Quotes by British Authors - Page 82

Bare heights of loneliness...a wilderness whose burning winds sweep over glowing sands, what are they to HIM? Even there He can refresh us, even there He can renew us.
Amy Carmichael
Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) is a major problem from poorly tested products and it should be dealt with sooner rather than later by government regulators.
Steven Magee
By far the most significant consequence of "selfish capitalism" (Thatch/Blatcherism) has been a startling increase in the incidence of mental illness in both children and adults since the 1970s.
Oliver James
I wish... I wish he wasn't quite so ashamed of me. And if he could stop feeling so ashamed of himself, then maybe we might stand a chance.
Malorie Blackman
Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.
Neil Gaiman
People that have a police car behind them pulling them over should put on their hazard lights and continue slowly driving to the nearest densely populated public place, such as a supermarket or shopping center. Pull over outside the busy entrance and start your video camera. Inform the police officer that you are video recording and very slowly give the requested documentation. Exercise your legal right to silence while the many independent witnesses video record the unexpected stop that rudely interrupts your day. If you are given a ticket, choose to go to court. It will give you time to obtain independent legal advice about the allegation.
Steven Magee
Remember that not to be happy is not to be grateful.
Elizabeth Carter
My grandad always said, "You should never judge a book by its cover." And it's for that reason that he lost his job as chair of the British Book Cover Awards panel.
Stewart Lee
There's only so much temptation a vampire can take.
Lindsay J. Pryor
In the attempt to find the just measure of horror and terror, I came upon the writing of Carole Gill whose work revealed a whole new dimension to me. The figure of the gothic child was there. Stoker's horror was there. Along with the romance! At the heart of her writing one stumbles upon a genuine search for that darkness we lost with the loss of Stoker." ~Dr. Margarita Georgieva ~ Gothic Readings in The Dark
Carole Gill
To err is human to forgive divine.
Alexander Pope
I expect to think that I would rather be author of your book [The Origin of Species] than of any other on Nat. Hist. Science.[Letter to Charles Darwin 12 Dec 1859]
Joseph Dalton Hooker
Nor is it the spirit of those Christians - alas, they are many - whose ambition in life seems limited to building a nice middle-class Christian home, and making nice middle-class Christian friends, and bringing up their children in nice middle-class Christian ways, and who leave the sub-middle-class sections of the community, Christian and non-Christian, to get on by themselves. The Christmas spirit does not shine out in the Christian snob. For the Christmas spirit is the spirit of those who, like their Master, live their whole lives on the principle of making themselves poor - spending and being spent - to enrich their fellowmen, giving time, trouble, care and concern to do good to others - and not just their own friends - in whatever way there seems need.
J.I. Packer
So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read in school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
Jeanette Winterson
Young love-making--that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to--the things whence its subtle interlacing are swung--are scarcely perceptible; momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life to another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust.
George Eliot
Are men like babies? Is trying to distract them a better tactic than asking them to behave reasonably?
Sophie Hannah
Aha! Today I shall become an author! And I will auth and auth and auth and make a squillion dollars, whoopee!
Brian Jacques
The well of true wit is truth itself.
George Meredith
There are only certain intervals of time when life of any sort is possible in an expanding universe and we can practise astronomy only during that habitable time interval in cosmic history.
John D. Barrow
Every man with a little leisure and enough money for railway tickets, every man, indeed, who knows how to read, has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
Aldous Huxley
[W]hen I see men callously and cheerfully denying women the full use of their bodies, while insisting with sobs and howls on the satisfaction of their own, I simply can't find it heroic, or kind, or anything but pretty rotten and feeble.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Faith begins as an experiment and ends as an experience.
William Ralph Inge
What we do every time we pray is to confess our impotence and God's sovereignty.
J.I. Packer
Giving is the only way of taking part
Benny Bellamacina
They were like animals, men. They found too much eye contact threatening.
Jojo Moyes
Do you enjoy your work? Are you happy to get out of bed each morning and dress for the office? If you answered ‘no’ to either of these questions, you are not alone. In a 2014 Conference Board survey, 52 per cent of Americans claimed to be unhappy at work and in a recent CIPD study 23 per cent of Britons claimed to be looking for a new job. In the same survey only about one-third claim to feel engaged with their work. You can see the effects of this in absence, stress and depression. In fact, you can see it in the rush hour in the tired and sad-looking faces of so many commuters.The majority of people I coach are unhappy or dissatisfied with their working lives. They describe their work in so many depressing ways – as ‘boring’, ‘tedious’, ‘mind-numbing’, ‘stressful’, ‘painful’ or even ‘scary’. I hear similar opinions as I travel the world from all types of people no matter what their background, education or choice of career.
Nigel Cumberland
Work as if everything depended upon work and pray as if everything depended upon prayer.
William Booth
Come to the edge.We might fall.Come to the edge.It's too high!COME TO THE EDGE!And they cameAnd he pushedAnd they flew.
Christopher Logue
Being terrified but going ahead and doing what must be done—that's courage. The one who feels no fear is a fool, and the one who lets fear rule him is a coward.
Piers Anthony
The wounded can inflict the most painful wound without hesitation.
Bella Forrest
It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.
Stephen Hawking
An artist is identical with an anarchist,' he cried. 'You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway.''So it is,' said Mr. Syme.'Nonsense!' said Gregory, who was very rational when any one else attempted paradox.
G.K. Chesterton
In North America there is the general belief that everything can be fixed that life can be fixed up. In Europe the view is that a lot can't be fixed up and that living properly is not necessarily a question of mastering the technology so much as learning to live gracefully within the constraints that the species invents.
Jonathan Miller
It is the custom on the stage in all good, murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes in as regular alternation as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon.
Charles Dickens
Cats do not hunt seals. They would hunt them if they knew what seals and where to find them. But they do not know, so it's okay.
Terry Pratchett
Artists, like criminals, are dependent on a jury.
Glenn Haybittle
Insofar as it is true, the idea that our actions or beliefs are merely one link in a causal link that runs back to the beginning of the universe is making a trivial claim. Insofar as it is saying something profound, the claim is untrue.
Kenan Malik
I was never less alone than when by myself.
Edward Gibbon
Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.
Friedrich A. Hayek
I don't take much stock of detectives in novels - chaps that do things and never let you see how they do them. That's just inspiration: not business.
Arthur Conan Doyle
So never give in,” continued the girl, and restated again and again the vague yet convincing plea that the Invisible lodges against the Visible. Her excitement grew as she tried to cut the rope that fastened Leonard to the earth. Woven of bitter experience, it resisted her. Presently the waitress entered and gave her a letter from Margaret. Another note, addressed to Leonard, was inside. They read them, listening to the murmurings of the river.
E.M. Forster
The trick here is arbitrary word assignment: that is, any violence engaged in by ourselves or our friends is ipso facto retaliation and counter-terrorism; whatever the enemy does is terrorism, irrespective of facts.’10 We might say, then, that the golden rule of state violence is: terrorism is what they do, and counter-terrorism is what we do. As Orwell himself observed in his essay, ‘Notes on Nationalism’: ‘Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by “our” side.
David Cromwell
Each time you turn your life issues over to God and allow Him to lead, you build trust in Him.
Elizabeth George
Wisdom comes through suffering or old age.
Lesley Pearse
Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young...
J.K. Rowling
A godly man often grows best when his worldly circumstances decay. He who follows Christ for his bag is a Judas; they who follow for loaves and fishes are children of the devil; but they who attend him out of love to himself are his own beloved ones. Lord, let me find my life in thee...!
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
When you close your eyes and you feel the color, that is when you know that love has entered your heart.
Anthony T.Hincks
If you cannot do great things in life, make sure you do the small things in a great way.
Habeeb Akande
Lysander saw that they were displaying all the timeworn and conventional feints and poor disguises of lovers meeting in a public place and hoping the real nature of their relationship would be invisible.
William Boyd
Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives—he called them enemies!—hidden out of sight somewhere.
Joseph Conrad
Energise your desires utilising your heart energy to create the things that you wish for in your life.
Steven Redhead
Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think…
John Stuart Mill
Things are seldom what they seem Skim milk masquerades as cream.
W.S. Gilbert
In the end we have one choice: to suffer well or suffer badly, to reach for or to reject that quality which is termed, equally, by both religious and secular, grace.
Anna Lyndsey
If you want to radiation poison a nation, just start shipping them cheap ionizing smoke detectors for the home with a little too much radiation in them.
Steven Magee
Find Sam Temple. Tell him you escaped.”Jack gulped and bobbed his head.“Better yet, find that girl, Astrid.” Diana recovered some of her mocking attitude. “Astrid the Genius. She’ll be desperate to save Sam.”“Okay. Okay.” He steeled himself. “I better go.”Diana touched his arm. “Tell them about Andrew.”Jack froze with his hand on the key. “That’s what you want me to do?”“Jack, if Sam blinks out, Drake will turn on me, and Caine won’t be able to stop him. Drake is stronger than before. I need Sam alive. I need someone for Drake to hate. I need balance. Tell Sam about the temptation. Warn him that he’ll be tempted to surrender to the big jump, but maybe, maybe, if he says no…” She sighed. It was not a hopeful sound. “Now: go.
Michael Grant
The world is full of love stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessors.
Salman Rushdie
Somehow, the more I get older, and the more I see of people and sadness and illness and everything, the sorrier I get for everyone.
Agatha Christie
No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.
Samuel Johnson
I place a high moral value on the way people behave. I find it repellent to have a lot and to behave with anything other than courtesy in the old sense of the word-politeness of the heart a gentleness of the spirit.
Emma Thompson