Quotes by British Authors - Page 37

The crowning blessing of life - to be born with a bias to some pursuit.
S. C. Tallentyre
The trappings of a monarchy would set up an ordinary commonwealth.
Samuel Johnson
When we are afraid we ought not to occupy ourselves with endeavoring to prove that there is no danger but in strengthening ourselves to go on in spite of the danger.
Mark Rutherford
The themes that exercised the minds of survivor movements and their allies within the health and welfare professions generated a political project: how to revolutionise medical and judicial approaches to injured adults and children, how to raise awareness so that other people didn’t have to suffer the same, and how to understand, and then challenge, offenders who so love what they do to children that they can and must shut their minds to the feelings of children who have put their trust in them. P4
Beatrix Campbell
I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets up for himself secretly.
Joseph Conrad
There is very seldom any true secret.
Diana Wynne Jones
Make sure your not followed! Don’t go anywhere
Benny Bellamacina
Souls do not break neither do hearts. Ravaged by time, they continue living within us and it is our choice whether to remove the walls of self preservation that we build as protection or to hide behind them and remain hardened within our comfort zone.Life is precious, giving it your all is preferable to withering and dying even before you fall off this mortal coil.
Virginia Alison
Women wear heels because they think they make their legs look thinner.
Caitlin Moran
A friend called the other day.'How are you?' she said.The sun was shining, the sky a merciless blue. It was only eleven in the morning but I had been awake since three twenty. I was in bed because, as usual, I could think of nowhere else to go. I said that I was feeling low. Low is the depressive's euphemism for despair.She said: 'How can you be depressed on a day like this?'I wanted to say: 'If I had flu, would you ask me how I could be sick on a day like this?
Sally Brampton
Books are the most important of all my possessions. They capture the thoughts, feelings, dreams and lives of their authors, welcoming us into their worlds and inspiring us to emulate their adventures.
Fennel Hudson
Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.
Robert Harris
A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of everything.
Samuel Johnson
When you succumb to obedience, in an erotic sense, you are not giving away a part of yourself, but seeking something new, something other, within yourself.
Chloe Thurlow
But we can never change enough to impress God. And here's the reason: trying to impress God, others, or ourselves puts us at the center of our change project. It makes change all about my looking good. It is done for my glory. And that's pretty much the definition of sin. Sin is living for my glory instead of God's.
Tim Chester
Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can't even finish my second apple pie.
Banksy
The Night has a thousand eyes The Day but one Yet the light of the bright world dies With the dying sun.
Francis William Bourdillon
I never had any preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing.
George Eliot
The title ‘Lord of All-Rus'’ did not possess much basis either in history or in current reality. It came into the same category as that whereby the kings of England laid claim to France. In the 1490s, two-and-a-half centuries after all traces of a united Kievan Rus' had been destroyed, it had the same degree of credibility that the king of France might have enjoyed if, in his struggle with the German Empire, he had proclaimed himself ‘Lord of all the Franks’. By that time, it conflicted with the separate identity that the ‘Ruthenes’ of Lithuania had assumed from the ‘Russians’ of Moscow. Indeed, it all seemed sufficiently unreal for the Lithuanians to accept it as a small price to pay for Ivan’s good humour. They were not to know it, but they were conceding the ideological cornerstone of territorial ambitions that would be pursued for 500 years.
Norman Davies
There nearly always is a method in madness.
G.K. Chesterton
What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.
Iris Murdoch
That which falls off a lorry belongs to he who follows the lorry.
Michael de Larrabeiti
They were steaming out of the station before Maia asked, 'Was it books in the trunk?''It was books, admitted Miss Minton.And Maia said, 'Good.
Eva Ibbotson
Some things you cannot stop happening.
Christie Watson
There is no house of life out of reach of the stream. So, to be surprised when the rain descends and the foods come, and the winds blow and beat upon the house, as though some strange thing happened unto us, is unreasonable and unjust; it so miscalls our good Master, who never told us to build for fair weather or even to be careful to build out of reach of floods. "We must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God" is not a fair-weather word. "My son, if thou comest to serve the Lord, prepare thy soul for temptation." "Ye will not get leave to steal quietly to heaven, in Christ's company, without a conflict and a cross." Even so, even though we must walk in the land of fear, there is no need to fear. The power of His resurrection comes before the fellowship of His sufferings.
Amy Carmichael
And the Great Adventure - the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they'd devoured as boys - consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that had promised so much in the way of 'manly' activity had actually delivered 'feminine' passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had hardly known. No wonder they broke down.
Pat Barker
The immediate reactions of the two superpower leaders when confronted with the gravest international crisis of their careers were much the same, shock, wounded pride, grim determination, and barely repressed fear.
Michael Dobbs
I sat in the dark and thought: There’s no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.
Neil Gaiman
the military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.
Tony Judt
When you sleepI will creepInto your thoughtsLike a bad debtThat you can't payTake the easy wayand give in!
Morrissey
Because this woman sobbed in the way that all women sob, whether they do it outwardly or whether they keep it silently locked up inside themselves. They sob because they realise, one day, that they were born on a planet of men, and that short of death or spinsterhood they can never escape. Effie's Aunt Rachel used to say, 'Even the slaves could run away, but where can women go?
Graham Masterton
Who stole the livery of the court of Heaven To serve the Devil in.
Frederick Pollock
How to stop time: kiss.How to travel in time: read.How to escape time: music.How to feel time: write.How to release time: breathe.
Matt Haig
I suppose it had something to do with it being a secret, just how much it had meant to me. Maybe all of us at Hailsham had little secrets like that--little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone with our fears and longings. But the very fact that we had such needs would have felt wrong to us at the time--like somehow we were letting the side down.
Kazuo Ishiguro
I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.
Winston Churchill
Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating.
Germaine Greer
No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.
Neil Gaiman
You will never be tougher than you are now. Children are the toughest creatures on the planet. They endure.
Katherine Rundell
There's no point in fighting for the throne if you're not going to make a difference.
Rhiannon Thomas
Massive changes may have occurred in libraries in recent years, with new digital resources and services supplementing the old traditional resources and services, the dog-eared card catalogues ripped up and destroyed, workstations suddenly everywhere, but one essential aspect of “libraryness” has not changed: libraries remain places dedicated to storage. Books continue to be published in greater and greater numbers – so great in fact that there are no accurate figures as to exactly how many are published: some say one every thirty seconds, others four thousand per day, others a million per year – and somehow, whether through the off-site storage of the physical books themselves, or microfilm copying, or digital scanning, we remain obliged to keep up with or afloat in this vast deluge of paper. Even the new, high-tech rebranded libraries opened to great fanfare in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in the 1990s could not get away from this essential fact of paper hoarding: they were called “Idea Stores.” - p.56
Ian Sansom
I will do what I can
Jude Morgan
When a man's busy leisure strikes him as a wonderful pleasure and at leisure once is he? Straightway he wants to be busy.
Robert Browning
For more than four hundred years we nurtured the belief (should that, perhaps, be faith?) that evidence-based investigation meeting scientific standards of rigor would reveal the true mechanism of nature. and yet when the mechanisms of nature were revealed to be quantum mechanisms, the worlds of science and philosophy were set on a collision course. instead of truth and comprehension, we got deeply unsettling questions about what we can ever hope to know about the world.
Jim Baggott
Granddad once told me that to truly love this life, you need to know its darkest corners. But if you can bring a bit of sunshine to the sunless, it can only be for the good. I mean, what else are we really here for on this earth? Think about it some day, when the spring mornings look so golden and green.
Gareth Thompson
Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back -- to be sucked back -- into it?
C.S. Lewis
The hamster-powered hat is the same as any other hat. It keeps your head warm and looks smart,” the inventor said. “The hamster generates heat by running on the wheel. If you get a big enough hamster, it will keep your whole face warm.
Mark Jackman
In time, Mr Hall, one gets to recognize that sneer, that hardness, for fornication extends far beyond the actual deed. Were it a deed only, I for one would not hold it anathema. But when the nations went a whoring they invariably ended by denying God, I think, and until all sexual irregularities and not some of them are penal the Church will never reconquer England.
E.M. Forster
Later the place was as deserted as Malcolm Muggeridge's Christmas party of fellow intellectuals.
William Donaldson
Patience is hard when your very soul cries for freedom.
Alan Kinross
A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.
G.K. Chesterton
If you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison' it is certain to disagree with you sooner or later.
Lewis Carroll
Maybe this was why people filled their house with stinking cats, so they didn't notice that they were alone, so they wouldn't die without a living soul noticing.
Kate Atkinson
Everyone’s talking about the death and disappearance of the book as a format and an object. I don’t think that will happen. I think whatever happens, we have to figure out a way to protect our imaginations. Stories and poetry do that. You need a language in this world. People want words, they want to hear their situation in language, and find a way to talk about it. It allows you to find a language to talk about your own pain.If you give kids a language, they can use it. I think that’s what these educators fear. If you really educate these kids, they aren’t going to punch you in the face, they are going to challenge you with your own language.
Jeanette Winterson
I close my eyes and try and shut him out. My fingers don’t want to stay in time. They want to race ahead in fury, plunging into the dense fog of black notes, pulling the music out by its roots, hurling it up out of the piano and into the air.
Tabitha Suzuma
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
Alan W. Watts
This was genius at close quarters, and genius had that something above normal in it that was a great strain upon the ordinary mind and feeling. All five were different from each other, yet each had that curious quality of burning intensity, the single-mindedness of purpose that made such a terrifying impression. She did not know whether it were a quality of brain or rather a quality of outlook, of intensity. But each of them, she thought, was in his or her way a passionate idealist.
Agatha Christie
If anything is poisoning our lives and weakening our society it is reality - and not the fabrication of television writers and producers.
Martin Moloney
While there is tea, there is hope.")
Arthur Wing Pinero
Parents who discipline their child by discussing the consequences of their actions produce children who have better moral development , compared to children whose parents use authoritarian methods and punishment.
Simon Baron-Cohen