Quotes by British Authors - Page 8

When I pray coincidences happen and when I don't they don't.
William Temple
Wit beyond measure is man’s greatest treasure.
J.K. Rowling
A letter?” repeated Professor McGonagall faintly, sitting back down on the wall. “Really Dumbledore, you think you can explain all this in a letter? These people will never understand him! He’ll be famous—a legend—I wouldn’t be surprised if today was known as Harry Potter day in the future—there will be books written about Harry—every child in our world will know his name! ...
J.K. Rowling
It was easy to make a difference to other people’s lives, so easy to change the little room in which people lived their life.
Alexander McCall Smith
He may become like a glass filled with a clear light for eyes to see that can.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven.
John Bunyan
Conventionality is not morality.
Charlotte Brontë
Flinging himself from his horse, he made, in his rage, as if he would breast the flood. Standing knee-deep in water he hurled at the faithless woman all the insults that have ever been the lot of her sex. Faithless, mutable, fickle, he called her; devil, adulteress, deceiver; and the swirling waters took his words, and tossed at his feet a broken pot and a little straw.
Virginia Woolf
I have detected disturbances in the wash.''The wash?''The space-time wash.''Are we talking about some sort of Vogon laundromat, or what are we talking about?''Eddies in the space-time continuum.''Ah...is he. Is he.''What?''Er, who is Eddy, then, exactly?
Douglas Adams
If the spirit of wonder & curiosity stays alive in us, then surely we will always have new questions, and always expand our creativity in response?
Jay Woodman
We ask only to be reassuredAbout the noises in the cellarAnd the window that should not have been open
T.S Eliot
There is something revolting about the way girls' minds so often jump to marriage long before they jump to love.
Dodie Smith
Very few live by choice. Every man is placed in his present condition by causes which acted without his foresight and with which he did not always willingly cooperate and therefore you will rarely meet one who does not think the lot of his neighbor better than his own.
Samuel Johnson
Existence, after losing her, would be hell
Emily Brontë
The night became silver again; looking up, it was as if they saw the moon sailing through the clouds instead of the other way around; racing smoothly across the sky, passing puffs and wisps of cloud on either side, and yet never moving from its place.
Susan Cooper
It is no accident that in the field of philosophy ontology is the study of reality, existence and coming into being. In the fields of information retrieval (semantic search) and computing, ontology is the naming of the types, interrelationships and properties of the entities that exist (in reality or conceptually) and which define a particular domain of knowledge or expertise.
David Amerland
It is always considered a piece of impertinence in England if a man of less than two or three thousand a year has any opinions at all upon important subjects.
Sydney Smith
Time spent in India has a extraordinary effect on one. It acts as a barrier that makes the rest of the world seem unreal.
Tahir Shah
Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too.
Alain de Botton
Stories aren't facts, Cait, they're not details. Stories are feelings. You've got your feelings, haven't you?""Too many," I said."Well, that's all you need." He put his hand on mine. "Cry yourself a story, love. It works. Believe me."So that's what I did, I cried myself a story.And this is it.
Kevin Brooks
The Assault Guards had one submachine-gun between ten men and an automatic pistol each; we at the front had approximately one machine-gun between fifty men, and as for pistols and revolvers, you could only procure them illegally. As a matter of fact, though I had not noticed it till now, it was the same everywhere. The Civil Guards and Carabineros, who were not intended for the front at all, were better armed and far better clad than ourselves. I suspect it is the same in all wars-always the same contrast between the sleek police in the rear and the ragged soldiers in the line.
George Orwell
I couldn’t stop crying. This fact in and of itself alarmed me, because for so long, I hadn’t been able to cry. And now, here I was, weeping. It didn’t feel therapeutic. I know scientists promise that all the negative hormones are being released as you cry, but I didn’t notice my emotional stability rising as the tears fell. I just knew I was crying, and my whole body was shaking, and I couldn’t make it stop.
Stephen Lovegrove
Even the loneliest and most solitary in the universe... the very cold space dust... will eventually come together to form a star.
G.C. Huxley
Patsy had asked him if he had had adventures in Paris and he had truthfully answered no. It was a fact that he had done nothing; his father thought he had had a devil of a time and was afraid he had contracted a venereal disease, and he hadn't even had a woman; only one thing had happened to him, it was rather curious when you came to think of it, and he didn't just then quite know what to do about it: the bottom had fallen out of his world.
W Somerset Maugham
There's never any great risk as long as you have money.
E.M. Forster
Please do not blame the story.The story cannot help itself. We do not realize it at the time, but sometimes the story we are all a part of is not just a story about Vikings and islands and dragons. It is a story about growing up.And one of the things about growing up, one of the inescapable, inevitable laws, is that one day...One day... one day... It is going to happen. I am sorry, but it's true.
Cressida Cowell
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
Terry Pratchett
Thence it is possible to arrive by easy stages at the happy notion, not uncommon among 'intellectuals', that taste consists of distaste, and that the loftiest of pleasures is that of feeling displeased; and thus to end by enjoying almost nothing in literature but one's own opinions, while oneself incapable of writing a living sentence.
F.L. Lucas
The greatest gift you can give (yourself or anyone else) is just being present
Rasheed Ogunlaru
I think, well, I've had a shit of a life, all things considered. It wasn't fair. Everyone I've ever loved is dead, and my leg hurts all the bloody time... But I think, any God that can do sunsets like that, a different one every night... 'Strewth, well, you've got to respect the old bastard, haven't you?
Neil Gaiman
No matter what you do each day...or in life...doing things God's way is a matter of the heart.
Elizabeth George
We may see a Creature with forty-nine headsWho lives in the desolate snow,And whenever he catches a cold (which he dreads)He has forty-nine noses to blow.'We may see the venomous Pink-Spotted ScrunchWho can chew up a man with one bite.It likes to eat five of them roasted for lunchAnd eighteen for its supper at night.'We may see a Dragon, and nobody knowsThat we won't see a Unicorn there.We may see a terrible Monster with toesGrowing out of the tufts of his hair.'We may see the sweet little Biddy-Bright HenSo playful, so kind and well-bred;And such beautiful eggs! You just boil them and thenThey explode and they blow off your head.'A Gnu and a Gnocerous surely you'll seeAnd that gnormous and gnorrible GnatWhose sting when it stings you goes in at the kneeAnd comes out through the top of your hat.'We may even get lost and be frozen by frost.We may die in an earthquake or tremor.Or nastier still, we may even be tossedOn the horns of a furious Dilemma.'But who cares! Let us go from this horrible hill!Let us roll! Let us bowl! Let us plunge!Let's go rolling and bowling and spinning untilWe're away from old Spiker and Sponge!
Roald Dahl
Ron: Why spiders? Why couldn't it be "follow the butterflies?
J.K. Rowling
Time is the Mind of Space.
Samuel Alexander
Most of us cherish freedom, but when we actually get the opportunity to make our own way it can be terrifying.
Tom Butler-Bowdon
One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one's philosophy to fit life...Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas, everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy?
Aldous Huxley
Polished brass will pass upon more people than rough gold.
Lord Chesterfield
Zaphod had never heard of this. He believed that he had heard of all the fun things in the Galaxy, so he assumed that the Total Perspective Vortex was not fun.
Douglas Adams
To live is to change and to be perfect is to change often.
John Henry Cardinal Newman
You can't do magic with books unless they're very special copies.
Jo Walton
That should give him time for another wank. It was a good job masturbating didn’t make you go blind.
Barbara Elsborg
Apparently wizards poke their noses in everywhere!
J.K. Rowling
And even if fairies built a nest in the bottom of my garden and it should turn out that I have to live for a thousand years, there's not one of them when I'll be of a mind to trust you.
Michael Dobbs
I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the “best” people, the “right” food, the “important” books.
C.S. Lewis
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
J.R.R. Tolkien
It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.You cannot give me too much work; to accumulate work has almost become a passion with me: my study is so full of it now, that there is hardly an inch of room for any more. I shall have to throw out a wing soon.And I am careful of my work, too. Why, some of the work that I have by me now has been in my possession for years and years, and there isn’t a finger-mark on it. I take a great pride in my work; I take it down now and then and dust it. No man keeps his work in a better state of preservation than I do.But, though I crave for work, I still like to be fair. I do not ask for more than my proper share.
Jerome K. Jerome
London is a roost for every bird.
Benjamin Disraeli
Feeling free of full & empty, feeling here but also there, Neither or but simply both, a universe within, one single stare.
Jay Woodman
For the sake of all the others who are like you, but less strong and less gifted perhaps, many of them, it's up to you to have the courage to make good.
Radclyffe Hall
People don't realize that the future is just now, but later.
Russell Brand
But to demand that a work be “relatable” expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book or movie or play: she expects the work to be done for her. If the concept of identification suggested that an individual experiences a work as a mirror in which he might recognize himself, the notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism.
Rebecca Mead
I am in the Pitte, but I have gone so deep that I can see the brightness of the Starres at Noon
Peter Ackroyd
To my mind's eye, my buried memories of Brandham Hall are like effects of chiaroscuro, patches of light and dark: it is only with effort that I see them in terms of colour. There are things I know, though I don't know how I know them, and things that I remember. Certain things are established in my mind as facts, but no picture attaches to them; on the other hand there are pictures unverified by any fact which recur obsessively, like the landscape of a dream.
L.P. Hartley
If hot food is they key to maintaining an expedition's stamina, then low grade gut-rot alcohol is the key to sustaining its sense of pleasure.
Tahir Shah
The child (mis)recognizes itself as a whole entity for the first time. It sees an image of itself as a unified person, an image which promises for the child that it will soon achieve full co-ordination of its body. The incoherent ‘hommelette’ sees an image of itself as an independent being and learns to identify with this image. This is when the ego (the sense of yourself as an individual) is formed. Thus, your sense of self is fundamentally bound up with an ‘exterior’ image. Instead of simply coming from within, your identity is formed out of a situation in which you see yourself for the first time from the outside. For Lacan this means that alienation and division are built into your identity from the outset. The result in adult life is that you are in a constant but fruitless state of desire for some mythical inner unity and stability to match the unity and stability you thought you saw in your childhood reflection. We spend our lives trying (and failing) to make ourselves ‘whole’.
Glenn Ward
Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?
Jeanette Winterson
He does not regard the quantity of faith, but the quality. He does not measure its degree, but its truth. He will not break any bruised reed, nor quench any smoking flax. He will never let it be said that any perished at the foot of the cross.
J.C. Ryle
Most Politicians Are The Whores at The Establishment Party, But We're The Ones Getting Fucked
Dean Cavanagh
Love is indeed its own hallucinogenic affecting the mind, heart and mood
Siân Lavinia Anaïs Valeriana
I couldn't make any sense of this logic, that the better off got more and those had little got less. The world ran on this law and only on this.
Neel Mukherjee