Quotes by British Authors - Page 52

...this is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash.
Hilary Mantel
The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be, and deserves fuller investigation.
Virginia Woolf
To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye to restore it and to render it more fit for its prime function of looking forward.
Margaret Fairless Barber
What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall; conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon self-restraint, patience, and decision. And the institution of the family, and the emotions that arise therein, the fierce jealousy, the tenderness for offspring, parental self-devotion, all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers of the young.
H.G.Wells
Yeah, Quirrell was a great teacher. There was just that minor drawback of him having Lord Voldemort sticking out of the back of his head!
J.K. Rowling
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.""Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
Arthur C. Clarke
In politics guts is all.
Barbara Castle
[Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner belonged to] that small army of brave people who made it their duty, without thought of themselves or hope or expectation of reward, to strive for unpopular causes.[Chapman Cohen on the death of noted freethinker and peace advocate Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner]
Chapman Cohen
I should and can play better. That is going to be the challenge for me.
Andrew Strauss
In every pang that rends the heart The Man of Sorrows had a part.
Michael Bruce
But then, he thought, most politicians are small and shabby, the sort of people who have been bullied at school.That's why they become politicians.
Anthony Horowitz
The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of. Our attention would have been on God.
C.S. Lewis
So long as there is death there will be sorrow, and so long as there is sorrow it can be no part of the duty of human beings to increase its amount, in spite of the fact that a few rare spirits know how to transmute it.
Bertrand Russell
No worthy goal should come easily, he told himself. Suffering created value.
Conn Iggulden
The modern State, whether in a totalitarian or a democratic country, has far too much power, and we are probably right to fear it.
Anthony Burgess
Properly speaking, altruism is an absurdity. Women are self-sacrificing in direct proportion to their incapacity to offer anything but this sacrifice. They sacrifice what they never had: a self. The cry of the deserted woman, 'What have I done to deserve this?' reveals at once the false emotional economy that she has been following.
Germaine Greer
The Forest that had been about her all her life, certain as a mountain, was made ashes. The high gable that had stood for two hundred years fallen in ruin. Throvenland was torn apart like smoke on the wind. Nowhere would be safe, ever again.
Joe Abercrombie
One week after New Year's Day in 2006, I was on a flight to Aceh…As we walked down the steps on to the tarmac, the air felt humid and tropical, familiar and almost Balinese. It felt like going home. As the heavy air embraced me, my first inclination was to relax into it, but yet this was not home and my entire body remained on edge.
Alexandra Harris
Ain't no deserving, or otherwise,' Silo said, his bass voice rolling out from deep in his chest. 'There's what is, and what ain't, and there's what you do about it. Regret's just a way to make you feel okay when you're not making amends. A man can waste a life with regrets.
Chris Wooding
I was too much taken up with another interest to care; I felt beneath my feet the threshold of the strange door, in my life, which had suddenly been thrown open and out of which came an air of a keenness I had never breathed and of a taste stronger than wine. I had heard all my days of apparitions, but it was a different thing to have seen one and to know that I should in all likelihood see it familiarly, as I might say, again. I was on the lookout for it as a pilot for the flash of a revolving light and ready to generalise on the sinister subject, to answer for it to all and sundry that ghosts were much less alarming and much more amusing than was commonly supposed. There's no doubt that I was much uplifted. I couldn't get over the distinction conferred on me, the exception - in the way of mystic enlargement of vision - made in my favour.("Sir Edmund Orme")
Henry James
Life is not about finding your true self, but creating who you wish to be.
Steven Redhead
The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat.
Douglas Adams
There are savages without God in any proper sense of the word, but none without ghosts.
Thomas Henry Huxley
The scientific definition of intelligence is the capacity to overcome obstacles
Mark Colenutt
So long as I am acting from duty and conviction, I am indifferent to taunts and jeers. I think they will probably do me more good than harm.
Winston S. Churchill
Let weakness learn meekness.
A. C. Swinburne
It was probably my mother's screaming that frightened the cat. It's just a guess. No one knows for sure why a cat fell from a ten-storey building onto my head.
J.E. Fison
Don't let the cares of the day interfere with living the life that you desire.
Steven Redhead
Marriage is the deep deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue.
Mrs. Patrick Campbell
My mother describes me as 'a real hero . . . just like your grandfather'. But I do not know what to do with this accolade for her son, other than let her have moment, or it helps her back here.
Jake Wood
To be a writer - write! To be an author - publish! To be a bestselling author - never stop writing!
David Maxwell
Saying of the ProphetLoveDo you think you love your Creator? Love your fellow-creature first.
Idries Shah
Life is a dance more than it is an assertion and there is more health in dynamism or fluidity than there is rigidity and stasis.
Oli Anderson
As has been long observed, men are people, but women are women.
Cordelia Fine
Ideas are interesting, but people are vastly more so.
Sarah Bakewell
You'd love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts.
China Miéville
It's hard to explain how an infatuation actually starts. It's a state so all-encompassing that it's almost impossible to remember how it felt to live inside your own head before it began. Everything that precedes it becomes a pathway that was always leading there. Time before is valuable only as a resource with which to create a persona, to bind the object of the infatuation closer. I had given my (partially fabricated) past life to Mizuko to make a story that in the end never got told. Or not by her. It is also hard to explain the intensity of the infatuation itself. There is rarely an explanation that seems reasonable to anyone but you. Unless you're part of a cult or viral phenomenon, so that when you weep outside the object of your infatuation's hotel room, you do so in the company of millions.
Olivia Sudjic
Love hurts. Love is fragile. Love comes like a breath of magic, then departs leaving us feeling empty, alone, a paper cup blowing on the wind.
Chloe Thurlow
All that is gold does not glitter,Not all those who wander are lost;The old that is strong does not wither,Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But there are a number of occasions when it suits him to pose as a sort of Candide: naive, and ill-prepared for and easily unhorsed by events. No doubt this pose costs him something in point of self-esteem. It is a pose, furthermore, which he often adopts at precisely the time when the record shows him to be knowledgeable, and when knowledge or foreknowledge would also confront him with charges of responsibility or complicity.
Christopher Hitchens
I -- I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.' But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And, by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died only yesterday -- nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time -- his death and her sorrow -- I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together -- I heard them together.
Joseph Conrad
We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.
William Golding
Unreal friendship may turn to real But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended
T.S Eliot
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.
Virginia Woolf
I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time.
Anna Freud
sometimes you don't need a goal in life, you don't need to know the big picture. you just need to know what you're going to do next!
Sophie Kinsella
He who wishes to fulfill his mission in the world must be a man of one idea one great overmastering purpose overshadowing all his aims and guiding and controlling his entire life.
Julius Bate
If we could change just one thing in time, what would we change?WARS, so that we could learn by our mistakes?FAMINE, so that we could feed the world's populace?DISEASE, so that we would never have any sick?POLLUTION, so that we would live in a pristine environment?GREED, so that we all learn that life isn't all about money?OLD AGE, so that we could all live forever?LOVE, so that we could all live in peace and harmony?BEING ALONE, so that we would never-ever be alone throughout life?MAN'S APATHY, so that he would truly understand what it's all about?The choice is hard, because no matter where we start, we will always leave out someone and something.
Anthony T.Hincks
Alcoholism is above all a disease of denial.
David Stafford
Do you mind telling me what you pray?""I pray for the wisdom to find meaning in the . . . her death.""And have you?""No, Mrs. Aislabie, I find no meaning. But perhaps that's because I'm too small to see a plan so large I rarely get anything but a brief glimpse of it.
Katharine McMahon
Laugh and the world laughs with you snore and you sleep alone.
Katharine Whitehorn
By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very well. He has done it. Perhaps he can ride. But there is a way of looking at a halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a kick.
Joseph Conrad
Odd that a festival to celebrate the most austere of births should end up being all about conspicuous consumption.
Jeanette Winterson
You don’t live in luxury! You are relegated to sleep in the little store room behind the kitchen with the cockroaches and rats and are at the mercy of Mrs. Gupta,’ Reena was indignant. ‘It’s five-star accommodation compared to a mud hut.
Renita D'Silva
Anyone who is desperate or alone will agree there is comfort in routine.
Simon Van Booy
In more than half of American homes where there are both children and firearms, according to a 2000 study, the weapons are in an unlocked place, and in more than 40 percent of homes, guns without a trigger lock are in an unlocked place. Almost three-quarters of children under the age of ten who live in homes with guns say they know where the guns are. A 2005 study showed that more than 1.69 million children and youth under eighteen live in homes with weapons that are loaded and unlocked. According to a Department of Education study, 65% of school shootings between 1974 and 2000 were carried out with a gun from the attacker's home or the home of a relative. And the laws, it seems, are effective. One study indicated that in the twelve states where child-access prevention laws were on the books for at least one year, unintentional gun deaths fell by 23 percent.
Gary Younge
The happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so.
William Ralph Inge
Take the straight path, even if it is long: marry no widow, even if she is a houri.
Idries Shah
The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one's own suffering: the identification of art is the sharing in the suffering of another.
W.H. Auden
Instead I’ve built a house made of lies that have come crashing down around me.
Anna Bell