Quotes by British Authors - Page 56

The brains of members of the Press departments of motion-picture studios resemble soup at a cheap restaurant. It is wiser not to stir them.
P.G. Wodehouse
There's something romantic about it, of course, in the way only other people's lives can be.
Scarlett Thomas
All true Northerners should bare steel to their enemies, and stand true to the course they have chosen, for when the heart is divided by fear then the battle is already lost.
Steven Poore
If I could not be persuaded into doing what I thought wrong, I will never be tricked into it.
Jane Austen
If you are looking for a job that may make you sick, I can recommend working at a high powered solar photovoltaic (PV) utility power plant.
Steven Magee
It didn’t take tragedy or war to derail a man. It took only a memory.
Ali Shaw
It was while bent over, trying to breathe through the pain of bruised ribs, with the sensation of spit running down his cheek that Jason decided he was going to die.
Paul W.S. Bowler
Suddenly finding it hard to breathe. It wasn’t because his grip was too tight, mind you. It was just the sudden proximity. And he smelled so good, the scent of fresh coffee and rain clinging to his skin as he leaned in.
J.M. Richards
Human history seems to me to be one long story of people sweeping down—or up, I suppose—replacing other people in the process.
Alexander McCall Smith
The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus insensibly are we, as years close around us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrow.
Walter Savage Landor
... everyone regrets something, but you can't change the past. You've got to let go and make new memories until the old ones fade enough that they don't hold any power over you.
Olivia Arran
One may escape from the prisons of experience, ideology or philosophy, but it is impossible to escape from the reality of one's innermost self. Understanding this, I had freed myself from nostalgia, and having done so, what remained was to free myself from the prospect of the future.("The Tower")
Mark Samuels
In moments of great uncertainty on my travels, I have always felt that something is protecting me, that I will come to no harm.
Tahir Shah
If I stood you in front of a man, pressed the cold metal of a gun into your palm and told you to squeeze the trigger, would you do it?''No, sir.''Are you sure?''Of course, sir. No ways!''What if I then told you we'd gone back in time and his name was Adolf Hitler? Would you do it then? Would you?
Jason Wallace
Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.
Anthony Burgess
It is better to travel than to arrive. Better, by far, to find your own way than to have someone else choose it for you -- don't you think?
Lesley Howarth
Had they known the difficulties that were to befall them, they might not have been so rash in falling in love. But perhaps there was no way of avoiding it. Fate, karma, the will of the Gods… call it what you like, it was surely meant to happen. After all, in all the vastness of the Universe they had been thrown together.
Isabel Greenberg
All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on the black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates,. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel....Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay.
Diane Setterfield
Jealousy's eyes are green.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if they had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought --to call it by a prouder name than it deserved-- had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until --you know the little tug -- the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating.
Virginia Woolf
We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all of the power we need inside ourselves already.
J.K. Rowling
There is much to be said for failure. It is more interesting than success.
Max Beerbohm
[Walking] is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things. It is the one way of freedom. If you go to a place on anything but your own feet you are taken there too fast, and miss a thousand delicate joys that were waiting for you by the wayside.
Elizabeth von Arnim
Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?""That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.""I don't much care where –""Then it doesn't matter which way you go.
Lewis Carroll
All sorts of spiritual gifts come through privations if they are accepted.
Janet Erskine Stuart
An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face.
George Orwell
It is another unsolved mystery in a world full of unsolved mysteries.Now stand up and walk out the way you came, and the moment that fresh air caresses your face, you will realize that that is what makes the world so beautiful. All those unsolved mysteries. And you won't ever want to interfere with that beauty again.
Matt Haig
We are governed not by armies but by ideas.
Mona Caird
Whatever else in the Bible catches your eye, do not let it distract you from Him.
J.I. Packer
American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.
W Somerset Maugham
Learn to think continentally.
Alexander Hamilton
And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell no man, for a secret that no one knows but you is the most powerful secret there can ever be.
Neil Gaiman
I'm not going to be hardened by these people, to these things, I'm not going to let them destroy my feelings or my emotions.
Pete Doherty
Who's got the last laugh now?If you will pardon the expression.
Anthony T.Hincks
There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can't stand Picasso those who can't stand Raphael and those who've never heard of either of them.
John White
I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it.Jean-Paul Sartre, Words
Carole Seymour-Jones
The New Testament is the very best book that ever was or ever will be known in the world.
Charles Dickens
oh love, doesn’t the fact that the world is so big,laid out like ripe fruitmake you want to stay?
Andrew McMillan
When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.
G.K. Chesterton
I count my blessings as follows:1) I'm alive.2) Beauty is in the world all around me.3) I share my love with everyone and not just a select few.4) I give thanks to whoever made and created us no matter which religion it my be.5) I never stop smiling, laughing and being happy.6) I try and help those who need it the most.7) I try not to hate, injure or kill anything or anyone.8) I share what I have even if I don't have a much.9) I write and share my thoughts so that it may bring comfort to other people.10) I never ask for anything for me from anyone.11) I follow the other 10 blessings.
Anthony T.Hincks
It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.
J.R.R. Tolkien
History is littered with the wars everybody knew could never happen.
Enoch Powell
Nearly' only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.
Neil Gaiman
What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning!
Cory Doctorow
An infinitely unpleasant fraction of a second is a small price to pay for the opportunity to stride across eternity.
R. Curtis Venture
The Nazis may write like schoolboys, but they're capable of anything. That's just why they're so dangerous. People laugh at them, right up to the last moment...
Christopher Isherwood
He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.
George Eliot
Contrary to what you have been told, metrosexuality is not about flip-flops and facials, ‘man-bags’ or ‘manscara’. Or about men becoming ‘girlie’ or ‘gay’. It’s about men becoming everything. To themselves. In much the way that women have been for some time. It’s the end of the sexual division of bathroom and bedroom labour. It’s the end of sexuality as we’ve known it.
Mark Simpson
The real offence as she ultimately perceived was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his - attached to his own like a small garden plot to a deer park.
Henry James
There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison
Jane Austen
We'll teach it that the humblest insect measuring out its miserable days by the pug-wuggery and skull duggery of the old Slug of Time is worth far more than this defecating bubble!
John Cowper Powys
On a harsh expedition, there's no space for anyone who does not intend to finish.
Tahir Shah
I do not know where the error lies. I do not pretend to set people right, but I do see they are often wrong.
Jane Austen
That orbed maiden with white fire laden Whom mortals call the moon.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
where actual evidence had been a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom* *Made it upand extrapolated from associated sources** **had read a lot of stuff that other people had made up, too.
Terry Pratchett
-No, not it...I mean...what makes things break up like they do?-Piggy rubbed his glasses slowly and thought. When he understood how Ralph had gone towards accepting him he flushed pinkly with pride.-I donnot, Ralph. I expect it's him.--Jack?--Jack- A taboo was evolving round that word too.
William Golding
American houses...' she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. 'They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean?
Zadie Smith
He was simply and staunchly true to his duty alike in the large case and in the small. So all true souls ever are. So every true soul ever was, ever is, and ever will be. There is nothing little to the really great in spirit.
Charles Dickens
She was surprised to discover that Paola was thirty-four. 'What have you been doing all this time?' she wanted to ask, but instead she said, 'What brought you to England?''There was a man,' Paola said. 'When the man left, I decided to stay.''An Italian man?'Barely perceptibly, Paola nodded.'He had a job here. He is an -' She paused. '- aeronautical engineer. After a year he had to go home.'Solly was seething with questions. It was strange: in Paola's presence she felt herself to be a failure, yet a part of her believed that a woman of thirty-four with no husband or children was the greatest failure of all. It was a kind of unstoppable need for resolution that grew from her like ivy over the prospect of freedom and tried to strangle it. She couldn't bear the idea of loose threads, of open spaces, of stories without ends. Did Paola not want to get married? Did she not want children, and a house of her own? She sat there in her white sweater, delicately eating. Solly, a sack stuffed with children, a woman who had spent and spent her life until there was none left, sat opposite her, impatient for more.
Rachel Cusk
Allegorical stories of saints battling with giants, monsters and demons may be interpreted as symbolizing the Christian's fight against paganism. At Bwlch Rhiwfelen (Denbigh) St Collen fought and killed a cannibal giantess, afterwards washing away the blood-stains in a well later known as Ffynnon Gollen. In Ireland, the tales of saints slaying giant serpents may have the same meaning; alternatively they (or some of them) may refer to early sightings of genuine water monsters. St Barry banished a serpent from a mountain into Lough Lagan (Roscommon), and a holy well sprang up where the saint's knee touched the ground.
Colin Bord