Quotes by British Authors - Page 57

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?
Russell Hoban
...Anand, look at the back of my hands. No hair. The sign of an advanced race, boy. And look at yours. No hair either. But you never know. With some of your mother's bad blood flowing in your veins you could wake up one morning and find yourself hairy like a monkey
V.S. Naipaul
First, the wind would rumble in the distance like an approaching river, then he would see grass bend, pressed by a great invisible hand. The dull rumble would rise in pitch to a swishing, lashing exultation, causing stalks to lie flat against the ground while the tougher branches of shrubs held themselves up and shrieked their defiance in the gusts. Then the first drops, cold and heavy, would plummet from the sky and burst on the ground.
Jonathan Renshaw
Meeting him was a miracle. He was a precious gift sent from God from heaven above!
Lily Amis
When an artist friend of mine explained she was working her way up the creative ladder, I asked if she would kindly paint the front of my house on the way up.
Benny Bellamacina
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
Thomas Henry Huxley
She said that that was the disadvantage of bringing creatures into the house: one grew used to them, and then, one had the upset of their loss.
Sarah Waters
Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerales.
Samuel Johnson
We are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later.
Alan Moore
Film-making has become a kind of hysterical pregnancy.
Richard Lester
When you share my heart. You share my love.
Anthony T.Hincks
Great services are not canceled by one act or by one single error.
Benjamin Disraeli
The path towards peace is not for the righteous, the ethical, the active and the compassionate to shit on the malicious, the complacent, the violent and the ignorant. The path towards peace is to be peaceful.
Ilyas Kassam
And it's hard to hate someone once you understand them.
Lucy Christopher
Controlling what you are exposed to remains positive is paramount.
Steven Redhead
Temujin nodded. He had every intention to do his bit in the battle, like his mother.
Bryn Hammond
I am moonlighting for the Buddha.
John Burdett
She must not give herself up as hopeless, as many a plain girl does, scrape her hair back into an unsymmetrical bundle, have her clothes "cut out with a hatchet and put on with a pitchfork," ill-use her skin with coarse soaps and neglect her figure. Only a beauty may dare all this, and even the loveliest cannot afford it.
Mrs. C.E. Humphry
The first time I ever felt the necessity or inevitableness of verse was in the desire to reproduce the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of western Canada.
T.E. Hulme
Without death there is little innovation. Extinction - death of a species - is part and parcel of evolutionary change. In the absence of this kind of extinction new developments would not prosper. In our own history, periods when ideas have been perpetuated by dogma, preventing the replacement of old by new ideas, have also been times of stultifying stagnation. The Dark Ages in western society were the most static, least innovative of times. So the fact that trilobites were replaced by batches of successive species through their long history was a testimony to their evolutionary vigour.
Richard Fortey
I am Mae Waylander from Halts-Walden, daughter of Robert Waylander, a good man who lost his life saving hers.' I point to Ellen. 'And I am the girl who has saved your brother's life on numerous occasions in the Waerg Woods - who fought off a wood nymph, a psychotic pre-adolescent prophet, and a determined flock of killer birds - only to have your father shoot an arrow in my side because I wouldn't let him kill my stag.
Sarah Dalton
Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this [atomic] energy in a form which could be employed, the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dream of scientific fiction, but the remotest possibility must always be considered that the energy once liberated will be completely uncontrollable and by its intense violence detonate all neighbouring substances. In this event, the whole of the hydrogen on earth might be transformed at once and the success of the experiment published at large to the universe as a new star.
Francis William Aston
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Bertrand Russell
You could have done something with newspapers. We didn't do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newspapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indecent assault, and no Government was wise enough to stop us having them that way. But something might have been done with newspapers, if we'd been wise enough.
Nevil Shute
Do not consider me now as an elegant female intending to plague you, but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart.
Jane Austen
Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts.
Henry Sweet
Why shine, when there's nothing to shine on?
Kevin Brooks
What was wrong with
Rhiannon Thomas
...every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures.
George Orwell
Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the download with the breeze in your face.
Julian Barnes
In India an explanation is often more confusing than what prompted it.
Tahir Shah
I certainly should have,' he agrees, smiling and thinking what an absurd and universally-accepted bit of nonsense it is, that your best friends must necessarily be the ones who best understand you. As if there weren't far too much understanding in the world already; above all, that understanding between lovers, celebrated in song and story, which is actually such torture that no two of them can bear it without frequent separations or fights.
Christopher Isherwood
Our attitude to these criticisms must be determined by our whole moral and emotional reaction to the future of international relations and the Peace of the World.
John Maynard Keynes
If we lived for ever, what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love death - not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. . . . Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him. Behind the coffins and the skeletons that stay the vulgar mind lies something so immense that all that is great in us responds to it. Men of the world may recoil from the charnel-house that they will one day enter, but Love knows better. Death is his foe, but his peer, and in their age-long struggle the thews of Love have been strengthened, and his vision cleared, until there is no one who can stand against him.
E.M. Forster
I find it disturbing that one anthropologist's readings of transcripts are being listened to more seriously than 40 senior health service clinicians.[Referring to Jean La Fontaine's 1994 research paper for the DOH]
Valerie Sinason
I'm nothing but envious that you've been happily married for two years. Try hauling your cookies on a new blind date every Friday, only to have your, already extremely low, expectations dashed as you meet men who look like Quasimodo and have Homer Simpson's IQ. 
Jane Green
I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest.
Siegfried Sassoon
We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I’ll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off.
Mark Lawrence
Before I got married I had six theories about raising children; now, I have six children and no theories.
John Wilmot
We humans who art on EarthHumanity is specialOur kingdom has comeDo what we innately know to be rightOn earth, because that's all there isShare the bread we haveTry not to screw upWhen others screw up, understandWe can't have everything that tempts usDeliver ourselves from evilBecause this is it, the Earth,The power to do right and the glory to come if we do is oursNow and forever,Hu-man.
Marcus Brigstocke
A smile is on everyone's lips.
Anthony T.Hincks
He was just about to turn the light off, when there was a heavy, “Tappety, tap, tappety, tap,” on the door. It was the kind of loud sound that could only be made with a hoof. A moose’s hoof, that is." - Snugs The Snow Bear
Suzy Davies
There are two ways to find a lost city. The first is to rely on luck alone, the second is to control all the information.
Tahir Shah
Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.
Charles Dickens
No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.
Charles Dickens
Blessed is the man who having nothing to say abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
George Eliot
The hands of fate keep time on a heart-shaped clock.
Darren Shan
All the supernatural yarns need a realist explanation and a supernatural one.
David Mitchell
I thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart’s blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.
W Somerset Maugham
We are not going to reduce energy capture unless catastrophe forces us to—which means that the only way to avoid running out of resources, poisoning the planet, or both, will be by tapping into renewable, clean power.
Ian Morris
He would insult the Universe. That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually, personally, one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit his teeth over) in alphabetical order.
Douglas Adams
The chances of finding out what’s really going on in the universe are so remote, the only thing to do is hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied.
Douglas Adams
I want to kiss you. I want to so badly I can barely think of anything else. When you enter a room it’s my only thought, and it torments me night and day.
Charlotte Stein
I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.
George Eliot
Was Mrs. Wilcox one of the unsatisfactory people- there are many of them- who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke our interests and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling around them. Then they withdraw. When physical passion is involved, there is a definite name for such behaviour- flirting- and if carried far enough, it is punishable by law. But no law- not public opinion, even- punishes those who coquette with friendship, though the dull ache that they inflict, the sense of misdirected effort and exhaustion, may be as intolerable. Was she one of these?
E.M. Forster
Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the truth. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away...and forgiveness descends.
Julian Barnes
Education is not a product but a relationship and a process; a relationship between student and lecturer, and process by which knowledge transforms the individual.
Kenan Malik
But those who seek only reassurance from life will never be more than tourists—seeing everything and trying to possess what can only be felt.Beauty is the shadow of imperfection.
Simon Van Booy
In those days a boy on the classical side officially did almost nothing but classics. I think this was wise; the greatest service we can to education today is to teach few subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.
C.S. Lewis
In the grounds of the château was a churchsaid to date from the year 1000, and he went to look at it, but he had never really understood what people saw in oldchurches.
Ken Follett