Quotes by British Authors - Page 71

Then said he, ’I am going to my Father’s; and though with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought His battles who now will be my rewarder.’.... So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.
John Bunyan
When people say "it's always the last place you look". Of course it is. Why would you keep looking after you've found it?
Billy Connolly
The incredible benefits of practising and applying mindfulness and self-compassion in the workplace are being increasingly recognised by human resource professionals as well as the medical profession, as the stresses of competing in today’s global economy take their toll on the mental health and emotional wellbeing of many otherwise talented and enthusiastic individuals in the workplace.
Christopher Dines
There's blood pounding through the Duke's head.Knighthood is glory, he's thinking, not just grace in the saddle and at swordplay, but courage enough to give your life to defend what you hold dear. A noble reward, for noble men. A badge of honour.He'd never ennoble a merchant. Even Chaucer, whom he admires, but knows to be a fool on a battlefield. Not Chaucer's fault, that; just his merchant blood.Knighthood's not for the likes of these people; for Madame Perrers' brood. He thought she knew her place. But she's overreached herself; she's as grasping as the rest of them, after all. Do these people think they can buy or steal everything?
Vanora Bennett
At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague or subordinate. Not among Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
C.S. Lewis
And the pain is too much it’s too much it’s too much and my hands are on my head and I’m rearing back and my mouth is open in a never-ending wordless wail of all the blackness that’s inside of me.
Patrick Ness
Be confident to make your magic.
Jay Woodman
Why were kings cross? Maybe their trains were late! Some say warrior Queen Boudica was buried under platform 8.
Terry Deary
Life is what it is...And even without having everything you desire...It is still gloriously beautiful...
Virginia Alison
I dread having to call the police, as I have no idea if they will send good cop, bad cop, lying cop, incompetent cop, aggressive cop, assaulting cop, corrupt cop, or the worst one of them all, the terminator cop.
Steven Magee
Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door.His name, as I ought to have told you before,Is really Asparagus. That's such a fussTo pronounce, that we usually call him just Gus.His coat's very shabby, he's thin as a rake,And he suffers from palsy that makes his paw shake.Yet he was, in his youth, quite the smartest of Cats —But no longer a terror to mice or to rats.For he isn't the Cat that he was in his prime;Though his name was quite famous, he says, in his time.And whenever he joins his friends at their club(which takes place at the back of the neighbouring pub)He loves to regale them, if someone else pays,With anecdotes drawn from his palmiest days.For he once was a Star of the highest degree —He has acted with Irving, he's acted with Tree.And he likes to relate his success on the Halls,Where the Gallery once gave him seven cat-calls.But his grandest creation, as he loves to tell,Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.
T.S Eliot
For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be.
Julian Barnes
I know many a strong man undone by marriage.
Clive Barker
It is always a mistake to underestimate how long it takes for mankind to understand the traumas it has suffered, especially the self-inflicted ones.
A.C. Grayling
You have to be a friend to have them.
J.M. Richards
Maybe belief is the biggest lie. In ages past, the earliest philosophers tried to explain the stars in the sky and the world around them. One of them conceived of the notion that the universe was mounted on giant crystal spheres controlled by a giant machine, which explained the movements of the heavens. He was laughed at and told that such a machine would be so huge and noisy that everyone would hear it. He simply replied that we are born with that noise all around us, and that we are so used to hearing it that we cannot hear it at all.
Dan Abnett
You worked at night, when the shadows masked you and you were little more than a dream. You hid in the forest or the mountains, away from the steam engines and the lamps of the cities, the things that would expose you, confirming you and stripping you of your mystery. You showed yourself rarely, and only to the ones who needed to see you. After the free-for-all that was the earlier Chapters, when babies were stolen, young men murdered and maidens locked away, the fae had had to learn to be very careful about their involvement in the lives of the characters, lest they turn still further away from their beliefs.
F.D. Lee
I was not always a Muslim, but once I was led into the absorption of prayer and the mysteries of the Qur’an, something troubled in me became still.
Camilla Gibb
Moral indignation is too precious an export to be wasted at home
Perry Anderson
I'm sorry to disappoint you, but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.
Ian McEwan
We pay people and reward them for greed and sleaze . When a sex tape gets made a star is born with a publicity agent on speed dial a six figure pay cheque and a tacky lingerie line....selling filth so you can get your face on Time magazine... From Jukebox
Saira Viola
Then where is home, Johannes?" He looks at the maps on his wall. "I don't know," He says. "Where comfort is. And that is hard to find.
Jessie Burton
The use of the blockade against Germany to starve large numbers of people to death broke through the moral barrier against the mass killing of civilians. It was the precedent for the 'conventional' bombing of civilians in the Second World War and then for the use of the atomic bomb.
Jonathan Glover
It was true. She was his soul’s star. His heart ignited every time she came into the room, flared with every just-so gesture. Anything she touched became instantly talismanic.
Mark Kirkbride
We have to do a better job at the work of anthropology if we hope to maintain our role in the public discourse.
Christopher W. Brooks
It is quite common for people to focus on the problem rather than the solutions.
Steven Redhead
Fear makes us feel our humanity.
Benjamin Disraeli
Legend tells us that the High King of Tara, who ruled supreme over all the Kings of Ireland, looked out from his castle one day during the festival of Eostre and saw a fire blazing away on a far hillside. Furious with this obvious disregard for the law, for which the penalty was death, he sent out soldiers to arrest the guilty party. When the soldiers arrived at the hillside they found St Patrick, the patron Saint of Ireland, piling wood onto his fire and immediately seized him. Standing before the King he was asked why he disobeyed the law, and he explained that his fire was a sign that Christ had risen from the dead and was the light of the world. The King so admired Patrick’s courage that he forgave him and became a convert to Christianity!
Carole Carlton
If things go wrong, you don't have to accept you made a bum decision.
Dorothy Koomson
The Specters feast as vampires feast on blood, but the Specters’ food is attention. A conscious and informed interest in the world. The immaturity of children is less attractive to them.
Philip Pullman
The steady soul and the ego pretender / walk with their arms round each other's shoulders / through the mirage.
Jay Woodman
The nuisance of her presence outweighs the gratification to be derived from tormenting her
Emily Brontë
If thou rememberest that thou art going to heaven, thou wilt not sleep on the road. If thou thinkest that hell is behind thee, and the devil pursuing thee, thou wilt not loiter.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
What? Quinn's one of them? I just thought he was an a*shole!
Simon Holt
At such times the universe gets a little closer to us. They are strange times, times of beginnings and endings. Dangerous and powerful. And we feel it even if we don't know what it is. These times are not necessarily good, and not necessarily bad. In fact, what they are depends on what *we* are.
Terry Pratchett
The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert's seventh symphony. And I've rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face.
Stephen Fry
In the end, the slow decay of the body didn't matter. We all continue on, renewing ourselves, through our offspring. They are what matter. They are what survives.
Andy Lane
There has to be a way to redirect employee's driving ambition and to channel it more productively. There is. Create heroes in every role. Make every role, performed at excellence, a respected profession.
Marcus Buckingham
No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.
Bertrand Russell
I will forever walk alone in a world overflowing with those that will never understand my meaning of “Learning to See” I’m always teaching myself to see beauty in all aspects of reality, yearning to learn the beauty in others, from their vision of everyday life to their deepest secrets of their dreams. As the sun rises I must smile, smile for those with the beautiful mind and soul. I’m so passionate for the visions I see, and the dreams I wish the world could be.
Michael Jones
What day is it?” It’s today, squeaked Piglet. My favorite day, said Pooh.
A.A. Milne
Sometimes one likes foolish people for their folly, better than wise people for their wisdom.
Elizabeth Gaskell
There is no correct way to write a novel, or rather, there is only one, and that one way is to make it interesting. That is very easily said, but how do you make your writing interesting?The answer to the question is, that you write interestingly only about the things that genuinely interest you. This is an infallible rule.
Ted Hughes
The ties that bind us to life are tougher than you imagine, or than any one can who has not felt how roughly they may be pulled without breaking.
Anne Brontë
God did not mean us to be ignorant. He left us this marvelous universe to decipher and understand.
James Targett
You behold him at the age of four-and-twenty stuffed with learning enough to produce an intellectual indigestion in an ordinary mind.
Rafael Sabatini
No company is preferable to bad. We are more apt to catch the vices of others than virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.
Charles Caleb Colton
Lovers die inward that their flames conceal.
John Webster
In the 20th century- an age in thrall to the new- women turn out to be the newest thing of all; still packed up in cellophane, still folded up in the box, having played dead for the length of history. But now we are the new species!We are the tulip- America- the Hula Hoop- the moon shot- cocaine! Everything we do is going to be, implicitly,amazing.
Caitlin Moran
You never know. Maybe when we’re dreaming…we’re more lucid than when we are awake.
Katherine Angela Yeboah
I'm not "happy" but I'm not unhappy about it.
Alan Bennett
The being who patiently endures injustice, and silently bears insults, will soon become unjust, or unable to discern right from wrong.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Trees are affected by many factors. Global warming is changing rainfall, humidity, air composition, solar radiation, heating and cooling. Plants are sensitive to any of these factors. When all of the factors start to change at once, it may lead to devastation in the plant world.
Steven Magee
Trust but check. Check on those we trust.
Tom Rob Smith
Negative emotional states are a breeding ground for mistakes.
Sam Owen
Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
Iris Murdoch
We are beginning to play with ideas of ecology, and although we immediately trivialize these into commerce or politics, there is at least an impulse still in the human breast to unify and thereby sanctify the total natural world, of which we are. ... There have been, and still are, in the world many different and even contrasting epistemologies which have been alike in stressing an ultimate unity, and, although this is less sure, which have also stressed the notion that ultimate unity is aesthetic. The uniformity of these views gives hope that perhaps the great authority of quantitative science may be insufficient to deny an ultimate unifying beauty. I hold to the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply, an epistemological mistake.
Gregory Bateson
If we seek solace in the prisons of the distant pastSecurity in human systems we're told will always always lastEmotions are the sail and blind faith is the mastWithout the breath of real freedom we're getting nowhere
Sting
...[D]eviance is an attributed designation rather than something inherent in individuals...
Peter Conrad
A moment when the worst had already happened, so there was nothing left to worry about. I wanted to stop forever in that pause between cause and effect. A place where I didn’t have to be responsible for everybody all of the time.
Jo Furniss