Quotes by British Authors - Page 6

Through music we may wander where we will in time, and find friends in every century.
Helen Thompson
Creative people depend on the generosity and graces of strangers.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
What are the years from twenty to forty? Fettered and bound by personal and emotional relationships. That's bound to be. That's living. But later there's a new stage. You can think, observe life, discover something about other people and the truth about yourself. Life becomes real--significant. You see it as a whole. Not just one scene--the scene you, as an actor, are playing. No man or woman is actually himself (or herself) till after forty-five. That's when individuality has a chance.
Agatha Christie
Learning is not filling up a box but seeing and imagining what we can create with it.
Jill Telford
I think a strong claim can be made that the process of scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art. This is best seen in the theoretical aspects of Physical Science. The mathematical theorist builds up on certain assumptions and according to well understood logical rules, step by step, a stately edifice, while his imaginative power brings out clearly the hidden relations between its parts. A well constructed theory is in some respects undoubtedly an artistic production. A fine example is the famous Kinetic Theory of Maxwell. ... The theory of relativity by Einstein, quite apart from any question of its validity, cannot but be regarded as a magnificent work of art.
Ernest Rutherford
One grey cloak is much like another, just as all cats are grey in the dark.
Andrew Taylor
If I had my life over again[, ] I'd have thought more about words. And thought about them earlier.
Enid Bagnold
But he looks no more than thirty. He's very handsome-- so much you will admit; nor will you deny that he is very wealthy and very powerful; the greatest nobleman in Brittany. He will make me a great lady.''God made you that, Aline.
Rafael Sabatini
Women are silenced by both the invisibility and the acceptability of the problem.
Laura Bates
Style is something peculiar to one person it expresses one personality and one only it cannot be shared.
Freya Stark
The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.
Alain de Botton
All God's giants have been weak men who did great things for God because they reackoned on God being with them.
James Hudson Taylor
Smoke curls among the ruins of East London. Many of the buildings have burned to the ground or split like exploded rocks. Small lights bloom like a sea of candles. Even this rain will never put them all out.
John Owen Theobald
Villon our sad bad glad mad brother's name.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
The father of confederation is deadlock.
Goldwin Smith
There was little Hiroko Tanaka hadn’t learnt about the shameful resilience of the human heart.
Kamila Shamsie
Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,One task more declin'd, one more foot-path ontrod,One more devil's triumph and sorrow for angels,One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!
Robert Browning
A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time then I know it can't be much good.
T.S Eliot
Suffering is the fire by which love is tested.
Jocelyn Murray
For at eight o’clock the world came to an end. It was reading time. The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours.
Diane Setterfield
It's no use talking about the 'Doomsday Clock' when it has already chimed. But, alas, the chimes fell on deaf ears.
Anthony T.Hincks
The greatest act of domestic terrorism in the history of the USA is currently in process and the culprits are the energy, electrical, electronics and wireless radiation industries.
Steven Magee
As soon as I laid eyes on him, it all came flooding back, all the reasons why I loved him, all the reasons why I hadn't been able to let him go.
Lindsey Kelk
Sorry Johnny." "Sorry for what " "For shouting at you. It's just that when I think about the future I keep panicking. It's like falling from the top of the stairs in the dark not knowing where I'll end up." He put his arm around my shoulders. "I understand. Life is precarious for most of us but more so for you. What you forget is what most of your friends see in you." "What's that " "The ability to beat the odds..." "And fall on my feet " He nodded. "I just hope that lasts." "It will Catkin it will. It wouldn't dare fail you.
Julia Golding
He tip-toed past the double bed that had been placed in a corner - wrought-iron headboard, embroidered pillows, amulets against the evil-eye and a satiny, cobalt-blue bedspread. Blue was Iskender's favourite colour. It was the colour for boys, which meant the sky was a boy. So were the rivers and lakes. And the oceans, though he had yet to see one.
Elif Shafak
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
Winston Churchill
Books do not per­ish like hu­mankind. Of course we com­mon­ly see them bro­ken in the hab­er­dash­er's shop when on­ly a few months be­fore they lay bound on the sta­tion­er's stall; these are not true works, but mere trash and new­fan­gle­ness for the vul­gar. There are thou­sands of such gew­gaws and toys which peo­ple have in their cham­bers, or which they keep up­on their shelves, be­liev­ing that they are pre­cious things, when they are the mere pass­ing fol­lies of the pass­ing time and of no more val­ue than pa­pers gath­ered up from some dunghill or raked by chance out of the ken­nel. True books are filled with the pow­er of the un­der­stand­ing which is the in­her­itance of the ages: you may take up a book in time, but you read it in eter­ni­ty.
Peter Ackroyd
Having a large world of his own in his own head and heart, he tolerated confinement to a small, still corner of the real world very patiently.
Charlotte Brontë
Ruby clapped her hands in glee and gave a comedic wiggle of her head, Bollywood style.I know the song now, can even sing it, but back then all I heard was the verdant Punjabi, the striking primary colours of the five rivers, the intricate history of a complex land.
Ruth Ahmed
Now this is the Law of the Jungle -- as old and as true as the sky;And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back --For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
Rudyard Kipling
As soon as reality breaks, as soon as we're separated from the phsical world, the cracks begin to appear in our minds. And through them seeps the madness that has always been there, flowing into your skull like a liquid nightmare ..
Alexander Gordon Smith
To know your ruling passion, examine your castles in the air.
Richard Whately
God’s purposes are achieved through the whole of your life, not in fragments of a moment, a day, or a year.
Elizabeth George
The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.
C.S. Lewis
I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones.
Joseph Conrad
Men like snails lose their usefulness when they lose direction and begin to bend.
Walter Savage Landor
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
Winston Churchill
What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves?
G.K. Chesterton
Drama is based on the Mistake.
W.H. Auden
Yo Mama’s so ugly, when she joined an ugly contest, they said, “Sorry, no professionals.
Oliver Oliver Reed
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaCommunity: Irrationals unified by hope of the impossible.
Idries Shah
Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.
Virginia Woolf
Perhaps nothing is as simple as it looks. Perhaps everything has another layer, a hidden room that only reveals itself when you accidentally stumble across the secret door. Or perhaps I'm talking bollocks and it's time to go to bed.
Liz Kessler
The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide‟s reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by thePage | 49 .state which paid the coroner? And then, since you had been declared temporarily mad, your reasons for killing yourself were also assumed to be mad. So I doubt anyone paid much attention to Adrian‟s argument, with its references to philosophers ancient and modern, about the superiority of the intervening act over the unworthy passivity of merely letting life happen to you.
Julian Barnes
But the other Ministers considered that to employ a magician was one thing, novelists were quite another and they would not stoop to it.
Susanna Clarke
I fear I am beyond your comprehension. - Gandalf the White
J.R.R. Tolkien
Let us have wine and woman, mirth and laughter,Sermons and soda water the day after.Man, being reasonable, must get drunk;The best of life is but intoxication:Glory, the grape, love, gold, in these are sunkThe hopes of all men, and of every nation;Without their sap, how branchless were the trunkOf life's strange tree, so fruitful on occasion:But to return--Get very drunk; and whenYou wake with head-ache, you shall see what then.
George Gordon Byron
Laura smiled a little wanly in the twilight. "Far more afraid of flesh and blood than ghosts," she murmured.
Marie Belloc Lowndes
We must leave the discovery of this mystery, like all others, to time, and accident, and Heaven's pleasure.
Charles Dickens
The massive spread of corporate controlled humans across the face of the Earth would be regarded as a parasitic growth by nature.
Steven Magee
Madge: I don't know why I keep shouting at them.The Doctor: Because every time you see them happy you remember how sad they're going to be. And it breaks your heart. Because what's the point in them being happy now if they're going to be sad later. The answer is, of course, because they are going to be sad later.~ The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe
Steven Moffat
It's funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they're related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there's a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again.
Alan Moore
AFC Leopards were as thrilling a side as ever took the pitch and they dominated East African football in the eighties. That Kenyan players were an excitable bunch was attested to in one memorable Leopards match, with the opposing goalkeeper being handcuffed and dragged away to jail by police.
David Bennun
The Latin word for sausage was botulus, from which English gets two words. One of them is the lovely botuliform, which means sausage-shaped and is a more useful word than you might think. The other word is botulism.Sausages may taste lovely, but it's usually best not to ask what's actually in them. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was a sausage-maker who disposed of the body.
Mark Forsyth
Religion and nationalism? I defecate on the altar of religious conviction, and wipe my arse on the flag of national pride.
Ian Martin
If he were a man of strong mind, it only gave him fits; but a person of mere average intellect it usually sent mad.
Jerome K. Jerome
No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Aneurin Bevan
No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to Hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretends it's God and hate that.
Evelyn Waugh
A self-made man" - not of woman born but alchemized, through sheer force of will, by the man himself. This is what I want to be. I want to be a self-made woman. I want to conjure myself out of every sparkling, fast moving thing I can see. I want to be the creator of myself. I'm going to begat myself
Caitlin Moran
It is glorious fun racing down the Hump, but you can't do it on windy days because then you are not there, but the fallen leaves do it instead of you. There is almost nothing that has such a keen sense of fun as a fallen leaf.
J.M. Barrie