Quotes by British Authors - Page 74

Gratitude leads to a good attitude
Habeeb Akande
It is always hazardous to express what one has to say indirectly and allusively.
Walter Pater
You know, sometimes love can be staring you right in the face, and you can be too blind to see it.
D.F. Jones
The two goals of liberation and social justice are not obviously compatible, any more than were the liberty and equality advocated at the French Revolution. If liberation involves the liberation of individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking and the strong from getting ahead, and what should we allow ourselves by way of constraining them?
Roger Scruton
The boulevard was awash with the curious and the shocked as wave after wave of tourist crashed into the unmoving masses of families who had just witnessed a brawl between The Incredible Hulk and SpongeBob Squarepants over territory, boundaries and the age old issue of ownership.
David Louden
Slowly, Anna put up a hand to his muzzle and began to scratch that spot behind the ear where large dogs keep their souls.
Eva Ibbotson
The greater are our affections the deeper are our afflictions, and the more we love the more we have to weep.
J.C. Ryle
I don't know about you, but I celebrate being in love with life by smiling.
Anthony T.Hincks
But maybe all it needs is a moment to change the course of history.
Sally Gardner
To associate with other like-minded people in small purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction.
Aldous Huxley
Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.
David Mitchell
Marriages last because the people in them want to be married
Linda Grant
Sometimes I turn around and catch the smell of you and I cannot go on I cannot fucking go on without expressing this terrible so fucking awful physical aching fucking longing I have for you. And I cannot believe that I can feel this for you and you feel nothing. Do you feel nothing?
Sarah Kane
When we westerners pray we join our hands, close our eyes, kneel, hunch up and put our hands over our faces to close up our bodies. Our God is inside us, his universe inside our heads. When Orthodox Christians pray they keep their eyes open. They hold their heads up and open up their senses to the universe. Their God is outside in a real world.
John Mole
The full-grown modern human being ... is conscious of touching the highest pinnacle of fulfillment... when he is consumed in the service of an idea in the conquest of the goal pursued.
R. Briffault
To tell you the truth, I'm something of an atheist.
Terry Pratchett
Unless social sciences can be as creative as natural science, our new tools are not likely to be of much use to us.
Edgar Douglas Adrian
I shall decide what I do. If you say my work is fighting, or healing, or exploring, or whatever you say, I'll always be thinking about it, and if I end up doing that, I'll feel resentful because it'll feel as I didn't have a choice, and if I don't do it, I'll feel guilty because I should. Whatever I do, I will choose it, no one else.
Philip Pullman
I need complicated railroad journeys and people speaking to me in foreign languages to keep me happy. I want to see the world and write stories about everything I see.
Elizabeth Wein
I regard taking healthy sea level adapted children to the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea as a form of child abuse.
Steven Magee
It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.
Neil Gaiman
Why does it have to be like this?' I asked bitterly. 'Why does life have to be so short, with all the good things passing quickly. Is it worth living at all?
Joseph Delaney
Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.
Bill Bryson
I thought I would write a love letter. But then, I wrote a book." - Suzy Davies, on "Johari's Window
Suzy Davies
What can I say at seventy-five? "Thank God for my good life,and for all the love that has been given to me.
Agatha Christie
Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity
Aldous Huxley
Nobody ever feels they’re doing well with teenagers,' he said. 'I think that’s kind of the point of them.
Jojo Moyes
Two girls discover the secret of lifein a sudden line of poetry.
Denise Levertov
A man who offers to cook after he's seen you trying to freeze a dead dog has to be at least a little bit keen.
Rosen Trevithick
I make a rule never to remember anything before last week. It makes life more interesting
Jude Morgan
Sometimes I like her calm, unwild, gentle as a sleeping child,and wonder as she lies, a fur ring,curled upon my lap, unstirring -- is it me or Tibbles purring?
Ian Serraillier
Mori made an unwilling sound. 'I don't like Western art.''No look at this.' He lifted it from its package. It wasn't heavy. 'It's clever, it looks like busy Mozart.''What?''I . . .' Thaniel sighed. 'I see sound. Mozart looks like this. You know. Fast strings.''See? In front of you?''Yes. I'm not mad.''I didn't think so. All sounds?''Yes.
Natasha Pulley
These stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become, or can perhaps be.
Salman Rushdie
It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears.
Mark Lawrence
I have no faith in the USA corporate government systems of protection of public health and safety.
Steven Magee
There ought to be a law that allows eavesdroppers to sue.
Gill McKnight
Being imperfect, makes you perfect.
Anthony T.Hincks
It [being very rich] used to worry me, and I thought it wrong to have so many beautiful things when others had nothing. Now I realize that it is possible for the rich to sin by coveting the privileges of the poor. The poor have always been the favourites of God and his saints, but I believe that is is one of the special achievements of Grace to sanctify the whole of life, riches included.
Evelyn Waugh
It's a pity. I don't know who he is to you... But you are disgusting. To claim you fight for his honor, when all you do is bring shame to his name.
Charles Lee
Ideas won't keep: something must be done about them.
Alfred North Whitehead
...the place I was bound for on my latest pilgrimage was filled with living, first-hand memories of all the enchanted years that lie between two and eighteen. How enchanted those years are is made more and more clear to me the older I grow. There has been nothing in the least like them since; and though I have forgotten most of what happened six months ago, every incident, almost every day of those wonderful long years is perfectly distinct in my memory.
Elizabeth von Arnim
Change, it seems, is inevitable. And so is compromise.
Fennel Hudson
Let every hindrance to joy become the soil out of which joy blossoms.
Elizabeth George
The Seven Social Sins are: Wealth without work. Pleasure without conscience. Knowledge without character. Commerce without morality. Science without humanity. Worship without sacrifice. Politics without principle.From a sermon given by Frederick Lewis Donaldson in Westminster Abbey, London, on March 20, 1925.
Frederick Lewis Donaldson
The rule of the universe is that others can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and one can paddle every canoe except one's own.
C.S. Lewis
I feel like I'm in a film about a struggling artist who keeps getting up at all hours of the night to look at his big, blank empty canvas. And in a way I am. Except that i'm not struggling. I'm Hector Kipling. I might be getting up at all hours of the night to look at my big, blank, empty canvas, but I am not fucking struggling.
David Thewlis
Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.
Bertrand Russell
Some people come to the edge of the cliff and they look over, then run away in fear. They never realize it's possible to fly, to soar, to be free. They spend their lives crawling along cliff tops without finding the courage.
Michael Dobbs
All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.
Nick Hornby
Yesterday was the first day of the rest of your life . . . and you messed it up again.
Patrick Murray
And she wanted to be free. It wasn't Mr. Brumley she wanted; he was but a means — if indeed he was a means — to an end. The person she wanted, the person she had always wanted — was herself. Could Mr. Brumley give her that? Would Mr. Brumley give her that? Was it conceivable he would carry sacrifice to such a pitch as that?...
H.G.Wells
I'd imagine "murderess" trumps "wife" when defining a close relationship.
Robert Galbraith
The motivation of all artists is 'Look at me, Mum'.
Sebastian Horsley
After all, Betty was ill and she was her sister, and she wouldn't be able to shave her legs for weeks because of the plaster.
Eva Ibbotson
LOGAN: I think you spend too much time believing what other people see, rather than what you think.
Sam Crescent
I notice I am taking risks with my own security and losing my sensitivity to danger. I don't know it at the time, but the effects of war are reaching into me in unexpected ways, and I am being changed by them. I am surrounded by destruction and the randomness of death, which I cannot fathom. I have felt the closeness of death as tangibly as the whisper of a murderous seducer, and felt the richness, twinged by guilt, of having escaped its grasp. I have seen too often the numb lost look of men consumed by undiluted grief, and heard the howl of children as their mothers are pulled from the rubble of a rocket-blasted home, and I am coming to understand the long dark pain of those who silently endure what first seems unendurable.
Jason Elliot
Yet, although he could not quite work this out in simple terms in his own mind, the very savour of life, he thought, was itself enhanced if it were not totally taken for granted. Perhaps it was something to do with the whole philosophy of the world into which we were born. If we lived for ever, who would look forward eagerly to tomorrow? If there were no darkness, should we appreciate the sun? Warmth after cold, food after hunger, drink after thirst, sexual love after the absence of sexual love, the fatherly greeting after being away, the comfort and dryness of home after a ride in the rain, the warmth and peace and security of one’s fireside after being among enemies. Unless there was contrast there might be satiety.
Winston Graham
wtf even is my sexuality
Dan Howell
But against sandfly fever one could be inoculated, and I have another, hideously vivid picture of a great menacing brute of a doctor sticking a Thing that ended in a vicious needle into my mother's arm. Mad to defend my own, I scrambled off my father's knee, and flew to her rescue. I fixed my teeth in the doctor's horrible hairy wrist and hung on like a terrier, until my father succeeded in prising me away. Afterwards, everybody said how wonderful the doctor had been, because he continued calmly giving the inoculation while I was prised off him, instead of breaking the needle in my mother's arm. But nobody said how brave it was of me, only three years old, when all is said and done, and gone in the legs at that, to take on such fearful odds for the sake of love.
Rosemary Sutcliff
I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said.But he never liked anyone who--our friends,' said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry her.Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than I've ever been since, he thought. And as if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall. There above them it hung, that moon. She too seemed to be sitting with him on the terrace, in the moonlight.
Virginia Woolf