Quotes by British Authors - Page 36

Only allow what contributes positively into your life.
Steven Redhead
He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
Emily Brontë
Illnesses represent human judgments of conditions that exist in the natural world. They are essentially social constructions - products of our own creation.
Peter Conrad
Perhaps the most difficult thing about loving and helping an addict, which most people who haven't been through it don't understand, is this: every day the cycle continues is your new worst day. When looked at from the outside it seems endless, the same thing over and over again; but when you're living it, it's like being a hamster on a wheel. Every day there's the chronic anxiety of waiting for news, the horrible rush when it turns out to be bad, the overwhelming sense of déjà vu - and the knowledge that, despite your best efforts, you'll probably be here again. Even so-called good days are not without their drawbacks. You enjoy them as much as you can, but in the back of your mind there's the lurking fear that tomorrow you could be back to square one again, or worse.
Mitch Winehouse
He feeds upon her face by day and night,And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.
Christina Rossetti
I could feel his whole body trying to claim me, want me, own me in lust, and it made me feel so valuable and wanted. As I was bent over the table, I felt like I was the world to him, and he could think of nothing else, could feel nothing else: he was consumed with my body, dedicated to exploring my female sexual power and energy, and his desperate hitting of me with the belt felt like he would rather die, than be without the chance to connect with me in sex.
Fiona Thrust
lose weight, eat backwards.
Benny Bellamacina
I'm my characters' galley slave.
Chloe Thurlow
He crept up, and touched the face of the boy. "Didst thou dream that I should be faithless and forsake thee? I— a dog?" said that mute caress.
Ouida
There is a definite process by which one made people into friends and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.
Rebecca West
A million years ago - some hairy bastard daubed a horse on the wall of his cave, he saw it, he drew it - well done! Flash forward: 'Hello, welcome to my vlog. Today I bought a plum
Patrick Marber
... secrecy adds a charm to an amour ...
Frederick Marryat
I'm always looking for meaningful one-night stands
Dudley Moore
I realize it's commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, 'I love you, but I don't always like you.' But what kind of love is that? It seems to me that comes down to, 'I'm not oblivious to you - that is, you can still hurt my feelings - but I can't stand having you around.' Who wants to be loved like that? Given a choice, I might skip the deep blood tie and settle for being liked. I wonder if wouldn't have been more moved if my own mother had taken me in her arms and said, 'I like you.' I wonder if just enjoying your kid's company isn't more important.
Lionel Shriver
each year, she finds her friendships less volatile and easier, because she increasingly succeeds at looking past their flaws and disappointments and homing in on their pleasures and on what set them in motion to begin with. And she wonders why she didn’t do that sooner, why she gave in to so much fury and sorrow when she could have just let those emotions go.
Frank Bruno
The mountains were so wild and so stark and so very beautiful that I wanted to cry. I breathed in another wonderful moment to keep safe in my heart.
Jane Wilson-Howarth
In the midst of your struggles, you WILL find a reason to keep going. Don’t give up!
Robert Tew
I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
Bertrand Russell
The artist (I suppose) usually pays for the privilege by some sort of partial insomnia, by the possession of one faculty that will not be controlled nor put to sleep. In a poet this must often be the visual imagination, bringing before his eyes a succession of images which he never summoned, and of which some (it is only too likely) will be ugly or pitiful.
Mary Lascelles
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing.
Thomas Hardy
My goal is to be the most magical person you know. I say that all the time, because it’s an idea that really does shape my daily life. But you might not have met me, or maybe you aren’t familiar with me at all. Still, I know that you have a person who has given you that feeling.
Stephen Lovegrove
Yo Mama’s so ugly, her dentist treats her by mail order.
Oliver Oliver Reed
I'm going to marry him. And if he thinks he can get divorced and married every two or three years in the approved Hollywood fashion, well, he never made a bigger mistake in his life. He's going to marry and stick to me.
Agatha Christie
Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid", whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"; though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy.
Richard Davenport-Hines
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible Gods and Goddesses. To remember that the dullest, and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.
C.S. Lewis
What do they think has happened, the old fools,To make them like this? Do they somehow supposeIt's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't rememberWho called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,They could alter things back to when they danced all night,Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?Or do they fancy there's really been no change,And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,Or sat through days of thin continuous dreamingWatching the light move? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange;tttWhy aren't they screaming?
Philip Larkin
Astronomy staff that routinely discharged industrial gas into the indoor environment at high altitudes did not wear oxygen deficiency monitors or protective breathing respirators.
Steven Magee
I mean, at the end of the day, what the hell does it matter who I end up with if it can't be you?
Tabitha Suzuma
You are the person that I should have had out there.....right out in front for eveyone to see. To be able to say to the world; Look at who it is that I love! Look how wonderful she is. To be proud of who it is that I am with. That person was you. In my self-absorbed and selfish ways, I didn't celebrate or regard you in the way I should have. I will always have regrets about that and those are the types of thoughts and feelings that have haunted me as I have sat alone in my quiet.
John Britton
Be good sweet maid and let who will be clever Do noble things not dream them all day long And so make life death and that vast forever One grand sweet song.
Charles Kingsley
We think our fathers fools so wise we grow Our wiser sons no doubt will think us so.
Alexander Pope
Previous journeys had taught me the danger of taking too much stuff.
Tahir Shah
Facing this stuff, in real life is not like school, in school, if you make a mistake you can just try again tomorrow, but out there...when your a second away from being murdered or watching a friend die right before your eyes...you don't know what that's like.
J.K. Rowling
The student of history knows no more refreshing recreation than that of nailing liars, like vermin, to the wall.
Frederick Rolfe
Enchanted islands are hard to understand,' he said. 'I've always thought that. It worried me even as a child. The trouble is that you can never be sure where the enchantment begins and where it ends.
Robert Aickman
There is much that I remember but which is painful to dwell on. I see no need to write about these things. They are over and must be accepted, made sense of and forgiven, afforded no more than their proper place in a long life in which I have always known that happiness is a gift, not a right.
P.D. James
Writing from the perspective of women survivors of violence, Moore is at his most appealing; though his writing about sex and brutality can verge on the exploitative, he sometimes reveals an unexpected sympathy with dominated women.
Zoë Brigley
When we lose these woods, we lose our soul. Not simply as individuals, but as a people.
Kevin Walker
Bloody men are like bloody buses —You wait for about a yearAnd as soon as one approaches your stopTwo or three others appear.You look at them flashing their indicators,Offering you a ride.You’re trying to read the destinations,You haven’t much time to decide.If you make a mistake, there is no turning back.Jump off, and you’ll stand there and gazeWhile the cars and the taxis and lorries go byAnd the minutes, the hours, the days.
Wendy Cope
Give your decision never your reasons your decisions may be right your reasons are sure to be wrong.
Lord Mansfield
I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be insid
Patrick Ness
Oh, Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!
C.S. Lewis
He felt his heart pounding fiercely in his chest. How strange that in his dread of death, it pumped all the harder, valiantly keeping him alive. But it would have to stop, and soon. Its beats were numbered. How many would there be time for, as he rose and walked through the castle for the last time, out into the grounds and into the forest?
J.K. Rowling
Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness.
F.R. Leavis
It is your turn to say something now, Mr. Darcy. I talked about the dance, and you ought to make some kind of remark on the size of the room, or the number of couples.
Jane Austen
My father never told us how the stories worked. He didn't reveal the layers, the nuggets of information, the fragments of truth and fantasy. He didn't need to -- because, given the right conditions, the stories activated, sowing themselves.
Tahir Shah
Why is it that one of the best songs in the world has to be written by the BeeGees?"Benedict
Tricia Walker
Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma Ramotswe could ascertain, lived in France. These French people said that you should just live in a way which made you feel real, and that the real thing to do was the right thing too. Mma Ramotswe had listened in astonishment. You did not have to go to France to meet existentialists, she reflected; there were many existentialists right here in Botswana. Note Mokoti, for example. She had been married to an existentialist herself, without even knowing it. Note, that selfish man who never once put himself out for another--not even for his wife--would have approved of existentialists, and they of him. It was very existentialist, perhaps, to go out to bars every night while your pregnant wife stayed at home, and even more existentialist to go off with girls--young existentialist girls--you met in bars. It was a good life being an existentialist, although not too good for all the other, nonexistentialist people around one.
Alexander McCall Smith
Ironically, we may discover that death meditation is not a morbid exercise at all. Only when we lose the use of something taken for granted (whether the telephone or an eye) are we jolted into a recognition of its value. When the phone is fixed, the bandage removed from the eye, we briefly rejoice in their restoration but swiftly forget them again. In taking them for granted, we cease to be conscious of them. In taking life for granted, we likewise fail to notice it. (To the extent that we get bored and long for something exciting to happen.) By meditat- ing on death, we paradoxically become conscious of life.
Stephen Batchelor
The USA government sure do like their propaganda feeds! Unfortunately, too much propaganda does create the scenario where no one believes anything that they say. It's just like Pinocchio.
Steven Magee
I never know," Harry called to Hagrid over the noise of the cart, "What's the difference between a stalagmite and a stalactite?""Stalagmite's got an 'm' in it," said Hagrid.
J.K. Rowling
In fighting its war, the Ministry of the Interior has resorted to a novel tactic–marriage. No Saudi official will admit on the record that the Kingdom’s terrorist problem might boil down to sexual frustration, but if a social system bans hot-blooded young men from contact with the opposite sex in their most hot-blooded years, perhaps it is hardly surprising that some of them channel this frustration into violence. One cornerstone of the extremist rehab program is to get the “beneficiaries,” as they are called, settled down with a wife as soon as possible. The Ministry of the Interior pays each unmarried beneficiary 60,000 riyals (some $18,000), the going rate for a dowry, or bride price. The family arranges a marriage, and whenever he can, Prince Mohammed turns up for the wedding.When Khaled Al-Hubayshi was released from Al-Haier prison early in 2007, he wasted no time finding himself a bride at government expense.
Robert Lacey
Quality of life is more important than the quantity
Marilyn L Rice
The attendance of that brother was now become like the attendance of a demon on some devoted being that had sold himself to destruction
James Hogg
You can’t be another person’s honesty, child, but you can be your own.
Jeanette Winterson
When in doubt go the library
J.K. Rowling
If I had the wings of a swan, over these stony hills I would fly. I would fly to the arms of my true love, and there I'd be happy to die.
Susan Price
Matthew would not like this, she had said. He would have liked it even less had he know how much Strike had liked it.
Robert Galbraith
I only care for the subjective life; I am very German, you see: The woods interest me, and the world does not.
Ouida
The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
Ian McEwan