Quotes by British Authors - Page 63

I have been so great a lover: filled my days So proudly with the splendour of Love's praise The pain the calm and the astonishment Desire illimitable and silent content And all dear names men use to cheat despair For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear Our hearts at random down the dark of life.
Rupert Brooke
Harold believed his journey was truly beginning. He had thought it started the moment he decided to walk to Berwick, but he saw now that he had been naïve. Beginnings could happen more than once, or in different ways. You could think you were starting something afresh, when actually what you were doing was carrying on as before. He had faced his shortcomings and overcame them, and so the real business of walking was happening only now.
Rachel Joyce
It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.
China Miéville
Must a name mean something?" Alice asked doubtfully.Of course it must," Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh; "my name means the shape I am - and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.
Lewis Carroll
(...)we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don’t really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures.
Bill Bryson
The Sufis say, "This is not a religion; it is religion
Idries Shah
Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. How briefly and to the point people always seem to speak on the stage or on the screen, while in real life we stumble from phrase to phrase with endless repetition.
Graham Greene
People are so overwhelmed with the prestige of their instruments that they consider their personal judgement of hardly any account.
Wyndham Lewis
And then the great music of which the world is made took him over, beyond thought, beyond control until he heard her cry his name and they fell together off the edge of the world.
Jean Gill
In 1949, neurologist Egas Moniz (1874-1955) received a Nobel Prize for his discovery of ‘the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses’. Today, prefrontal leucotomy is derided as a barbaric treatment from a much darker age, and it is to be hoped that, one day, so too might antipsychotic drugs.
Neel Burton
Never rely upon a time machine to fix your problems, as everyone knows, they're much too faulty.
Lily O'Brien
Think wrongly if you please but in all cases think for yourself.
Doris Lessing
At the moment that target was eating tacos his mother had brought in despite hospital orders against outside food.“Oh, God, this is good,” Sam said as juicy beef and crisp lettuce dribbled out onto the tray on his lap.“Still not tired of eating?” Connie asked him.“I will never be tired of eating. I’m going to eat until I’m huge. Food, hot water, clean sheets. At least I’ll get those three in prison.
Michael Grant
Human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism...inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon)....And through it all there has always been some truly awful food.
Matt Haig
…one half of her should not be always so much wiser than the other half…
Jane Austen
Organic life cannot be far from water.
Fennel Hudson
Sometimes you need to take a break from everyone and spend time alone, to experience, appreciate and love yourself.
Robert Tew
There are certain shocks which, if sufficiently strong, seem to have power to destroy the balance of life. Such a shock would seem to overthrow all the intricate, vital, slowly developed mechanism of mind, to plunge the victim into a chaotic half-world of confusion and loss. This is what had happened to Anna.
Anna Kavan
But when on shore, & wandering in the sublime forests, surrounded by views more gorgeous than even Claude ever imagined, I enjoy a delight which none but those who have experienced it can understand - If it is to be done, it must be by studying Humboldt.
Charles Darwin
Reading - like masturbation - is something you do alone and very little in life brings more pleasure.
Chloe Thurlow
I have always noticed that these artists and writers are very unbalanced
Agatha Christie
Always the following wind of historyOf others' wisdom makes a buoyant airTill we come suddenly on pockets where Is nothing loud but us; where voices seemAbrupt, untrained, competing with no lieOur fathers shouted once.
W.H. Auden
Come live with me and be my love And we will all the pleasures prove That valleys groves or hills or fields Or woods and steepy mountains yield.
Christopher Marlowe
Hawksmoor had often noticed how, in the moments when he first carne upon a corpse, all the objects around it wavered for an instant and became unreal- the trees which rose above a body hidden in woodland, the movement of the river which had washed a body onto its banks, the cars or hedges in a suburban street where a murderer had left a victim, all of these things seemed at such times to be suddenly drained of meaning like an hallucination.
Peter Ackroyd
The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead.
P.D. James
So what do you wants?" asked Myrtle."I want to help evolution."Evolution did not fill Faith with the same horror her father had felt. Why should she weep to hear that nothing was set in stone? Everything could change. Everything could get better. Everything was getting better, inch by inch, so slowly that she could not see it, but knowing it gave her strength.
Frances Hardinge
Lucy's eyes began to grow accustomed to the light, and she saw the trees that were nearest her more distinctly. A great longing for the old days when the trees could talk in Narnia came over her. She knew exactly how each of these trees would talk if only she could wake them, and what sort of human form it would put on. She looked at a silver birch; it would have a soft, showery voice and would look like a slender girl, with hair blown all about her face, and fond of dancing. She looked at the oak: he would be a wizened, but hearty old man with a frizzled beard and warts on his face and hands, and hair growing out of the warts. She looked at the beech under which she was standing. Ah!- she would be the best of all. She would be a precious goddess, smooth and stately, the lady of the wood.
C.S. Lewis
A pessimist is a liar, unless he destroys himself, and no less of a hypocrite than a priest who defiles the holy.
Mark Samuels
Stories twist and turn and grow and meet and give birth to other stories. Here and there, one story touches another, and a familiar character, sometimes the hero, walks over the bridge from one story into another.
Marcus Sedgwick
Life gets boring with only humans to talk to.
Stephen Baxter
What is now proved was once only imagined.
William Blake
There is no straight road to finding yourself, to making something.
Edmund de Waal
Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.
Tom Stoppard
For the rest, they shall represent the other Free Peoples of the World: Elves, Dwarves, and Men, Legolas shall be for the Elves; and Gimli son of Gloin for the Dwarves. They are willing to go at least to the passes of the Mountains, and maybe beyond. For Men you shall have Aragorn son of Arathorn, for the Ring of Isildur concerns him closely
J.R.R. Tolkien
The psyche is the essence of humanity, its greatest instrument, an indefinable, multidimensional creative entity of enormous scope, subtlety, and power that eludes all attempts to explain it, including this one. The psyche becomes impossible to fully describe because there is nothing, including the process of describing it, that is not 'it' in action.
Paul Levy
I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.
Charles Dickens
I am like a ruined piece of parchment scrawled over and over again with your name, so many times it has become illegible.
Elizabeth Wein
Timid people always reek their peevishness on the gentle.
George Eliot
Come live with me and be my Love, And we will all the pleasures prove
Christopher Marlowe
It is the afternoon of my birthday, but still the morning of my life.
Simon Van Booy
The less one has to do the less time one finds to do it in. One yawns one procrastinates one can do it when one will and therefore one seldom does it at all whereas those who have a great deal of business must buckle to it and then they always find time enough to do it.
Lord Chesterfield
It's called evolution. You must know that. Yes, we are.'She looked up from her book.'I would hope, though,' she went on, 'that we also have some rather more beautiful ancestors. Don't you?' --Mina
David Almond
My soul is a pale, tenuous membrane..."That was pleasing: a thin, tenuous membrane. It had the right anatomical quality. Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisy life. It was time for him to descend from the serene empyrean of words into the actual vortex. He went down slowly. "My soul is a thin, tenuous membrane...
Aldous Huxley
Civilization is a movement and not a condition a voyage and not a harbor.
Arnold Toynbee
You are not alone. There are Freedom Seekers everywhere.
Beth Kempton
I think so,' said Professor McGonagall dryly, 'we teachers are rather good at magic, you know.
J.K. Rowling
You have found love in your heart - and out of small changes come great things.
Alan Kinross
The Times is a paper which is seldom found in any hands but those of the highly educated.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Draco Malfoy is a bad boy!" squeaked Dobby angrily.
J.K. Rowling
How may times can you lose the one you love?
Lauren James
Don't sit around waiting for it to happen. Get out there and make it happen!
Anthony T.Hincks
Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still are.
David Mitchell
We live in a time that hungers for HOPE; to believe in MIRACLES and DREAMS, for without these soul gems, humanity is ripped at the seams.
Debi Tibbles
All social inequalities which have ceased to be considered expedient, assume the character not of simple inexpediency, but of injustice, and appear so tyrannical, that people are apt to wonder how they ever could have. been tolerated; forgetful that they themselves perhaps tolerate other inequalities under an equally mistaken notion of expediency, the correction of which would make that which they approve seem quite as monstrous as what they have at last learnt to condemn.
John Stuart Mill
Zen is a way of liberation concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous but what is.
Alan Watts
There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss.
Jeanette Winterson
Merlin’s beard.
J.K. Rowling
In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.
Julian Barnes
While we are actually subjected to them, the 'moods' and 'spirits' of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, 'Look. Listen. Attend.
C.S. Lewis
Roger edged past the chief, only just avoiding pushing him with his shoulder. The yelling ceased, and Samneric lay looking up in quiet terror. Roger advanced upon them as one wielding a nameless authority.
William Golding