Quotes by British Authors - Page 23

And sometimes I misbehave on purpose.""Seriously?!""It's called being a brat. Ben will sometimes indulge me [and punish me], but occasionally I have to listen to a lecture about asking for what I want. And those times, I get sent to bed without an orgasm.
Sierra Cartwright
The sports pages are men's pages, although they are not presented as such. /.../ On foreign fields, the men win their trophies, or lose their honour, doing battle on the nation's behalf. The readers, mainly men, are invited to see these male exploits in terms of the whole homeland, and, thus, men's concerns are presented as if defining the whole national honour.The parallel between sport and warfare seems obvious...
Michael Billig
But now isn’t simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until — later of sooner — perhaps — no, not perhaps — quite certainly: it will come.
Christopher Isherwood
I love to see the bud bursting into maturity; I love to mark the deepening tints with which the beams of heaven paint the expanded flower; nay, with a melancholy sort of pleasure, I love to watch that progress towards decay, so endearingly bespeaking a fellowship in man's transient glory
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna
Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.
John Lennon
He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood.
E.M. Forster
You care for each other. There's a love for another. People don't want to use that word, but I thought Wenger set that influence. Because you get some managers who would trust you, they've all got good knowledge, but not all of them care for you. But he cared in such a way that you gave more for him. He spread that. He certainly spread that to me. I felt that I was being more caring, or more helpful towards other people because of what he did. I felt that habit and behaviour came from the boss.
martin keown
And the peace which I always found in the silence and emptiness of the moors filled me utterly
James Herriot
She would not allow herself to remember how Note had treated her, and many others too, she suspected. She had forgiven him, yes, but she still did not like to remember. And perhaps a deliberate act of forgetting went along with forgiveness. You forgave, and then you said to yourself: Now I shall forget. Because if you did not forget, then your forgiveness would be tested, perhaps many times and in ways that you could not resist, and you might go back to anger, and to hating.
Alexander McCall Smith
For the longest time my company is what got me up in the morning. It was what motivated me every second of every day. Since the moment you started working for me, you are what has gotten me up in the morning. You are what motivates me every second of every day. And still I want more from you. Tomorrow the day is all ours, because I want to talk to you about something.
Samantha Young
Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them.
A.S. Byatt
Zeal is more often checked after long years in the same service than when novelty gives a charm to our work.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I did what I had to do. Now he's motivated.""Yeah, sure, motivated to s**t his pants maybe," Luke point out.
Amanda Steel
You know your Bible too well and life too little.
Richard Llewellyn
You need to claim the events in your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done which may take some time you are fierce with reality.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
Africa was full of people in need of help and there had to be a limit. You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life. That principle allowed you to deal with the suffering you saw. That was your suffering. Other people would have to deal with the suffering that they, in their turn, came across.
Alexander McCall Smith
Questions don't have to make sense, Vincent," said Miss Susan. "But answers do.
Terry Pratchett
Dorothea: "What the fuck are you?"Nix: "A man who wanted to be a God...then changed his mind.
Clive Barker
If he didn`t want his opinion,why did he ask for it?
Jerome K. Jerome
She had never felt so light of heart and it seemed to her as though her body were a shell that lay at her feet and she pure spirit. Here was Beauty.
m. somerset maugham
Unfortunately, humans have a long history of trying to fix their engineering mistakes with more engineering mistakes!
Steven Magee
Reach out for, then embrace your heart consciousness, tap into The Power of The Heart.
Steven Redhead
I was in '78 recently," he announced. "I brought you this."He handed me a single by the Beatles. I didn't recognize the title."Didn't they split in '70?""Not always. How are things?
Jasper Fforde
Watching a dog try to chew a large piece of toffee is a pastime fit for gods. Mr. Fusspot's mixed ancestry had given him a dexterity of jaw that was truly awesome. He somersaulted happily around the floor, making faces like a rubber gargoyle in a washing machine.
Terry Pratchett
I DON'T CARE!" Harry yelled at them, snatching up a lunascope and throwing it into the fireplace. "I'VE HAD ENOUGH, I'VE SEEN ENOUGH, I WANT OUT, I WANT IT TO END, I DON'T CARE ANYMORE!""You do care," said Dumbledore. He had not flinched or made a single move to stop Harry demolishing his office. His expression was calm, almost detached. "You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.
J.K. Rowling
[Grief] is everything. It is the fabric of selfhood, and beautifully chaotic. It shares mathematical characteristics with many natural forms.
Max Porter
There were friends all over London who would welcome his eagerly to their homes, who would throw open their guest rooms and their fridges, eager to condole and to help. The price of all of those comfortable beds and home-cooked meals, however, would be to sit at kitchen tables, once the clean-pajamaed children were in bed, and relive the filthy final battle with Charlotte, submitting to the outraged sympathy and pity of his friends' girlfriends and wives. To this he preferred grim solitude, a Pot Noodle and a sleeping bag.
Robert Galbraith
There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.
Robert Graves
So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.
Virginia Woolf
I do to miss my childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in simple things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not away from things, or people or moments that hurt, but I found joy in the things that made me happy.
Neil Gaiman
You can be a leader, a follower or out of business.
Terence Mauri
It is indeed strange, given the heavy emphasis placed by chroniclers on Churchill's sheer magnitude of personality, that the ingredient of pure ambition should be so much ignored or even disallowed.
Christopher Hitchens
Sadly but, perhaps, not altogether unexpectedly this society has had very limited success in achieving what is supposed to be the justification for its existence-- the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest possible number of people. In so far as its citizens are saved from the major anxieties and responsibilities which normally surround the business of being a man, they transfer what appears to be an unvarying human capacity for worry to the most trivial things, making mountains out of molehills on a vast scale; and they have 'nervous breakdowns' over problems which men and women living under sterner conditions would hardly find time to notice.
Charles Le Gai Eaton
Did they love me? The question is beside the point, somehow. Certainly they each spoiled me, mainly by giving me the false impression that I was entitled to attention nearly all the the time. They played. THEY were like children, if you consider that one of the things about being a child is that you are a parasite of sorts and have to brazen out self-righteously. I want. They were good at wanting and I shared much more common ground with them than with my mother when I was three or four years old.
Lorna Sage
O Thou who art my quietness, my deep repose,My rest from strife of tongues, my holy hill,Fair is Thy pavilion, where I hold me still.Back let them fall from me, my clamorous foes,Confusions multiplied;From crowding things of sense I flee, and Thee I hide.Until this tyranny be overpast,Thy hand will hold me fast;What though the tumult of the storm increase,Grant to Thy servant strength, O Lord, and bless with peace.
Amy Carmichael
People lie to cover their mistakes, and then make even worse ones to cover their lies.
Anne Perry
Crucially we haven't been figuring out how to live in oneness, with the Earth & every other living thing; we have just been insanely trying to figure out how to live with each other, billions of each other, only we're not living with each other our crazy selves are living with each other, and perpetuating an epidemic of disconnection.
Thandie Newton
The conquest of the earth which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves is not a pretty thing when you look into it.
Joseph Conrad
Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.
Winston S. Churchill
If it pleases Him to bid our patience exercise itself, shall He not do as He wills with His own!
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don't belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional.
Virginia Woolf
The essence of the Revolution is to abolish the attainment of unqualified power of man over man either by vote-getting, money-pressure or crude terror. The Revolution repudiates profit or terror altogether as methods of human intercourse. It turns the attention of men and women back from a frantic and futile struggle for the means of power, a struggle against our primary social instincts, to an innate urgency to make and to a beneficial competition for preeminence in social service. It recalls man to a clean and creative life from the entanglements and perversion of secondary issues into which he has fallen. It replaces property and official authority by the compelling prestige of sound achievement. Eminent service remains the only source of influence left in the world . . .
H.G.Wells
It takes a lot of grace and maturity to simply forgive, but a lot of healing takes place when you do.
Elizabeth George
Does he know about me? George wonders; do any of them? Oh yes, probably. It wouldn't interest them. They don't want to know about my feelings or my glands or anything below my neck. I could just as well be a severed head carried into the classroom to lecture to them from a dish.
Christopher Isherwood
The purr is very important. It's the purr that does it every time. It's the purr that makes up for the Things Under the Bed, the occasional pungency, the 4 a.m. yowl. Other creatures went in for big teeth, long legs or over-active brains, while cats just settled for a noise that tells the world they're feeling happy.
Terry Pratchett
Corporate advertising is simply expensive lying dressed up as brainwashing
Dean Cavanagh
Originally it had had two settings: Stun and Kill. These had proved inadequate against the ridiculously well-armored skin of monsters from particularly rough planets, so I'd found a way to tinker with the built-in limitations. The dial now had a third setting, labeled with the handwritten words 'Solve All Immediate Problems.
Yahtzee Croshaw
I thank Thee first because I was never robbed before second because although they took my purse they did not take my life third because although they took my all it was not much and fourth because it was I who was robbed and not I who robbed.
Matthew Henry
To live a life without awakening is to leave it as it was begun.
Belsebuub
...shiny trinkets and frivolous spending make people forget what world they're living in.
Beth Lewis
And there was something both frustrating and maddeningly arousing about that. His restraint made something burn low and deep in her belly, and then his mouth, oh God his mouth. He tasted like cinnamon, again, and every now and then he’d pull away, just a little — just enough to make her want to drag him back. Before giving her a teasing lick with that perfect, curling tongue of his. It set all the nerve endings in her upper lip on fire.
Charlotte Stein
To those who know thee not no words can paint! And those who know thee know all words are faint!
Hannah Moore
I always thought falling in love was hard, but now I realize that was the easy bit. It’s staying in love that‘s the hard part.
Alexandra Potter
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.
Joseph Conrad
For money buys all virtues. Money suffereth long and is kid, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own
George Orwell
It is unfortunate that for some, kindness is an unwarranted expenditure, compassion an avoidable weakness, and love an unnecessary gamble.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
What we do with the product of genius is first of all ram it down to the lowest common denominator and then multiply it by the vulgarest possible fraction. -from "Pawley's Peepholes
John Wyndham
The winds shook off in unison and yipped beneath the gleaming stars.She gave him her lips. They kissed.And she was in love with the thunder.
Ali Shaw
Astrology has no more useful function than this, to discover the inmost nature of a man and to bring it out into his consciousness, that he may fulfil it according to the law of light.
Aleister Crowley
I have an inward treasure born within me which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford.
Charlotte Brontë