Quotes by British Authors - Page 70

What can promote innocent mirth, and I may say virtue, more than a good riddle?
George Eliot
After all, you can argue – argue until you cry – about whatmodern, codified misogyny is; but straight-up ungentlemanliness,of the kind his mother would clatter the back of his head for, isinarguable. It doesn’t need to be a ‘man vs woman’ thing. It’s just atiff between The Guys.Seeing the whole world as ‘The Guys’ is important. The ideathat we’re all, at the end of the day, just a bunch of well-meaningschlumps, trying to get along, is the basic alpha and omega of myworld view. I’m neither ‘pro-women’ nor ‘antimen’. I’m just ‘Thumbsup for the six billion’.
Caitlin Moran
Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.
Samuel Johnson
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God "Thy will be done " and those to whom God says "All right then have it your way."
C.S. Lewis
Greed like the love of comfort is a kind of fear.
Cyril Connolly
OK, so the guy is cool, but... I mean own up, this is barking time, this is major lunch, this is stool approaching critical mass, this is... this is... total vocabulary failure!
Douglas Adams
There was almost a flicker of humanity in the man. The kind of human who pulled wings off flies as a kid, but still human.
Kate Griffin
The world goes up and the world goes down And the sunshine follows the rain And yesterday's sneer and yesterday's frown Can never come over again Sweet wife. No never come over again.
Charles Kingsley
Glenn could see I was bricking it and turned round to me as I sat there, gripping the armrests."You all right?" he said."I hate flying, Boss. I'm shitting myself.""Don't worry, Merse. It's going to be OK. We *won't* crash."I thought, "Thank God for that. Glenn's said we're going to be safe. Nothing's going to fuck with us now.
Paul Merson
Superman once challenged Chuck Norris to a fight, the loser had to wear his underwear on the outside.
Oliver Oliver Reed
And perhaps we have reason to be very grateful that, both as children and long afterwards, we are never allowed to guess how the absorbing pursuit of the moment will appear, not only to others, but to ourselves, a very short time hence.
Kenneth Grahame
My flute, M. Poirot, is my oldest companion. When everything else fails, music remains.
Agatha Christie
He tastes of white wine and apple pie and Christian. I run my fingers through his hair, holding him to me while our tongues explore and curl and twist around each other, my blood heating in my veins.We're breathless when Christian pulls away.
E.L. James
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,Or what's a heaven for?
Robert Browning
Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.
Winston S. Churchill
We're fighting for unhappiness?" Noah asked skeptically. "It sounds a bit crazy when you put it that way."Nijinsky laughed, delighted. "Oh, it is." Then, serious again, he said, "We fight for the right to be what we choose,to feel what we choose. Even if what we choose seems crazy to others.""If it's all the same to you, I'll fight for revenge," Sadie said.Nijinsky's eyes glittered. "Oh, yes. That's fine with me.
Michael Grant
Your trials and difficulties are a golden opportunity for joy.
Elizabeth George
Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in this sense, goes outside-in.
Malcolm Gladwell
,"I am not crazy, my reality is just different from yours."-Cheshire Cat
Lewis Carroll
A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.
David Mitchell
The real problem here is a massive elephant in the room: our own culture. Our social values, our media - so influential on impressionable young girls - that have been allowed, for millenia, to send out this powerful, alienating message about girls and sport: that sport is unfeminine, that sport makes you sweaty and muscular, that sport is swearing and violence, that sport is ugliness in a world where women’s sole priority, value and focus should be beauty and becoming an object of desire.
Anna Kessel
Please then, can we stop this obsession with the tiny minority of writers who have made a fortune from their work, and/or those who look hot in their author pics. Please can we also stop dissolving into factions of the bestselling, the midlist, the self-published, the Hampstead-dwelling, those who like to write cheerful stories and those who prefer to write grim ones. And instead take a proper and considered look at the future of the entire profession of writing.
Caroline Sanderson
When I am dead I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet but his books were read.'
Hilaire Belloc
But what is this clock, marking only so many years, that such men seem to consult in the dark of their being? We do not know. All we do know for certain is that no such clock, no such warnings, can come out of the passing time that we are told is all we have. They belong to a larger idea of Time, like all these dreams that came true.
J.B. Priestley
We're high on the adrenaline of feeling, even though we know it's fleeting and evanescence. And we're getting worse -- checking texts and emails and Facebook every five minutes, always searching for that next hit of feeling, that next morsel of approval.
Deborah Meyler
Bruce Wayne/Batman: A hero can be anyone, even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat on a young boy's shoulders to let him know that the world hadn't ended.
Christopher Nolan
These are the people who will encourage you to go after your dreams and will inspire you to succeed. Stick to them like a barnacle to a rock.
Steve Backley
Wait and wonder when we will return, mouse - then you will really see what a battle is like."Simeon turned his head in the direction of Graypatch's voice. "Alas, I will never see anything for I am blind; but I can sense a lot. I can feel you are both evil and desperate. They say you have only one eye. I am surprised at you—even a fool with half an eye could see that you will never triumph against good if you are evil.
Brian Jacques
If ever you want a rainbow in your home, go to Sandwich Glass Museum, and let them put one in your heart too.
Anthony T.Hincks
Like the 'good' characters in literature, the sane don't have any memorable lines.
Adam Phillips Going Sane
Sometimes for our sanity own sanity we just have to look at the bigger picture.
Jojo Moyes
Yearn for the opposite, to buck the trend, to be different.
Fennel Hudson
A pair of jeans makes you feel good.A pair of Levis make you feel special!
Anthony T.Hincks
The gene contains a single 'word', repeated over and over again: CAG, CAG, CAG, CAG ... The repetition continues sometimes just six times, sometimes thirty, sometimes more than a hundred times. Your destiny, your sanity and your life hang by the thread of this repetition. If the 'word' is repeated thirty-five times or fewer, you will be fine.Most of us have about ten to fifteen repeats. If the 'word' is repeated thirty-nine times or more, you will in mid-life slowly start to lose your balance, grow steadily more incapable of looking after yourself and die prematurely.
Matt Ridley
Don't Stop Searching Until You Find Creative & Gainful Unemployment
Dean Cavanagh
One day you might just find something worth living an eternity for
Abigail Gibbs
Whatever we may think of the merits of torturing children for pleasure, and no doubt there is much to be said on both sides, I am sure we all agree that it should be done with sterilized instruments.
G.K. Chesterton
PDR: Persons of Dubious Reality; refugees from the collective consciousness. Uninvited visitors who have fallen through the grating that divides the real, from the written. They arrive with their actions hardwired due to their repetitious existence and the older and more basic they are, the more rigidly they stick to them. Characters from cautionary tales are particularly mindless; they do what they do because it's what they've always done.And it's our job to stop them.
Jasper Fforde
For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top of St Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet
Virginia Woolf
One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.
John Locke
DEATH: "Mostly they aren't too keen to see me. They fear the sunless lands. But they enter your realm each night without fear."MORPHEUS: "And I am far more terrible than you, sister.
Neil Gaiman
We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.
George Eliot
Religion is never more tested than when our emotions are ablaze. At such a time, the timeless grandeur of the Law and its ethics stand at our mercy.
Abdal Hakim Murad
If a little labour little are our gains. Man's fortunes are according to his pains.
Robert Herrick
Anyone can see that an ass laden with books remains a donkey. A human being laden with the undigested results of a tussle with thoughts and books, however, still passes for wise.
Idries Shah
He had had a severe shock some weeks earlier, when, having narrowly failed to capture a large grey-brown hare for his dinner, it had stopped at the edge of the forest, looked at him with disdain, and said, 'Well, I hope you're proud of yourself, that's all,' and had scampered off into the long grass
Neil Gaiman
Ah, fairest maiden, thine beauty doth maketh mine loins stir, and mine cup runneth over.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Chuck Norris will never have a heart attack. His heart isn't nearly foolish enough to attack him.
Oliver Oliver Reed
I'd always thought it was gaudy, but standing there watching him beside the gold and glass shrine, I realised that his was a candlelight faith. It didn't work in the clear unforgiving light in London or Scandinavia, where even the dust in the cathedrals showed. But in the warm dimness and the shadows, what would have been tasteless at home made sense. The shrine looked like an oil painting made into real substance. So did he. England's was a reading religion, one it was difficult to understand at the bleak unimpressive first glance, one that needed books to explain itself. But his was images and images, the same as the old stages, in a place where not everyone could read and good light was expensive.
Natasha Pulley
He had made a vow, a private promise to the world in the long dark watches of the night, that if he did survive then in the great afterward he would always try to be kind, to live a good, quiet life. Like Candide, he would cultivate his garden. quietly. And that would be his redemption. Even if he could add only a feather to the balance it would be some kind of repayment for being spared. When it was all over and the reckoning fell due, it may be that he would be in need of that feather.
Kate Atkinson
No surgeon can treat the wounds of the tongue.
Idries Shah
Empty-page staring again tonight. It's maddening. I suppose people who don't write (like the Connollies) imagine anything that can be though can be expressed. Well, I don't know. I can't do it. It's this sort of thing that makes me belittle the whole business: what's the good of a 'talent' if you can't do it when you want to? What should we think of a woodcarver who couldn't woodcarver? or a pianist who couldn't play the piano? Bah, likewise grrr.
Philip Larkin
It has made me better loving you... it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It’s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it’s a delightful story.
Henry James
In any case the friendships of later life, in contrast wih those negotiated before thirty, are apt to be burdened with reservations, constraints, inhibitions.
Anthony Powell
Sometimes it feels as though happiness is just a word people say to hide the despair of not knowing anything.
Michael Gilbert
If you can't get everyone on your side, make sure they're right behind you.
Benny Bellamacina
Traveling through the Dragon's Den, it has just been explained that Haroun, the Ifrit, has been caught in a mirror trap. Here is the passage that follows:"So," said Silas. "Now there are only three of us.""And a pig," said Kandar [the mummy]"Why?" Asked Miss Lupescu, with a wolf-tongue, through wolf teeth. "Why the Pig?""It's lucky," said Kandar.Miss Lupescu growled, unconvinced."Did Haroun have a pig?" asked Kandar, simply.
Neil Gaiman
Stars, I have seen them fall,But when they drop and dieNo star is lost at allFrom all the star-sown sky.The toil of all that beHelps not the primal fault;It rains into the seaAnd still the sea is salt.
A.E. Housman
He had to be nice to me at the moment because he had to be surrounded by people. This was because boys like him were, essentially, pasta. Everyone thought they loved him because they had never been forced to experience the true blandness of him on his own.
Matthew Crow
Who says you only get one? If you're lucky, you will meet The One, The Two, The Three.....and so on.Nesta
Cathy Hopkins