Quotes by British Authors - Page 41

I had never met a lord before, nor had I ever expected to meet one. It didn't matter what he looked like: he was a lord first, and a human being, with a face and limbs and body, long, long after.
L.P. Hartley
The minute you start compromising for the sake of massaging somebody's ego, that's it, game over.
Gordon Ramsay
Who can say they saw a whole play or read a whole book? Each has their own experience, their own play, their own book
Johnny Rich
Strong isn't about not being afraid, Caitlin. It's about facing what you're scared of.
Lindsay J. Pryor
When I was an undergraduate we were told that history had ended, and we all believed it. When the Berlin Wall fell, what history was made of was over. No more Cold War. No more wars. And yet here it was, and is and all of it falling apart. Endings. Worlds dissolving. Weather systems, baking systems, the careful plans of municipal gardeners. Families, hearts, lives.
Helen Macdonald
You can play the part for so long, wear the mask, say what people expect you to say. Fight for as long as there is air in your lungs. Fly if you have wings. But you can never be free from someone who won't let you go.
Debbie Howells
What a blessing it is to love books.
Elizabeth von Arnim
Married women are kept women and they are beginning to find it out.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are callingFrom glen to glen, and down the mountain sideThe summer's gone, and all the flowers are dying'Tis you, 'tis you must go and I must bide.But come ye back when summer's in the meadowOr when the valley's hushed and white with snow'Tis I'll be here in sunshine or in shadowOh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so.And if you come, when all the flowers are dyingAnd I am dead, as dead I well may beYou'll come and find the place where I am lyingAnd kneel and say an "Ave" there for me.And I shall hear, tho' soft you tread above meAnd all my dreams will warm and sweeter beIf you'll not fail to tell me that you love meI'll simply sleep in peace until you come to me.I'll simply sleep in peace until you come to me.
Fred E. Weatherly
People show you who they are, not by what they say, but by what they do.
Jane Green
But Andrew was right about one thing. Human beings need to tell stories. Historically, it's the quickest way we have for transmitting useful information to other members of our species. Stories are not simply nice things to have; they are essential survival tools. And yes, the stories we tell ourselves are just as important as the stories we tell other people.
Hugh MacLeod
Just because you’re allowed to use magic now you don’t have to whip your wands out for every tiny little thing!
J.K. Rowling
We're going' Anne said firmly. So soon?' Percy pleaded. 'But stars come out at night.'Then they fade at dawn', Anne replied. 'This star needs to veil herself in darkness.
Philippa Gregory
For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.
Alfred Tennyson
The functions of the human frame are, broadly speaking, known. They are a country, anyhow, that has been charted and mapped out. But outside that lie huge tracts of undiscovered country, which certainly exist, and the real pioneers of knowledge are those who, at the cost of being derided as credulous and superstitious, want to push on into those misty and probably perilous places. I felt that I could be of more use by setting out without compass or knapsack into the mists than by sitting in a cage like a canary and chirping about what was known. Besides, teaching is very very bad for a man who knows himself only to be a learner: you only need to be a self-conceited ass to teach.
E.F. Benson
Carnal love is the love of table, not of the host.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Since the dawn of humanity, stories have allowed each of us to be many.
Neil Gaiman
There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself. As if the Good Lord had nothing better to do than exist!
C.S. Lewis
Cookery means…English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness.
John Ruskin
I shouldn't believe anything I say, if I were you-and that includes what I just told you.
Jasper Fforde
A child cannot quarrel with its elders, as I had done, cannot give its furious feelings uncontrolled play, as I had given mine, without experiencing afterwards the pang of remorse and the chill of reaction. A ridge of lighted heath, alive, glancing, devouring, would have been a meet emblem of my mind when I accused and menaced Mrs. Reed: the same ridge, black and blasted after the flames are dead, would have represented as meetly my subsequent condition.
Charlotte Brontë
A man employs the full power of the state in his grief and ends up plunging his government into a fruitless and costly experiment. A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive - and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down. - Chapter 8
Malcolm Gladwell
A shade flickered to my left, an eerie shadow balanced even more precariously on the railing than I. Her plimsolls struggled to grip the same rail my fingers now held. I knew her face, just as I knew her death; I’d watched it often enough, those times I’d been unable to avoid crossing here. Nerys was always here, tied to the moment of her death, an echo, forever hurtling down into those waters, only to reappear an instant later, once more wavering on the rails.
Hazel Butler
Somehow everything I own smells of you, and for the tiniest moment it's all not true
Snow Patrol
Logic issues in tautologies, mathematics in identities, philosophy in definitions; all trivial, but all part of the vital work of clarifying and organising our thought.
Frank Plumpton Ramsey
It's like in the great stories Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn't want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end it's only a passing thing this shadow, even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines it'll shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something even if you were too small to understand why. But I think Mr. Frodo, I do understand, I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going because they were holding on to something.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn’t have to be like this.
Stephen Hawking
On the revelation that there are no gods or afterlife:-"I do not 'like' the truth any more than you Avil, or anyone. I wrestled with it for a long time, for a while I was distraught, desperate to find that my research had been wrong - the more I searched, the deeper I delved the more clear it became that the truth was what it is. After much reflection, I came to the conclusion that though accepting the truth is hard, moving on from that, it becomes clear that the important thing is to make the world we live in a better place. We get one life, it's our duty to make the most of it."~Brael Truthseeker of House KrazicDeathsworn Arc 2 : The Verkreath Horror
Martyn Stanley
In the forest you may find yourself lost, without companions. You may come to a river which is not on a map. You may lose sight of your quarry, and forget why you are there. You may meet a dwarf, or the living Christ, or an old enemy of yours; or a new enemy, one you do not know until you see his face appear between the rustling leaves, and see the glint of his dagger. You may find a woman asleep in a bower of leaves. For a moment, before you don’t recognise her, you will think she is someone you know.
Hilary Mantel
Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.
Jean Rhys
It was a bad night to be about with such a feeling in one's heart. The rain was cold, pitiless and increasing. A damp, keen wind blew down the cross streets leading from the river. The fumes of the gas works seemed to fall with the rain. The roadway was muddy; the pavement greasy; the lamps burned dimly; and that dreary district of London looked its very gloomiest and worst.("The Old House In Vauxhall Road")
Charlotte Riddell
Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.
Winston S. Churchill
Contentment is not a power that may be exercised naturally, but a science to be acquired gradually.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Much depends on asking the right question at the right time.
Arthur Koestler
War would end if the dead could return.
Stanley Baldwin
I shrug, trapped. I don’t want to lose him. In spite of all his demands, his need to control, his scary vices. I have never felt as alive as I do now. It’s a thrill to be sitting here beside him. He’s so unpredictable, sexy, smart, and funny. But hismoods… oh – and he wants to hurt me. He says he’ll think about my reservations, but it still scares me. I close my eyes. What can I say? Deep down I would just like more, more affection, more playful Christian, more… love.
E.L. James
In hatred as in love we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe we graft into our very soul.
Mary Renault
With this answer Elizabeth was forced to be content; but her own opinion continued the same, and she left disappointed and sorry. It was not in her nature, however, to increase her vexations by dwelling on them. She was confident of having performed her duty, and to fret over unavoidable evils, or augment them by anxiety, was no part of her disposition.
Jane Austen
If you are foe, we do not fear you. If you are friend, your foes will be taught the fear of us.
C.S. Lewis
You think that you're in control of your life.Well, think again.
Anthony T.Hincks
The world was created for Mankind, not for some of mankind.
Richard Llewellyn
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is - infinite.
William Blake
Don't reach for the halo too soon. You have plenty of time to enjoy yourself, even a little maliciously sometimes, before you settle down to being a saint.
Ellis Peters
Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think feel experience with a man they are in love with is still very small.
Doris Lessing
Parents are impelled by the profit motive - nothing more, nothing less. For their attentions, they expected, from me, the immense dividend of greatness.
Salman Rushdie
I thought if I told no one it might not be true.
Jean Rhys
Oh let me live my own! and die so too! ("To live and die is all I have to do:") Maintain a poet's dignity and ease, And see what friends, and read what books I please.
Alexander Pope
However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.
Iris Murdoch
When something is dirty you wash it. That's what my mum always said.Yet...When you have dirty money and you launder it, people jump up and down.I guess that's life.
Anthony T.Hincks
There's a large strain of irony in our human affairs... Interwoven with our affairs is this wonderful spirit of irony which prevents us from ever being utterly and irretrievably serious, from being unaware of the mysterious nature of our existence.
Malcolm Muggeridge
...even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
G.K. Chesterton
The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for.
C.S. Lewis
..deceivers must expect to be deceived.
Michael Frayn
It was one of those rare occasions when the true story is even more strange and exciting than the wild rumours.
J.K. Rowling
Fail not to call to mind, in the course of the twenty-fifth of this month, that the Divinest Heart that ever walked the earth was born on that day; and then smile and enjoy yourselves for the rest of it; for mirth is also of Heaven's making.
Leigh Hunt
Saint Laurent has excellent taste. The more he copies me, the better taste he displays. - Coco Chanel
Justine Picardie
A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under.
Jeanette Winterson
We, as women, have this slight flaw. Yes, admitting it, we are flawed with a faultless memory in regards to the good and bad in men...Stored within our memory banks is every loving gesture and sugar coated word, thoughtful moments, places, arguments, indiscretions, lies all catalogued, timed and dated...The list, for us, is endless...It is not our fault...You give us so much to remember...
Virginia Alison
Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face - the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man - all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us - we have died - what is there to be afraid of?It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I'm afraid of being rushed.
Christopher Isherwood
...this pattern of casual intrusion whereby women could be leered at, touched, harassed, and abused without a second though, was sexism: implicit, explicit, commonplace, and deep-rooted, pretty much everywhere you'd care to look.
Laura Bates