Quotes by British Authors - Page 4

There is something brittle in me that will break before it bends. Perhaps if the [the enemy] had brought a smaller army I might have had the sense to run. But he overdid it.
Mark Lawrence
The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented.
J.G. Ballard
Turn around.”Only two words, but they deliver such a sensual threat.I do as you ask without question. You are right behind me, breathing hard into the small of my neck, where I like to be kissed.
Felicity Brandon
You have to realize that modern power, is nothing but a concept in the mind of the one who’s under the power. And once you realize this, you realize that authority is indeed an illusion.
Phoenix Sinistra
I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head.
Paula Hawkins
You ever had the feeling the future’s become the past while you were busy being scared?
Benjamin Johncock
Inspiration comes from not only within ourselves, but also from watching life around us.
Anthony T.Hincks
What are men to rocks and mountains?
Jane Austen
Presumably, a confused person would be too addled to recognize that he was confused. Ergo, if you know that you are not confused then you are not confused. Unless, it suddenly occurred to me--and here was an arresting notion--unless persuading yourself that you are not confused is merely a cruel, early symptom of confusion. Or even an advanced symptom. Who could tell? For all I knew I could be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusional state characterized by fear on the part of the sufferer that he may be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusional state. That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.
Bill Bryson
The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves.
John Stuart Mill
The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything is...42!
Douglas Adams
Sometimes all the players get a bad hand. You just have to be determined enough to see the game through.
Dean F. Wilson
The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure it was worth all the effort.
Terry Pratchett
Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.
Bertrand Russell
I might show it to you, but you'd never see it. The privilege isn't given to every one; it's not enviable. It has never been seen by a young, happy, innocent person like you. You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge. In that way your eyes are opened to it.
Henry James
All new news is old news happening to new people
Malcolm Muggeridge
You is getting nosier than a parker.
Roald Dahl
War makes rattling good history but Peace is poor reading.
Thomas Hardy
~Do you like him much?~I told you I like him a little. Where is the use of caring for him so very much? He is full of faults.~Is he?~All boys are.~More than girls?~Very likely. Wise people say it is folly to think anyboy perfect, and as to likes and diskiles, we should be friendly to all, and worship none.
Charlotte Brontë
If you don't look. You can't see.
Anthony T.Hincks
Life is difficult and those who make us laugh are angels.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
God alone can finish.
John Ruskin
The beauty of the ultrasound scan is something that only parents can appreciate, but Emma had seen these things before and knew what was required of her. ‘Beautiful,’ she sighed, though in truth it could have been a Polaroid of the inside of his pocket.
David Nicholls
A life has to move or it stagnates.
Beryl Markham
If any have more of the government of thee than Christ, or if thou hadst rather live after any other laws than his, if it were at thy choice, thou art not his disciple (331).
Richard Baxter
When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened
Winston S. Churchill
A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
Alain de Botton
What greater gift than the love of a cat.
Charles Dickens
The heart is the window to the soul, the portal through which we can understand the desires of the spirit.
Steven Redhead
If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.
Julian Barnes
It is never about who is right or wrong, it is about what is best.
Steve Backley
One man's fool is just another man's savior.
Anthony T.Hincks
Life is a series of events and sensations. Everything else is interpretation. Much is lost in transition - and added in assumption / projection
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.
Kate Moss
The author explores the result of endless choice. It is not only overload, but a profound loss of unity, solidity, and coherence in life.
Os Guinness
Everyone is given the potential to excel, whether you do or not is entirely up to you.
Steven Redhead
Publishing is definitely something you do because you enjoy educating or entertaining people.
Steven Magee
Inner peace is the key to worldly harmony
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said "Exactly" to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty,--how could he affect her as a lover? The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it.
George Eliot
Parenting at its best comes as naturally as laughter. It is automatic involuntary unconditional love.
Sally James
When God does not answer His children according to the letter, He does so according to the spirit. If thou askest for coarse meal, wilt thou be angered because He gives thee the finest flour? If thou seekest bodily health, shouldst thou complain if instead thereof He makes thy sickness turn to the healing of spiritual maladies?
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
It isn't enough for you to love money - it's also necessary that money should love you.
Baron Rothschild
But most dragons seem to have interesting personalities--besides probably having quite good reasons for what they do, if only one could understand them
Diana Wynne Jones
A wise man does not step betwixt the beast and his meat
David Mitchell
The grief of children was unconditional, fueled by the implicit belief that it would last forever; for a child, grief was not grief unless it was eternal.
Andrew Taylor
I loved her- I always loved her- no matter what she was-I wanted her safe- not shut up- a prisoner for life, eating her heart out. And we did keep her safe- for many years" Phillip Stark
Agatha Christie
Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad.
Friedrich A. Hayek
But in spite of this material prosperity he was a slave. His work and his leisure consisted of feverish activity, punctuated by moments of listless idleness which he regarded as both sinful and unpleasant. Unless he was one of the furiously successful minority, he was apt to be haunted by moments of brooding, too formless to be called meditation, and of yearning, too blind to be called desire. For he and all his contemporaries were ruled by certain ideas which prevented them from living a fully human life.
Olaf Stapledon
Zeal was like gas, most dangerous when you could not see it. The wrong spark could light it at any time.
Frances Hardinge
Empathy Is An Endangered Instinct
Dean Cavanagh
England and America owe their liberty to commerce, which created a new species of power to undermine the feudal system. But let them beware of the consequences: the tyranny of wealth is still more galling and debasing than that of rank.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Everything I learned I learned from the movies.
Audrey Hepburn
Many in the church have turned their back on serious study, and have embraced an anti-intellectualism which refuses to learn anything from scholarship at all lest it corrupt their pure faith. It is time to end this standoff, and to reestablish a hermeneutic of trust (itself a sign of the gospel!) in place of the hermeneutic of suspicion which the church has so disastrously borrowed from the postmodern world.
N.T. Wright
Tolkien came to regard the tale of Beren and Tinuviel as 'the first example of the motive (to become dominant in Hobbits) that the great policies of world history, "the wheels of the world", are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak'. Such a worldview is inherent in the fairy-tale (and Christian) idea of the happy ending in which the dispossessed are restored to joy; but perhaps Tolkien was also struck by the way it had been borne out in the Great War, when ordinary people stepped out of ordinary lives to carry the fate of nations.
John Garth
Your mother is holding your hand too tightly. You whimper and cling to her dress, because you know what will happen next. She stares at you, as if she's forgotten how to blink. There's one last glimpse of her face before she bundles you into the cupboard under the stairs. 'Don't make a sound,' she hisses, 'don't even breathe.' Darkness smothers you as the key twists in the lock. There's a chance that he won't find you, cowering on the floor, between the broom and floor mops, a stack of wellington boots.
Kate Rhodes
Wouldn’t you rather play chess, Ma’am?....It’s less destructive of clothes.
Rowena Cherry
Then a hundred sad voices lifted a wail,And a hundred glad voices piped on the gale:'Time is short, life is short,' they took up the tale: 'Life is sweet, love is sweet, use to-day while you may;Love is sweet, and to-morrow may fail; Love is sweet, use to-day.
Christina Rossetti
He led her back to the house, the perfume from the acacia clinging to her. The djinn was supposed to live in the scent of the acacia blossom, making themselves visible only to the young in order to entrap them in otherworldly world.
Nadeem Aslam
Something like panic struck at Hurlow. Moffat's calm confession of fear withdrew the prop upon which he had leaned. Down there, among the motionless shadows, lurked invisible things, things that were nameless, shapeless and malignant; things which could see without being seen. One of the long lost terrors of childhood returned to him, and like a child he put his hand into Moffat's.
A.M. Burrage
Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
Alain de Botton