Quotes by British Authors - Page 172

They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.
George Eliot
I think, honestly, the film industry is eating up comics characters at such a fast pace, and spewing them out as so much unspeakable, stench-y, crap. I mean, I think people are going to get pretty sick of the comics product of superhero, per se. Super-heroism seems to be so visceral for these times. Nobody needs a big clunky guy to throw cars about. You know, we’ve got drunks in town here that can do that. We don’t need that kind of superhero. What we need is a super-sage. We need a genuine group of wise people. We need to become wise. That’s the job of tomorrow; becoming wise, and integrated, and understanding.
Melinda Gebbie
Imagination frames events unknown In wild fantastic shapes of hideous ruin And what it fears creates.
Hannah More
Research" is a wonderful word for writers. It serves as excuse for EVERYTHING
Rayne Hall
Run mad as often as you choose but do not faint
Jane Austen
The “romance” of a missionary is often made up of monotony and drudgery; there often is no glamour in it; it doesn’t stir a man’s spirit or blood. So don’t come out to be a missionary as an experiment; it is useless and dangerous. Only come if you feel you would rather die than not come. Don’t come if you want to make a great name or want to live long. Come if you feel there is no greater honor, after living for Christ, than to die for Him.
C.T. Studd
When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.
T.S Eliot
Mentioning violence to Bruce was like mentioning chocolate sauce to a six-year-old.
Robert Muchamore
A windmill is eternally at work to accomplish one end although it shifts with every variation of the weathercock and assumes ten different positions in a day.
Charles Caleb Colton
Of course we're guilty!-That's what we've got pardons for!
Anthony T.Hincks
The Christian ministry is the worst of all trades but the best of all professions.
John Newton
Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
When everyone is hungry and waiting – when things need doing urgently and the clock is ticking - it’s often wiser to get cooking and present a ready-made dish they’ll find tasty to eat rather than getting everyone involved in deciding on the recipe.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Little Alice fell d o w nthe hOle, bumped her head and bruised her soul
Lewis Carroll
This is what creation is. The might and marvel of forever creating out of opposition.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.
Bertrand Russell
I mean, that star over there is blinking at me madly now, but for how long? An hour or two, or for the next million years? And how long will we sit here like this? Just another moment, or the rest of our lives? You know which one I'd prefer...
Lucy Christopher
Anyone who has used that comforting phrase 'a nice cup of tea' invariably means Indian tea.
George Orwell
Music is everybody's business. It's only the publishers who think people own it
John Lennon
Tea has nothing to do with being hungry," said Nimrod. "For Englishmen, it is like a canonical hour. And almost as much of an important ritual as the tea ceremony in Japan. Except for one thing. With tea, in Japan, recognition is given that every human encounter is a singular occasion which can, and will, never recur again exactly. Thus every aspect of tea must be savored for what it gives the participants. But in England, the significance occurs in the fact that teas is always the same, and will always recur again and again, exactly . For how is the endurance of a great civilization to be measured?
P.B. Kerr
It is an adherent condition of human affairs that no intention, however sincere, of protecting the interests of others can make it safe or salutary to tie up their own hands. Still more obviously true is it, that by their own hands only can any positive and durable improvement of their circumstances in life be worked out.
John Stuart Mill
I began to long, as I had before, for some special smell, some special music that would fill me, lift me up and carry me away, float me off the rocks of my body and sweep me into some wideness, some vast expanse of blue-grey nothingness.
Denton Welch
Saying of the ProphetTruthSpeaking the truth to the unjust is the best of holy wars.
Idries Shah
[W]e talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannise over them too; we are fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to wait upon us on great occasions; we think it looks important, and sounds well. As we are not particular about the meaning of our liveries on state occassions, if they be but fine and numerous enough, so, the meaning or necessity of our words is a secondary consideration, if there be but a great parade of them. And as individuals get into trouble by making too great a show of liveries, or as slaves when they are too numerous rise against their masters, so I think I could mention a nation that has got into many great difficulties, and will get into many greater, from maintaining too large a retinue of words.
Charles Dickens
It is a place that 'grows upon you' every day. There seems to be always something to find out in it. There are the most extraordinary alleys and by-ways to walk about in. You can lose your way (what a comfort that is, when you are idle!) twenty times a day, if you like; and turn up again, under the most unexpected and surprising difficulties. It abounds in the strangest contrasts; things that are picturesque, ugly, mean, magnificent, delightful, and offensive, break upon the view at every turn.
Charles Dickens
We have an obligation to make things beautiful, to not leave the world uglier than we found it.
Neil Gaiman
But psychology is a more tricky field, in which even outstanding authorities have been known to run in circles, 'describing things which everyone knows in language which no one understands'.
Raymond Cattell
If I have done anything, even a little, to help small children enjoy honest, simple pleasures, I have done a bit of good.
Beatrix Potter
A love of writing is far greater than any word count.
Molly Looby
It’s degrading being routinely subjected to a battery of medical tests to ensure I continue to deserve a place in this new world.
Siobhan Davis
...and tell you the worst of me and try to give you the best of me...
Sarah Kane
If boys would think, it would be well to give them less classwork and more opportunity for thought.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.
Christopher Hitchens
Values carry the message of shared purposes, standards and conceptions of what is worth living for and what is worth striving for.
Anita Roddick
You must take the world as you find it, with a struggle to be something more honest than those around you. Phineas, as he preached himself this sermon, declared to himself that they who attempted more than this flew too high in the clouds to be of service to men an women upon the earth
Anthony Trollope
Once you have been tortured, you can never belong in this world. There is no place that ever be your home.
Roma Tearne
The organist was almost at the end of the anthem’s long introduction, and as the crescendo increases the cathedral began to glitter before my eyes until I felt as if every stone in the building was vibrating in anticipation of the sweeping sword of sound from the Choir.The note exploded in our midst, and at that moment I knew our creator had touched not only me but all of us, just as Harriet had touched that sculpture with a loving hand long ago, and in that touch I sensed the indestructible fidelity, the indescribable devotion and the inexhaustible energy of the creator as he shaped his creation, bringing life out of dead matter, wresting form continually from chaos. Nothing was ever lost, Harriet had said, and nothing was ever wasted because always, when the work was finally completed, every article of the created process, seen or unseen, kept or discarded, broken or mended – EVERYTHING was justified, glorified and redeemed.
Susan Howatch
Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.
C.S. Lewis
The destruction of this universe would have no significance on a cosmic scale.
Stanley Kubrick
What does Mrs Preston want to go abroad for?' asked Mr Leslie.'I think her doctor wanted her to, Father,' said Agnes.'Doctors!' said Mr Leslie, wiping the whole of the Royal College of Physicians off the face of the world with this withering remark.
Angela Thirkell
It was a gambler's action, but his whole life had probably been made up of gambles; it could hardly be otherwise in the outback.
Nevil Shute
How gleefully life shreds our well crafted plans.
David Mitchell
A story conducted by the time of a clock and calendars alone would be a story not of human beings but of mechanical toys.
Mary Lascelles
And then came the three-toed sloth. Stupid sloth. It was a crazy-looking beastie, all arms and bristling grey fur; its body was a blob, the kind of shape a six-year-old would draw for a pig, and its face was flattened like a racoon that had run full tilt into a brick wall. A triangular stub of a nose jutted out at an angle beneath a fringe that must have been difficult to see through. In fact, from side-on it looked disturbingly like John Lennon.
Tony James Slater
The essence of me, is YOU.
Anthony T.Hincks
No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.
Bertrand Russell
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
John Locke
Elle wondered if he had regrets. But she didn't let herself wonder for too long. She had locked her heart up against him, and it would take something extraordinarily strong to break it open.
Harriet Evans
Perhaps the year and a half spenttrying to make sense of all this has finally drained meMaybe, just maybe, I always know I deserved better, but was too afraid to accept it
Samantha King
There’s only one Earth, and it’s tiny, but evil human leaders avoid problems they don’t want to resolve by giving them names which make the problems sound like they’re taking place in a different world: they make people not care about other people dying of starvation by calling the place the dying live “the third world.
Craig Stone
… Science is constantly proved all the time. You see, if we take something like any fiction, any holy book… and destroyed it, in a thousand years’ time, that wouldn’t come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book, and every fact, and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they’d all be back, because all the same tests would [produce] the same result.
Ricky Gervais
From that altitude, the world looked calm and vivid and possible. But by the time we landed at Prestwick the clouds were down like the black cap on a hanging judge.
Al Álvarez
There was a sudden stillness like the gap between ticks on a clock, but the next tick never coming.
Sadie Jones
Just one thing worse than the dark, ain't there? And that's what's inside it - the things that call it home ...
Joseph Delaney
Is it not possible — I often wonder — that things we have felt with great intensity have an experience independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible,in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? …Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into the wall; and listen in to the past
Virginia Woolf
The mole dug its way deep, deep down, under the foundations of the wall. No magical alarm sounded, though I did hit my head five times on a pebble.Once each on five different pebbles. Not the same pebble five times. Just want to make that clear. Sometimes you human beings are so dense.
Jonathan Stroud
Mailer famously labeled writing the spooky art. He was right. There's a lot of frontal lobe blather, a lot of pencil-sharpening and knuckle-cracking and drafting and chat, but the big decisions are made in the locked subconscious, decisions not just on the writing but on the conditions for writing: I resolve on the one story I've never told and lo! Here I sit, holed up in a house that means nothing to me, bone-certain no other places will do. Art, even the humble autobiographer's, invokes occult necessities.
Glen Duncan
Count the times. The number of times you have seen the silence of another world seep though a crack. The number of times you have heard the sea trying to escape from the blue painted wall.
Jay Woodman
I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.
Tom Stoppard
There is a philosophy by which many people live their lives, and it is this: life is a shit sandwich, but the more bread you've got, the less shit you have to eat.These people are often selfish brats as kids, and they don't get better with age: think of the shifty-eyed smarmy asshole from the sixth form who grow up to be a merchant banker, or an estate agent, or one of the Conservative Party funny-handshake mine's a Rolex brigade. (This isn't to say that all estate agents, or merchant bankers, or conservatives are selfish, but that these are ways of life that provide opportunities of a certain disposition to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Bear with me.)There is another philosophy by which people live their lives, and it goes thus: You will do as I say or I will hurt you.. . . Let me draw you a Venn diagram with two circles on it, denoting sets of individuals. They overlap: the greedy ones and the authoritarian ones. Let's shade in the intersecting area in a different color and label it: dangerous. Greed isn't automatically dangerous on its won, and petty authoritarians aren't usually dangerous outside their immediate vicinity -- but when you combine the two, you get gangsters and dictators and hate-spewing preachers.
Charles Stross