Quotes by British Authors - Page 83

The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents--or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall.
C.S. Lewis
The light on her face was a lesson, a book that she hoped he would want to read, but he looked away from her...she did not want this man to leave her alone. He was kind. And she feared the loneliness of dreaming
Caryl Phillips
There is a kind of truth in a well-told lie. When we look back, we don't see things as they were but how we would like them to have been.
Chloe Thurlow
It was a light which gave solidity to everything and drew colour out from the heart of objects.
V.S. Naipaul
One thing you who had secure or happy childhoods should understand about those of us who did not: we who control our feelings, who avoid conflicts at all costs, or seem to seek them, who are hypersensitive, self-critical, compulsive, workaholic and above all survivors…we’re not that way from perversity, and we cannot just let it go. We’ve learned to cope in ways you never had to.
Piers Anthony
Mad Eye' Moody on the Avada Kedavra curse: "Not nice," he said calmly. "Not pleasant. And there's no counter curse. There's no blocking it. Only one known person has ever survived it, and he's sitting right in front of me.
J.K. Rowling
Zombies are the ideal late twentieth-century monsters. A zombie is the one thing you can't deal with. It survives anything. Frankenstein's monster and Dracula could be sent down in so many ways. Zombies, though, fall outside all this. You can't argue with them. They just keep coming at you.
Clive Barker
It was at Long Huruk that we encountered the vortex of the dream time of which we had so far only touched the periphery, for this was the semi-nomadic community of mystics and dream wanderers.
Lawrence Blair
Remember that fear causes to happen the very things it fears. That's why fear should be unknown to us.
Louis de Bernières
Perhaps he was a wicked man, as Robert Falcon had said, but he had the saving grace of laughter, could even laugh at his own fatal predicament, and he had been so full of life.
Madeleine Brent
Once upon a time,’ is code for ‘I’m lying to you.’ We experience stories as lies and truth at the same time. We learn to empathize with real people via made-up people. The most important thing that fiction does is it lets us look out through other eyes, and that teaches us empathy—that behind every pair of eyes is somebody like us.
Neil Gaiman
Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.
Alexander Pope
The web and its technologies are digital representations of everything we did before in a more private, bigger, faster and more empowering format than ever before.
David Amerland
Poverty is an anomaly to rich people: it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.
Walter Bagehot
Learn to love your haters, they are a wonderful source of inspiration.
Habeeb Akande
Wisdom or accident, at length, recall us from our error, and offers to us some object capable of producing a pleasing, yet lasting effect, which effect, therefore, we call happiness. Happiness has this essential difference from what is commonly called pleasure, that virtue forms its basis, and virtue being the offspring of reason, may be expected to produce uniformity of effect.
Ann Radcliffe
There's no shame in enjoying the quiet life.
Daniel Radcliffe
As food nourishes the body, beauty nourishes the spirit.
Ginger Gilmour
I sat down and knitted for some time - my usual resource under discouraging circumstances.
Isabella L. Bird
There were thousands of brown books in leather bindings, some chained to the book-shelves and others propped against each other as if they had had too much to drink and did not really trust themselves. These gave out a smell of must and solid brownness which was most secure.
T.H. White
It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can't relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don't know if there is one.
George Harrison
Most people like praise . . . When it is really deserved most people expand under it into richer and better selves.
Joseph Farrell
I don't think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it's raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable, and a good place to go when things are bad, but that doesn't mean you have to write directly about the bad thing; sometimes you need to let time pass, and allow the thing that hurts to get covered with layers, and then you take it out, like a pearl, and you make art out of it.When my father died, on the plane from his funeral in the UK back to New York, still in shock, I got out my notebook and wrote a script. It was a good place to go, the place that script was, and I went there so deeply and so far that when we landed Maddy had to tap me on the arm to remind me that I had to get off the plane now. (She says I looked up at her, puzzled, and said "But I want to find out what happens next.") It was where I went and what I did to cope, and I was amazed, some weeks later when I pulled out that notebook to start typing, to find that I'd written pretty much the entire script in that six hour journey.
Neil Gaiman
The notion that the only way you can critically engage with a person’s ideas is to take a shot at them, is to be openly critical — this is actually nonsense. Some of the most effective ways in which you deal with someone’s idea are to treat them completely at face value, and with an enormous amount of respect. That’s actually a faster way to engage with what they’re getting at than to lob grenades in their direction…If you’re going to hold someone to what they believe, make sure you accurately represent what they believe.
Malcolm Gladwell
The glitter of the great world, you know, is only so much froth and spume: you may look in vain for happiness there.
Jude Morgan
Find what you love to do, what you're good at and passionate about and then dedicate your entire life to working hard at it. I wil say it again. Work hard. I mean that. Even if you're not sure where that work will lead, even if it is underappreciated or undervalued. Do it because the satisfaction, pride, and sense of self that comes from a job well done; from being the very best at what you do; from knowing that you did this, will be your ulltimate weapon and our greatest shield in a life that will often test you. One day destiny may conspire to take everything away from you, but it can never take away the abilities you have cultivated. As I am sure your grandfather will tell you, your winning lottery ticket is your mind.
Amy Mowafi
I suspected his middle name was "Yum".
Camilla Chafer
He went through the bills with the jaundiced eye of a China trader, asking himself not whether he had been stolen from, but where the theft had occurred. If he couldn’t find it, that would suggest his factor back home in Shanghai was either cleverer or more honest than he had thought, and Crane didn’t think he was particularly honest.
K.J. Charles
Animal welfare - yes. Animal rights - don't make me laugh. I'm not an animals rights activist. I certainly do not love animals. In fact, I secretly mistrust all four-legged / furry / two-winged / feathered / shelled ar scaly brothers and sisters. If I were them, I would by now be plotting ultimate revenge on a scale previously unknown to man. ... I stick to a vegan diet only for reasons of self-preservertion. Call it insurance. When the time of the great animal uprising comes, I may have a small chance of escaping ...
Sharon Dodua Otoo
No critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. For English is a language that simply cannot be fixed, not can its use ever be absolutely laid down. It changes constantly; it grows with an almost exponential joy. It evolves eternally; its words alter their senses and their meanings subtly, slowly, or speedily according to fashion and need.
Simon Winchester
To the Virgins, To Make much of TimeGather ye rose-buds while ye may,Old Time is still a-flying;And this same flower that smiles today,tTomorrow will be dying.The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,tThe higher he’s a-getting,The sooner will his race be run,tAnd nearer he is to setting.That age is best which is the first,tWhen youth and blood are warmer;But being spent, the worse, and worsttTimes still succeed the former.Then be not coy, but use your time,tAnd while you may, go marry;For having lost but once your prime,tYou may for ever tarry.
Robert Herrick
If the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fail to catch the tiny, shrew-like ancestor of all the mammals, we should none of us be here.
Richard Dawkins
I am so grateful to be here on this awesome planet with it's diverse life - everything we need to not just survive but to thrive. I am excited to continually learn more about it, and always curious to see what is going to come up next.
Jay Woodman
The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
There have been occasions in my later life (I suppose in most lives) when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all interest in romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance.
Charles Dickens
The Sweat and the Furrow was Silas Weekley being earthly and spade-conscious all over seven hundred pages. The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas's last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the the hayloft, everyone else lying low in the barn. The rain dripped from the thatch, and the manure steamed in the midden. Silas never omitted the manure. It was not Silas's fault that its steam provided the only uprising element in the picture. If Silas could have discovered a brand of steam that steamed downwards, Silas would have introduced it.
Josephine Tey
The true America is the Middle West and Columbus discovered nothing at all except another Europe.
W. L. George
...Because a book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else’s head. You see out of the world through somebody else’s eyes. It’s very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you’ve just read a book by one of those people.
Neil Gaiman
Always good to remember when you're making art. You don't have to like it, just be ready to do the next thing.
Neil Gaiman
Yes, but the world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters,' said Sirius with a wry smile.
J.K. Rowling
My level of excitement is above cricket proportions
C.S. Woolley
After all, why be right when you can be happy.
Tom Holt
The soft whispers of the God in man.
Edward Young
Love isn't all sparks and firecrackers. Sometimes it’s more subtle than that.
Becky Wicks
It is curious what patches of hardness and tenderness lie side by side in men’s dispositions. I suppose he has some test by which he finds out whom Heaven cares for.
George Eliot
Unless we remember we cannot understand.
E.M. Forster
Will I be some kid’s dad one day? Are any future people lurking deep inside mine?...Which girl’s carrying the other half of my kid, deep in those intricate loops? What’s she doing right now? What’s her name?
David Mitchell
The world you acquire and partake in is purely driven by the choices taken.
Steven Redhead
It was then that we connected. His sound bounced through my head and out my eyes, painting my world with new shades of color. I still remember the smile that unnoticeably took my face as I inched for another touch.
Charles Lee
But that's men all over ... Poor dears, they can't help it. They haven't got logical minds.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Because if it is to spite her,' Biddy pursued, 'I should think -but you know best- that might be better and more independently done by caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her over, I should think -but you know best- she was not worth gaining over.
Charles Dickens
Faith is the road, but communion with Jesus is the well from which the pilgrim drinks.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
consider the implications. We think we know what we want, but we can never really know until we've got it. And sometimes when we have, we discover we never really wanted it in the first place - but then it's too late
Alexandra Potter
It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should.
Alain de Botton
The fireworks continued to burn and spread all over the school that afternoon. Though they caused plenty of disruption, the other teachers did not seem to mind them very much."Dear, dear," said Professor McGonagall sardonically, as one of the dragons soared around her classroom, emitting loud bangs and exhaling flame. "Miss Brown, would you mind running along to the headmistress and informing her that we have an escaped firework in our classroom?""Thank you so much, Professor!" said Professor Flitwick in his squeaky little voice. "I could have got rid of the sparklers myself, of course, but I wasn't sure whether I had the authority..."Beaming, he closed the classroom door in Umbridge's snarling face.
J.K. Rowling
He stares now at the three words he has written.They are ridiculous. Writing is ridiculous. A sentence, any sentence, is absurd. Just the idea of it; jam one word up against another, shoulder-to-shoulder, jaw-to-jaw; hem them in with punctuation so they can't move an inch. And then hand that over to someone else to peer at, and expect something to be communicated, something understood. It's not just pointless. It is ethically suspect.
Jo Baker
For a woman, every outfit is a hopeful spell, cast to influence the outcome of the day. An act of trying to predict your fate, like looking at your horoscope.
Caitlin Moran
A letter from a French cleric to Nicholas of St. Albans, written c. 1178, rehearsed what was already a familiar perception: Your island is surrounded by water, and not unnaturally its inhabitants are affected by the nature of the element in which they live. Unsubstantial fantasies slide easily into their minds. They think their dreams to be visions, and their visions to be divine. We cannot blame them, for such is the nature of their land. I have often noticed that the English are greater dreams than the French.
Peter Ackroyd
How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?
Logan Pearsall Smith
Progress is not an illusion; it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
George Orwell