Quotes by British Authors - Page 43

Sir, — Whether women are the equals of men has been endlessly debated; whether they have souls has been a moot point; but can it be too much to ask [for a definitive acknowledgement that at least they are animals?… Many hon. members may object to the proposed Bill enacting that, in statutes respecting the suffrage, 'wherever words occur which import the masculine gender they shall be held to include women;' but could any object to the insertion of a clause in another Act that 'whenever the word "animal" occur it shall be held to include women?' Suffer me, thorough your columns, to appeal to our 650 [parliamentary] representatives, and ask — Is there not one among you then who will introduce such a motion? There would then be at least an equal interdict on wanton barbarity to cat, dog, or woman… Yours respectfully, AN EARNEST ENGLISHWOMAN
Joanna Bourke
Unni will come, if not today, then tomorrow. Today is nearly gone, but other todays stir fecund in the word tomorrow, many other todays when this one has lapsed from existence. And because I think of Unni, invoking his name in this for ever recurrent today, already he is here for me." - The Mountain is Young
Han Suyin
He had a notebook. He took notes in it. It was always useful. And them Sybil, gods bless her, had brought him this fifteen-function imp which did so many other things, although as far as he could see at least ten of its functions consisted of apologizing for its inefficiency in the other five.
Terry Pratchett
The process of applying Mindfulness Burnout Prevention (MBP) in the workplace or any environment has a much more far-reaching effect than simply accessing equanimity throughout the vicissitudes of life. Continuous learning helps us to stay youthful, sharpen our mental faculties and wire new neural connections in our brain (making us better equipped to accomplish); it is also a sign of humility.
Christopher Dines
Life is so full of rough edges - small tasks and expectations that scratch you bloody and remind you that you're naked and alone.
Alexis Hall
I think it is important for our society to wonder why it has lately become so ready to accept that human woe can be cured or soothed by chemicals. These chemicals do not alter or reform the ills of our civilisation. They adapt the human being to them.
Peter Hitchens
Your average witch is not, by nature, a social animal as far as other witches are concerned. There's a conflict of dominant personalities. There's a group of ringleaders without a ring. There's the basic unwritten rule of witchcraft, which is 'Don't do what you will, do what I say.' The natural size of a coven is one. Witches only get together when they can't avoid it.
Terry Pratchett
What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book?
Julian Barnes
Ryan had read half his book, listened to all his music, eaten two packets of biscuits and an apple, played seventy-two games of Donkey Kong, completing all the levels, and counted every Italian sports car they’d passed in the last hundred miles. Twenty-four hours of groggy sticky travel, twenty-four hours stuck in this overheated tin can on wheels, and he finally knew what it was like to be utterly and unendingly bored. He propped an elbow on the car window frame and stuck his arm out of the opening. Combing his hand through the slipstream, he let the cool air tickle his fingers as he watched the countryside stream past.
Peter Bunzl
All my life flashed before my eyes.… It was really boring.
Chicken Run (2000)
As long as the forest stood the Tchetchens were unconquerable... and it is literally the fact that they were beaten in the long run not by the sword but by the axe.
John F. Baddeley
but good girls dont do that, dont make a fuss, dont upset parents. and i was a good girl so i curled up on the floor and sobbed silently instead
Laura Jarratt
It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven...
Virginia Woolf
But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.
D.H. Lawrence
Man of an hard heart! Hear me, Proud, Stern, and Cruel! You could have saved me; you could have restored me to happiness and virtue, but would not! You are the destroyer of my Soul; You are my Murderer, and on you fall the curse of my death and my unborn Infant’s! Insolent in your yet-unshaken virtue, you disdained the prayers of a Penitent; But God will show mercy, though you show none. And where is the merit of your boasted virtue? What temptations have you vanquished? Coward! you have fled from it, not opposed seduction. But the day of Trial will arrive! Oh! then when you yield to impetuous passions! when you feel that Man is weak, and born to err; When shuddering you look back upon your crimes, and solicit with terror the mercy of your God, Oh! in that fearful moment think upon me! Think upon your Cruelty! Think upon Agnes, and despair of pardon!
Matthew Lewis
There is already enough chattering nonsense on the ground. Do we really need aviaries in pressurised tin cans at 30,000 feet as well ?
Alex Morritt
our triumphant age of plenty is riddled with darker feelings of doubt, cynicism, distrust, boredom and a strange kind of emptiness
Samuel Johnson
To die hating them, that was freedom
George Orwell
If Blake thought she was going to be some meek, mealy-mouthedpushover grateful for his dick and his non-apologies, he obviously didn’t know what it took to make a room full of tenth graders pay attention.
Rebecca Brooks
You are blinded,” said Dumbledore, his voice rising now, the aura of power around him palpable, his eyes blazing once more, “by the love of the office you hold, Cornelius! You place too much importance, and you always have done, on the so-called purity of blood! You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow up to be!
J.K. Rowling
(on learning Westlife had beaten Oasis, U2 and The Beatles in an album chart battle in November 2006): There is no God.
Noel Gallagher
Plutarch taught me high thoughts; he elevated me above the wretched sphere of my own reflections, to admire and love the heroes of past ages. Many things I read surpassed my understanding and experience. I had a very confused knowledge of kingdoms, wide extents of country, mighty rivers, and boundless seas. This book developed new and mightier scenes of action. I read of men concerned in public affairs, governing or massacring their species. I felt the greatest ardour for virtue rise within me, and abhorrence for vice.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Now here comes in the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age. We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things. Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision. It should mean that we are slow but sure in bringing justice and mercy among men: it does mean that we are very swift in doubting the desirability of justice and mercy: a wild page from any Prussian sophist makes men doubt it. Progress should mean that we are always walking towards the New Jerusalem. It does mean that the New Jerusalem is always walking away from us. We are not altering the real to suit the ideal. We are altering the ideal: it is easier.
G.K. Chesterton
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting. (in "The Sporting Spirit", Tribune, GB, London, December 1945)
George Orwell
We seek no treasure, we seek no territorial gains, we seek only the right of man to be free; we seek his rights to worship his god, to lead his life in his own way, secure from persecution. As the humble labourer returned from his work when the day is don, and sees the smoke curling upwards from his cottage home in the serene evening sky, we wish him to know that no rat-a-tat of the secret police upon his door will disturb his leisure or interrupt his rest.
Winston S. Churchill
It is because baptism is a real insertion of human beings into the ascended manhood of Christ that the Church is Christ's own body, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bones.
E.L. Mascall
I said to my mother, Henry VII is interesting. No he's not, my mother said.
Hilary Mantel
You are never too old to set a new goal or to dream a new dream.
C.S. Lewis
Everyone should keep a dream journal, did you know that?
Sophie Kinsella
Although Poets are vain and ambitious, their vanity and ambition are of the purest kind attainable in this world. They are ambitious to be accepted for what they altimately are as revealed in their poetry.
Stephen Spender
You are put in school to be trained to become exactly what they want you to be: not them, anything but them. They live on a golden island and have the key to the only bridge. Your parents are not millionaires, so it doesn't matter how intelligent you are, you aren't invited to their party. That’s the great shame. The idiots have the gold, and the poor die to give it to them. So you better start to laugh, because this world is one big joke written by the few, at the expense of the masses. Look around you, that feeling your life isn't going anywhere? That’s the feeling that makes you part of the masses.
Craig Stone
I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory.
Oliver Sacks
I couldn't claim that I have never felt the urge to explore evil but when you descend into hell you have to be very careful.
Kathleen Raine
...the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.
G.K. Chesterton
It’s not always best to know what’s going on beneath the surface.
Fennel Hudson
Butterfly KissesAged imperfectionsstitched upon my faceyears and years of wisdomearned by His holy grace.Quiet solitude in a humble homeall the family scattered nowlike nomads do they roam.Then a giftsent from abovea memorypure and tangiblewrapped in innocence andunquestioning love.A butterfly kisslands gently upon my cheekfrom an unseen childa kiss most sweet.Heaven grants graceand tears followas youth revisitsthis empty hollow.
Muse
He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to depart.
Salman Rushdie
End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path. One that we all must take.
J.R.R. Tolkien
It's no use filling your pocket with money if you have got a hole in the corner.
George Eliot
You yourself are your own barrier – rise from within it.
Idries Shah
To succeed in the digital realm, technology has to provide a strong disruptive element right from the start. If things cannot be done differently , a transition to digital is not going to be compelling enough for a wide enough adoption to create sustainability.
David Amerland
There should be no boundary to human endeavor.
Stephen Hawking
I have felt that odd whirr of wings in the head.
Virginia Woolf
Perhaps his tragedy is that he is the only normal writer left on earth -- and it is this that adds to his isolation and so too his so sense of guilt.
Malcolm Lowry
Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.
P.D. James
He once told me, Instead of scoring thirty goals a season, why don't you score twenty-five and help someone else to score fifteen? That way the team's ten goals better off.
David Peace
Take these broken wings and learn to fly.
Paul McCartney
There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer—committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.
George Eliot
Do you want to stick needles in the living or scalpels in the dead?
Alice Broadway
If I had to choose a companion to be at the return of eternal darkness with, I'd choose you.'No offence, but I'd choose someone massive and really good at magic.
J.K. Rowling
It is no accident that Sufis find that they can connect most constructively with people who are well integrated into the world, as well as having higher aims, and that those who adopt a sensible attitude towards society and life as generally known can usually absorb Sufi teachings very well indeed
Idries Shah
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on where you were sitting) Libby let off the smelliest, loudest fart known to humanity. It came out of her bum-oley with such force that she lifted off my knee - like a hovercraft. Even she looked surprised by what had come out of her.
Louise Rennison
in a constitutionally ordered state, where laws are derived from broad principles of right and wrong and where those principles are enshrined and protected by agreed upon procedures and practices, it can never be in the long-term interest of the state or its citizens to flout those procedures at home or associate too closely overseas with the enemies of your founding ideals.
Tony Judt
Anger and worry are the enemies of clear thought.
Madeleine Brent
Doubt not your purpose nor your strength.
Joe Dever
The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written., 8 September 1935)
Dorothy L. Sayers
For a once renowned woman who loved telling tales of dodging bullets, wielding grenades and subverting dogs trained to kill, Christine's story is, surprisingly, little known today.
Clare Mulley
I'm just a wretched half-blood girl caught in a storm."Akil tasted his wine and smiled. "Muse, you are the storm.
Pippa DaCosta
If you want romance, fuck a journalist.
W.H. Auden
He says every story has at least some truth in it, even if most are made up.
Darren Shan