Quotes by British Authors - Page 58

After the war of course it will be like the start of spring, which is always so brilliantly sudden. The leaves will burst back onto the trees and close the gaps between the branches and we shall be startled - shan't we? - s we are startled at the end of every winter. We shall think: oh, I had quite forgotten there were three livable seasons.
Chris Cleave
I have been in love only once in my life. I suppose that makes me a romantic, in a sense. The idea that you have one true love, that no one else will compare after they have gone. It's a sweet idea, but the reality is terror itself. To be faced with all those lonely years after. To exist when the point of you has gone.
Matt Haig
what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto." (p123) Architecture of Happiness
Alain de Botton
...when women survive an awful marriage or love affair, and all that shit, they generally avoid another relationship for quite some time. With men, however, it is just the opposite; the moment they finish a catastrophe they start looking for another one. Men are incapable of being alone.
Elif Shafak
Sometimes it is no great shame to give in, even to despair, provided that it is just for a little while. Sometimes a little surrender is good for the soul.
Alexia Casale
Nothing in life is a foregone conclusion unless and until it is foregone and concluded
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Never tickle a sleeping dragon.
J.K. Rowling
A central part of the torturer’s craft is to make his job easier by stripping the victim of protective dignity.
Jonathan Glover
He smiled at me shyly and took a step closer. I froze, heart pounding, as he put one hand on my cheek and leaned toward me. I swallowed, gazing up at him with what I hoped was an expectant (and not alarmed) expression. He bent his head toward mine and...
J.M. Richards
At some point, you have to set down the past. At some point, you have to accept that everyone was doing their best. At some point, you have to gather yourself up, and go onward into your life.
Olivia Laing
Dimly--at first wary that it was merely a dislodged fragment of the dream--she remembered Resurgam. And then, slowly, events returned, not as a tidal wave, or even as as landslide, but as a slow, squelching slippage: a disembowelment of the past.
Alastair Reynolds
Is there wisdom in innocence? I think there is, but there is a cult now of drab men and women, for whom the world, and even life itself, is a kind of commodity. These critics, having eaten, now study their excrement to see what they consumed. On this they base certain conclusions. Their ignorance is uncompromising. Let us rather stand before the unknown, in very humble, quiet observance and wait while it reveals itself.
Phillip Mann
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Maybe I should drown myself before I freeze to death?
Mark A. Cooper
Anyway, lots of warrior tribes think that when they die, they go to a heavenly land somewhere," said the toad. "You know, where they can drink and fight and feast forever? So maybe this is theirs.""But this is a real place!""So? That's what they believe. Besides, they're only small. Maybe the universe is a bit crowded and they have to put heavens anywhere there's room? I'm a toad, so you'll appreciate that I'm having to guess a lot here.
Terry Pratchett
Woman's fatal weakness is to desire sympathy and comprehension.--"Wanda
Ouida
What dire offence from am'rous causes springs,What mighty contests rise from trivial things,...
Alexander Pope
We were a bit like bacon and eggs, where y'know, the chicken is involved, but the pig is really committed? I totally gave myself to it just as we promised, "for better or worse", and you didn't see it like that.
Dawn French
If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.
Winston S. Churchill
How can a man’s candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind—impetuous, arm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian.
George Eliot
The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.
Neil Gaiman
When trouble comes, close ranks
Jean Rhys
Your coffin reached the monstrous hole. And a part of me went down into the muddy earth with you and lay down next to you and died with you.
Rosamund Lupton
An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.
Kazuo Ishiguro
You are hard at work madam ," said the man near her.Yes," Answered Madam Defarge ; " I have a good deal to do."What do you make, Madam ?"Many things."For instance ---"For instance," returned Madam Defarge , composedly ,Shrouds."The man moved a little further away, as soon as he could, feeling it mightily close and oppressive .
Charles Dickens
Like sexual intercourse, death needs foreplay.
Martin Page
Words are what you fight with but what you fight about is whether or not you’re afraid of them.
David Mitchell
Twittering just seemed to be people telling other people what they were doing--getting in the shower, making coffee. Who on earth wanted to know these things?...Babble and twitter. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Kate Atkinson
The human interpretation of a disability is a primitive departmentalized view of ignorance.
Alastair Agutter
I suppose this was the first time I had ever felt an urge not to be. Never an urge to die, far less an urge to put an end to myself - simply an urge not to be. This disgusting, hostile and unlovely world was not made for me, nor I for it.
Stephen Fry
It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive, when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.
George Eliot
No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself.
Anthony Trollope
When the waiter brought the cheese-board, there was a large carrot carved in the shape of a mermaid sitting between the Dolcelatte and the Pecorino. Teo could have sworn that the carrot-mermaid flexed her tail and plunged her little hand inside a smelly Gorgonzola. 'Tyromancy, ye know,' remarked the mermaid. 'The Ancient Art of Divination by Cheese.' Then she pulled her tiny hand out and inspected the green cheese-mold on her tiny fingers. 'Lackaday!' she moaned. 'Stinking! It goes poorly for Venice and Teodora, it do!
Michelle Lovric
The present: It is interesting that the “NOW" is called "the present.” The present is the ultimate gift; it is the gift of truth and life. You are given the present every second, and you will receive it forever. The present is the only thing that exists, the only thing you are ever conscious of. Your life is a series of presents moving through time. The future does not exist until it becomes the present.Life is one perpetual present.Creation is happening now: Your body, mind, and the world around it are being created from microsecond to microsecond. Things may look the same, but they are not; everything is constantly changing and being recreated. Our life and our world is being created from moment to moment.Life and everything in it is always new.
Michael Smith
Enlightenment, and the death which comes before it, is the primary business of Varanasi.
Tahir Shah
Vegetarianism is harmless enough though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self-righteousness.
Sir Robert Hutchinson
You will find that reason, which always ought to direct mankind, seldom does; but that passions and weaknesses commonly usurp its seat, and rule in its stead.
Philip Dormer Stanhope
The nobility of England would have snored through the Sermon on the Mount. But you'll labor like scholars over a bulldog's pedigree.
Robert Bolt
Be honest with yourself, face your feelings and what they really mean, then you will be able to deal with them and move on.
Jay Woodman
His eyes lingered on me, and I wondered if that was a message. Was he danger? Was I supposed to run? I wasn’t afraid.
Abigail Haas
...And you, you better run because i'm going to destroy you for what you've taken from me.
Samantha Young
As with all travel, replacing familiar surroundings with the unknown fires an electric charge that awakens a sense of adventure.
Joe Cawley
His plan in your life means his work in your hands, and you can be sure it is work he has chosen and gifted you to do.
Jill Briscoe
I hate to be what is called a clever girl—there are too many of that sort now!
Thomas Hardy
Every man wherever he goes is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions which move with him like flies on a summer day.
Bertrand Russell
They say some couples are joined in heaven, and on Earth they look for their partner soul to be with.I knew I had found mine in her. And who can fight heaven?
Ruth Ahmed
Birds are sensitive to mispronunciation, even more sensitive than the French.
Alan Powers
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
Aldous Huxley
To the Buddhist or the eastern fatalist, existence is a science or a plan, which must end up in a certain way. But to a Christian, existence is a STORY, which may end up in any way. In a thrilling novel (that purely Christian product) the hero is not eaten by cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of the thrill that he MIGHT be eaten by cannibals. The hero must (so to speak) be an eatable hero. So Christian morals have always said to the man, not that he would lose his soul, but that he must take care that he didn't. In Christian morals, in short, it is wicked to call a man "damned": but it is strictly religious and philosophic to call him damnable.All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that? - that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking.
G.K. Chesterton
There are adventures of the spirit and one can travel in books and interest oneself in people and affairs. One need never be dull as long as one has friends to help, gardens to enjoy and books in the long winter evenings.
D.E. Stevenson
If then the question is put to me whether I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.
Thomas Henry Huxley
An eminent American is reported to have said to friends who wished to put him forward 'Gentlemen let there be no mistake. I should make a good president but a very bad candidate.'
James Bryce
...but fear of death gives us strength.
Neil Gaiman
In their huge bedroom that night, Tyr said to Thor, "I hope you know what you are doing.""Of course I do," said Thor. But he didn't. He was just doing whatever he felt like doing. That was what Thor did best.
Neil Gaiman
Scientific knowledge scarcely exists amongst the higher classes of society. The discussion in the Houses of Lords or of Commons, which arise on the occurrence of any subjects connected with science, sufficiently prove this fact…
Charles Babbage
In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.
Ian McEwan
If we are seeking to serve the God of truth then we should really welcome truth from whatever source it comes. We shouldn’t fear the truth. Some of it will be from science, obviously, but by no means all of it. It will sometimes by perplexing, how this bit of truth relates to that bit of truth; we know that within science itself often enough and we find it outside of science as well. The crucial thing is to be honest.
John Polkinghorne
My sister's bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by hand, gave her no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments, disgraces, fasts and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed this assurance; and to my communing so much with it, in a solitary and unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was morally timid and very sensitive.
Charles Dickens
Do I dream you? Or you dream me? Or does someone, something bigger than all' - her hands swept the vast constellations above them - 'this beauteous calamity, dream everything we see and more?
David Hewson
He showed videotape of himself committing acts of self-violence and informing news crews that he had been assaulted by a marauding mob of irate art historians.
Johnny Rich