Quotes by British Authors - Page 45

The cocktail party - as the name itself indicates - was originally invented by dogs. They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the rank of formal ceremonies.
Laurence Durrell
It's oneiric, a beautiful, formless sequence of silver nitrate shadows, and when it ends I wonder what happened, and then I begin to rebuild it in my head
Neil Gaiman
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
Karl R. Popper
The practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness or virtue—involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows... It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence... Laws and moral precepts are directed to the end of curbing the cosmic process.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Your husband certainly love money,' she said. 'That is no lie Money have pretty face for everybody, but for that man money pretty like pretty self, he can't see nothing else.
Jean Rhys
The NSA is looking for terrorists. They’re not getting psychosexual pleasure out of their schadenfreude about you.”—
Jon Ronson
I'm a man of few words, most of them end in off!
Kensington Gore
… when we are talking about 'Christians' and 'Moslems' we must first make sure that we are talking about people who have an idea, which should be more or less correct, as to what the other is supposed to believe and what he is expected to do as a consequence of that belief.
Idries Shah
It's just odd being a guest at the wedding. When you dreamed about it for so long, even if you we're a different person, and it was years ago. Sounds so stupid. I was stupid.
Harriet Evans
We need to stop using fossil fuels as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the two leading replacements of wind and solar have emerging health and environmental problems.
Steven Magee
It is only goodness which gives extra...
Arthur Conan Doyle
Every carbon atom in every living thing on the planet was produced in the heart of a dying star.
Brian Cox
Be one of the crowd? It went against everything a wizard stood for, and a wizard would not stand for anything if he could sit down for it, but even sitting down, you had to stand out.
Terry Pratchett
Love is waiting, just around the corner, over the hill...
Virginia Alison
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is – I repeat it – a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.
Charlotte Brontë
Evil things are easy things: for they are natural to our fallen nature. Right things are rare flowers that need cultivation.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom...
Alexander McCall Smith
Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.
George Orwell
Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark ... In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and abso
Germaine Greer
To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.
George Eliot
Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.
Neil Gaiman
Globally, democracies have also acted in ways that suggest an outright renunciation of their principles at home.
Nayef Al-Rodhan
It's all right, Tessa, you can go. We love you. You can go now.''Why are you saying that?''She might need permission to die, Cal.''I don't want her to. She doesn't have my permission.
Jenny Downham
People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
Rebecca West
The heart of [J.G.] Ballard's vision [is] the object at odds with its function and abandoned by its time.
Tacita Dean
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues....
George Orwell
As it stands, the diagnostic criteria for depression are so loose that two people with absolutely no symptoms in common can both end up with the same unitary diagnosis of depression. For this reason especially, the concept of depression as a mental disorder has been charged with being little more than a socially constructed dustbin for all manner of human suffering.
Neel Burton
No doubt there are some who, when confronted with a line of mathematical symbols, however simply presented, can only see the face of a stern parent or teacher who tried to force into them a non-comprehending parrot-like apparent competence--a duty and a duty alone--and no hint of magic or beauty of the subject might be allowed to come through.
Roger Penrose
... The form of leadership must be the focus of constant reappraisal. Weber states, for example: 'Each new fact may necessitate the re-adjustment of the relations between end and indispensable means, between desired goals and unavoidable subsidiary consequences.' This process of re-adjustment is ultimately without resolution, for the political and ethical value-spheres are not only in constant opposition but also in permanent flux. It is the task of the politician to negotiate this value conflict and to be decisive as to the value to be pursued and the means to be employed.
Nicholas Gane
No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
Your vile and bitter diatribes only serve to show how vile and bitter you must be.
C.S. Woolley
Pessimism is a funny thing, isn't it? Madison thought as she looked at Judith's furrowed face. I like a bit of pessimism as much as the next man, but when I'm bombarded with it I suddenly became an eternal optimist.
Melissa Kite
Our feelings of anxiety are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss, and so need to be listened to and patiently interpreted -- processes which are unlikely to be completed when we have to hand, in the computer, one of the most powerful tools of distraction ever invented. The entire internet is in a sense pornographic, a deliverer of a constant excitement that we have no innate capacity to resist, a seducer that leads us down paths that for the most part do nothing to answer our real needs.
Alain de Botton
When in love or inspired,An eternal kiss from the divineAwaits us all.
Scott Hastie
Only you, Will Traynor, could tell a woman how to wear a bloody dress.
Jojo Moyes
I was thinking of Cambridge, and then I got a bit homesick for a minute, 'cause I never been this far away from home before. But the I remember you're here, and now I'm not homesick no more.
J.L. Merrow
You haven't lost Iraki, you know. I don't know if it helps to say that. I lost a friend once myself, and I know how it goes.'He'll find his way inside you, and you'll carry him onward. Behind your heartbeat, you'll hear another one, faint and out of step. People will say you are speaking his opinions, or your hair has turned like his.'There are no more facts about him, that part is over. Now is the time for essential things. You'll see visions of him wherever you go. You'll see his eyes so moist, his intentions so blinding, you'll think he is more alive than you. You will look around and wonder if it was you who died.'Gradually you'll grow older than him, and love him as your son. 'In the future, you'll live astride the line separating life from death. You'll become experienced in the wisdom of grief. You won't wait until people die to grieve for them. You'll give them their grief while they are still alive, for then judgement falls away, and there remains only the miracle of being.'
Rana Dasgupta
We're each other's questions, aren't we? The question that never gets an answer.
Patrick Ness
Having something is not always better than not having it.
Beth Kempton
A life of nothing's nothing worth From that first nothing ere his birth To that last nothing under earth.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
Where are Haldad my father, and Haldad my brother? If the king of Doriath fears a friendship between Haleth and those who have devoured her kin, then the ways of the Eldar are strange to Men.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Whatever you are by nature keep to it never desert your own line of talent. Be what nature intended you for and you will succeed be anything else and you will be ten thousand times worse than nothing.
Sydney Smith
A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.
Alain de Botton
Emerson lifts his head. His eyes are two dark pools of desire, a clouded night’s sky. He catches his breath a moment, unsteady, and then drops a kiss on my lips. Sweet. Almost tender. I barely have time to take it in before he grabs my shoulder and spins me around, pushing me so my bare chest is slammed up into the wall, my cheek pressed against the cold concrete. I gasp, my heart skipping with the thrill. I can feel him up against me, a solid wall of muscle trapping me in place, the hard ridge of him pressed against the small of my back. I can’t move, or see the expression on his face, only hear the hoarse groan Emerson sounds as he twists a handful of my hair and yanks it to one side, kissing a searing trail along the curve of my neck.I whimper, bound and powerless against him, and oh God, loving every minute of it.
Melody Grace
Keep striving, for God gives His hardest battles to His strongest soldiers.
Habeeb Akande
Poor Uther. He believed that virtues are handed down through a man's loins! What nonsense! A child is like a calf; if the thing is born crippled you knock it smartly on the skull and serve the cow again. That's why the Gods made it such a pleasure to engender children, because so many of the little brutes have to be replaced. There's not much pleasure in the process for women, of course, but someone has to suffer andthank the Gods it's them and not us.
Bernard Cornwell
Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.
Anthony Powell
Pink colors my world!
Anthony T.Hincks
For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.
C.S. Lewis
[T]hat mutual jealousy, that intolerantly keen edge of criticism, that irrational hunger for a beautiful perfection, that life and wisdom do presently and most mercifully dull.
H.G.Wells
Iron deficiency can lead to a wardrobe full of crumpled clothes
Benny Bellamacina
Satan will always find you something to do when you ought to be occupied about that [regular, prayerful Bible study], if it is only arranging a window blind.
Hudson Taylor
work hard. play hard. be kind.
Harry Styles
Here lies the body of Colonel Cornell’s. The rest of the fellow, I fancy, in hell is.
Mark Hodder
We are but phantoms, and the phantoms of phantoms, desires like cloud-shadows and wills of straw that eddy in the wind; the days pass, use and wont carry us through as a train carries the shadow of its lights - so be it! But one thing is real and certain, one thing is no dream-stuff, but eternal and enduring. It is the centre of my life, and all other things about it are subordinate or altogether vain. I loved her, that woman of a dream. And she and I are dead together!
H.G.Wells
And then, when there is nothing else between us but love, we can begin to find a way to truly be together.
S.J. Watson
So this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.
Elizabeth Goudge
We might not know we are seeking people who best enrich our lives, but somehow on a deep subconscious level we absolutely are. Whether the bond is temporary or permanent, whether it succeeds or fails, fate is simply a configuration of choices that combine with others to shape the relationships that surround us. We cannot choose our family, but we can choose our friends, and we sometimes, before we even meet them.
Simon Pegg
And now it appeared that there was a mysterious Queen clothed by rumour with dread and wonderful attributes, and commonly known by the impersonal but, to my mind, rather awesome title of She.
H. Rider Haggard
You will serve. Either someone else's vision and purpose, or your own.
Alan Froggatt