Quotes by British Authors - Page 38

It is the north wind that lashes men into Vikings it is the soft luscious south wind which lulls them to lotus dreams.
Ouida
When I'm in doubt - as I am now - I ask myself, 'What would Carl Jung do?' - and act accordingly.
David Mitchell
Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold...The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.
J.R.R. Tolkien
What's the point of a houseful of books you've already read?
Cory Doctorow
the centre is missing, but we cannot stop searching for it or positing it. It is not that there is nothing there - it is that what is there is not capable of exercising responsibility
Mark Fisher
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting one. Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen.
Jerome K. Jerome
It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man's sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover.
Graham Greene
The only thing I am afraid of is fear.
Arthur Wellesley
Birth copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks.
T.S Eliot
Conscience is a treacherous thing and mine behaves badly whenever there is a serious danger of being found out.
Margaret Lane
The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children’s lunch boxes. The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies. What’s a kid to find out? Presumably we lord over them an exclusive deed to sex, but this pretense flies so fantastically in the face of fact that it must result from some conspiratorial group amnesia. […] In truth, we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut. The secret is there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its supression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.
Lionel Shriver
Winnie the Pooh finds comfort in counting his pots of honey, and Rabbit finds comfort in knowing where his relations are – even if he doesn't need them at the moment.
A.A. Milne
Sometimes you need to loose in order to win.
Adele Rose
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
Douglas Adams
I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, or how lonely the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland
Arthur Conan Doyle
She looked at them with shining eyes. Her chin went up. She said: "You regard it as impossible that a sinner should be struck down by the wrath of God! I do not!" The judge stroked his chin. He murmured in a slightly ironic voice: "My dear lady, in my experience of ill-doing, Providence leaves the work of conviction and chastisement to us mortals-and the process is often fraught with difficulties. There are no short cuts.
Agatha Christie
When we observe the flow of our breathing, we transcend our thoughts and are able to bring mind and body into harmony with each other. Thus, we create calm.
Christopher Dines
He who knows himself best esteems himself least.
H. G. Bohn
Vain mistaken mortals, who, valuing themselves on names and titles, suppose that the virtues of the mind must be attached to an empty sound, when every day's experience proves that birth is disgraced, titles rendered contemptible, and riches a curse, by the vices, meanness, and dissipation of its possessors!
Eliza Parsons
Helping people and putting smiles on their faces is a great, great thing. God only knows why more people don't do it more often.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
The Japanese had no idea what elements of Western culture and institutions where the crucial ones, so they ended up copying everything, from western clothes and hair styles to the European practice of colonizing foreign people. Unfortunately, they took up empire-building at precisely the moment when the cost of imperialism began to exceed the benefits.
Niall Ferguson
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
C.S. Lewis
Juliet's version of cleanliness was next to godliness, which was to say it was erratic, past all understanding and was seldom seen.
Terry Pratchett
Companies' motives to make profit means they neglect inherent social or moral values.
Russell Brand
I earned the right not to compete for a man.He wants me... Or... She is welcome to him...
Virginia Alison
People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.
W Somerset Maugham
With a savage grin, he let out an inhuman roar of bloodlust and threw himself into an unholy orgy of blood, fangs, claws, and death.
Alan Kinross
What? An alien. You think I'm from outer space." She snorts in disbelief. "I'm Kelly Tillman, you dumb-ass. From 41 Montana Avenue, Valentine, Texas. What's left of it. I canned seventh grade for a piece-of-crap job with lousy tips and lousy hours. You ain't telling me I'm the outsider here. No way.
Philip Webb
Yes", Kumiko said, seriously. "Exactly that. The extraordinary happens all the time. So much, we can't take it. Life and happiness and heartache and love. If we couldn't put it in story - ""And explain it -""No!" she said, suddenly sharp. "Not explain. Stories do not explain. They seem to, but all they provide is a starting point. The story never ends at the end. There is always after. And even within itself, even by saying that this version is the right one, it suggests other versions, versions that exist in parallel. No, story is not an explanation, it is a net, a net through which the truth flows. The net catches some of the truth, but not all, never all, only enough so that we can live with the extraordinary without it killing us." She sagged a little, as if exhausted by this speech. "As it surely, surely would.
Patrick Ness
Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.
Malcolm Gladwell
Alice More: As for understanding, I understand that you are the best man that I ever met, or am likely to; And, if you go...Well, God knows why I suppose. Though as God's my witness God's kept deadly quiet about it!
Robert Bolt
If you don't start, you're finished.
Max McKeown
The pessimists believe that the cosmos is a clock that is running down; the progressives believe it is a clock that they themselves are winding up. But I happen to believe that the world is what we choose to make it, and that we are what we choose to make ourselves; and that our renascence or our ruin will alike, ultimately and equally, testify with a trumpet to our liberty.- The Illustrated London News, July 10, 1920 Issue.
G.K. Chesterton
The danger of restorative nostalgia lies in its belief that the mutilated 'wholeness' of the body politic can be repaired. But the reflective nostalgic understands deep down that loss is irrecoverable: Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world. In pop terms, Morrissey is the supreme poet of reflective nostalgia.
Simon Reynolds
Troubles like babies grow larger by nursing.
Lady Holland
Just as mental toughness and physical energy are the primary traits of an army, they also mark God's beautiful woman.
Elizabeth George
The Machine stops.""What do you say?""The Machine is stopping, I know it, I know the signs."She burst into a peal of laugher.
E.M. Forster
Did you know, ji,’ Zulu offered, ‘that the map of Tolkien’s Middle earth fits quite well over central England and Wales? Maybe all fairylands are right here, in our midst.
Salman Rushdie
Soul meets soul on lovers lips.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Marianne could never love by halves; and her whole heart became, in time, as much devoted to her husband, as it had once been to Willoughby.
Jane Austen
I wondered if all women did with other women was lie and hug.
Sarah Winman
Our pasts shape us,Sam.None of us the person he or she used to be,it's true, but what we are still contains a great proportion of what we once were.Nothing,not even suffering the worst kind of tragedy,alters us completely.At core,we are set in stone.
James Lovegrove
On the other hand, if God's moral judgement differs from ours so that our 'black' may be His 'white', we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say 'God is good', while asserting that His goodness is wholly other than ours, is really only to say 'God is we know not what'. And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying Him. If He is not (in our sense) 'good' we shall obey, if at all, only through fear - and should be equally ready to obey omnipotent Fiend. The doctrine of Total Depravity - when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing - may thus turn Christianity into a form of devil-worship.- The Problem of Pain, pp. 28 - 29
C.S. Lewis
The rose I gave you was an emblem of myheart,' said she; 'would you take it away andleave me here alone?' 'Would you give me your hand too, if I askedit?' 'Have I not said enough?
Anne Brontë
Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it’s a mistake to make a habit of it.
W Somerset Maugham
The only time you have no opportunities is when you decide to stop taking them.
Danny Wallace
Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.
Virginia Woolf
Women joked amongst themselves: 'Why do you think a bride cries on her wedding day? It's for the love that this marriage is putting an end to for all eternity. Men may think a woman has no past- "you were born and then I married you"- but men are fools.
Nadeem Aslam
God is too good to be unkind and He is too wise to be mistaken. And when we cannot trace His hand, we must trust His heart.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
It is one thing to believe in witches, and quite another to believe in witch-smellers.
G.K. Chesterton
I don't really enjoy experiencing pain. No one does. But we will become less human if we learn to detach ourselves from one another to the point that when we experience death of a beautiful being (our mothers, our fathers, our sisters, our brothers, our soul mates, our friends etc.) that it will not bother us that we will not feel. But see that's suppression. It will bother us somewhere deep inside. So, love someone. Hold them tight. Don't fear the loss. Fear the part of being too afraid to love someone. Love Everyone. It's inevitable: we all die. Thats the ugly part of life. But Love and being alive is so beautiful and so strong that the love, the memories stay even in death. Life is love, life is being alive to feel pain. The love the beautiful love always remains. Love. Life. Joy. Peace
Jill Telford
Down in the cellar the Gestapo were licensed to practice was the Ministry of Justice called ‘heightened interrogation’. The rules had been drawn up by civilised men in warm offices and they stipulated the presence of a doctor.
Robert Harris
I'm crazy, Zed.' There, I'd admitted it.'Uh-huh. And I'm crazy too -about you.
Joss Stirling
He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death.
Graham Greene
I was covered in gore, dripping in slime, and in a very bad mood.
Lavie Tidhar
Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens.
Virginia Woolf
Yeah! "I love you" is subject to the law of diminishing returns; like one or two other critical weekly elements of a relationship, it loses a bit of thrilling value every time you get it out.'... That's what happens with "I love you", that same phrase that you once shouted Hollywood or Heathcliff-like in the lashing raining, now- now you are saying it dumbly at the end of every phone conversation, a follow-on from," I'll be back for dinner." Once it came out spontaneous rush, it forced itself out; now it's reflex.
David Baddiel
The last thing he ever said to me was, 'Just always be waiting for me, and then some night you will hear me crowing.
J.M. Barrie
... forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on.
Julian Barnes
Sometimes I think depression should be called the coping illness. So many of us struggle on, not daring or knowing how to ask for help. More of us, terribly, go undiagnosed.
Sally Brampton