Quotes by British Authors - Page 7

The fool says 'I never intended to kill. I meant only to wound.' But I tell you that if you prick a finger with a poisoned thorn you may not claim innocence when the heart dies. Do not plant a weed and pretend surprise when it grows to strangle your garden. For, I tell you that hate is to kill, for from hatred grows death as surely as life grows from love. Therefore do not nurture hatred, but love, even for those who hate you in return. Hatred wins many battles, and yet love will triumph.
Michael Grant
All my life I had lived on the presumption that there was no existence beyond... flesh, the moment of being alive... then nothing. I had searched in superstition... But there was nothing. Then I heard the sound of my own life leaving me. It was so... tender. I regretted that I had paid it no attention. Then I believed in the wisdom of what other men had found before me... I saw that those simple things might be true... I never wanted to believe in them because it was better to fight my own battle. You can believe in something without compromising the burden of your own existence.
Sebastian Faulks
I pity you Juliet. You don't know what love is. You think it's Valentine's Day, and weekends in Italy. You think it's drinking champagne in some expensive restaurant and being bought stupid bloody underwear. But that's just the trimmings. The decoration. They're just gestures. Without trust, and respect, and kindness, they don't mean shit. I thought love was about caring about someone day in and day out, about being there when it's rucking amazing and still wanting to be there when it feels like crap, I thought it was about forever.
Alexandra Potter
If you're an atheist, you know, you believe, this is the only life you're going to get. It's a precious life. It's a beautiful life. Its something we should live to the full, to the end of our days. Where if you're religious and you believe in another life somehow, that means you don't live this life to the full because you think you're going to get another one. That's an awfully negative way to live a life. Being a atheist frees you up to live this life properly, happily and fully
Richard Dawkins
I meant skies all empty aching blue. I meant years. I meant all of them with you.
Kate Clanchy
Is Dust immortal then, I ask'd him, so that we may see it blowing through the Centuries? But as Walter gave no Answer I jested with him further to break his Melancholy humour: What is Dust, Master Pyne?And he reflected a little: It is particles of Matter, no doubt.Then we are all Dust indeed, are we not?And in a feigned Voice he murmered, For Dust thou art and shalt to Dust return. Then he made a Sour face, but only yo laugh the more.
Peter Ackroyd
We are in the era of dysfunctional relationships.
Steven Magee
Why do you always rescue me?" — "Every Cinderella needs a fairy godmother. But sometimes your fairy godmother needs you right back.
Holly Smale
Can the law get blood out of a stone? I haven't any money.
W Somerset Maugham
I want to save the world but I haven't worked out a way to save myself yet.
Rae Earl
How simple love would be, Younger Brother, if we only had to bestow it on those who deserved it. Yet what would it be worth? If you gave a poor man a silver coin then that would be a gift. If you expected him to pay you back, then that would make it a loan. We do not loan our love, Lantern. We give it freely.
David Gemmell
A long long kiss a kiss of youth and love.
Lord Byron
His voice goads me and then I register the perfect rhythm he is creating in my tightly wound body. One, two, and then three fingers fill me, his hand rocking flawlessly against my quivering clitoris as he fucks me. Slowly at first and then the tempo increases as Shaw builds the pace. Before I know it I am panting as the sensations consume me. Eyes shut tight, I feel myself grinding against what feels like the palm of his hand or maybe his wrist, loving the friction it creates as Shaw penetrates me over and over again.
Felicity Brandon
We went back into the Mens Apartments where there were others raving of Ships that may fly and silvered Creatures upon the Moon: Their Stories seem to have neither Head nor Tayl to them, Sir Chris. told me, but there is a Grammar in them if I could but Puzzle it out.This is a mad Age, I replied, and there are many fitter for Bedlam than these here confin'd to a Chain or a dark Room.A sad Reflection, Nick.And what little Purpose have we to glory in our Reason, I continu'd, when the Brain may so suddenly be disorder'd?
Peter Ackroyd
Battles are all about strategy, and strategy pivots on priorities. Since my priorities were Prince Jalan, Prince Jalan, and Prince Jalan, with “looking good” a distant fourth, I took the opportunity to resume running away. I find that the main thing about success is the ability to act in the moment. A hero attacks in the moment; a good coward runs in it. The rest of the world waits for the next moment and ends up as crow food.
Mark Lawrence
It's what you do when you grow up, apparently, face up to things you'd rather not and accept the fact that nobody is who you thought they were, maybe not even close.
Jenny Valentine
He was so much the humblest one that Wendy was especially gentle with him.
J.M. Barrie
I have always felt,” he said, “that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats
Neil Gaiman
Fame, infamy, they're of the same family.
Gemma Malley
In his time the Pirate Captain had made a number of dramatic entrances of his own – not always intentional it had to be said, as quite often they were the result of him accidentally setting himself on fire – but even he had to admit that Cutlass Liz’s dramatic entrance set an extremely high dramatic-entrance standard.
Gideon Defoe
The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet.
Anthony Burgess
Many roads to take some to joy some to heart ache
Kate Winslet
I just can't get with this idea that literature is a 12-step program. If someone wants to read a book to see good people get rewarded and the bad people get punished, essentially what they want is a fairy tale.
China Miéville
If he had learned anything from his father’s fate, it was to win, no matter how you did it. It was not important if someone else was hurt, or killed. If you won, you would be forgiven anything. You could be taken from a stinking ger and forced through the ranks until a thousand men followed your orders as if they came from the khan himself. Blood and talent. The nation was built on both.
Conn Iggulden
We are in the process of finding out what filling the sky with hundreds of thousands of satellites does to all life on Earth.
Steven Magee
An hour's conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy.
Charles Williams
He was the subject of a little respectful ribbing. But he was, of course, the captain, which meant he had to do lots of the ribbing himself.
Geoff Dyer
The truth is not that we need the critics in order to enjoy the authors, but that we need the authors in order to enjoy the critics.
C.S. Lewis
Putting everything on hold to achieve the one thing you think will make you happy will actually mean that you're miserable along the way to getting there, and when you get there, you might find that the thing wanted doesn't make you as happy as you thought it would. Or worse, you've completely forgotten how to be happy.
Dorothy Koomson
If I am right Thy grace impart Still in the right to stay If I am wrong O teach my heart To find that better way!
Alexander Pope
I won't eat what I can't kill. It seems shoddy, hypocritical.
Jeanette Winterson
Everyone says it's wrong, 'drinking and driving', don't they. I can tell you two things that are far more dangerous than 'drinking and driving': 1. 'drinking'; 2. 'driving'.Do you know how many people were killed last year in Britain as a direct result of alcohol abuse?--thirty-five-thousand!Do you know how many people were killed as a direct result of driving a car?--twenty-two-thousand!Do you know how many people were killed as a direct result of drinking _and_ driving?--five-hundred! ::pauses::I'm not taking any fuckin' chances!::swigs his beer::
Lee Mack
There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism
Alan Hollinghurst
LightLightThe visible reminder of Invisible Light.
T.S Eliot
The demons were scary, but girls - Well, girls are really terrifying
Darren Shan
Them as can do has to do for them as can't. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.
Terry Pratchett
The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef.
Samuel Johnson
A lawyer's dream of heaven - every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.
Samuel Butler
You ever have the feeling you were in the wrong place? That if you could just get over the next hill, cross the next river, look down into the next valley, it'd all...fit. Be right.""All my life, more of less"“All your life spent getting ready for the next thing. I climbed a lot of hills now. I crossed a lot of rivers. Crossed the sea even, left everything I knew and came to Styria. But there I was, waiting for me at the docks when I got off the boat, same man, same life. Next valley ain’t no different from this one. No better anyway. Reckon I’ve learned … just to stick in the place I’m at. Just to be the man I am.
Joe Abercrombie
Good and bad luck is a synonym in the great majority of instances for good and bad judgment.
John Chatfield
I know that a stranger's hand will write to me next, to say that the good and faithful servant has been called at length into the joy of his Lord. And why weep for this? No fear of death will darken St. John's last hour: his mind will be unclouded; his heart will be undaunted; his hope will be sure; his faith steadfast. His own words are a pledge of this: “My Master,” he says, “has forewarned me. Daily he announces more distinctly, ‘Surely I come quickly!’ and hourly I more eagerly respond, ‘Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!
Charlotte Brontë
Generosity is also marked by doing what one says one will do.
Idries Shah
But the helmet had gold decoration, and the bespoke armorers had made a new gleaming breastplate with useless gold ornamentation on it. Sam Vimes felt like a class traitor every time he wore it. He hated being thought of as one of those people that wore stupid ornamental armor. It was gilt by association.
Terry Pratchett
The measurement of human ability is in an infant state. Was it a requirement for the Wright Brothers to hold PhD’s before they could invent and take flight?
Alastair Agutter
All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.
Diane Setterfield
You never know whether you've already experienced your greatest moment or your worst
Dean Cavanagh
And this gray spirit yearning in desireTo follow knowledge like a sinking star,Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
Alfred Tennyson
Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits...
A.A. Milne
Soon, they actually began to titter on their toes as they glared at me, looking more like an army of angry wasps than ever before. All they needed now were matching yellow and black jumpers and pretend stingers!
Adele Rose
Liberties aren't given, they are taken.
Aldous Huxley
Like so many plain cups on the shelves. You can reach for them, use them without thinking. Most of them don't matter. Sometimes you lose your grip on one of them and it falls and smashes to piece, and you shrug and say to yourself, what a pity. Then you reach for the cup that you use every day, one that you love and use so often that as you stretch out your hand it is already making the shape that fits its curve. You are certain that yesterday it was in its proper place, but now there is nothing. Just air. You have lost something that was so familiar, so much a part of your life that you were not even looking for it. Just expecting it to be there, as always.
Rosie Thomas
Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
C.S. Lewis
They say, 'The coward dies many times'; so does the beloved. Didn't the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?
C.S. Lewis
Sense howEven the smooth stones acheWith stories of their ownIn the shuddering light of day.
Scott Hastie
I have now concentrated all my prayers into one, and that one prayer is this, that I may die to self, and live wholly to Him.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Everyday, you get home from the shops with a bag of cat food and bin-liners and realise that, yet again, you failed to have cosmetic surgery, book a cheap weekend in Paris, change your name to something more glamorous, buy the fifth series of The Sopranos, divorce your spouse, sell up and move to Devon, or adopt a child from Guatemala.
Lynne Truss
Writing which flows is more like play than work!
Suzy Davies
The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.
George Orwell
Heaven for climate hell for company.
James M. Barrie
Till thou hast learned to suffer from a saint a well as from the wicked, and to be abused by the godly as well as the ungodly, never look to live a contented or comfortable life, nor ever think thou has truly learned the art of suffering (383).
Richard Baxter