Quotes by British Authors - Page 24

I think computer viruses should count as life ... I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Stephen Hawking
No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. but they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.
C.S. Lewis
It's good to fail now and again - you learn a lot more out of failure than you do out of success.
Ian Hunter
The experience of returning to the blank page and having nothing in the drawer was intensely painful. I just thought, I never want that to happen again.
Edgar Wright
Every novel is an attempt to capture time, to weave something solid out of air. The author knows it is an impossible task - that is why he keeps on trying.
David Beaty
What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And -- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall-- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing. ((p. 62, Reading & Writing)
V.S. Naipaul
Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
Samuel Butler
Mapleshade: "Your punishment is complete now, Crookedstar. You have lost everything." Crookedstar: "No, Mapleshade. You're wrong. I still have a clan that I love and am proud to lead. And now... ...now everything precious to me is here, in StarClan. My family is waiting here for me, when my ninth life has passed. It's you who have lost. You have no power over me anymore." Mapleshade: "I have destroyed you!" Crookedstar: "No, Mapleshade. I still have the cats that I loved. You have nothing and no one.
Erin Hunter
After using a paint chart from a local DIY superstore to identify the skin tone of his penis as midnight chocolate, Miriam stayed down on one knee and offered him the citizenship he had always wanted and the middle-aged white woman he would grudgingly accept.
David F. Porteous
The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other - he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy - but it would be the only strictly correct method. My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Dedication note: To everyone, you are beautiful, and don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise.
Sam Crescent
If a wizard should take up residence in your garden, and requests food, you are obliged to feed him.
Mark Jackman
Those with the money are eccentric. Those without, insane.
Bruce Robinson
Every line, every word was -- in the hackneyed metaphor which their dear writer, were she here, would forbid -- a dagger to my heart. To know that Marianne was in town was -- in the same language -- a thunderbolt. -- Thunderbolts and daggers! -- what a reproof would she have given me! -- her taste, her opinions -- I believe they are better known to me than my own, -- and I am sure they are dearer.
Jane Austen
That will do extremely well, child. You have delighted us long enough. Let the other young ladies have time to exhibit.
Jane Austen
I do not think it matters whether one agrees or not as long as ons is forced to think.
Vanessa Bell
If it’s taking to long to get up the career ladder, get a career lift.
Benny Bellamacina
It was the ring on the left hand that people at the Old Girls' Reunion looked for. Often, in fact nearly always, it was an uninteresting ring, sometimes no more than the plain gold band or the very smallest and dimmest of diamonds. Perhaps the husband was also of this variety, but as he was not seen at this female gathering he could only be imagined, and somehow I do not think we ever imagined the husbands to be quite so uninteresting as they probably were.
Barbara Pym
Feelings trap us in the self, Tony dear. Doing a thing because you feel wonderful about it—even a work of charity—is in the end a selfish act. We perform the work not to feel wonderful but to know and love the other. It's the same with your romance. You may not feel your love, but God is still your loved one, your other.
Tony Hendra
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always asked to do things and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.
T.S Eliot
Hot crumpets with butter and jam - what could be more ambrosial?
William Boyd
She’s wonderful. Tell her I’ve never seen such beautiful hands. I wonder what she sees in you.”Waddington, smiling, translated the question.“She says I’m good.”“As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue,” Kitty mocked.
W Somerset Maugham
The new disease of our age is being OK doing everything at exactly the same time.
Nigel Cumberland
He stared at the corner of the yellowed ceiling, at the spider web and its solitary occupant. “Why here?” he asked the spider. “You could choose anywhere instead of this house. I know I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have to be.” The spider said nothing. Come to think of it, Callum was sure the spider hadn’t moved even an inch in the last week. Maybe it was dead. Dead and crisp like the untouched wasp carcass on his window sill.
Scott Kaelen
It's so shameful of me: I like you.
Morrissey
I am not sure that the best way to make a boy love the English poets might not be forbid him to read them and then make sure that he had plenty of opportunities to disobey you.
C.S. Lewis
Affliction is a good man's shining time.
Edward Young
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
Aldous Huxley
The half-moon westers low, my love,And the wind brings up the rain;And wide apart lie we, my love,And seas between the twain.I know not if it rains, my love, In the land where you do lie;And oh, so sound you sleep, my love,You know no more than I.
A.E. Housman
People will hold an opinion because they want to keep the company of others who share the opinion, or because they think it is the respectable opinion, or because they have publicly expressed the opinion in the past and would be embarrassed by a “U-turn,” or because the world would suit them better if the opinion were true, or . . . Perhaps it is better to get on with your family and friends, to avoid embarrassment, or to comfort yourself with fantasies than to believe the truth. But those who approach matters in this way should give up any pretensions to intellectual seriousness. They are not genuinely interested in reality.
Jamie Whyte
The problem with all students, he said, is that they inevitably stop somewhere. They hear an idea and they hold on to it until it becomes dead; they want to flatter themselves that they know the truth. But true Zen never stops, never congeals into such truths. That is why everyone must constantly be pushed to the abyss, starting over and feeling their utter worthlessness as a student. Without suffering and doubts, the mind will come to rest on clichés and stay there, until the spirit dies as well. Not even enlightenment is enough. You must continually start over and challenge yourself.
Robert Greene
Autumn arrived and life was in danger of becoming boring again.
Deborah Curtis
... a whole day’s tête-à-tête between two women can never end without a quarrel.
Jane Austen
Cheerfulness is as natural to the heart of man in strong health as color to his cheek and wherever there is habitual gloom there must be either bad air unwholesome food improperly severe labor or erring habits of life.
John Ruskin
To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Bertrand Russell
Gulliver was soon being read "from the cabinet council to the nursery".
John Gay
I have a horrid scar right under my left knee from you. Well, the absence of you. Seems appropriate. But I still miss you. My pillowcase smells like you, so I bury my face in it and breathe it in. Things feel empty. My couch, my living room, my heart. I see pictures of things. Silly things, beautiful things, and I want to share them with you. But alas, I cannot, I do not, I press the red button when you call.
Elizabeth Brooks
Always have joy in your life by pursuing your bliss.
Steven Redhead
The dove descending breaks the airWith flame of incandescent terrorOf which the tongues declareThe one discharge from sin and error.The only hope, or else despairLies in the choice of pyre or pyre-To be redeemed from fire by fire.Who then devised the torment? Love.Love is the unfamiliar NameBehind the hands that woveThe intolerable shirt of flameWhich human power cannot remove.We only live, only suspireConsumed by either fire or fire.
T.S Eliot
Family is all politics. Everyone hates each other’s guts, if they’re honest… Most brothers and sisters try to top each other, given the chance; you always get the worst wars in countries with big families….People have kids because they go soft in the head, tarts especially. They forget what it’s like to be a kid themselves and want to remember through their own. They don’t want us, not real brand-new people who puke and criticise and tell them to bog off: they want their own frigging innocence back. They want to have their own lives back again, with the bad bits taken out. Quite frankly, they’d be better off with a dog.
Amanda Craig
It is not in the entrails of doves that the fall of empires can be read, but in the breeding of secrets and the multiplication of lies.
Rod Duncan
The written word has its limits and its challenges, for the primal sound in the whole world is that made by the human voice, and the likeness of this human voice must be rendered in dots and strokes...Yet I never forget that the voice, too, is important...Don't mumble or hesitate. Speak...in a loud voice, clearly, and without fear.
Jonathan D. Spence
Yes I answered you last night "No " this morning sir I say: Colors seen by candle-light Will not look the same by day.
E. B. Browning
When they got to their hotel she went straight up to bed, but he paused to get a drink. There was, in the vestibule, a flower stall and he bought a handful of roses, stiffly wired into a bouquet, before proceeding to the oppressive gorgeousness of their bridal suite. The lift was lined with looking glass, so that as he shot upwards he got an endlessly duplicated version of himself, stout and nervous, a light cloak flung over his shoulder and flowers in his hand: an infinitely long row of gentlemen carrying offerings to an unforgiving past.
Margaret Kennedy
to bar communication between intellectuals, who are always our best hope of peace, is particularly self-defeating and inane. It declares, inter alia, that we have a) made up our minds about what we think, b) closed our minds to what others think, and c) chosen to go on hearing nothing with which we happen to disagree.
Howard Jacobson
For I chase but one hind, he says, one strange deer timid and wild, and she leads me off the paths that other men have trod, and by myself into the depths of the wood.
Hilary Mantel
How do they find out with the experiments?''...one way they can find out a whole lot is to make an animal ill and then try different ways to make it better until they find one that works.''But isn't that unkind to the animal?''Well, I suppose it is...but I mean, there isn't a dad anywhere who would hesitate, is there, if he knew it was going to make [his child] better? It's changed the whole world during the last hundred years, and that's no exaggeration.
Richard Adams
Love is such a powerful subject matter because it comes in so many different shapes and sizes. It's about timing, fate, failure, redemption.
Jim Sturgess
Soothing the exhaustionIn my soul,So I can fall back skyward,Safe in your arms,And survive to dream again.
Scott Hastie
Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. Interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero.
Aldous Huxley
Disappointment to a noble soul is what cold water is to burning metal; it strengthens, tempers, intensifies, but never destroys it.
Eliza Tabor Stephenson
Write every day. Even if it's only a letter.
Julia Bell
Caine tried to roll to his feet, but something was jabbing him in the crouch. He shook off the stars and saw Edilio standing over him. Edilio had the business end of his automatic rifle in a very sensitive place. "If you move, Caine, I will shoot your balls off," Edilio said. "Toto?" "He will," Toto said, "Although he's not sure it will be just your balls.
Michael Grant
Eventually, after much dreaming, the dream no longer suffices. You have to physically be there.
Fennel Hudson
But, first, remember, remember, remember the signs. Say them to yourself when you wake in the morning and when you lie down at night, and when you wake in the middle of the night. And whatever strange things may happen to you, let nothing turn your mind from following the signs. And secondly, I give you a warning. Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly: I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind. And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearances. Remember the signs and believe the signs. Nothing else matters.
C.S. Lewis
There's such a thing as free will, Tanner. You didn't have to go along with me, unless you want to admit your brain is ruled by your dick. And I didn't get the impression you regretted any of that.
Alastair Reynolds
Make your own Miracles, don't wait for miracles to happen; they need a spark of energy to make them real.
Steven Redhead
I know that I'm doomed and I'm not going to struggle against my fate. I am only writing this down so that when you do not see me any more you will know that my enemy has finally triumphed.
Anna Kavan
Behind every no entry sign there's a door.
Peter Jones
He held her face in his hands, and stared into her eyes, and said that she was his for only a while anyway, and that it wasn’t his going to Cranwell that would split them up. “You’re destined for greater things, Susannah Hammond. I see it in you. You’re so clever, so bright. So beautiful. So special. I’m not any of those things. Except when I’m flying, maybe. Down here, I’m ordinary. I’m going to be just a memory for you. A sweet one, I hope. Happy. But just a part of your past. I might be good enough for now, but I’m not good enough forever. Not for you.
Elizabeth Noble