Quotes by British Authors - Page 40

The way I tell it, he says to Fitzwilliam, you would think that the blow on the head had improved him. That he actually set out to get it. That every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.
Hilary Mantel
Print, it transpired, was not just an instrument of agitation and change: now it was equally necessary to win the peace.
Andrew Pettegree
-'What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this?'There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter
P.G. Wodehouse
Men let women down. Over and over again. I'ts what they're programmed to do.
Liz Jensen
If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.
Neil Gaiman
Rosies mother was a highly strung bundle of barely thought-through prejudices, worries and feuds.
Neil Gaiman
The altar must be built in one place so that the fire may come down in another place.
Charles Williams
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of it's process.
Henry James
There was certainly plenty to watch and listen to. The tree which Digory had noticed was now a full-grown beech whose branches swayed gently above his head. They stood on cool, green grass, sprinkled with daisies and buttercups. A little way off, along the river bank, willows were growing. On the other side tangles of flowering currant, lilac, wild rose, and rhododendron closed them in.
C.S. Lewis
Growth occurs when we discover how to remain authentically ourselves in the presence of potentially threatening things. Maturity is the possession of coping skills: we can take in our stride things that previously would have knocked us off course. We are less fragile, less easily shocked and hence more capable of engaging with situations as they really are
Alain de Botton
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.
John Maynard Keynes
A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty.
Rudyard Kipling
When we understand that Peace is a state of mind we understand true Peace.
Tony Samara
A single word indicative of doubt, that any thing, or every thing, in that country is not the very best in the world, produces an effect which must be seen and felt to be understood. If the citizens of the United States were indeed the devoted patriots they call themselves, they would surely not thus encrust themselves in the hard, dry, stubborn persuasion, that they are the first and best of the human race, that nothing is to be learnt, but what they are able to teach, and that nothing is worth having, which they do not possess.
Frances Trollope
There's nothing an economist should fear so much as applause.
Herbert Marshall
No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.
Edward St. Aubyn
A foe to God was never true friend to man
Edward Young
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.
Leigh Hunt
The thing about the Lexington International Bank ladder was that it was very long, and climbing it was very exhausting, and so Andrew Brown didn't have a lot of time to think about whether he really wanted to get to the top of it—and besides, since so many other people were climbing too, the view from the top must be worth it.So he kept going. He worked hard. He put his heart and mind and soul into it. There was an opening for a position half a rung higher than he already was. With a promotion, he might get two hours a week of a secretary's time. He'd go to more important meetings, with more senior people, and have the opportunity to impress them, and if he did he might be promoted again and then... well, of course eventually he'd be running the whole office. It's important to have a dream: otherwise you might notice where you really are.
Naomi Alderman
O thou by whom we come to God The Life the Truth the Way The path of prayer Thyself hast trod- Lord teach us how to pray.
James Montgomery
He turned, as he spoke, a peculiar look in her direction, a look of hatred unless he has a most perverse set of facial muscles that will not, like those of other people, interpret the language of his soul.
Emily Brontë
There is no such things as magic, though there is such a thing as knowledge of the hidden ways of Nature.
H. Rider Haggard
The purpose of collecting so much information can only be power.
Nick Drake
It is an anxious, sometimes a dangerous thing to be a doll. Dolls cannot choose; they can only be chosen; they cannot 'do'; they can only be done by.
Rumer Godden
Out of doubt, out of dark to the day's risingI came singing into the sun, sword unsheathing.To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking:Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!
J.R.R. Tolkien
You wouldn't believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended.
Nick Hornby
I soon forgot about my bedraggled appearance. Until, that is, an old man shuffled in and propped himself, hunched and wheezing, over the check-in desk. Karen asked him if he needed assistance. “No,” he grunted sucking on his teeth, “your wet-T-shirt librarian with the punk rock hair is helping me out just fine.
Suzanne Kelman
The ocean is both my mistress and my lover. How else can I explain her salty kiss that is still on my lips.
Anthony T.Hincks
He talked about the future with such certainty, he might have been talking about the past.
Michael Dobbs
Everybody is special. Everybody. Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. Everybody. Everybody has their story to tell.
Alan Moore
Hey, you’re not supposed to find our magnificent organs amusing.
Barbara Elsborg
The captain of a ship can run a great ship, but he can't do anything about the tides.
Matthew Norman
With you it is always the law, never equity.
Rafael Sabatini
Two people occupying the same air. Nothing else in common. Just oxygen.
Dawn French
Over the years, I have been subjected to many indignities, all for the sake of Art. If I ever catch him, I'm going to kill the guy.
Bob Hope
Every intelligent being, whether it breathes or not, coughs nervously at some time in its life.
Terry Pratchett
Her stare fixed me. Without rancour and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemona once looked back on Venice. On the incomprehension, the baffled rage of Venice. I had taken myself to be in some way the traitor Iago punished, in an unwritten sixth act. Chained in hell. But I was also Venice; the state left behind; the thing journeyed from.
John Fowles
Cruel blows of fate call for extreme kindness in the family circle.
Dodie Smith
Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does:otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that the character peaks a little later;between twenty and thirty, say. And after that we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also if this isn't too grand a word--our tragedy.
Julian Barnes
Oh, miss Haversham said I,there have been sore mistakes and my life has been a blind and thankless one, and I want forgiveness and direction far too much to be bitter with you.
Charles Dickens
Right time, right place, right people equals success.Wrong time, wrong place, wrong people equals most of the real human history.
Idries Shah
Poets make the best topographers.
W.G. Hoskins
If you didn't divide it up, carve things into categories, it was all one in the same anyway - waves and oceans, dawns and sunsets, noise and silence. Life was a single connected river that ran through mechanicals, people, animals, planets. Everything that ever was or would be, all mixed together in a soup of being; of shouting and jumping, moving and bumping. Echoes of the great creation.
Peter Bunzl
With horror he saw that her hair was already afire as the tarred stake burned about her head. He held her agonized gaze with his fierce black eyes. "I'll love you forever, and beyond," he vowed as he raised both arms and plunged his sword into her heart.~Marcus Magnus
Virginia Henley
As a non-believer, I want the atheist case to be made. I want religious belief to be scrutinised and challenged. I want Britain to be a genuinely secular nation, where religious belief is protected and defended as a private matter of conscience. But I feel prevented from doing so because atheism in public life has become so dominated by a particular breed that ends up dressing up bigotry as non-belief. It is a tragedy. And that is why it is so important that atheists distance themselves from those who undermine our position. Richard Dawkins can rant and rave about Muslims as much as he wants. But atheists: let's stop allowing him to do it in our name.
Owen Jones
Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries.
Jeanette Winterson
The angry men know that this golden age (of fossil fuels) has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.
George Monbiot
His own true hidden reality that he had desired to know grew palpable, recognizable. It seemed to him just this: a great, glad, abounding hope that he had saved his brother; too expansive to be contained by the limited form of a sole man, it yearned for a new embodiment infinite as the stars.What did it matter to that true reality that the man's brain shrank, shrank, till it was nothing; that the man's body could not retain the huge pain of his heart, and heaved it out through the red exit riven at the neck: that hurtling blackness blotted out forever the man's sight, hearing, sense?
Clemence Housman
Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.
C.S. Lewis
The meaning of sex is illustrated by two eponymous heroes of British history, King Edward VII (who flourished in the years before the First World War) and the King Edward variety of potato which has fed the British working class for almost as long). The potato, unlike the royal family, reproduces asexually. Every King Edward potato is identical to every other and each on has the same set of genes as the hoary ancestor of all potatoes bearing that name. This is convenient for the farmer and the grocer, which is why sex is not encouraged among potatoes.
Steve Jones
The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
William Blake
Sleep disorders are a known occupational hazard to astronomers and their support staff.
Steven Magee
Hope itself is always genuine. It's only what it's placed in that can prove to be false.
Karen Maitland
It is purity of spirit that will keep corruption from the flesh
Mark Lawrence
You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.
W.H. Auden
Oh fair enough are sky and plain,But I know fairer far:Those are as beautiful againThat in the water are;The pools and rivers wash so cleanThe trees and clouds and air,The like on earth was never seen,And oh that I were there.These are the thoughts I often thinkAs I stand gazing downIn act upon the cressy brinkTo strip and dive and drown;But in the golden-sanded brooksAnd azure meres I spyA silly lad that longs and looks And wishes he were I.
A.E. Housman
Impossibility is only a whisper away from reality
Steven Aitchison
These days, we've got booksellers in cities, in deserts, and in the middle of a rain forest; we've got travelling bookshops, and bookshops underground. We've got bookshops in barns, in caravans and in converted Victorian railway stations. We've even got booksellers selling books in the middle of a war. Are bookshops still relevant? They certainly are.All bookshops are full of stories, and stories want to be heard.
Jen Campbell
The choice is to listen to the chaos your mind creates or the intuitive wisdom from the heart.
Steven Redhead
Nor should they be, but everyone needs to feel they're part of something worthwhile. That, in the last analysis, their life has some meaning in a larger context. The questions is what am I part of? What have I done?
Julian Fellowes