Quotes by British Authors - Page 173

When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.
John Berger
What lurking temptations to forbidden tenderness find their finding-places in a woman's dressing-gown, when she is alone in her room at night!
Wilkie Collins
Having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second time around.
Douglas Adams
At a time when she was engaged to Stilton Cheesewright, I remember recording in the archives that she was tall and willowy with a terrific profile and luxuriant platinum blond-hair, the sort of girl who might, as far as looks were concerned, have been the star unit of the harem of one of the better-class sultans.
P.G. Wodehouse
People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it's no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.
John Fowles
And infatuated be damned. He was near to being blinded by his attraction to her. He was in love, damn it all. He disliked her, he resented her, he disapproved of almost everything about her, yet he was head over ears in love with her, like a foolish schoolboy.He wondered grimly what he was going to do about it.He was not amused.Or in any way pleased.
Mary Balogh
Do what thy manhood bids thee do.
Sir Richard Burton
seven times down eight times up like the Daruma doll
Chris Bradford
His brow is seamed with line and scar;His cheek is red and dark as wine;The fires as of a Northern starBeneath his cap of sable shine.His right hand, bared of leathern glove,Hangs open like an iron gin,You stoop to see his pulses move,To hear the blood sweep out and in.He looks some king, so solitaryIn earnest thought he seems to stand,As if across a lonely seaHe gazed impatient of the land.Out of the noisy centuriesThe foolish and the fearful fade;Yet burn unquenched these warrior eyes,Time hath not dimmed, nor death dismayed.
Walter de la Mare
The first rule of an expedition is that everyone should stick together.
Tahir Shah
A hundred years ago, people had perfectly understood that you could die of a broken heart, now they thought you were making a fuss about nothing…Certain kinds of suffering are like radiation: they cause furious growth and mutation of the inner self.
Amanda Craig
England expects every man to do his duty.
Lord Horatio Nelson
Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
W Somerset Maugham
But death has taken root inside you and you know it will grow, like a cancer with a voice, from now until the day it consumes you whole.
Sharon Bolton
Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.
George Orwell
Without a degree of risk, there is little chance for the enormous mixture of relief and achievement that follows in its steps. It is the leap that goes on to support even greater attempts at the seemingly impossible challenges that the world often uses to sort the men from the boys, and of course, the women from the girls!
Graham Kerr
The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.
Christopher Hitchens
The reflection was that of a putrefying corpse. By some trick of the light, her face seemed sallow and slipping, the patches of darkness giving the appearance of skin sloughing off in small pockets. I’d almost forgotten the knife in my panic; the woman was far more dangerous than the weapon. Blood drizzled down the blade, obscuring the macabre reflection of Natalya’s face and suddenly I was transfixed by a thought that should have been immediate:Whose blood is that?
Hazel Butler
The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time--for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.
C.S. Lewis
Treece quite seriously divided the world into writers, who led life as a conscious effort, and people, and people who didn't; sometimes he preferred writers and sometimes he preferred people.
Malcolm Bradbury
The Law of God was never a ladder for unsaved people to climb up to heaven. It was always a pattern of life for God’s people who had been saved from judgment by the blood of the Lamb.
Colin S. Smith
It is agreed that 'girls take more bringing up' than boys: what that really means is that girls must be more relentlessly supervised and repressed if the desired result is to ensue.
Germaine Greer
When we look ahead to 2018, we should expect big steps forward in science to come once again from changes in style rather than from marginal improvements in technology.
Freeman Dyson
Matthew knew that phrenology was nonsense, and yet, years later, he found himself making judgments similar to those made by his father; slippery people looked slippery; they really did. And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudiced and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!
Alexander McCall Smith
However she redefined herself, that part of one that made for the core of the self, that part that we think of as the ultimate, inner being—that was ineradicable Scottish. That part spoke with a Scottish voice; that part looked out through Scottish eyes; and it was that part that now welled within her as she gazed out through the window of the descending plane and saw below her the rolling Borders hills…
Alexander McCall Smith
Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
If you have been sunned through and through like an apricot on a wall from your earliest days you are oversensitive to any withdrawal of heat.
Margot Asquith
The Conditioned Mind / shuts off magical vision and gnosis / gives up freedom, truth, real choices / loses sight of love, trust, and social coherence / loses touch with organic life, gives way to interference // risks personal wellbeing, peace of heart, balance of mind / is tricked into believing we need power, money, lies / and people to lead us by the nose into violence and war / is hypnotised, drugged, poisoned, misinformed.
Jay Woodman
Having the thought of you being with someone else is like a knife twisting in my dark soul
E.L. James
They didn't just live with secrets. Secrecy surrounded their entire lives.
Anthony Horowitz
The thing about football - the important thing about football - is that it is not just about football.
Terry Pratchett
paradise seemed further away than India, but Hell had become a bit closer
V.S. Naipaul
She lived a good deal by herself, to herself, working, passing on from day to day, and always thinking, trying to lay hold on life, to grasp it in her own understanding. Her active living was suspended, but underneath, in the darkness, something was coming to pass. If only she could break through the last integuments!
D.H. Lawrence
In a world turned upside-down, where everything was wrong, bizarre, you could at least look up at the sky and see normality. Stars that shone regardless of who won a civil war, or who should or should not be a president. Their light was billions of years old. They didn't have a care...
Alex Scarrow
The hamster-powered hat is the same as any other hat. It keeps your head warm and looks smart,' the inventor said. 'The hamster generates heat by running on the wheel. If you get a big enough hamster, it will keep your whole face warm.
Mark Jackman
Gazing out from the mountains, the clouds are whiter, the sky is bluer, the air seeping into your lungs is as clear as the water roaring down from the snow, melting on the high peaks. A place where heaven is a little closer.
Virginia Alison
He was becoming aware that there was no such thing as over-the-top with Lawrence Davenport, as long as you were talking to Lawrence Davenport about Lawrence Davenport.
Jeffrey Archer
Noble dragons don't have friends. The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive.
Terry Pratchett
Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream, And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?---"On death
John Keats
As we were about to cross the road, Davin suddenly grabbed my wrist and held me back a moment; a car peeled out of the driveway and roared past us. “Geez,” I gasped, and then, glancing at him curiously, I added, “Thanks.” He didn’t say anything, but slowly released my wrist. Before he completely withdrew, I took his hand and interlaced my fingers through his. He looked at me, his lips parted in surprise, but then he smiled shyly and gave my hand a squeeze as we kept walking. It gave me a feeling of nervous flutters in the best way. As we walked up to the doors, Jill and Laurel came bursting out the exit.
J.M. Richards
No art like the art displayed in our salvation, no cunning workmanship like that beheld in the righteousness of the saints. Justification has engrossed learned pens in all ages of the church, and will be the theme of admiration in eternity.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Confound the subtlety of lawyers with the subtlety of the law.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
I remainMistress of mine own self and mine own soul
Alfred Tennyson
As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I'm still looking for the door.
David Mitchell
Sexism is often an invisible problem. This is partly because it's so frequently manifest in situations where the only witnesses present are victim and perpetrator.
Laura Bates