Quotes by British Authors - Page 42

The Apparent is the Bridge to the Real
Idries Shah
A man may follow vanity as truly in the counting-house as in the theatre. If he be spending his life in amassing wealth, he passes his days in a vain show.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
It's a sad fact that most people can't even spot a story when they see one. Most people don't know that stories aren't confined by the covers of books or by half-hour slots on TV. The world is made of stories. The world is driven by stories. When a sunburned-friend tells you about their holiday, it's not a straight list of everything that happened to them - it's a story, an anecdote with a plot, a beginning, a middle and an end. Each one of their holiday snaps is a story too. When you're making a decision, and you imagine the possible outcomes - what are you doing if not telling yourself a story? History is a story. Society is a story. Countries are stories. Your plans are stories. Your desires are stories. Your own memories are stories - narratives selected, trimmed and packaged by the hidden machinery in your mind. Human beings are story engines. We have to be - to understand stories is to understand the world.
Steven Hall
Hello, Harry" said George, beaming at him. "We thought we heard your dulcet tones.""You don't want to bottle up your anger like that, Harry, let it all out," said Fred, also beaming. "There might be a couple of people fifty miles away who didn't hear you.
J.K. Rowling
The attempt to interpret human behavior in terms of models derived from the natural sciences eventually destroys personal responsibility.
Lesslie Newbigin
Happiness is the cure—a cheerful mind the preventive: cultivate both.
Charlotte Brontë
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
Arthur C. Clarke
A bed is a place where so much of life is played out - births and deaths and passions and dreaming - all the most fundamental moments of our fragile human existence.
Tracy Rees
What was it with gay men and art photos of nude male torsos?
David Pratt
If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.
Rachel Cusk
The beauty of having faith, is that no matter what the time of day, whether it be day or night I know that someone is always there with me to give me comfort.It doesn't matter whether it is Buddha, God or Allah because whoever it is, is special to each of us. And that is the beauty of having faith.
Anthony T.Hincks
In business, if you want to make money, you have to spend money. If you want to have a result, you have to make an investment.
Sophie Kinsella
Yeah,” said Harry. “No more pretending we care what happens when Jupiter and Uranus get too friendly .
J.K. Rowling
...we can love someone without understanding that person.
Dorothy Rowe
the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was locatedwill betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them,and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what wereally desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols,breaking the hearts of their worshippers.For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
C.S. Lewis
During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trip was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out how to break free. But trying to escape would have been instant suicide.
Tahir Shah
..."vers libre," (free verse) or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture.
G.K. Chesterton
If we do not touch the heart, we will soon weary the ear.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Through mastering the means of perception, the promise of who you are in physical form is opened with an increasing opportunity for fulfilment.
Georgi Y. Johnson
Virtue is what happens when someone has made a thousand small choices requiring effort and concentration to do something which is good and right, but which doesn't come naturally. And then, on the thousand and first time, when it really matters, they find that they do what's required automatically. Virtue is what happens when wise and courageous choices become second nature.
N.T. Wright
There is no doubt a new dress is a help under all circumstances.
Noel Streatfeild
When someone we love is snatched from us, it often feels very hard to make plans.Sometimes people feel like they have lost faith in the future, or they become superstitious.
Jojo Moyes
Our vision of the heavenly realm...can sustain us through the most difficult of days and circumstances. It births hope amidst hardship and nurtures faith amidst opposition.
David Timms
She was a Phantom of delight When first she gleamed upon my sight A lovely Apparition sent To be a moment's ornament.
William Wordsworth
Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure
Jane Austen
And don't go whining to God about it. It was pretty clear that there was no God up there, no kindly old gent looking down, keeping score in a notebook. You did good, you did bad, it didn't make any difference, did it? This one's going to heaven, this one's going to hell, this one's going to Disneyland.No. God wouldn't have let any of this shit happen. If you were going to believe in anything, then believe in the devil. He was much more real than God. Up there causing mischief. Laughing at the chaos he'd created.
Charlie Higson
I started crying when the group [therapy] was over because the last thing we did upset me - we all held a piece of the same cloth, leaned back and supported each other's weight. I couldn't do it. I bent my legs and elbows and stood very firm, yet . . .I needed to feel supported, as i do in life, but i can't let myself be, and i pretend not to need that support.
Carol Lee
When I can't ride anymore, I shall keep horses as long as I can hobble around with a bucket and a wheelbarrow. When I can't hobble, I shall roll my wheelchair out to the fence of the field where my horses graze and watch them. Whether by wheelbarrow or wheelchair, I will do likewise to keep alive-as long as I can do as best I can-my connection with horses.
Monica Dickens
When you break rules, break 'em good and hard
Terry Pratchett
He had conquered murder only to be faced with war. There were no laws for that.
T.H. White
Passion and prejudice govern the world only under the name of reason.
John Wesley
Look at him now, poor fellow. That's what a dose of reality does for you...Never touch the stuff myself, you understand. Find it gets in the way of the hallucinations.
Alan Moore
I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves.
Jeanette Winterson
A man without enemies is a man without character.
David Gandy
The sound a box of Lego makes is the noise of a child's mind working, looking for the right piece. Shake it, and it's almost creativity in aural form.
Grayson Perry
I was thinking about all these things and more, but I wasn't really thinking about them at all. They were just there, floating around in the back of my mind, thinking about themselves. What I was really thinking about, of course, was Lucas.
Kevin Brooks
They know they dare not have their stuff stripped down to plain words. These Bishops and parsons with their beloved Christianity are like a man who has poisoned his wife and says her body's too sacred for a post-mortem. Nowadays, by the light we have, any ecclesiastic must be born blind or an intellectual rascal. Don't tell me. The world's had this apostolic succession of oily old humbugs from early Egypt onwards, trying to come it over people. Antiquity's no excuse. A sham is no better for being six thousand years stale. Christianity's no more use to us now thanthe Pyramids.
H.G.Wells
The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has shown that the same neural mechanisms mediate the fear response in all sorts of animals, from pigeons and rats to cats and humans. The idea that other animals experience similar emotions to us is not anthropomorphism: it is based on sound scientific evidence.
Dylan Evans
Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly coloured civilizations of the past, he would have had a definite status, his rank and his income would have corresponded. But in his day the angel of Democracy had arisen, enshadowing the classes with leathern wings, and proclaiming, "All men are equal--all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas...
E.M. Forster
Do not weep. Being is enough. There, that is all. I am done...
Alan Moore
It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump.
David Ormsby Gore
The best way to treat obstacles is to use them as stepping-stones. Laugh at them, tread on them, and let them lead you to something better.
Enid Blyton
The hyping of disabled athletes into superhuman status by Channel 4 only deepens our wounds, inflicted by continual assaults on our daily lives. It truly seems that the only acceptable disabled person is a Paralympian – and then only for a few weeks.
Penny Pepper
A man who aspires to rise above the mediocre, to be something more than the ordinary, surely deserves admiration, even if he fails and loses a fortune on account of his ambitions(...)if one has failed only where others have not had the courage or will to try, there is consolation - indeed, deep satisfaction - to be gained from his observation when looking back over one's life.#Page no.134
Kazuo Ishiguro
If we are continuing to attract partners that are emotionally unavailable, then it’s essential that we observe our own addictive patterns rather than focusing on theirs.
Christopher Dines
The problem with beauty is that it's like being born rich and getting poorer.
Joan Collins
Endurance is nobler than strength and patience than beauty.
John Ruskin
In post-Nietzschean spirit, the West appears to be busily undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical foundations with an unholy mélange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism.
Terry Eagleton
Sometimes people say that we're living in the future, and time's up for science fiction, but I think that never will be, because science fiction really isn't about the future. It's about change and present-day concerns
Stephen Baxter
Luck is what a capricious man believes in.
Benjamin Disraeli
We routinely and rightly condemn the terrorism that kills civilians in the name of God but we cannot claim the high moral ground if we dismiss the suffering and death of the many thousands of civilians who die in our wars as ‘collateral damage’. Ancient religious mythologies helped people to face up to the dilemma of state violence, but our current nationalist ideologies seem by contrast to promote a retreat into denial or hardening of our hearts. Nothing shows this more clearly than a remark of Madeleine Albright when she was still Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations. Later she retracted it, but among people around the world it has never been forgotten. In 1996, in CBS’s 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl asked her whether the cost of international sanctions against Iraq was justified: 'We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean that’s more children than died in Hiroshima … Is the price worth it?’ 'I think this is a very hard choice,’ Albright replied 'but the price, we think the price is worth it.
Karen Armstrong
...a more open and honest appraisal of the true nature of Silicon Valley and its opportunities as well as the many problems.
David Welch
And when we describe it as I shall do, it becomes plain that imagination is a specifically human gift. To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man.
Jacob Bronowski
I’m not afraid of anything and I will not fight.
Matthew De Abaitua
A friendship with the Lord will sustain you in difficult times.
Elizabeth George
Heads up lads!” someone shouted. “Here we go!”More missiles, this time not just bottles, but coins as well. And then from the other side of the cordon, a roar went up. Bellowing across the road toward them. Billy watched as the Manchester lads poured forward, desperately trying to force a way through the massed ranks of the police only to be driven back by batons and gloved fists. Another salvo of bottles came flying across, trying to provoke a reaction. But the West Ham lads merely stood and laughed. They didn’t need to respond. The point had been made, the result earned. Billy was happy. Very happy.
Dougie Brimson
This Christian claim [of universal validity] is naturally offensive to the adherents of every other religious system. It is almost as offensive to modern man, brought up in the atmosphere of relativism, in which tolerance is regarded almost as the highest of the virtues. But we must not suppose that this claim to universal validity is something that can quietly be removed from the Gospel without changing it into something entirely different from what it is... Jesus' life, his method, and his message do not make sense, unless they are interpreted in the light of his own conviction that he was in fact the final and decisive word of God to men... For the human sickness there is one specific remedy, and this is it. There is no other.
Stephen Neill
He says, "You know I love you. Still. Forever".
Sally Green
Stephen had spared no expense in making himself more unhappy, his own position as a rejected lover clearer.
Patrick O'Brian