki Archer
Happy Hauntings; and, pleasant dreams!
Peter James
Be frank and explicit. That is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and to confuse the minds of others.
Benjamin Disraeli
No sooner was the wound given than the remedy was provided and revealed.
Matthew Henry
One of the many innovations of modernism was the new demands it placed on the audience. Music, painting, literature, even architecture, would never again be quite so 'easy' as they had been.
Peter Watson
It is not our abilities that show who we truly are, it is our choices.
J.K. Rowling
Death was far more certain than God.
Graham Greene
Poverty, for me, is synonymous with degradation.
Charlotte Brontë
You've got to capture as much of the room sound as possible. That's the very essence of it.
Jimmy Page
I don't think you can define love.
Harry Styles
So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading -- about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.
Nick Hornby
The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings.
G.K. Chesterton
One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
Alain de Botton
If I had a girl I should say to her, 'Marry for love if you can, it won't last, but it is a very interesting experience and makes a good beginning in life. Later on, when you marry for money, for heaven's sake let it be big money. There are no other possible reasons for marrying at all.
Nancy Mitford
...Nature becomes your teacher, and from her you will learn what is beautiful and who you are and what is your special quest in life and whither you should go...You live on manna vouchsafed to you daily, miraculously. You stretch out arms for hidden gifts, you year toward the moonbeams and the stars, you listen with new ears to bird's songs and the murmurs of trees and streams....From day to day you keep your log, your day-book of the soul, and you may think at first that it is a mere record of travel and of facts; but something else will be entering into it, poetry, the new poetry of your life, and it will be evident to a seeing eye that you are gradually becoming an artist in life, you are learning the gentle art of tramping, and it is giving you an artist's joy in creation.
Stephen Graham
Whether we like it or not asking is the rule of the Kingdom.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I see a girl, soon to be a woman," Tibb continues. "The girl who will share your life. She will love you, she will betray you, and finally she will die for you. And it will all have been for nothing. All for nothing in the end.
Joseph Delaney
And he grew and grew strong as a boy must grow who does not know that he is learning any lessons, and who has nothing in the world to think of except things to eat" (23).
Rudyard Kipling
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which,if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
C.S. Lewis
Why don't you find out for yourself?Then you'll see the glass, hidden in the grass.
Morrissey
He glanced at her, musing on the wonder of a beautiful woman with a disagreeable personality.
J.G. Farrell
You couldn’t get worse food, or food more detached from nature, if you tried. If you have an apple, you’re connected to an apple tree. If you have a dish of set custard and half a glace cherry you’re not connected to anything.
Jo Walton
No one ever pays to learn the most important things.
Neel Burton
We had, I felt, bared small pieces of our symmetrical souls to each other, fast, as if playing one of those breathless card games, and I had pretended to be as moved as I had been the first time I uncovered it all myself, back in East Hampton.
Olivia Sudjic
This is an epiphany moment, I can either sink or swim
Jamie Scallion
Words borrowed of antiquity do lend a kind of majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes.
Ben Jonson
But they are many and he is alone.This has not come to pass yet, he thinks, this is not happening. I am not dying. This is my fate, what shall be. This is the future, it has not happened yet.
John French
Thoughts will lead you in circles. Silence will bring you back to your centre.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Look for solutions, instead of being difficult; be more thoughtful, instead of allowing anger to burn you out. Look at things from a different perspective, embrace change, look out for opportunities and you will feel much more in control.
Steve Backley
Drelmere and sons, fine outfitters for the discerning magician!” he was shouting, his voice barely carrying over the hubbub. “Robes! Pointy hats! Beard grooming supplies! Yes, you sir, how can OH GOD HURRAAARRGLAB.”I waited patiently for him to finish decorating the pavement with his stomach contents. “Sorry,” he said, bent double and gulping. Impressively, he immediately continued his sales pitch from that position. “Looking for a new robe?”“Yes, this one’s starting to whiff a bit.”“Yes, I . . . gathered that, sir.” He took a few deep, groaning breaths into a star-patterned hanky and seemed to gather himself.“What sort of price range were you OH GOD YOUR EYES HURRAAARRGLAB.”I tapped my now bile-sodden foot. “Shall I come back later?
Yahtzee Croshaw
Relationships don't remain constant, but are in a constant state of evolving, either positively or negatively.
Steven Redhead
In order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us without our permission. If we wish life to be a system, this may be a nuiseance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential. It may often happen, no doubt, that a drama may be written by somebody else which we like very little. But we should like it still less if the author came before the curtain every hour or so, and forced on us the whole trouble of inventing the next act. A man has control over many things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much hero that there would be no novel.
G.K. Chesterton
We still don't have a good word to describe what is missing in Cameroon, indeed in poor countries across the world. But we are starting to understand what it is. Some people call it 'social capital, or maybe 'trust'. Others call it 'the rule of law', or 'institutions'. But these are just labels. The problem is that Cameroon, like other poor countries, is a topsy-turvy world in which it's in most people's interest to take action that directly or indirectly damages everyone else.
Tim Harford
Correctly identifying a negative emotion takes the brain out of fight-or-flight mode and into problem-solving mode, out of tension, anger and confusion and into ease, calm and clarity.
Sam Owen
[…] but she cannot make him eat, like you.
Warsan Shire
Man I’m hot,� I exclaimed, fanning myself. The combination of climbing out of the cave and the sun meant that I was perspiring like crazy. “Why thank you,� retorted Blaine, smirking. “I’m pleased that my presence causes that kind of reaction.
Adele Rose
Real affection does not see anything in terms of 'rights', nor does it even care if it is reciprocated. It merely waits by the door and hopes."From 'A Walking Shadow
E.M. Swift-Hook
Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you'd be okay.
Jojo Moyes
I remember how amazing it felt to be loved by him and how he was all I ever wanted.
Siobhan Davis
I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation; our appearance in the world; should be the culmination, or at least one of the latest products of 3,000 Million years of organic evolution, than a kind of country trick, taking a rib out of a man's side in a trance.
David Attenborough
Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond since it deals with what one is and not what one has.
Freya Stark
A good church is a Bible-centered church. Nothing is as important as this--not a large congregation, a witty pastor, or tangible experiences of the Holy Spirit.
Alistair Begg
Try to remember it always," he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. "Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.
Jhumpa Lahiri
If the father cannot, the son will finish the task.
Idries Shah