Quotes by British Authors - Page 28

Deep down we all know that freedom is a choice, yet so many of us don’t feel that truth.
Beth Kempton
Rincewind stared, and knew that there were far worse things than Evil. All the demons in Hell would torture your very soul, but that was precisely because they valued souls very highly; evil would always try to steal the universe, but at least it considered the universe worth stealing. But the gray world behind those empty eyes would trample and destroy without even according its victims the dignity of hatred. It wouldn't even notice them.
Terry Pratchett
...that human hunger birthed the Civ'lize, but human hunger killed it too.
David Mitchell
PART 2 I felt doomed to death,But in a flash, Before I could reduce my thoughts To an emotion, I felt a mass leave my body:Departing. Then my mind becomes anonymous As is each night. Just unfinished thoughts, and a deep sickness inside,As I was forced to swallow it, Something I've tried to bury deep inside mypsyche to this day. (poem written by alter personality)
Alice Jamieson
The significance of the dwelling is in the dweller.
Idries Shah
Those half-learn'd witlings, num'rous in our isle As half-form'd insects on the banks of Nile
Alexander Pope
In fact, the truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
A man is deficient in understanding until he perceives that there is a whole cycle of evolution possible within himself: repeating endlessly, offering opportunities for personal development.
Idries Shah
... 'Many waters cannot quench love' was said of divine, not human, love, which the Dean knew was not always tough enough to survive the indifference of misery. That was one of the chief reasons why he struggled to do away with misery.
Elizabeth Goudge
When a baronet is discovered behind a bush in the park with a guardsman, or a minister of the crown is caught creeping out of a country with his socks stuffed full of bank notes and a woman not his wife ten paces behind, or a public person is revealed disporting himself with a couple of tarts and a teddy bear in West Paddington, they complain to the press that the outcry is hypocritical and that everyone would like to do what they were doing if only they had the chance. They regard the law as an instrument of envy, like nationalization and death duties.
Alice Thomas Ellis
DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.
Terry Pratchett
The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door.
G.K. Chesterton
while she wanted to look neither to her past nor her future, she lived exclusively in both. They had took different paths, but they had journeyed, so she realized, together.
Monica Ali
Your destiny is the result of the choices that you make, which paths you take in life.
Steven Redhead
As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.
G.K. Chesterton
If you don't believe in yourself,How can you ever believe in another?
Anthony T.Hincks
In a designed economy there would be no trees, or certainly no very tall trees: no forests, no canopy. Trees are a waste. Trees are extravagant. Tree trunks are standing monuments to futile competition - futile if we think in terms of a planed economy. But the natural economy is not planned. Individual plants compete with other plants, of the same and other species, and the result is that they grow taller and taller, far taller than any planner would recommend.
Richard Dawkins
He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other.
W Somerset Maugham
Oh... Blip. Yeah, I see." He sounds distracted, awed. "Your child," I whisper."Our child." He counters.
E.L. James
I bought a packet of Trojan® Ultra Pleasure Extra Sensitive condoms: ‘No. 1 in AMERICA’. They smell nothing like a positive first sexual experience.
Joe Dunthorne
For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait.
C.S. Lewis
History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.
Julian Barnes
Printing currency for foreigners to buy is the best racket a government can get into.
Lee Child
If the Lord Jehovah makes us wait, let us do so with our whole hearts; for blessed are all they that wait for Him. He is worth waiting for. The waiting itself is beneficial to us: it tries faith, exercises patience, trains submission, and endears the blessing when it comes. The Lord’s people have always been a waiting people.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Your life - and all lives - will be richer if lived with a open, loving heart rather than a closed, fearful mind
Rasheed Ogunlaru
The only problem was, when your whole existence is something you have to cope with, you look back one day and find that your strategy has become a way of life.
Joanna Cannon
No, Harry, you listen," said Hermione. "We're coming with you. That was decided months ago - years, really.
J.K. Rowling
Fire is easy to work with if you keep your mind clear, but pain . . . pain fights back. Pain is alive. Pain is the enemy.
Terry Pratchett
I wasn’t born to fetch, or sit, or accept a beating. I’m here to be me, to write, and know my purpose.
Fennel Hudson
An intelligent man is one who acknowledges his intelligence as that of those who surround him.
Ilyas Kassam
About this business of being a gentleman: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman’s education that I feel entitled, now and then, to get some sort of return.
Robert Graves
It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires.
Rebecca West
Books are people,'' smiled Miss Marks. ''In every book worth reading, the author is there to meet you, to establish contact with you. He takes you into his confidence and reveals his thoughts to you.
D.E. Stevenson
I appreciated art, long before I could produce it.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
There are things so horrible that even the dark is afraid of them. Most people don't know this and this is just as well because the world could not really operate if everyone stayed in bed with the blankets over their head, which is what would happen if people knew what horrors lay a shadow's width away.
Terry Pratchett
It is when we stop believing that religions have been handed down from above or else that they are entirely daft that matters become more interesting.
Alain de Boton
Parents raise children then grow old, and their children forget the things their old parents did for them, because their brains don’t remember before they grew selfish.There are buildings all over the world full of old people sitting around looking out of windows, full of hate for their selfish sons and daughters.And meanwhile, the selfish sons and daughters look out of their windows at their children playing and think how wonderful their unbreakable bond of love is between them and their children.
Craig Stone
If anyone has a new idea in this country there are twice as many people who keep putting a man with a red flag in front of it.
Prince Philip
In one sense, all causes of a problem are 'current', although many of them represent the residue of earlier learning or unprocessed memories.
Richard S. Hallam
If you wish to make anything grow, you must understand it, and understand it in a very real sense. 'Green fingers' are a fact, and a mystery only to the unpracticed. But green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart.
Russell Page
When psychotherapy began, it was about the practitioner listening to a patient and interpreting what the patient said, in order to afford the patient insights about his or her psyche. But now we understand that the main curative part of psychotherapy is the relationship itself. It appears not to be relevant which psychology school the practitioner belongs to. What matters is the quality of the relationship and the practitioner's belief in what he or she is offering.
Philippa Perry
To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off
Christopher Hitchens
... all his faces were designed to express rage or loathing. Now that something had happened which really deserved a face, he had none to celebrate it with. As a kind of token, he made his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face.
Kingsley Amis
First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.
Douglas Adams
Yes, alive,” said Fudge. “That is — I don’t know — is a man alive if he can’t be killed? I don’t really understand it, and Dumbledore won’t explain properly — but anyway, he’s certainly got a body and is walking and talking and killing, so I suppose, for the purposes of our discussion, yes, he’s alive.
J.K. Rowling
Being famous is wicked, but being normal is better.
Rupert Grint
A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.
Virginia Woolf
Delirium: You use that word so much. Responsibilities. Do you ever think about what that means? I mean, what does it mean to you? In your head? Dream: Well, I use it to refer that area of existence over which I exert a certain amount of control or influence. In my case, the realm and action of dreaming. Delirium: Hump. It's more than that. The things we do make echoes. S'pose, f'rinstance, you stop on a street corner and admire a brilliant fork of lightning--ZAP! Well for ages after people and things will stop on that very same corner, stare up at the sky. They wouldn't even know what they were looking for. Some of them might see a ghost bolt of lightning in the street. Some of them might even be killed by it. Our existence deforms the universe. THAT'S responsibility.
Neil Gaiman
Running away from love is never any good at all, to our sort. It only deepens the feeling, and it’s better to stay and wear it down.
Rachel Ferguson
By learning to observe without becoming involved, the pattern of stimulus-response which underlies most human behaviour can be broken. Little by little the realisation dawns that one is free to choose how to react in all situations … The grip of long-standing habits is weakened and replaced with a new sense of freedom.
Damien Keown
There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows--in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain--in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine--it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt, and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction.
George Eliot
I work my way through the rest of my dates, but I'm only there in body. The boys usually give up after the first hour; it's difficult to have a conversation all by yourself. My ratings plummet, but at least my air-time is minimal now, I'm not offering much in the way of entertainment these days.
Siobhan Davis
Storylines from fiction always seem inherently improbable to occur in real life, yet when we read them we are happy to suspend our disbelief, which may simply suggest that in our everyday lives we have an irrational craving for certainty and probability.
Guy Fraser-Sampson
Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything.
Aldous Huxley
Then very faintly, he heard above his head the low familiar murmur of the sea outside. At once the comfortable noise made him cheerful, and he even remembered what they were supposed to be.
Susan Cooper
Fighting for equality is often misunderstood as simply being offered the same terms as men on paper. In may ways we already have that. What we don’t have is emancipation: the opportunity to be free of social and external shackles that perpetuate inequality and women’s lower position.
Dawn Foster
What is life without a little risk?" -Sirius Black
J.K. Rowling
Constantinople had been changing for sometime before the Young Turks got hold of it. It would continue to change long after they had gone.
Charles Emmerson
Mr Mandela, who had given his whole life for justice and had never once thought of himself. How unlike these people were modern politicians, who thought only of power and tricks.
Alexander McCall Smith
Do you want to be safe from the influence, ways, and lusts of the world and the flesh (I John 2:16)? From the sins which so easily entangles us (Hebrews 12:1)? Then delight in yourself in the Lord, in His provision, in His Word. Faithfully feed on the things that possess true substance and real meaning. When you remember that "all Scripture is given by inspiration by God and is profitable" (2 Timothy 3:16) and partake of such divine substance, then you are fed, you are led and you are safe!
Elizabeth George