Quotes by British Authors - Page 21

Polly felt questing eyes boring into her. She was embarrassed, of course. But not for the obvious reason. It was for the other one, the little lesson that life sometimes rams home with a stick: you are not the only one watching the world. Other people are people; while you watch them they watch you, and they think about you while you think about them. The world isn’t just about you.
Terry Pratchett
According to the latest official figures, 43% of all statistics are totally worthless.
Ashleigh Brilliant
A man who says that no patriot should attack the [war] until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men…he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, "I am sorry to say we are ruined," and is not sorry at all…Granted that he states only facts, it is still essential to know what are his emotions, what is his motive. It may be that twelve hundred men in Tottenham are down with smallpox; but we want to know whether this is stated by some great philosopher who wants to curse the gods, or only by some common clergyman who wants to help the men.
G.K. Chesterton
Sometimes callers from a distance invade my solitude, and it is on these occasions that I realize how absolutely alone each individual is, and how far away from his neighbour; and while they talk (generally about babies, past, present, and to come), I fall to wondering at the vast and impassable distance that separates one's own soul from the soul of the person sitting in the next chair.
Elizabeth von Arnim
You've got to ensure that the holders of an opinion however unpopular are allowed to put across their points of view.
Betty Boothroyd
I have tried hard to be a good person and to leave the world a better place. To feel that I have in any small way succeeded is to me a prize beyond measure, the most wonderful wealth that I could ask for, a form of prosperity that I would wish for the whole world to experience and enjoy.
Roz Savage
Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: The case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut. Of course, against all these considerations you might prefer the newly fashionable and more media-weighty notion that if you don't show her enough appreciation, and after all she's done for us, she may cry.
Christopher Hitchens
I wake and in those first fuddled moments forget you’re not here. I must have been dreaming about you – a tense, erotic dream. I reach out in bed to the place your body should be. It’s cold and there is no hollow. Even the bed is forgetting you.
A.J. Waines
I have forgotten more of my life than I remember, and with my forgetting I have lost my being.
Russell Hoban
There are events in one's life which, no matter how remote, never fade from memory
Jim Corbett
Had you been lying all along? Mum gently stroked my hair. I whispered into her shoulder. “I can’t go back. Not yet. I can’t leave.” And she held my head tight to her chest and wrapped her arms around me. “You don’t have to,” she said, rocking me. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, not anymore.” And I cried.
Lucy Christopher
Every increase in objectivity takes us further from reality.
Nanavira Thera
My Muse sits forlornShe wishes she had not been bornShe sits in the coldNo word she says is ever told.
Stevie Smith
He'd kept his figure despite being past his first youth. Pretty good for nearly forty.Who was she fooling? She knew quite well that he was thirty-five and a half, exactly five years older than she. Their birthdays were two days apart. It was absurd the way trivial facts lingered in the memory, facts as unimportant as what she had for dinner on Tuesday. Except that she couldn't remember last week's menu and she was annoyingly aware of Max Quinton's preference for lamb over beef, for apple tart over syllabub. He preferred Shakespeare to the modern poets, the country to the town.
Miranda Neville
But you can't save people from the world.There's nowhere else to take them
Mike Carey
Every test successfully met is rewarded by some growth in intuitive knowledge, strengthening of character, or initiation into a higher consciousness.
Paul Brunton
Look at this charming donkey!
Kenneth Clark
The door of illumination is open to those for whom other doors are closed.
Idries Shah
I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem inasmuch as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right.
Henry Bessemer
So I fight for a Father who I never loved, against a brother that I did. I defend an empire that never wanted me against an army that would have taken me in a heartbeat.
Chris Wraight
And if you do see any pirates, I don't want you to pick up any rough manners from them. Do you understand?
Alexander McCall Smith
Conservatives believe in the ties that bind us. Society is stronger when we make vows to each other and we support each other. I don’t support gay marriage in spite of being a conservative. I support gay marriage because I am a conservative.
David Cameron
You want me to spy on a National Colour operative?''Wow,' she said, 'you got it. I thought I was going to have to explain that one for a lot longer.
Jasper Fforde
The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.
George Orwell
... Of his sins [Heavenly Father] does not want [man] to think [on them] too much: once they are repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better [Heavenly Father] is pleased.
C.S. Lewis
The point is not to be the best, but to be the best you can be.
Ken Robinson
A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.
Terry Pratchett
People who are born even-tempered placid and untroubled-secure from violent passions or temptations to evil-those who have never needed to struggle all night with the angel to emerge lame but victorious at dawn never become great saints.
Eva Le Gallienne
When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.
Anthony Burgess
A part of my depression lies, I think, in my unanswered question: Where is home? I feel a sense, always, of trying to find my way back to a place that doesn't exist.
Sally Brampton
I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, he said, BUT I COULD MURDER A CURRY.
Terry Pratchett
An Act of Dissent is simply a way of saying, 'No, I do not accept this and, as my silence may be construed as acquiescence, I would like to make a small gesture to indicate that you can all go fuck yourselves.
Mark Thomas
This book will prove the following ten facts:1. A Goon is a being who melts into the foreground and sticks there.2. Pigs have wings, making them hard to catch.3. All power corrupts, but we need electricity.4. When an irresistible force meets an immovable object, the result is a family fight.5. Music does not always sooth the troubled beast.6. An Englishman's home is his castle.7. The female of the species is more deadly than the male.8. One black eye deserves another.9. Space is the final frontier, and so is the sewage farm.10. It pays to increase your word power.
Diana Wynne Jones
You have heard that evil is a perversion of the good. The greatest goods can be perverted into the greatest evils. The poor man has not the opportunities for covetousness and self-indulgence which the rich man enjoys. The unlettered man has not the opportunities for intellectual pride and arrogance which the scholar may succumb to. An irreligious man may prostitute the flesh; but it takes a 'religious' man to prostitute the things of the Spirit and the Church of God. Every gift, every insight, ever vision, every talent brings its demand for self-forgetfulness in sanctified service: each brings its opportunities for richer worship or for more damnable self-love. The slum labourer may pervert beer and steak to the sole end of abusing an indulged body. It takes a bishop to pervert episcopacy to the service of self-indulgence; it takes a monk to pervert the religious life to the service of pride.
Harry Blamires
I hold another creed, which no one ever taught me, and which I seldom mention, but in which I delight, and to which I cling, for it extends hope to all; it makes eternity a rest - a mighty home, not a terror and an abyss. Besides, with this creed, I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime; I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last; with this creed, revenge never worries my heart, degradation never too deeply disgusts me, injustice never crushes me too low. I live in calm, looking to the end.
Charlotte Brontë
Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body.
Aldous Huxley
It was her brother,' said Mr. Thornton to himself. 'I am glad.I may never see her again; but it is comfort-a relief-to know that much. I knew she could not be unmaidenly; and yet I yearned for conviction. Now I am glad!' It was a little golden thread running through the dark web of his present fortunes; which were growing ever gloomier and more gloomy.
Elizabeth Gaskell
I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.
Aldous Huxley
I couldn't keep myself from wondering how on earth I got to have such demented parents".
Bella Forrest
The pen is mightier than the sword!
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment on the nature of sin, for example.""And what do they think? Against it, are they?""It is not as simple as that. It's not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.""Nope.""Pardon?"There's no grays, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That's what sin is.""It's a lot more complicated than that--""No it ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts.""Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes-""But they Starts with thinking about people as things…
Terry Pratchett
Things could change so entirely, in a heartbeat; the world could be made entirely anew, because someone was kind.
Jo Baker
Satan walks nowhere on this Earth, nor has he ever, save where he treads within the human heart.
Joseph D'Lacey
Some things never change
Jeffrey Archer
Be kind to the hawk and harm the sparrow.
Idries Shah
All failure is failure to adapt, all success is successful adaptation.
Max McKeown
But only a person in the depths of despair neglected to look beyond winter to the spring that inevitably followed, bringing back color and life and hope.
Mary Balogh
Of course there must be lots of Magic in the world," he said wisely one day, "but people don't know what it is like or how to make it. Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen. I am going to try and experiment.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
When someone uses the phrase ‘the prick one’, and you know immediately that this is a synonym for the word ‘metaphorically’, you are entitled to wonder whether you know the speaker too well. You are even entitled to wonder whether you should know her at all.
Nick Hornby
Life is made up of chances to make choices, decisions of what you wish to do; the accumulated result of those choices is what you call your life.
Steven Redhead
And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband.
Virginia Woolf
Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives - darn, durn, goldurn, goshdad, goshdang, goshawful, blast, consarn, confound, by Jove, by jingo, great guns, by the great horn spoon (a nonce term first cited in the Biglow Papers), jo-fired, jumping Jehoshaphat, and others almost without number - but even this cautious epithets could land people in trouble as late as the 1940s.
Bill Bryson
To her [Florence Nightingale] chiefly I owed the awakening to the fact that sanitation is the supreme goal of medicine its foundation and its crown.
Elizabeth Blackwell
Stop complaining and start living.
Habeeb Akande
Harry Potter," he said very softly. His voice might have been part of the spitting fire. "The Boy Who Lived."None of the Death Eaters moved. They were waiting. Everything was waiting. Hagrid was struggling, and Bellatrix was panting, and Harry thought inexplicably of Ginny, and her blazing look, and the feel of her lips on his--Voldemort had raised his wand. His head was still tilted to one side, like a curious child, wondering what would happen if he proceeded. Harry looked back into the red eyes, and wanted it to happen now, quickly, while he could still stand, before he lost control, before he betrayed fear--He saw the mouth move and a flash of green light, and everything was gone.
J.K. Rowling
The flawlessly beautiful were flawlessy happy, weren't they? To Kristy this had always seemed self-evident. Tonight, however, the alcohol made her wonder if envy hadn't blinded her. Perhaps to be flawless was another kind of sadness.
Clive Barker
…all the evils of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings.
George Orwell
The dusk light is impossibly bright. Timothy Squire is still pale, casting backwards glances as we run. After we are well free of the neighbourhood, I gesture for him to stop.'You all right?' he pants.I time it perfectly, and my fist connects, hard, with his stomach. He stumbles, falls to his knees on the wet pavement. Although his grip is strong I have taken him by surprise, and soon the knife is in my hands.
John Owen Theobald
Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
Virginia Woolf
Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came fear.
H.G.Wells