Quotes by British Authors - Page 2

Bad enough to be ill, but to feel compelled to deny the very thing that, in its worst and most active state, defines you is agony indeed.
Sally Brampton
When you write something down, it stays forever.It's like a little part of you that you're giving to the universe
Emma Abdullah
I mean what does a democracy depend on? A democracy depends on the individual voter making an intelligent and rational choice for what he regards as his enlightened self-interest, in any given circumstance.
Aldous Huxley
In what he suffered, as in all true suffering and in true joy, there was the quality of eternity. He could not believe it would ever end.
Elizabeth Goudge
I didn't cry. Real things don't make me cry. Only false or sentimental things can do that. In this respect I'm like most civilised humans.
Glen Duncan
Because time is not like space. And when you put something down somewhere, like a protractor or a biscuit, you can have a map in your head to tell you where you have left it, but even if you don't have a map it will still be there because a map is a representation of things that actually exist so you can find the protractor or the biscuits again. And a timetable is a map of time, except that if you don't have a timetable, time isn't there like the landing and the garden and the route to school.
Mark Haddon
Have you paused to consider that there is no way out? Each way out of one situation necessarily being the way into another situation.
Russell Hoban
You don't know, oh, ohYou don't know you're beautiful.
One Direction
One's nature is like a mountain
Hisham Matar
Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
Alan W. Watts
Personally, I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
Winston S. Churchill
In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles.
Graham Greene
I do wish," said Lucy, "now that we're not thirsty, we could go on feeling as not-hungry as we did when we were thirsty.
C.S. Lewis
Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.
Charles Lamb
If you would not have affliction visit you twice listen at once to what it teaches.
James Burgh
Forget the soul. No such ghost in the machine. What happens to our mind befalls our body also. The condition of the body is also the state of the mind.
Salman Rushdie
I think it was then that it dawned on me that Mum wasn't going to notice Chris was missing. She has been made so that she thinks Chris is just round the corner all the time. She doesn't realise that she never sees him. I don't know why I didn't understand earlier. If Aunt Maria can turn Chris into a wolf, she's surely strong enough to do this to Mum- except that it seems a different kind of thing, much more natural and ordinary, and I didn't really think she could do both kinds.
Diana Wynne Jones
Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
Aldous Huxley
We have had enough of the old men and the money-counters!" And people further off took up the cry: "Up Bowman, and down with the moneybags,
J.R.R. Tolkien
That's half of your trouble," muttered the crocodile. "You believe everything's true.""That's because everything is," replied Mr. Bacchus.
Clive Barker
Not to be with the one you love, Laura, the one person you should be spending your life with--it’s like a kind of living death. To wake up every morning and know you are still here. To have that brief, sweet moment of blankness, before your mind reminds you who you are, and why you are unhappy. It was like hell. A living hell of the heart’s own making.
Harriet Evans
If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.
Alfred Tennyson
Not that I'm the kind of person who would actually inflict emotional pain on another human being out of a selfish, twisted need for revenge.I just like to think about it.
Jennifer Gilby Roberts
Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn´t all it´s cracked up to be.
Julian Barnes
In the dream world, anything is possible. It requires a fertile imagination, and a desire to explore the half-light between the known and the unknown.
Fennel Hudson
God is very good to those who trust in Him, and often surprises them with unlooked for blessings. Little do we know what may happen to us to-morrow. Chance is banished from the faith of Christians, for they see the hand of God in everything.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Every woman who chooses - joyfully, thoughtfully, calmly, of their own free will and desire - not to have a child does womankind a massive favour in the long term. We need more women who are allowed to prove their worth as people; rather than being assessed merely for their potential to create new people. After all, half those new people we go on to create are also women - presumably themselves to be judged, in their futures, for not making new people. And so it will go on and on...
Caitlin Moran
Refuse to be ill. Never tell people you are ill never own it to yourself. Illess is one of those things which a man should resist on principle at the onset.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
Hades is evolved to the highest state of simplicity.
J.M. Ledgard
The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds — making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation — men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.
C.S. Lewis
Remembering the good has also resurrected the bad.
Siobhan Davis
Does he make you see stars?’ he asks in a low voice. ‘Does he call you his north star? Because that’s what you are to me. You’re the reason I made it home.
Mila Gray
Which was how Britteny ended up nestled next to Mickey, under the shelter of a painter's drop cloth.She felt no pain.She saw no light.She heard, but barely.Her heart was still and silent.Yet she did not die.
Michael Grant
We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate people of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes – our language is the language of everything we have read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.
Penelope Lively
Before the counter-culture revolutionary Li Lian was executed in 1971 for criticising the Cultural Revolution, pour policemen pushed her face against the window of a truck, lifted her shirt and cut out her kidneys with a surgical knife,’ Mau Sen said, his face stony and white. ‘I think that removing the organs of convicts while they are still alive is too much. It completely contravenes medical ethics.’ ‘This is a dissection class, not a political meeting,’ Sun Chunlin said.
Ma Jian
And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.
Martin Amis
The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise. The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls.
Wilkie Collins
The rights we have as free individuals is the right to choose as we please.
Steven Redhead
How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it's so slow and sweet and everlasting.
Graham Swift
The poor and the busy have no leisure for sentimental sorrow.
Samuel Johnson
Their making of love ... had even been something like this, when it became a kind of harmony, enveloping them together and together and for ever into that crescendo. And, yes, now really, really she knew the multitudinous singing of the stars and she wanted everything to stay where it was, now and forever with him ...
Bryan Islip
I love the story of a thing. I love a thing for what it means a thousand times more than for what it's worth.
Elizabeth Wein
If, years later, I do use the slit detector to observe which way the electron went, it will mean that many years earlier the electron must have passed through one slit or the other. But if I don't use the "slit detector," then the electron must have passed through both slits. This is, of course, extremely weird. My actions at the beginning of the twenty-first century can change what happened thousands of years ago when the electron began its journey. It seems that just as there are multiple futures, there are also multiple pasts, and my acts of observation in the present can decide what happened in the past. As much as it challenges any hope of ever really knowing the future, quantum physics asks whether I can ever really know the past. It seems that the past is also in a superposition of possibilities that crystallize only once they are observed.
Marcus du Sautoy
Let us be honest: most of us rather like our cats to have a streak of wickedness. I should not feel quite easy in the company of any cat that walked around the house with a saintly expression.
Beverley Nichols
My feelings towards it can only be paralleled by that of a doting parent towards an idiot child.
Charlotte Brontë
The mind of man is capable of anything.
Joseph Conrad
We set out to save the Shire, Sam and it has been saved - but not for me.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won't be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It'll be because people have changed. They'll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It's healthy.
Kazuo Ishiguro
I asked her what a true story was because I thought that all stories were made up. She said a true story was called fact, and a made-up story was called ficton. Auntie May said a made-up story is a bit like telling lies, only the people who read them knew that already and so it didn’t matter
Rebecca Lloyd
How sick in your mind and your soul to be scared of my voice and my words.
The Cure
My dear Mrs Casaubon," said Farebrother, smiling gently at her ardour, "character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.""Then it may be rescued and healed," said Dorothea.
George Eliot
Forms have changed through the centuries in obedience to the external world to which all forms belong.
Idries Shah
My notion of a wife at forty is that a man should be able to change her like a banknote for two twenties.
Douglas Jerrold
The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life--or at least, shoved up so hard against someone else's life that you might as well have your face pressed against their window--is that it forces you to rethink your idea of who you are. Or how you might seem to other people.
Jojo Moyes
Do not complain of life's unfairness. It is never fair - at best it is impartial.
David Gemmell
When she spoke, Tom held his breath, so eagerly he listened; when she sang, he sat like one entranced. She touched his organ, and from that bright epoch even it, the old companion of his happiest hours, incapable as he had thought of elevation, began a new and deified existence.
Charles Dickens
And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that 'knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.
Hisham Matar
Pre-modern forms of authority , based predominantly upon value-rationality and natural law, are here succeeded by legal-rational forms of domination and by the rule of instrumental reason. With this, religious beliefs and ultimate ideals gradually recede from (public) life as they are disenchanted by the claims of 'rational' science and are replaced increasingly by the idealized pursuit of secular, material ends. This leads to a world in which questions of meaning and value disappear from the public arena, and in which the scope for creative action and for the pursuit of ultimate values becomes increasingly restricted. And in this regard, the twin processes of cultural and social rationalization lead to the same end: to a condition of nihilism in which the highest 'ultimate' values are devalued, or devalue themselves, and hence, for the most part, are no longer able to guide social action, which itself becomes, in turn, increasingly routinized and mundane.
Nicolas Gane
On the contrary, having the amiable vanity which knits us to those who are fond of us, and disinclines us to those who are indifferent, and also a good grateful nature, the mere idea that a woman had a kindness towards him spun little threads of tenderness from out his heart towards hers.
George Eliot
It's an unfair world, Child. Be glad you have friends.
Terry Pratchett