Quotes by British Authors - Page 32

The butterflies in my stomach turn into vampire bats as we pull up to the school.
Cat Clarke
I have not broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.
Emily Brontë
The point of an organi family is to release the children from the disadvantages of being extensions of their parents so that they can belong primarily to themselves. They may accept the services that adults perform for them naturally without establishing dependencies.
Germaine Greer
Divinity retains the appearance of insight, when in reality it celebrates ignorance. Its tenets are so much clay, and when the clay sets, it becomes dogma.
Anthony Ryan
We are snared into doing things for which we get called names, and things for which we get hanged, and yet the spirit may well survive - survive the condemnations, survive the halter, by Jove! And there are things - they look small enough sometimes too - by which some of us are totally and completely undone.
Joseph Conrad
Some cynical Frenchman has said that there are two parties to a love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated.
William Makepeace Thackeray
True inward quietness ... is not vacancy but stability-the steadfastness of a single purpose.
Caroline Stephen
Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.
Neil Gaiman
Then I say, "Let's go and brush our teeth." So Lola says, "But Charlie, I can't brush my teeth because somebody is using my tooth." "But who would use your toothbrush?" I ask. Lola says "I think that lion. I saw a lion with my toothbrush and now he's brushing his teeth with it." "But it isn't this your toothbrush Lola?" "Oh," says Lola, "he must be using yours.
Lauren Child
It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too.
Graham Greene
This city is like no other city in the world. It is brilliant but it is bloated, and I've never called it home
Jessie Burton
Affraig’s eyes moved to the oak tree that towered above her, its branches like antlers against the white sky. Her gaze travelled up to the weathered web that hung from one of the higher boughs, the slender noose swinging inside. In her mind she saw herself weaving it while she chanted words against Malachy’s wrathful curse. She remembered the lord’s hand settling on her shoulder, the hiss of the fire,his breath on her neck and, outside, stars falling like fiery rain. Her gaze moved west towards Turnberry.Her memory clouded with thoughts of the earl, but as she thought of his son her mind cleared. The stars had been falling too on the night he was born. She remembered seeing Mars, full and red, a bloody eye winking in the black.
Robyn Young
Look beyond yourself.
Michael J. Jackson
God gives us always strength enough and sense enough for everything He wants us to do.
John Ruskin
People are so fucking dumb. Nobody reads anymore, nobody goes out and looks and explores the society and culture they were brought up in. People have attention spans of five seconds and as much depth as a glass of water.
David Bowie
We're all prostitutes sir we're all selling ourselves for something
Saira Viola
And suddenly, as if her head had cleared, she was quite sure that wonderful things did indeed exist. Even if they’re only in my own mind, she thought, they’re there and worth fighting for. I mustn’t give in.
Diana Wynne Jones
The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.
Doris Lessing
Ah, those foolish days, those foolish days when we were unselfish and pure-minded; those foolish days when our simple hearts were full of truth, and faith, and reverence! Ah, those foolish days of noble longings and of noble strivings! And oh, these wise, clever days when we know that money is the only prize worth striving for, when we believe in nothing else but meanness and lies, when we care for no living creature but ourselves!
Jerome K. Jerome
Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
John Keats
Just because you can explain it doesn't mean it's not still a miracle.
Terry Pratchett
I thought I would stand myself a little dinner. I hadn't quite enough sense to know that what I really wanted was human companions. There aren't such things. Every man is eternally alone. But when you get mixed up with a fairly decent crowd, you forget that appalling fact for long enough to give your brain time to recover from the acute symptoms of its disease - that of thinking.
Aleister Crowley
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
William Blake
Make good use of bad rubbish.
Elizabeth Beresford
I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned.
George Gordon Byron
Those darling byegone times, Mr Carker,' said Cleopatra, 'with their delicious fortresses, and their dear old dungeons, and their delightful places of torture, and their romantic vengeances, and their picturesque assaults and sieges, and everything that makes life truly charming! How dreadfully we have degenerated!
Charles Dickens
You are about to awake when you dream that you are dreaming.
Ian Fleming
If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a newborn child, then that will be at least a small intellectual advance. In time, perhaps, we may even learn to toddle.
Salman Rushdie
But during those two months of fog . . . the saddest and the heaviest thing was to stand beside the sea. To be upon the beach yourself, and see the long waves coming in; to know that they are long waves, but only see a piece of them. And to hear them lifting roundly, swelling over smooth green rocks, plashing down in the hollow corners, but bearing on all the same as ever, soft and sleek and sorrowful, till their little noise is over.
R.D. Blackmore
The two of them together in a place like Retribution Falls would result in alcoholic carnage, sure as bird shit on statues.
Chris Wooding
Submit in silence and scream from within.Or...Stand up and shout and silence the pain.
Anthony T.Hincks
We stood at the crossroads and we all knew that we should turn right to where the sign pointed, but in our stupidity we turned left and out over the precipice.I guess we had the same chance with pollution, but then again, we were at those damn crossroads.
Anthony T.Hincks
Sometimes I still feel that there are two of me: one clean, flawless picture, the other imperfect and cracked; one boy, one girl; one voice that speaks aloud and one that whispers in my ear; one publicly known to have been troubled but be on the mend, the other who has privately lost something to do with innocence and gained something to do with knowledge and adulthood that can never be undone. I feel sometimes there are things that tear me in two directions, that there are two sets of thoughts that grow side by side. But then I realize that I am whole, whatever that means and does not mean; I am complete without the need for additions or alteration.
Abigail Tarttelin
But I’ve learned that sometimes, somehow, no matter how much time we spend apart from the ones we care most about, our love for them never fades, for time apart only makes our love grow stronger.
Rebecah McManus
Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.
Christopher Morcom
Nothing is the same.
Silvia Hartmann
Let us begin by giving all proper respect to what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves: it reveals some of the most important conditions that are necessary for behavior and awareness. What neuroscience does not do, however, is provide a satisfactory account of the conditions that are sufficient for behavior and awareness. ... The pervasive yet mistaken idea that neuroscience does fully account for awareness and behavior is neuroscientism, an exercise in science-based faith. ... This confusion between necessary and sufficient conditions lies behind the encroachment of “neuroscientistic” discourse on academic work in the humanities...
Raymond Tallis
To give a man full knowledge of true morality I would send him to no other book than the New Testament.
John Locke
It wasn't that Nanny Ogg sang badly. It was just that she could hit notes which, when amplified by a tin bath half full of water, ceased to be sound and became some sort of invasive presence.
Terry Pratchett
The gilded spiralOf longings within.Our very own cathedralThat points persistently to heaven.
Scott Hastie
I am not good at deception,' said Tuesday gloomily, flushing.Right, my boy, right,' said the President with a ponderous heartiness, 'You aren't good at anything.
G.K. Chesterton
Compassion is a fundamental principle of meditation. Meditation is not a narcissistic, self-interested path. It provides the foundation for love, integrity, compassion, respect and sensitivity (Feldman, 1998, p.2).
Christina Feldman
Physicians do not systematically prescribe placebos to their patients. Hence they have no way of comparing the effects of the drugs they prescribe to placebos. When they prescribe a treatment and it works, their natural tendency is to attribute the cure to the treatment. But there are thousands of treatments that have worked in clinical practice throughout history. Powdered stone worked. So did lizard's blood, and crocodile dung, and pig's teeth and dolphin's genitalia and frog's sperm. Patients have been given just about every ingestible - though often indigestible - substance imaginable. They have been 'purged, puked, poisoned, sweated, and shocked', and if these treatments did not kill them, they may have made them better.
Irving Kirsch
Later that night she picked the polish offwith her front teeth until the bed you sharedfor seven years seemed speckled with glitterand blood.
Warsan Shire
I'd rather have your lifeblood tainted than spilled on a forest floor.'He said no more, just held her. 'I'm not worth it,' she whispered at last.'Who says so?''I do.''Then you don't know what love is.
Kate Furnivall
IVREVEILLEWake: the silver dusk returningUp the beach of darkness brims,And the ship of sunrise burningStrands upon the eastern rims.Wake: the vaulted shadow shaatters,Trampled to the floor it spanned,And the tent of night in tatters Straws the sky-pavilioned land.Up, lad, up, 'tis late for lying:Hear the drums of morning play;Hark, the empty highways crying"Who'll beyond the hills away?"Towns and countries woo together,Forelands beacon, belfries call;Never lad that trod on leatherLived to feast his heart with all.Up, lad: thews that lie and cumberSunlit pallets never thrive;Morns abed and daylight slumberWere not meant for man alive.Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;Breath's a ware that will not keepUp, lad: when the journey's overThere'll be time enough to sleep.
A.E. Housman
My mother showed me that when tin or zinc was bent it uttered a special ‘cry’. ‘It’s due to deformation of the crystal structure,’ she said, forgetting that I was five, and could not understand her - and yet her words fascinated me, made me want to know more.
Oliver Sacks
I became lost in a world darkened beyond any known shade of black, and the only light that I have seen since...is you.
Tracey-anne McCartney
Yes, they mean well, but the only good that an absence of malice guarantees is a clear conscience.
Zia Haider Rahman
I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine.
Peter Ustinov
...Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs— To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another’s mind. While the touch of Nature’s art Harmonizes heart to heart. I leave this notice on my door For each accustomed visitor:— “I am gone into the fields To take what this sweet hour yields;...Awake! arise! And come away! To the wild woods and the plains, And the pools where winter rains Image all their roof of leaves, Where the pine its garland weaves Of sapless green, and ivy dun Round stems that never kiss the sun: Where the lawns and pastures be, And the sandhills of the sea:— Where the melting hoar-frost wets The daisy-star that never sets, And wind-flowers, and violets, Which yet join not scent to hue, Crown the pale year weak and new; When the night is left behind In the deep east, dun and blind, And the blue noon is over us, And the multitudinous Billows murmur at our feet, Where the earth and ocean meet, And all things seem only one In the universal sun.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
An interval of meditation, serious and grateful, was the best corrective of everything dangerous.
Jane Austen
Cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb's feathers.
George Meredith
Modesty: the gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it.
Oliver Herford
Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance.
William Paley (paraphrase)
Disappointment cannot exist without expectation. “The expected apricot is never as sweet when it reaches the mouth.
Idries Shah
That was how Sinner got his first taste of anything other than the froth on his father's ale. It made you grimace, but if you drank enough it felt like discovering an entire hidden room in your own house that you'd never even known about. You wanted to do more than poke your head through the doorway. You wanted to take its dimensions.
Ned Beauman
I was realizing something I should have known by using my intelligence, without ever having gone to their flat at all: that the ties between Nelson and his wife are bitterly close, and never to be broken in their lives. They are tied by the closest of all bonds, neurotic pain-giving; the experience of pain dealt and received; pain as an aspect of love; apprehended as a knowledge of what the world is, what growth is.Nelson is about to leave his wife; he will never leave her. She will wail at being rejected and abandoned; she does not know she will never be rejected.
Doris Lessing
Should I after tea and cakes and ices have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
T.S Eliot
A man Sir should keep his friendship in constant repair.
Samuel Johnson