Quotes by British Authors - Page 84

Satan is so much more in earnest than we are--he buys up the opportunity while we are wondering how much it will cost.
Amy Carmichael
...Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul. Power’s comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballet box, diktat, and accident of birth, are the plot of history. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.” Immaculée Constantin now looks up at me. “Power will notice you. Power is watching you now. Carry on as you are, and power will favor you. But power will also laugh at you, mercilessly, as you lie dying in a private clinic, a few fleeting decades from now. Power mocks all its illustrious favorites as they lie dying…
David Mitchell
Change has to come for life to struggle forward.
Helen Hollick
Stories are one of the most powerful ways in which we communicate ideas among ourselves. They are the stuff that brings us together, the things we celebrate, the things we share with one another.
Robert Stephen Parry
Arguably insane utility workers that blatantly harass law abiding customers is likely to become more frequent as the long term effects of biologically toxic radio frequency (RF) radiation exposures from their transmitting smart meters continues to emerge.
Steven Magee
This is my moral. Trust what you dream. Not what you think.
David Mitchell
Things have to be made to happen in a way you want them to happen. Without management without the intervention of organized willpower the desired result simply cannot be obtained.
Robert Heller
What you believe or come to accept has infinite effects upon your thoughts.
Steven Redhead
Do not think it impossible just because it has never happened.- Friar Tuck
Stephen R. Lawhead
Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.
C.S. Lewis
False love, desire, and beauty frail, adieu! Dead is the root whence all these fancies grew.
Walter Raleigh
The theories of the social sciences do not consist of “laws” in the sense of empirical rules about the behavior of objects definable in physical terms. All that the theory of the social sciences attempts is to provide a technique of reasoning which assists us in connecting individual facts, but which, like logic or mathematics, is not about the facts. It can, therefore, and this is the second point, never be verified or falsified by reference to facts.
Friedrich A. Hayek
You cannot pour more water into a full cup without causing a spillage.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
I don’t want your babies, Felix. I can assure you I’m not sitting up here like some tragic fallen woman every night dreaming of having your babies.” She began tracing a figure of eight with her fingernail along his stomach. The movement looked idle but the nail pressed in hard. “You realize of course that if it were the other way round there would be a law, there would be an actual law: John versus Jen in the high court. And John would put it to Jen that she did wilfully fuck him for five years, before dumping him without warning in the twilight of his procreative window, and taking up with young Jack-the-lad, only twenty-four years old and with a cock as long as my arm. The court rules in favor of John. Every time. Jen must pay damages. Huge sums. Plus six months in jail. No—nine. Poetic justice.
Zadie Smith
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
Aldous Huxley
If Mr. Thornton was a fool in the morning, as he assured himself at least twenty times he was, he did not grow much wiser in that afternoon. All that he gained in return for his sixpenny omnibus ride, was a more vivid conviction that there never was, never could be, any one like Margaret; that she did not love him and never would; but that she — no! nor the whole world — should never hinder him from loving her.
Elizabeth Gaskell
One just has to look at the thing from a perspective that interests you personally.
Zadie Smith
Part of me can't understand how Mom could do this. But there's that other part of me that can readily relate. Because I feel a pull in two different directions too.
Siobhan Davis
I routinely inform people when I meet them that I am like a real life version of Dory the fish, as I am very forgetful and have problems tracking conversations.
Steven Magee
Political prisoners describe:- extreme physical and emotional torture- distortion of language, truth, meaning and reality- sham killings- begin repeatedly taken to the point of death or threatened with death- being forced to witness abusive acts on others- being forced to make impossible "choices"- boundaries smashed i.e. by the use of forced nakedness, shame, embarrassment- hoaxes, 'set ups', testing and tricks- being forced to hurt othersRitual abuse survivors often describe much the same things.
Laurie Matthew
It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.
Jeanette Winterson
Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations.
Oliver Sacks
A strange volume of real life in the daily packet of the postman. Eternal love and instant payment!
Douglas Jerrold
I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the Army and I, from the first importunate courtship until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom. I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found the early tiffs become more frequent, the tears less affecting, the reconciliations less sweet, tell they engendered a mood of aloofness and cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the loved one who was at fault. I caught the false notes in her voice and learned to listen for them apprehensively; I recognized the blank, resentful stare of incomprehension in her eyes, and the selfish, hard set of the corners of her mouth. I learned her, as one must learn a woman one has kept house with, day in, day out, for three and a half years; I learned her slatternly ways, the routine and mechanism of her charm, her jealousy and self-seeking, and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying. She was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly.
Evelyn Waugh
When penciling in your future, always use a pen
Benny Bellamacina
Be batty, be traditional, and be proud.
Fennel Hudson
It is characteristic of genius to be hopeful and aspiring.
Harriet Martineau
Not by discussions nor by argument, but by lifting up Christ shall we draw men unto Him.
James Hudson Taylor
The average man's opinions are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself.
Bertrand Russell
Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.
Jeanette Winterson
I wish I was as sure of anything as Macaulay is of everything.
William Windham
Tis always morning somewhere in the world.
Richard Hengest Horne
Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge.
Winston Churchill
If you don't follow your dreams, someone else, somewhere will follow theirs. Don't get left behind.
Anthony T.Hincks
The sacred bequestOf times long spent with your heartThat saturate and illuminate you nowSo piercingly…
Scott Hastie
Writing about the unholy is one way of writing about what is sacred.
Clive Barker
Yes, my tiara sets off the whole thing nicely," said Auntie Muriel in a rather carrying whisper. "But I must say, Ginevra's dress is far too low-cut."Ginny glanced round, grinning, winked at Harry, then quickly faced the front again.
J.K. Rowling
Before the antidote arrives from Iraq The man with snake-bite will be dead.
Idries Shah
I'm living in a world of goldfish.
Mycroft Holmes
They sounded like intestines, only on the outside, and the men in the Bible were always having them cut off and not being able to go to church. Horrid.
Jeanette Winterson
The great liberal betrayal of this generation is that in the name of liberalism, communal rights have been prioritized over individual autonomy within minority groups. And minorities within minorities really do suffer because of this betrayal. The people I really worry about when we have this conversation are feminist Muslims, gay Muslims, ex-Muslims—all the vulnerable and bullied individuals who are not just stigmatized but in many cases violently assaulted or killed merely for being against the norm.
Maajid Nawaz
Lewis at his best is about trying on ways of looking at the world.
Alister E. McGrath
The first drops of rain started to fall.'God's policemen,' said Jester. 'You what?' 'The police always used to pray for rain before any big demonstration because people wouldn't turn up. Nobody wants to run riot in the streets if it's pouring with rain. Who's going to want to fight in this?
Charlie Higson
The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first - wanting to be the centre - wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race. Some people think the fall of man had something to do with sex, but that is a mistake...what Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they 'could be like Gods' - could set up on their own as if they had created themselves - be their own masters - invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come...the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
C.S. Lewis
My geekness is a-quivering.
Jack Thorne
And there was this jerk named Dwayne who kept saying, 'Go on, have a beer. You know you want one. One little beer's not going to hurt ya. You haven't had a drink for three years. You can handle it.'" He looked at me again. "You know?"I nodded."Caught me when I was vulnerable. You know, when I was still breathing.
Bill Bryson
Without risk in our lives, we’re scarcely better than machines ourselves.
Alastair Reynolds
Suffering is a form of knowledge. It tells us what is wrong with our world.
David Smail
It is a sad truth that those who crave and seek power, invariably abuse that power once they obtain it.
Ian Gregoire
You don't become a success by breaking the rules. You don't become a success by obeying the rules. You become a success by inventing the rules.
Chloe Thurlow
Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.
Samuel Butler
The captain was amusing. He said that he himself couldn't draw and proved his words by drawing his own house for his prisoner to see. It was just such a house as the babies drew in the kindergarten: a square box with four square windows, a door and two chimneys, each with a neat curl of smoke. "That's best I can do," said the Captain, laughing.Max laughed with him for politeness' sake, though inwardly he was shocked that an important man like the Captain made a fool of himself. "Vater does not draw," he said kindly, "nor does Mutti; but they are both very keen on photography. Perhaps you are good at that?""Not brilliant," said the Captain.
Constance Savery
[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.
Dorothy L. Sayers
That was a good straightforward point of view, no pretence that games were anything but an outlet for power and aggression; no stuff about their being enjoyable as such. You played a game to demonstrate that you did it better than someone else. If it came to that, I thought how few people do anything for its own sake, from making love to practising the arts.
Anthony Powell
Is the prison that Mr. Scoundrel lives in at the end of his career a more uncomfortable place than the workhouse that Mr. Honesty lives in at the end of his career?
Wilkie Collins
I think you're a shit,’ said Keith sharply. ‘I think much of what you’ve done this season is shit and I think what you've put everyone involved with this club through is shit. How’s that?
Dougie Brimson
Life is a pigsty.
Morrissey
Hey Jude, don't make it bad, take a sad song and make it better.
The Beatles
I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they're supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons.
Jeanette Winterson
I had done all that I could, and no Man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little.
Samuel Johnson