Quotes by British Authors - Page 80

There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us, and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is possible that man may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead.
Arthur Machen
what's real within the story is real within the story
Jo Walton
The man was staring directly at him now, a curious expression on his face, half smiling, half quizzical. Instantly Eager had a sense of certainty far deeper than anything he had experienced so far. "I have it too!" he exclaimed. "I am a part of this Earth, aren't I? Just like the birds and the trees and the people - I am.""Om." said his companion.Unseen by them, a blossom fell.
Helen Fox
But what are kings, when regiment is gone,But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?- Edward II, 5.1
Christopher Marlowe
We are not defined by what knocks us down - we are defined by how we get back up
Madeleine Black
I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.
Jeanette Winterson
A mode of conduct, a standard of courage, discipline, fortitude and integrity can do a great deal to make a woman beautiful.
Jacqueline Bisset
His hand closed automatically around the fake Horcrux but in spite of everything, in spite of the dark and twisting path he saw stretching ahead for himself, in spite of the final meeting with Voldemort he knew must come whether in a month in a year or in ten, he felt his heart lift at the thought that there was still one last golden day of peace left to enjoy with Ron and Hermione.
J.K. Rowling
A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
In essence the renaissance is simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.
John Fowles
It was all about survival. That's all it had ever been about.
Molly Looby
This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment to my meditations.
Joseph Conrad
Humanists were people who wanted to return to ideas found in old Greek and Latin writing of Greece and Rome, written many centuries earlier. Christian Humanists also wanted to get back to these ideas, but they were mainly concerned with learning about the early Christian Church, before it had become involved with money-making and superstition. They wanted to read the books of the early Church, especially the gospels of Christ, in the original language of Greek, so that they would know exactly what the writings meant. The leader of the Christian Humanists was Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), who attacked superstitions in the Catholic Church in his writing.
Michael A. Mullett
Whether I resolve to fire, earth, water, air, Or all the elements by scruples, I know not, Nor greatly care. - Shoot. Shoot!Of all deaths, the violent death is best;For from ourselves it steals ourselves so fast,The pain, once apprehended, is quite past.
John Webster
Look at us. One bleeding body, one corpse, and a husk who's been half dead for years. No one who took an objective look at this room could think it was anything but too late, Ruth. For all of us.
Sophie Hannah
For me there is something primitively soothing about this music, and it went straight to my nervous system, making me feel ten feet tall.
Eric Clapton
A desire for privacy does not imply shameful secrets; Moglen argues, again and again, that without anonymity in discourse, free speech is impossible, and hence also democracy. The right to speak the truth to power does not shield the speaker from the consequences of doing so; only comparable power or anonymity can do that.
Nick Harkaway
This is what labels do. They stick. If people think you're MAD, then everything you do, everything you think will have MAD stamped across it.
Nathan Filer
Unlike Christianity which preached a peace that it never achieved Islam unashamedly came with a sword.
Stephen Runciman
[P]art of the pleasure of engaging with a writer is unraveling some allusions and admitting defeat by others.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto
The joy of life is variety the tenderest love requires to be renewed by intervals of absence.
Samuel Johnson
To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours, and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, boots, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can imagine how this can exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.
G.K. Chesterton
A library is thought in cold storage.
Viscount Herbert Samuel
Sex ought to be a wholly satisfying link between two affectionate people from which they emerge unanxious rewarded and ready for more.
Alex Comfort
We do not believe until we want a thing and feel that we shall die if it is not granted to us and then we kneel and believe.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
To conclude this personal note, I, William Joyce, will merely say that I left England because I would not fight for Jewry against the Führer and National Socialism, and because I believe most ardently, as I do today, that victory and a perpetuation of the old system would be an incomparably greater evil for [England] than defeat coupled with a possibility of building something new, something really national, something truly socialist.
Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce)
Don't Stare Into Your i-Phone Too Long Lest The Abyss Stares Back at You
Dean Cavanagh
Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic.
Edward de Bono
In a perfect world, you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again.
Neil Gaiman
It was as though they had been plunged into a fabulous dream. This, thought Harry, was surely the only way to travel — past swirls and turrets of snowy cloud, in a car full of hot, bright sunlight, with a fat pack of toffees in the glove compartment...
J.K. Rowling
Present opportunities are neglected and attainable good is slighted by minds busied in extensive ranges and intent upon future advantages.
Samuel Johnson
To be as vehement as he is is to be almost non-committal.
John Osborne
Love, my child, is a thing that every mother learns; it is not born with a baby, but made; and for eleven years, I have learned to love you as my son.
Salman Rushdie
For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols
Aldous Huxley
I saw [Linus Pauling] as a brilliant lecturer and a man with a fantastic memory, and a great, great showman. I think he was the century’s greatest chemist. No doubt about it.
Max F. Perutz
We may have to face God's truth about our pain--it is real, but we must be careful not to get God and life mixed up. God does not cause the pain and sorrow. He suffers with us and desires to comfort us as only he can.
Jill Briscoe
I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next d
Doris Lessing
You can come round to my flat." Toreth's voice changed, sliding subtly into something hard-edged but seductive. "I don't need chains to make you do what I want. I don't need anything. I can take whatever I want from you, however I want it, and you can't stop me.
Manna Francis
A researcher that has a brain that functions differently from their peers is at an advantage, as they can see things that the others cannot.
Steven Magee
He had no idea that he never went out of the house without her blessing going with him too, hovering, like a little echo of finished love, round that once dear head
Elizabeth von Arnim
The literature of childhood abounds with evidence that the peaks of a child's experience are not visits to the cinema, or even family outings to the sea, but occasions when he escapes into places that are disused and overgrown and silent. To a child there is more joy in a rubbish tip than a flowery rockery, in a fallen tree than a piece of statuary, in a muddy track than a gravel path.
Iona Opie
I, a miserable wretch, haunted by a curse that shut up every avenue to enjoyment.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.
Neil Gaiman
All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
Clive James
If people reach perfection they vanish, you know.
T.H. White
You must regard this deviation from your plan as part of the adventure that you sought when you decided to embark on it in the first place...Absence of certainty is its essence. People...who choose to shun the mundane must not only expect, but also enjoy and profit from surprises.
Adam Yamey
It was also a room full of books and made of books. There was no actual furniture; this is to say, the desk and chairs were shaped out of books. It looked as though many of them were frequently referred to, because they lay open with other books used as bookmarks.
Terry Pratchett
Liberation from the tyranny of the body contributes to greatness, but just as much to greatness in sin as to greatness in virtue.
Bertrand Russell
Such impulses have displayed themselves very widely across left and liberal opinion in recent months. Why? For some, because what the US government and its allies do, whatever they do, has to be opposed—and opposed however thuggish and benighted the forces which this threatens to put your anti-war critic into close company with. For some, because of an uncontrollable animus towards George Bush and his administration. For some, because of a one-eyed perspective on international legality and its relation to issues of international justice and morality. Whatever the case or the combination, it has produced a calamitous compromise of the core values of socialism, or liberalism or both, on the part of thousands of people who claim attachment to them. You have to go back to the apologias for, and fellow-travelling with, the crimes of Stalinism to find as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion as in the wrong-headed—and too often, in the circumstances, sickeningly smug—opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people from one of the foulest regimes on the planet.
Norman Geras
They are an American Delegation who are doing a tour of the region to apologize for the crusades', said Arafat. Then he, and his guest, burst out laughing. They both knew that America had little or no involvement in the wars of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. But Arafat, at any rate, was happy to indulge the affliction of anyone who believed they had and use it to his own political advantage.
Douglas Murray
Why do gentlemen's voices carry so clearly, when women's are so easily stifled?
Sarah Waters
If real, regular, normal, boring life, (when you're at home every day, seeing the same people, doing the same things) is like sitting at home on the floor surrounded by toys... traveling feels to me like going to Toys R Us with your toy box and getting to trade stuff in and buy new things and explore whole new ideas.
Alex Day
Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.
Agatha Christie
This is when I became myself. The girl before this time is a shadow, like a soul who is practicing how not to become. She is the background, the hole in the fabric from which the real shape is cut.
Gabriel Weston
Guilt is a feeble emotion. It surrenders too easily
Deborah McKinlay
Now I am twenty-eight, and am in reality more illiterate than many schoolboys of fifteen. It is true that I have thought more, and that my day dreams are more extended and magnificent; but they want (as the painters call it) keeping; and I greatly need a friend who would have sense enough not to despise me as romantic, and affection enough for me to endeavour to regulate my mind.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
You need three things in the theatre - the play the actors and the audience and each must give something.
Kenneth Haigh
A Coy Aversion...a fluttertoo shyto be seen...
Muse
In the popular imagination hairiness is like furriness, an index of bestiality, and as such an indication of aggressive sexuality. Men cultivate it, just as they are encouraged to develop competitive and aggressive instincts, women suppress it, just as they suppress all the aspects of their vigour and libido.
Germaine Greer
In the old days he had clutched life with such violence that the juice of it ran out between his fingers and was lost, but now he would touch it delicately, thankful for the good and accepting the ills with patience.
Elizabeth Goudge