Quotes by British Authors - Page 171

There is no limit on the level that the reflections can be at and in a modern environment, such as a city, the albedo can increase the power levels many times of the sky based solar radiation of direct and diffuse combined. The trees prevent the albedo reflections from occurring.
Steven Magee
I gave my heart to a man who loved me, who wanted to be with me. Who ultimately was afraid of all I offered.I didn’t understand why he sabotaged our future at the time – cheating on me, again, as we were making final plans to move in together. By the time he came over to smooth talk his way out of it, I was done. No more crying. Even my tears had given up on him. I’d already moved on, his cheating was simply the key left in the mailbox.
Rachel Thompson
What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?
Tom Stoppard
People don't like to talk about alcohol. They don't like to think about it, except in the most superficial of ways. They don't like to examine the damage it does and I don't blame them. I don't like it either. I know that desire for denial with every bone in my body: clavicle, sternum, femur and phalanx.
Olivia Laing
No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.
Niall Ferguson
I have found that it is the small everyday deed of ordinary folks that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love." ~ Gandalf (J. R. R. Tolkein ~ The Hobbit)
J.R.R. Tolkien
When my journal appears many statues must come down.
Duke of Wellington
Rainbows make great pets,because they're already house trained.
Anthony T.Hincks
Floyd arrived in the kitchen and leapt onto Casper’s back, then proceeded to start biting his neck. I’m an only child with a smallish family who had never done Christmas in a big way, but there was something about having two male cats tenderly humping in the corner of the room that made the occasion a little more festive.
Tom Cox
And I will go on criticising Socialism, and opposing Socialism because it is bad for Britain (...) It’s the Labour Government that have brought us record peace-time taxation. They’ve got the usual Socialist disease – they’ve run out of other people’s money.
Margaret Thatcher
It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.
Joseph Conrad
Colon thought Carrot was simple. Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was.Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.
Terry Pratchett
Prayer allows you to tap into God’s wisdom anywhere, anytime, no matter what’s going on.
Elizabeth George
This self-reliance, this direct dealing with the world, seemed to him, even in the height of his concern, unwomanly, a deeper injury to his own abandoned assumptions than any he had contemplated.
H.G.Wells
I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
John Keats
If you’re given a dirty look, wash it and give it back.
Benny Bellamacina
A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.
Neil Gaiman
The belief that personality is mysterious and irreducible has no scientific warrant, and is accepted chiefly because it is flattering to our human self esteem.
Bertrand Russell
For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The ego isn't a bad thing. If we didn't develop a strong ego, a strong sense of self, we wouldn't be able to relate to and engage with the extremely powerful and archetypal forces (both dark and light) of the unconscious. If we don't have a strongly developed sense of self (even though it is not, ultimately speaking, the true self), we will get overwhelmed and taken over by the powers of the unconscious such that we will compulsively act them out.
Paul Levy
She knew them by their thick woven cloaks, their hanging hair and beards, and their Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples spilt over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Like her father’s words, and her mother’s, and her sister’s. Utterly unlike Onnen’s otter-swift British or the dark liquid gleam of Irish. Hild spoke each to each. Apples to apples, otter to otter, gleam to gleam, though only when her mother wasn’t there.
Nicola Griffith
Nowists get off on getting on, so they run when they could walk, jump when they could sit and dance when they could sit at the edge. They regret inaction, so simply act.
Max McKeown
alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know
Virginia Woolf
You can put the human mind and body into strange states through the use of alien environments.
Steven Magee
The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.
Nancy Astor
I held out my book. It was precious to me, as were all the things I'd written; even where I despised their inadequacy there was not one I would disown. Each tore its way from my entrails. Each had shortened my life, killed me with its own special little death.
Tanith Lee
But because day at her dawning hours hath so bewitched me, must I yet love her when glutted with triumph she settles to garish noon? . . . Who dares call me turncoat, who do but follow now as I have followed this rare wisdom all my days: to love the sunrise and the sundown and the morning and the evening star.
E.R. Eddison
I am glad you are here with me. Here at the end of all things, Sam.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like all-embracing compassion.
Arnold Bennett
Your fear is, that if you marry Adèle, you will love her. If you have children, you will love them more than anything else in the world, more than patriotism, more than democracy. If your children grow up, and prove traitors to the people, will you be able to demand their deaths, as the Romans did? Perhaps you will, but perhaps you will not be able to do it. You’re afraid that if you love people you may be deflected from your duty, but it’s because of another kind of love, isn’t it, that the duty is laid upon you?
Hilary Mantel
People said that I was crazy, but I wasn't.I was just different.
Anthony T.Hincks
The people he met, the places he passed, were all steps in his journey, and he kept a place inside his heart for each of them.
Rachel Joyce
A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied he is content.
Alfred North Whitehead
They weren't making much sense; she decided they were having an argument as old and comfortable as an armchair, the kind of argument that no one ever really wins or loses, but which can go on for ever, if both parties are willing.
Neil Gaiman
That's why Twinkle likes the place so much, Scott thought, looking around at the faded wood veneer tables, and the faded souls drinking at them. Misery was soaked through the place like the old beer soaked through its carpets.
R.D. Ronald
It is our duty to ensure we have a peace worth fighting for.
Chris Bradford
We live in truly unbelievable times. Autism is an epidemic in most westerncountries, western governments are nothing more than corrupt corporations, and corporations areroutinely suppressing information regarding the toxicity of many common household items. The resultis that many people are unnecessarily suffering from easily preventable developmental problems,sickness and cancer.
Steven Magee
I stared at him. At this too-thin, too-sincere boy. This person.Because I knew what he meant. I understood exactly. And I’d felt it too, that interior certainty. But over the years, I’d let all the fervour fade. I’d stopped believing in it, somehow. I’d let it become something I did, not something I was.
Alexis Hall
... as we travel again between life and death, Waking and dream, blinking, while layers within layers,None better, none worse, unravel and knit up before us . . .
Jay Woodman
I like a good detective story," he said. "But, you know, they begin in the wrong place! They begin with the murder. But the murder is the end. The  story begins long before that—years before sometimes with all the causes and events that bring certain people to a certain place at a certain time on a certain day.
Agatha Christie
Hollowness: that I understand. I'm starting to believe that there isn't anything you can do to fix it. That's what I've taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mold yourself through the gaps
Paula Hawkins
Tried living in the real world instead of a shell, but I was bored before I even began.
Morrissey
I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.
Lawrence Durrell
...those who break the law should be loved more and not less for their sin, for if we do not forgive then is sin added to sin and the end is death.
Elizabeth Goudge
CHORONZON: I am a dire wolf, prey-stalking, lethal prowler.MORPHEUS: I am a hunter, horse-mounted, wolf-stabbing.CHORONZON: I am a horsefly, horse-stinging, hunter-throwing.MORPHEUS: I am a spider, fly-consuming, eight legged.CHORONZON: I am a snake, spider-devouring, posion-toothed.MORPHEUS: I am an ox, snake-crushing, heavy-footed.CHORONZON: I am an anthrax, butcher bacterium, warm-life destroying.MORPHEUS: I am a world, space-floating, life-nurturing.CHORONZON: I am a nova, all-exploding... planet-cremating.MORPHEUS: I am the Universe -- all things encompassing, all life embr
Neil Gaiman
Writers are liars, my dear, surely you know that by now? And yet, things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.
Neil Gaiman
…for what after all is Youth and Beauty?
Jane Austen
It's naive to assume that another person can fulfill you, or save you, if the two things are, in fact, different, and I have never felt that way with Colin. I simply believe that he fulfills an important part of me, and that Robert fulfilled another equally important part of me. The part of me Robert fulfilled is a part which I imagine Colin, even now, doesn't know exists. It is the part of me that can destroy as easily as it loves. It is the part of me that feels safest and most at home behind closed doors, in a dark bedroom, that believes that the only truth lies in the secrets we keep from each other.
Andrew Porter
Good writers can't die. Their words live on forever.
Kensington Gore
Faith - The most precious asset you can build up for all generations.
Christian Hunt
You have to find your own shtick. A Picasso always looks like Picasso painted it. Hemingway always sounds like Hemingway. A Beethoven symphony always sounds like a Beethoven symphony. Part of being a master is learning how to sing in nobody else's voice but your own.
Hugh MacLeod
The sky above us seems huge, vast. It’s clear and crisp and visibility is so good that, when I look up, I feel like I'm staring at an inverted, endless ocean. I'm sure the blue is the colour of water above sand and the tiny, wispy clouds look like waves breaking over distant swells. I envy the birds I see overhead, zipping joyfully from left to right and so far above the death and decay that pollute the lower levels. A day like this should be enjoyed completely. I should be able to forget what dwells in the towns around us, I should find it in myself to dismiss what happened at that crossing, I should.
Jack Croxall
Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Andrew Marvell
She would only make me take my seat if I didn't act calm and Swiss about it all.
Bill Bryson
Unless the inquiry has been so exhaustive as to explore every possibility, the lack of evidence should never be used to ground a statement of fact. Unlikelihood certainly, but no more. A prematurely assumed fact blocks further inquiry.
Jonathan Renshaw
Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.
Henry James
Being pregnant is a very boring six months. I am not particularly maternal. It's an occupational hazard of being a wife.
Princess Anne
Breaking our silence is powerful. Whether it comes as a whisper or a squeak at first, allow that sense of spaciousness, of opening, allow yourself to trust the bottomlessness, and lean into the dark roar which will light up every cell.Though it may start softly, we build in confidence and skills, we realise we do not need to wait for permission before we open our mouths. We do not need to wait for others to make space for us, we can take it. We do not need to read from others’ scripts or style ourselves in weak comparison. We do not need to look to another’s authority because we have our own. Down in our cores. We have waited so long for permission to know that it was our time, our turn on stage. That time is now. Our voices are being heard into being. They are needed.
Lucy H. Pearce
I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It's full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being 'objective.' Nostalgia for what? I don't know. Because I'd rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the 'Anna' of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
Doris Lessing
Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.
Richard Dawkins