Quotes by British Authors - Page 44

Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
C.S. Lewis
The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.
Terry Pratchett
The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.
Herbert Spencer
Yes, well, rein it in, Prom King. British people have been successfully repressing our emotions since before your country was even a thing.
Holly Bourne
He places one of his long fingers over my lips, silencing me. I can smell my own musky arousal on his digit and I have the strongest urge to take it in my mouth and suck it as I did earlier during my audition. He says nothing but drills into me with those dazzling eyes. I have the strangest feeling that he is looking into my soul.“Let us see where the wave takes us. I know I am going to enjoy the ride and I can guarantee our mutual satisfaction. Maybe we’ll be washed to shore, I just don’t know yet, but you can be certain of one thing…”I gaze up at him from his chest, breathing in the scent of his masculinity as I do.“What’s that, sir?” I ask, my voice betraying the curiosity I feel.He looks down at me for a long, hard moment before he answers.“I won’t let you drown.
Felicity Brandon
Age may catch up with you, just never let it over take you.
Benny Bellamacina
Financial crashes happen precisely because the people who remember the last one have either died or retired and thus are no longer around, with memories and character formed by that previous experience, to warn people not to be irresponsible.
N.T. Wright
What do we live for if not to make life less difficult for each other?
George Eliot
Is 'fat' really the worst thing a human being can be? Is 'fat' worse than 'vindictive', 'jealous', 'shallow', 'vain', 'boring' or 'cruel'? Not to me.
J.K. Rowling
There's no greater show on earth than observing human nature
Benny Bellamacina
The destination of the journey could not be altered, only the manner in which one approached it - whether one chose to walk erect or to be dragged complaining through the dust.
Robert Harris
First and foremost, if we maintain healthy emotional boundaries and direct love and kindness inwards, we are taking care of ourselves and secondly we are giving a subliminal message to others about how we wish to be treated. People tend to subconsciously treat us how we treat ourselves.
Christopher Dines
I'll walk where my own nature would be leading. It vexes me to choose another guide.
Charlotte Brontë
But they turned out to be prescriptions for medicines, and not for the common cold: opium, lavender oil, belladonna, orange rind, chloral hydrate, strychnine, potassium bromide. Such sedatives and stimulants were common remedies at that time for epilepsy.
Catherine Bailey
That is why it could happen anywhere, given the right ingredients: particular people in government, competing with others- or with each other- over natural and wealth-creating resources.
Clea Koff
You're staring," Lana said."Yes. I am. I'm a teenage boy. Beautiful girls in wet underwear have a tendency to cause staring in teenage boys.
Michael Grant
Often she felt as though she had been picked up and turned about like a kaleidoscope, that all her complacent assumptions had been shaken up and reassembled in a different order
Judith Lennox
If someone treads on my hand accidentally, while trying to help me, the pain may be no less acute than if he treads on it in contemptuous disregard of my existence or with a malevolent wish to injure me. But I shall generally feel in the second case a kind and degree of resentment that I shall not feel in the first. If someone's actions help me to some benefit I desire, then I am benefited in any case; but if he intended them so to benefit me because of his general goodwill towards me, I shall reasonably feel a gratitude which I should not feel at all if the benefit was an accidental consequence unintended or even regretted by him, of some plan of action with a different aim.
Peter Frederick Strawson
Don't overestimate everyone else and underestimate yourself
Tanya Burr
It is in fact the height of selfishness to merely consume what others create and to retreat into a shell of limited goals and immediate pleasures.
Robert Greene
Do not wait for ideal circumstances nor for the best opportunities they will never come.
Janet Erskine Stuart
Georgie, I've got it," she said. "I've guessed what it means."Now though Georgie was devoted to his Lucia, he was just as devoted to inductive reasoning, and Daisy Quantock was, with the exception of himself, far the most powerful logician in the place."What is it, then?" he asked."Stupid of me not to have thought of it at once," said Daisy. "Why, don't you see? Pepino is Auntie's heir, for she was unmarried, and he's the only nephew, and probably he has been left piles and piles. So naturally they say it's a terrible blow. Wouldn't do to be exultant. They must say it's a terrible blow, to show they don't care about the money. The more they're left, the sadder it is. So natural. I blame myself for not having thought of it at once...
E.F. Benson
Ultimately, we are all products of the experiences we have and the decisions we make as children, and it remains a peculiar detail of human condition that something as precious as the future is entrusted to us when we possess so little foresight. Perhaps that's what makes hindsight so intriguing. When you're young the future is a blank canvas, but looking back you are always able to see the big picture.
Simon Pegg
After reading Burgum, [Patricia Highsmith] wrote in her cahier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, 'a young man whose authority is art and therefore himself,' who when he murders, 'feels no guilt or even fear when he thinks of legal retribution'. The more she read of Kafka the more she felt afraid as she came to realise, 'I am so similar to him.
Andrew Wilson
It was his home now. But it could not be his home till he had gone from it and returned to it. Now he was the Prodigal Son.
G.K. Chesterton
There’s no point in believing in things that exist.
Terry Pratchett
Court life for a queen of France at that time was, however, stultifyingly routine. Eleanor found that she was expected to be no more than a decorative asset to her husband, the mother of his heirs and the arbiter of good taste and modesty.
Alison Weir
In ourselves our safety must be sought. By our own right hand it must be wrought.
William Wordsworth
Let the tears which fell, and the broken words which were exchanged in the long close embrace between the orphans, be sacred. A father, sister, and mother, were gained, and lost, in that one moment. Joy and grief were mingled in the cup; but there were no bitter tears: for even grief arose so softened, and clothed in such sweet and tender recollections, that it became a solemn pleasure, and lost all character of pain.
Charles Dickens
Discontented women are like pressure cookers. The steam rises and one day they just reach boiling point.
Bella Pollen
A head full of stars, just not in constellation yet.
Elias Canetti
...there began to come to her a first dim realization of God's humility. Rejected by the proud in His own right by what humble means He chose to succor them; through the spirit of a child, a poor gypsy or an old man, by a song perhaps, or even it might be by the fall of a leaf or the scent of a flower. For His infinite and humble patience nothing was too small to advance His purpose of salvation and eternity was not too long for its accomplishment.
Elizabeth Goudge
Do not let us speak of darker days let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days: these are great days - the greatest days our country has ever lived.
Winston Churchill
In the constant pursuit of perfection, junk food will always be a rather painful stumbling block
C.S. Woolley
If you care for money too much, it is only the money you see, everything else is in shadow.
Agatha Christie
For almost a generation, psychologists around the world have been engaged in a spirited debate over a question that most of us would consider to have been settled years ago. The question is this: is there such a thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is yes. Not every hockey player born in January ends up playing at the professional level. Only some do – the innately talented ones. Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger role preparation seems to play.
Malcolm Gladwell
I put it to the great man [Hitchcock], the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that's... the stuff of Buchloe, dystopia, depression. We'll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless unive3rse, but only our toes.
David Mitchell
Where do you think they've gone?' he said.'Where what?' said Lady Ramkin, temporarily halted.'The dragons. You know. Errol and his wi - female.''Oh, somewhere isolated and rocky, I should imagine,' said Lady Ramkin. 'Favourite country for dragons.''But it - she's a magical animal,' said Vimes. 'What'll happen when the magic goes away?'Lady Ramkin gave him a shy smile.'Most people seem to manage,' she said.She reached across the table and touched his hand.
Terry Pratchett
Never trust a high altitude astronomer.
Steven Magee
Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.
T.S Eliot
Mental illnesses grab you by the leg, screaming, and chow you down whole.They make you selfish. They make you irrational. They make you irrational. They make you self-absorbed. They make you needy. They make you cancel plans last minute. They make you not very fun to spend time with. They make you exhausting to be near.
Holly Bourne
To hold the courage to let another witness our tears, while refuting fears invitation to shield face, is to grant the most privileged of all loving intimacies to them.
Ged Thompson Liverpool Poet
When today fails to offer the justification for hope, tomorrow becomes the only grail worth pursuing.
Christopher Bigsby
If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships.
Bertrand Russell
I think there is a natural maternal instinct that comes out, which creates a much more nurturing environment. I've been accused of misogyny in the past, for relationship stuff that’s been twisted in the press and for bullshit that gets said, and that gets to me because I've always had a huge amount of respect for women, and I think that all the women who I've surrounded myself with in both a professional and personal capacity would agree with that.
Zayn Malik
For a minute, the fantasy frightened her, but ultimately, this fear saved her from feeling alone.
Stephen Grosz
Law of Suspects. Suspects are those: who have in any way aided tyranny (royal tyranny, Brissotin tyranny...); who cannot show that they have performed their civic duties; who do not starve, and yet have no visible means of support; who have been refused certificates of citizenship by their Sections; who have been removed from public office by the Convention or its representatives; who belong to an aristocratic family, and have not given proof of constant and extraordinary revolutionary fervor; or who have emigrated.
Hilary Mantel
I got my dad a great father's Day present. He called to say: 'Ach. Zis present is so good I now think it vas almost vorth having children.
Johann Hari
Family. Friendship. Loyalty. These things have been my guiding stars, my light in these dark times.
John Gwynne
I think about the story I always tell her – of the kind lady who gave her to us. I suppose that must be how she imagines her father – as a kind man who gave her away too, as if she were a gift. Only now he wants her back.
Sanjida Kay
The stars and planets don’t disappear just because it’s daytime.
Tami Egonu
I am that woman...A woman with compassion and empathyAn alluring woman whose beauty emanates from the insideA woman of courage and perseveranceA woman gifted with many talentsA woman who has so much to give and know where she is goingA woman who is everything but lost without you.
Julie Cox
I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.
Niall Ferguson
It is presumptuous to draw conclusions about a person from what one has heard
Jude Morgan
she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.
Jane Austen
You know you've checked into Heartbreak Hotel for real when you feel less desirable than uncooked fish.
Plum Sykes
But he was absolutely alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met.
John Fowles
It is always the simple that produces the marvelous.
Amelia Barr
Things haven't always been this bad, therefore they won't always be this bad.
Carrie Hope Fletcher
For long the two enemies looked at one another, Hook shuddering slightly, and Peter with the strange smile upon his face."So, Pan," said Hook at last, "this is all your doing.""Ay, James Hook," came the stern answer, "it is all my doing.""Proud and insolent youth," said Hook, "prepare to meet thy doom.""Dark and sinister man,“For long the two enemies looked at one another, Hook shuddering slightly, and Peter with the strange smile upon his face."Dark and sinister man," Peter answered, "have at thee.
J.M. Barrie