Quotes by British Authors - Page 167

None meets harm who knows his capacity.
Idries Shah
There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student.
Paul Graham
Jesus never asked me to give to an organization the kind of exclusive devotion he demands from his disciples. Over and over, Jesus calls people to himself - out of the church, the culture, the economy, and the family.
Michael Spencer
She wasn't fit to be a member of society. Her mind was a running sewer. The raunchiest teenager didn't think about sex as much as she did.
Barbara Elsborg
To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.
Oliver Sacks
For some folks death is release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them.
Neil Gaiman
This perpetual hurry of business and company ruins me in soul if not in body. More solitude and earlier hours!
William Wilberforce
If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome."]
Anne Bradstreet
It’s no company at all, when people know nothing and say nothing,’ she muttered.
Emily Brontë
We may properly and profitably amuse ourselves by distinguishing those writers who are respectively 'father-ridden,' 'son-ridden,' and 'ghost-ridden.' It is the mark of the father-ridden that they endeavor to impose the idea directly upon the mind and senses, believing that his is the whole of the work...Among the son-ridden, we may place such writers as Swinburne, in whom the immense ingenuity and sensuous loveliness of the manner is developed out of all proportion to the tenuity of the ruling idea...The ghost-ridden writer, on the other hand, conceives that the emotion which he feels is in itself sufficient to awaken response, without undergoing discipline of a thorough incarnation, and without the coherence that derives from reference to a controlling idea...It may serve as a starting point to say that, whereas failure in the father may be roughly summed up as a failure of thought and a failure in the son is a failure in action, failure in the ghost is a failure in wisdom--not the wisdom of the brain, but the more intimate and instinctive wisdom of the heart and bowels.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Fear no one except the One.
Habeeb Akande
Belonging to another man and therefore not even a little bit to him.
Jhumpa Lahiri
A true master will not deceive an able disciple. You are hampered by the limits you set and no limit can be set on skill.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
...I tell myself it does not matter what one reads--favorite authors, particular themes--as long as we read something. It is not even important to own the books.
Helen Simonson
Surrender to your fear so you may triumph over it.Choose me,open you soul to me, and embrace the Devouring.
Simon Holt
She was of traditional build herself, but her figure was largely concealed by the folds of a generously cut shift dress made out of a flecked green fabric. It was like a tent, thought Mma Ramotswe--a camouflage tent of the sort that the Botswana Defence Force might use. But I do not sit in judgement on the dresses of others, she told herself, and a tent was a practical enough garment, if that is what one felt comfortable in.
Alexander McCall Smith
Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
Alain de Botton
[T]he greater the sense of awe with which a text was regarded, the more complete might be the amnesia as to the original circumstances of its composition.
Tom Holland
Temujin watched Borte's ballet, her elegance on the fulcrum of her hips.
Bryn Hammond
This is what parenting involved: hard decisions. She was his mother, she reminded herself. He didn't have to like her.
Paula Daly
The arms race between [predators] and [prey] is asymmetric, in which success on either side is felt as failure by the other side, but the nature of the success and failure on the two sides is very different. The two sides are 'trying' to do very different things. [Predators] are trying to eat [prey]. [Prey] are not trying to eat [predators], they are trying to avoid being eaten by [predators].From an evolutionary point of view asymmetric arms races are more [likely] to generate highly complex weapons systems.
Richard Dawkins
Reading is reading - no matter what the material.
Giovanna Fletcher
No, what Great Aunt Winifred was suffering from was the persecution every happily single woman suffers: the predictable social condemnation of her independence and childlessness. Dorothy reminded herself of what she'd learned during a university course on feminist history (with a strong Marxist slant): spinsters are a threat to patriarchy.
Tobsha Learner
All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
As the hound follows the hare, never ceasing in its running, ever drawing nearer in the chase, with unhurrying and imperturbed pace, so does God follow the fleeing soul by His Divine grace. And though in sin or in human love, away from God it seeks to hide itself, Divine grace follows after, unwearyingly follows ever after, till the soul feels its pressure forcing it to turn to Him alone in that never ending pursuit.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Everything man needs is in the world.
Idries Shah
Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?
Bertrand Russell
It has often been said that the more unusual the murder the easier it is to solve, but this is a theory I don't believe. Nothing is easy, nothing is simple, and you should think of your investigations as a complicated experiment: look at what remains constant and look at what changes, ask the right questions and don't be afraid of wrong answers, and above all rely on observation and rely on experience.
Peter Ackroyd
I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence.
John Lennon
They were from different generations, culture, nations. But even these things did not divide them so much as their separate conceptions of what it meant to be a woman.
Patricia Duncker
The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievements in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It's not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.
Malcolm Gladwell
Parenting is a partnership. Loving each other has a big impact on your children.
Elizabeth George
But after reading it he knew better than before that he was not mad. Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
George Orwell
You are only limited by your own imagination
Benny Bellamacina
Most women still need a room of their own and the only way to find it may be outside their own home.
Germaine Greer
Opera cuts to the chase—as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.
Julian Barnes
I wish I knew the good of wishing.
Henry S. Leigh
With the development of utility electricity for the masses in the 1900's, very few people realize that a new era of sickness and disease was unleashed that are collectively called radiation sickness.
Steven Magee
What was I waiting for with regards to the sea-soaked woman laughing in front of me? What would I tell myself if I didn't watch her grow gorgeously ripe with our baby? If we didn't become sleep-deprived and snappy with each other as we tried to navigate the stormy seas of parenthood together.
Dorothy Koomson
Life's more important than a living. So many people who make a living are making death, not life. Don't ever join them. They're the gravediggers of our civilization - The safe men. The compromisers. The moneymakers. The muddlers-through. Politics is full of them... so is businesses... so is the church. They're popular. Successful. Some of them work hard, other are slack, but all of them could tell a good story. Never where there such charming gravediggers in the world's history.
James Hilton
He felt a spasm of excitement because he knew instinctively who it was, or at least knew who it was he wanted it to be, and once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is.
Douglas Adams
Oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology.
Bryan Sykes
Despite all the identifying, measuring, photographing, I had managed to set the experience in a kind of present past, a having looked, even as I was temporally and physically still looking...It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same result.
John Fowles
One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.
Aldous Huxley
How can a bird that is born for joySit in a cage and sing?
William Blake
For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.
Virginia Woolf
Burning Woman is a powerful image. A role model. A metaphor. A warning. A source of power. She is Feminine power incarnate.
Lucy H. Pearce
One group of riders doped, the others alongside them racing clean. You can work out for yourselves which group was fastest.
David Millar
Even the best cookery book is no substitute for even the worst dinner.
Aldous Huxley
LOVE the hideous in order to find the sublime core of it.
Mina Loy
I'm already under the covers when he comes in. I watch as he takes off his shirt and jeans, and climbs into bed beside me. On any other occasion, the sight and feel of his near naked body would send my blood pressure into orbit, but I'm so exhausted by the events of today that I'm incapable of feeling anything even close to desire. And he doesn't ask anything of me.
Siobhan Davis
One little Indian left all alone, he went out and hanged himself and then there were none.
Agatha Christie
Or -- and this she knew was a far more accurate way of looking at it -- the book was true and reality was lying.
Terry Pratchett
If I wasn't me, you wouldn't be you.
Kamila Shamsie
Most books are so well written they barely have any effect on the reader’s senses
Steve Aylett
When you have truly come to know a person, Nella -- when you see beneath the sweet gestures, the smiles -- when you see the rage and the pitiful fear which each of us hide -- then forgiveness is everything.
Jessie Burton
Enemy-occupied territory---that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.
C.S. Lewis
What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millenia opening in your gut. What is salted up in the memory of you? Memory past and memory future.
Jeanette Winterson
1776: A declaration of the Parlement of Paris:The first rule of justice is to conserve for each individual that which belongs to him. This is a fundamental rule of natural law, human rights and civil government; a rule which consists not only in maintaining the rights of property, but also those rights vested in the individual and derived from prerogatives of birth and social position.
Hilary Mantel
Ivanov- "Up to now , all revolutions have been made by moralizing diletantes. They were always in good faith and perished because of their dilettantism. We for the first time are consequent...""Yes," said Rubashov. "So consequent, that in the interests of a just distribution of land we deliberately let die of starvation about five million farmers and their families in one year. So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labour in the Artic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the Party line to be followed in Indo-China. ...
Arthur Koestler