Quotes by British Authors - Page 66

Worry is a cloud which rains destruction.
Idries Shah
A friend is someone who walks into a room when everyone else is walking out.
Gary Moore
The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.
Quentin Crisp
The Sufi is 'One who does not care when something is taken from him, but who does not cease to seek for what he has not.
Idries Shah
Only someone you loved could make you wear that kind of expression. Someone who had once loved you knew how to get to the part of you where the pain lived.
Dorothy Koomsoon
You're the only man I know willing to jump from the top floor of a skyscraper, naked with an axe just to get the bad guy - Selena
David Gallie
The Word of God will be to you a bulwark and a high tower, a castle of defense against the foe. Oh, see to it that the Word of God is in you, in your very soul, permeating your thoughts, and so operating upon your outward life, that all may know you to be a true Bible-Christian, for they perceive it in your words and deeds.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Being a blesséd writer is a cursed attribute, when you wish to no longer be encompassed by someone and yet you are surrounded by loose leaf papers filled with the sound of his voice.
Elizabeth Brooks
Love makes things possible, not easy.
Sam Gayton
How merciful a thing is man's ignorance of his immediate future! What a ghastly, paralysing thing it would have been if all those present could have known what was about to happen within a matter of seconds! For nothing short of pre-knowledge could have stopped the occurrence, so suddenly it sprang upon them.
Mervyn Peake
Yeah, I must have been really bad in a past life or something." He smiled, his eyes still in pain. Reaching up, he touched a strand of mt hair. " Don't leave, OK?""Shhh. I'm not going anywhere." I kept stroking his forehead, trailing my fingers across it. His muscular shoulders gradually relaxed, his eyes closing again. His breathing slowed, became more regular.I could hear the TV on in the other room, the sound of voices. None of it mattered to me. I stayed there until long after Alex had fallen asleep-- gently caressing the vbrow of the boy I loved, trying to keep his pain at bay.
l.a weatherly
No time is more precious and well rewarded than those few moments you spend reading a story to a child
Robert D. Harris
Was this what the city would look like when knowledge was no longer enough? When the desire to turn inward, surrendering entirely to one's own private world of nonresistance, overwhelmed, like creeping ivy, our desire to know worlds beyond it?
Olivia Sudjic
It is true I little respect women or girls who are loquacious either in boasting the triumphs, or bemoaning the mortifications, of feelings.
Charlotte Brontë
You have to make your own chances.
Duncan Bannatyne
The library was the best place in the world.
Anita Anand
Desires kept within the mind are simply unrealised dreams.
Steven Redhead
There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism
Alexander Hamilton
You can be any sex you like provided you act male. There's no men and women in the Watch, just a bunch of lads.
Terry Pratchett
And so Mort came at last to the river Ankh, greatest of rivers. Even before it entered the city, it was slow and heavy with the silt of the plains, and by the time it got to The Shades even an agnostic could have walked across it. It was hard to drown in the Ankh, but easy to suffocate.
Terry Pratchett
The commonplace books of the old Puritans were invaluable to them. They would never have been able to compile such works as they did if they had not been careful in collecting and arranging their matter under different heads.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Ours was not going to be a clone of the usual expeditions, oozing with sleekness. It was clear from the start that oddity was our advantage.
Tahir Shah
You will die, and I, and all we can create—why not a city? But if there is one thing that deserves to be immortal, it is knowledge.
John Brunner
Septimus has been working too hard" - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought.
Virginia Woolf
It didn't get much more patriotic than sex in a Chevy on the Fourth of July. God bless America.
Kate Meader
This was beyond a joke. This had moved beyond foolishness, slipped over the line into genuine 24 karat Jesus-Christ-I-fucked-up-bigtime territory.
Neil Gaiman
Rupert: "... At this rate, somebody is bound to upset the Warlock once too often, and we'll end up with a Court full of bemused looking toads.""He wouldn't dare use his magic here," said the Champion."Don't bet on it," said Rupert. "The High Warlock has all the practicality and self-preservation instincts of a depressed lemming.
Simon R. Green
Work is more fun than fun.
Noël Coward
Still, perhaps that's all lives are, all the world is, a collision of vast conflagrations, each sparked from nothing.
Mark Lawrence
Je fais mon lit et mon ménage; I seek my dinner in a restaurant; my supper takes care, of itself; I pass days laborious and loveless; nights long and lonely; I am ferocious, and bearded and monkish; and nothing now living in this world loves me, except some old hearts worn like my own, and some few beings, impoverished, suffering, poor in purse and in spirit, whom the kingdoms of this world own not, but to whom a will and testament not to be disputed has bequeathed the kingdom of heaven.
Charlotte Brontë
Guilt is a destructive and ultimately pointless emotion
Lynn Crilly
Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.
Graham Greene
It's chemical, fancying him is purely chemical. It's intoxicating - the frisson, the attraction - it's intoxicating because it's purely chemical. But you'll just have to remember the wedding ring - divorcees don't wear wedding rings. This guy has his own Vita at home. You're his potential Suzie. Is that who you want to be? Do you want the next man in your life to have Tim's principles?
Freya North
The human mind prefers to be spoonfed with the thoughts of others but deprived of such nourishment it will reluctantly begin to think for itself- and such thinking remember is original thinking and may have valuable results.
Agatha Christie
Never place your happiness in someone else's hands because if they walk away, so does your happiness.
Robert Tew
Like the pain of a bad wound, the effect of a deep shock takes some while to be felt. When a child is told, for the first time in his life, that a person he has known is dead, although he does not disbelieve it, he may well fail to comprehend it and later ask--perhaps more than once--where the dead person is and when he is coming back.
Richard Adams
Holiness is as much about what you do on a Monday morning on the factory floor as it is about what you do on a Sunday morning in a church gathering. Holiness is as much about the kind of neighbour you are as it is about the kind of church member you are. It is as much about who you are when you are holding a steering wheel as who you are when you are holding a Bible.
Tim Chester
My romantic history since arriving on Novo has been non-existent, but I don't know what, if anything, came before; thanks to the government's cerebral pilfering.
Siobhan Davis
I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.”“Yes,” said Harriet, “but I am one of them. I disconcert myself very much. I never know what I do feel.”“I don’t think that matters, provided one doesn’t try to persuade one’s self into appropriate feelings.
Dorothy L. Sayers
To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
George Orwell
I woke to find the sun streaming through the bedroom window. Looking up with one eye opened and the other still closed, I saw that Luca was awake, lying on one side and looking down on me. “Good morning. Do you want to talk Adriana?”“No, I just want to fuck. Oh, good morning by the way.”“For a prospective sub you are becoming a little demanding.”“Sorry, am I not supposed to want sex?”“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you wanting sex, in fact it is a condition of you being here in bed with me. It’s just that a good little sub waits to be asked.”“Sorry. Then of course I will withdraw that demand and lie here to await your pleasure.”“Good, a fast learner, that’s what I like.
Rachel de Vine
Words, they say, are the food of minds. But, like other foods, they can do little by themselves.
Idries Shah
But whichever form it took it brought with it, in those moments of bitter anguish, such a desperate surge of hope that it was almost untouchable, and flitted away like a golden butterfly into the bright blue sky - beautiful, unreachable and completely transistent.
Tabitha Suzuma
Tiffany thought of the little spot in the woods where Granny Weatherwax lay. Remembered. And knew that You had been right. Granny Weatherwax was indeed here. And there. She was, in fact, and always would be, everywhere.
Terry Pratchett
Of course, the abolition of Hell meant that such thoughts were now the merest fantasy. Isobel was agnostic as to what, if anything, lay in store for us after this life; that there was a world of spirit seemed to her to be a possibility that we should not exclude. Consciousness was an elusive entity about which we knew very little, other than that it came into existence when certain conditions were present- a sufficient mass of brain cells operating in a particular way. But could we really say much more than that about where it was located & whether it could survive in other conditions? The fact that a plant grew in one place did not mean that it could not grow in another. And if something lay behind this consciousness, orchestrated it & and the conditions that produced it, then why should we not call this something God?
Alexander McCall Smith
My son, there may be a time when I explain these things to you, because there may be a time when I understand them.
Hanif Kureishi
As Harry and Ron rounded the clump of trees behind which Harry had first heard the dragons roar, a witch leapt out from behind them.It was Rita Skeeter. She was wearing acid-green robes today; the Quick-Quotes Quill in her hand blended perfectly against them."Congratulations, Harry!' she said beaming at him. "I wonder if you could give me a quick word? How you felt facing that dragon? How do you feel now about the fairness of the scoring?""Yeah, you can have a word," said Harry savagely. "Goodbye!
J.K. Rowling
It doesn't matter what happens to you. What matters is, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to complain and shrink or are you going to step into your greatness?
Robert Tew
As your lover describes you, so you are.
Jeanette Winterson
A person has to be comfortable in his or her own skin.
Fennel Hudson
Being in the present moment, one can step outside the mechanical train of life, and this is where the inner revolution begins.
Belsebuub
Faith is not a hothouse plant that must be shielded from wind and rain, so delicate that it has to be protected, but it’s like the sturdy oak which becomes stronger with every wind that blows upon it. An easy time weakens faith, while strong trials strengthen it.
Elizabeth George
It is the bungled crime that brings remorse.
P.G. Wodehouse
Oh thank God, please you have to help me!” begged the human. “She tied me up, she wants to kill me!”I arched a brow. “Is that so?”“She’s insane!”I folded my arms across my chest. “Well, the good news is, she’s totally sane. The bad news is my fiancée here is a crazy, homicidal bitch and she wants to kill you.
Suzanne Wright
Idealism, though just in its premises, and often daring and honest in their application, is stultified by the exclusive intellectualism of its own methods: by its fatal trust in the squirrel-work of the industrious brain instead of the piercing vision of the desirous heart. It interests man, but does not involve him in its processes: does not catch him up to the new and more real life which it describes. Hence the thing that matters, the living thing, has somehow escaped it; and its observations bear the same relation to reality as the art of the anatomist does to the mystery of birth.
Evelyn Underhill
I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.
Christopher Hitchens
...For like a rugged tree you are hard and sound at the core.
H. Rider Haggard
Rose's work of art took her all day, including two playtimes, story time, and most of lunch.At the end of school it was stolen from her by the wicked teacher who had pretended to be so interested."Beautiful- what-is-it?" she asked as she pinned it high on the wall, where Rose could not reach."They take your pictures," said Indigo,... when he finally made out what all the roaring and stamping was about. "They do take them.... Why do you want that picture so much?" he asked Rose."It was my best ever," said Rose furiously. "I hate school. I hate everyone in it. I will kill them all when I'm big enough.""You can't just go round killing people," Indigo told her...
Hilary McKay
Bisexuals are really attracted to senior Lib Dems - as they are both a man and a great big pussy.
Frankie Boyle
The world of those who are happy is different from the world of those who are not.
Ludwig Wittgenstein