Quotes by British Authors - Page 81

Ultimately, we all have to decide what our own life is for. I will die one day, and, whether my day is near or far, I choose to look back on my time and know that I walked through the doors that inspired me.
Shaun Chamberlin
Why, on to the castle, to kill the royal family, and claim the throne that isn't mine by right!
Richard Curtis
I have started a new blog W.A.R.(Writers Amongst Readers) for all those writing or reading books. Quotes, excerpts, comments from the world's greatest writers. See robinhawdonblog
Robin Hawdon
Men have special needs too: for example, a man generally needs a higher daily intake of calories than a woman. But this has never been though of as a sign of men's inferiority to women; if anything, it is a sign of strength and an entitlement to extra food.
Jonathan Wolff
Craigengelt, you are either an honest fellow in right good earnest, and I scarce know how to believe that; or you are cleverer than I took you for, and I scarce know how to believe that either.
Walter Scott
Nothing had ever existed between us except the possibility of something, and now even that was over.
Alastair Reynolds
It was important not to offend against the laws of magic. If a woman left you it was because you did not cast the right spell over her, or else because someone else cast a stronger enchantment than yours, or else because your marriage was cursed in such a way that it cut the ties of love between husband and wife. Why did So-and-so enjoy success in his businesses? Because he visited the right enchanter. There was a thing in the emperor that rebelled against all this flummery, for was it not a kind of infantilization of the self to give up one's power of agency and believe that such power resided outside oneself rather than within? This was also his objection to God, that his existence deprived human beings of the right to form ethical structures by themselves.
Salman Rushdie
I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellry?
Graham Greene
To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.
Charles Darwin
There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of un-hatched chicks.
Neil Gaiman
A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
Alexander Pope
It’s as if people used the invention
John Lanchester
The internet and online communication is the window into your world - but real life, in person communication / connection is the door.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
...it really struck me that, just as people might look at me and never imagine I'd worked as a prostitute, they must look at some of those girls and see only the alienation and disaffection that hides their on fears and hurt.
Sophie Hayes
The sprint is like life ... blink and you miss it.
Steve Backley
I have lived recklessly, gambled my income away at the horse races, gone whoring, have been more drunk than sober, beaten men to a pulp with my hands, have had a man’s nose cut off for insulting my father and have been indebted to villains more times than I care to say. But, I do not want to live like this anymore. I want a quiet life with a good woman who will care and love me – not for being the Duke of Monmouth, but for me, Jemmy.
Andrea Zuvich
A good problem statement often includes: (a) what is known (b) what is unknown and (c) what is sought.
Edward Hodnett
That's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster.
Ted Hughes
Let me tell thee time is a very precious gift of God so precious that it's only given to us moment by moment.
Amelia Barr
We are, after all, human. There is something wild in those opposable thumbs.
Andrew Miller
For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very precisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping.
Peter Medawar
She says it's really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate.
W Somerset Maugham
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Doris Lessing
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold.
George Orwell
I burn, I shiver, out of this sun, into this shadow.
Virginia Woolf
Strange how potent cheap music is.
Noël Coward
As he spoke, I had the mental image of a small boy switching on the nightlight, not because he wants to be able to find his parents during the night, but because he fears his parents will forget him - lose him - in the dark.
Stephen Grosz
Each generation has its own dream of beauty. I have lived long enough to watch it change. Just then, he was what all sculptors were reaching after, and only the great achieved.
Mary Renault
The feast of reason and the flow of soul.
Alexander Pope
I shall always attribute my uncertain start in New Zealand to the fact that I was introduced too early to what is knows as the 'five o'clock swill'. The phrase has, when you consider it, a wonderful pastoral - one might almost say idyllic - ring to it. It conjures up a picture of fat but hungry porcines, all freshly scrubbed, eagerly and gratefully partaking of their warm mash from the horny but kindly hands of the jovial farmer, a twinkling eyed son of the soil.Nothing could be further from the truth.The five o'clock swill is the direct result of New Zealand's imbecilic licensing laws. In order to prevent people getting drunk the pubs close at six, just after the workers leave work. This means they have to leave their place of employment, rush frantically to the nearest pub, and make a desperate attempt to drink as much beer as they can in the shortest possible time. As a means of cutting down drunkenness, this is quite one of the most illogical deterrents I have come across.
Gerald Durrell
I tried to convey to the boy how people’s lives are often altered by curved lines read slowly from paper, sand, or stone.
Simon Van Booy
From the Buddhist perspective, the only lasting way to bring about change is for people themselves to change.
Pat Allwright
An important aspect of the ebbing of sex was that other things became interesting. Sex obliterates the individuality of young women more often than it does that of young men, because so much more of a woman than a man is used by sex.
Diana Athill
But that kiss did more than turn her into a puddle of lust. It terrified her. Not because of how soul-searingly good it was, but because kisses like that don’t just happen. Kisses like that implied history and connection and bone-deep knowledge, and it made her question everything that had existed between them before.
Kate Meader
Ron's ears turned bright red and he become engrossed in a tuft of grass at his feet, which he prodded with his toe 'he must've known I'd run out on you'.'No', Harry corrected him, 'He must've known you'd always want to come back
J.K. Rowling
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;Conspiring with him how to load and blessWith fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shellsWith a sweet kernel; to set budding more,And still more, later flowers for the bees,Until they think warm days will never cease,For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
John Keats
You see, I, unlike you, have been made a prefect, which means that I, unlike you, have the power to hand out punishments.”“Yeah,” said Harry, “but you, unlike me, are a git.
J.K. Rowling
It's a police mantra that all members of the public are guilty of something, but some members of the public are more guilty than others.
Ben Aaronovitch
I think we may have reached the point where guns need to be confiscated from police officers.
Steven Magee
[Phoebe Broome] 'Well,' she said at last. 'You've now met my father. At his worst.'[Lord Vladimir] 'Being myself widely considered my family's most difficult member, I would not presume to comment.''That is... gentlemanly of you.
Alison Sinclair
After the sorts of winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen. Every February since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time winter is going to be permanent. But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same moment. Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle happens and the decaying slum in which I live is transfigured.
George Orwell
About Anna Faktorovich's "Romances of George Sand": “What a read! Not lacking in action and very imaginative.
Belinda Jack
Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.
Alain de Botton
The rich feel much less need than their predecessors to account for their wealth, whether to society, to governments or to God. Their attitudes and values are not seriously challenged by anyone. The respect now shown for wealth and money-making has been the most fundamental change in Britain over four decades.
Anthony Sampson
Use your intuition. Picture how things happen, why they happen. Don’t stick rigidly to first impressions, and once you’ve read the rule book, throw it away. Better still, burn the bastard.
Andrew Barrett
For the moment we might very well can them DUNNOS (for Dark Unknown Nonreflective Nondetectable Objects Somewhere).
Bill Bryson
We can’t handle absence anymore, anything is better than the blankness; the quiet of nothingness. People fight to put images of love and hate – both equally nauseating – between themselves and the blank space that surrounds us. It’s the only escape, and yet we feel the pressure of the blankness pressing in against us, forcing the violent display ever closer, forcing us to demand images brighter, more graphic until they scorch our senses badly enough that we no longer feel the void and the images become our reality. But it’s ok. Most people don’t need to fear absence anymore – we’re blinded, permanently. There’s no need to seek out the light show that protects us either; inoculation precedes the sickness now. Sedation isn’t an option, it’s a shared reality. Most people don’t see the beauty of the system, how perfect our salvation is.
Matthew Selwyn
Previous journeys in search of treasure have taught me that a zigzag strategy is the best way to get ahead.
Tahir Shah
Maybe because the Dark can only reach people at extremes; blinded by their own shining ideas, or locked up in the darkness of their own heads.
Susan Cooper
We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.
Alfred North Whitehead
Gos was still out there in the forest, the dark forest to which all things lost must go. I'd wanted to slip across the borders of this world into that wood and bring back the hawk White lost. Some part of me that was very small and old had known this, some part of me that didn't work according to the everyday rules of the world but with the logic of myths and dreams. And that part of me had hoped, too, that somewhere in that other world was my father. His death had been so sudden. there had been no time to prepare for it, no sense in it happening at all. He could only be lost. He was out there, still, somewhere out there in that tangled wood with all the rest of the lost and dead. I know now what those dreams in spring had meant, the ones of a hawk slipping through a rent in the air into another world. I'd wanted to fly with the hawk to find my father; find him and bring him home.
Helen Macdonald
Woman cannot be content with health and agility: she must make exorbitant efforts to appea something that never could exist without a diligent perversion of nature. Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate? Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men; following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves.
Germaine Greer
A game?’ Rob spluttered. ‘A bloody game?’ He turned to face his father. ‘This is your bloody fault! I’m living your bloody karma!
Dougie Brimson
These summer nights are short. Going to bed before midnight is unthinkable and talk, wine, moonlight and the warm air are often in league to defer it one, two or three hours more. It seems only a moment after falling asleep out of doors that dawn touches one gently on the shoulder, and, completely refreshed, up one gets, or creeps into the shade or indoors for another luxurious couple of hours. The afternoon is the time for real sleep: into the abyss one goes to emerge when the colours begin to revive and the world to breathe again about five o'clock, ready once more for the rigours and pleasures of late afternoon, the evening, and the night.
Patrick Leigh Fermor
Those who do not care, escape the anguish of mourning but never know the delights of love. The meaning of life forever eludes them.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Two men look out through the same bars: One sees the mud and one the stars.
Frederick Langbridge
Having knowledge of an unethical act and allowing it to continue can spread a contagion that can affect multiple beings in society
Bertrand Russell
Relationships based on dishonesty, lies,Secrets and cheats R not only predictedto fail but also a waste of precious timeand energie! U can’t fool yourself 4ever!
Lily Amis
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I'm right.
Ashleigh Brilliant
Art hath an enemy called ignorance.
Ben Jonson