Quotes by British Authors - Page 85

She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldn’t let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving that turmoil.
Ian McEwan
The key to greatness is knowing when to take the hand that has been offered.
Sam Crescent
How old did someone have to be before they could be put to use to make tea?
Jenny Oliver
You can never know enough about your characters
W Somerset Maugham
An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.
George Eliot
The secret to good health is to behave like your ancestors did before the Industrial Revolution.
Steven Magee
Believing, too, that is not enough. You cannot just believe. Your belief must have a purpose.
Ian Baucom
Leave any problem alone for long enough and it will solve itself.
Nell Dixon
A thin grey fog hung over the city, and the streets were very cold; for summer was in England.
Rudyard Kipling
He who has two grounds of trust is lost! He who relies upon twosalvations, and cannot say of Christ, “He is all my salvation and all my desire,” that man is not only in danger of beinglost, but he is already condemned; because, in fact, he believes not on the Son of God! He is not alive to God at all, but rests partly on the Cross, and then in some measure on something else.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Sufis are those who have expunged from their minds the human tendencies of envy and enmity.
Idries Shah
Everything ritualistic must be strictly avoided, because it immediately turns rotten. Of course a kiss is a ritual too and it isn't rotten, but ritual is permissible only to the extent that it is as genuine as a kiss.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
My swimming cap was really sprouting leaks these days. The thing is, you could patch over the holes, but it would never be the same. Like my love life.
Helen Salter
And how am I to face the odds of man's bedevilment and God's? I a stranger and afraid in a world I never made.
A.E. Housman
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.
C.S. Lewis
I think if Eternity held torment, its form would not be fiery rack, nor its nature, despair. I think that on a certain day amongst those days which never dawned, and will not set, an angel entered Hades — stood, shone, smiled, delivered a prophecy of conditional pardon, kindled a doubtful hope of bliss to come, not now, but at a day and hour unlooked for, revealed in his own glory and grandeur the height and compass of his promise: spoke thus — then towering, became a star, and vanished into his own Heaven. His legacy was suspense — a worse boon than despair.
Charlotte Brontë
No time to see, in broad daylight,Streams full of stars, like skies at night.No time to turn at Beauty's glance,And watch her feet, how they can dance.No time to wait till her mouth canEnrich that smile her eyes began.
W.H. Davies
Without fail, he always signed off on these letters with love and he always included Whiskey and Bess in the list of individuals sending this love my way. At the time it made me laugh, it made me embarrassed, but as soon as I softened, as soon as I matured back into his son, I came to appreciate what he was saying -- an endearing and magnanimous reminder of how family will always be the sum of its individual members, be they human or animal.
Nick Trout
She expressed an opinion that the happiness of a woman in Paradise is beneath the soles of her husband's feet,' he enlightened humorously, seemingly not at all averse to her obvious desire to be comforted.
Margaret Rome
The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished not by doing something but by refraining from doing. Great is truth but still greater from a practical point of view is silence about truth.
Aldous Huxley
You are corrupting me, Theo." "But you like being corrupted, don't you, sweet girl?
Juliette Banks
Well, the terrible fact is that though we are all more or less thinking of something or other all the time, some of us are thinking more and some less.Some brains are battling and working and remembering and puzzling things over all the time and other brains are just lying down, snoring and occasionally turning over. It is to the lazy minds that I am now speaking, and from my own experience I imagine this includes nineteen people out of every twenty. I am one of that clan myself and always have been.
Ted Hughes
If you are setting a goal without understanding the reason for it, then maybe you should reevaluate the goal in general.
Tina Brown
Allegedly, allegedly I say, the R.G.A. were extremely miffed of portrait painted of their monarch, King Tingaling XX, by Master. Portrait apparently, as it’s yet t’be unveiled, depicts King Tingaling XX in rather compromisin’ position with a pineapple, a wad of cash and his favourite pig, Buttercup.
Elias Zapple
None of the characters in (the story) were distinguished ones -- not even the lion.He was an old lion, prepared from birth to lose his life rather than to leave it. But he had the dignity of all free creatures, and so he was allowed his moment. It was hardly a glorious moment.The two men who shot him were indifferent as men go, or perhaps they were less than that. At least they shot him without killing him, and then turned the unsconscionable eye of a camera upon his agony. It was a small, a stupid, but a callous crime.
Beryl Markham
Relative poverty is when you have more taste than money.
Neel Burton
If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
P.D. James
Rome sees some bloke from the London School of Economics on the telly while he’s flicking through the channels. This chap makes the point that governments don’t actually do anything for us. The only thing that makes them boss is that they control all the currency. Historically, anyone proposing an alternative to cash is brutally suppressed, but then historically they haven’t got the Internet, which makes such things much easier to set up; much harder to crack down on.
Alan Moore
It's early days. A few skeletons are bound to keep jumping out of the closet.
Alan Moore
Orwell's short and intense life has for years borne witness to some of those verities of which we were already aware. Parties and churches and states cannot be honest, but individuals can. Real books cannot be written by machines or committees. The truth is not always easy to discern, but a lie can and must be called by its right name. And the imagination, like certain wild animals, as Orwell himself once put it, will not breed in captivity. Actually, that last metaphor is beautiful but inaccurate. Even in the most dire conditions, there is a human will to resist coercion. We must believe that even now in North Korea, there are ideas alive inside human brains that were not put there by any authority.
Christopher Hitchens
Do you know, the only people I can have a conversation with are the Jews? At least when they quote scripture at you they are not merely repeating something some priest has babbled in their ear. They have the great merit of disagreeing with nearly everything I say. In fact, they disagree with almost everything they say themselves. And most importantly, they don't think that shouting strengthens their argument.
Iain Pears
Anyone who limits her vision to memories of yesterday is already dead.
Lillie Langtry
The future is terrifying because it's full of stuff, not because it's empty.
Alexis Hall
Your trials and difficulties are a golden opportunity to illustrate your faith in God.
Elizabeth George
War is a kind of superstition, the pageantry of arms and badges corrupts the imagination of men.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Forget the American dream...whats your dream? The thing that keeps you up at night...the thing that makes you happy...the thing that keeps your spirit going. Do that thing. Don't label it a hobby or what you do in your spare time type of thing...label that thing you do the thing you love to do. The thing you were born to do. When you stop doing what you love you lose a huge part of yourself. Don't get lost.
Jill Telford
And who says you always have to understand things? You can like them without understanding them -- like 'em better sometimes.
Dodie Smith
To me there is no more tragic sight than the average missionary. …We have given so much, yet not the one thing that counts; we aspire so high, and fall so low; we suffer so much, but so seldom with Christ; we have done so much and so little will remain; we have known Christ in part, and have so effectively barricaded our hearts against His mighty love, which surely He must yearn to give His disciples above all people.
Amy Carmichael
Self-expression has to come out pure. It has to have an environment waiting for it. It has to have a garden it can plant itself in.
Melinda Gebbie
Killing a pig for a good old fry-up is one thing. But there’s no excuse for being cruel, even if you’re a bored teenage kid.
Ozzy Osbourne
The mistake ninety-nine percent of humanity made, as far as Fats could see, was being ashamed of what they were; lying about it, trying to be somebody else.
J.K. Rowling
We’ve searched all of the homes and carried the food to Ralph’s,” Sam continued. “The problem is that all the fruit and veggies spoiled while we were all filling up on chips and cookies. The meat all rotted. People were stupid and careless, and there’s nothing we can do about that now.” Sam swallowed the bitterness he felt, the anger he felt at his own foolishness. “But we have food sitting out in the fields. Maybe not the food we’d like, but enough to carry us for months—many months—if we bring it in before it rots and the birds eat it.”“Maybe we’ll get rescued, and we won’t have to worry,” another voice said.“Maybe we’ll learn to live on air,” Astrid muttered under her breath but loudly enough to be heard by at least a few.“Why don’t you go get our food back from Drake and the chuds up there?”It was Zil. He accepted a congratulatory slap on the back from a creepy kid named Antoine, part of Zil’s little posse.“Because it would mean getting some kids killed,” Sam said bluntly. “We’d be lucky to rescue any of the food, and we’d end up digging more graves in the plaza. And it wouldn’t solve our problem, anyway.
Michael Grant
The dead are often known to eat 27 and 53
David Almond
Desperation makes men fearless
Jocelyn Murray
There’s no such thing as probability," she says, slowly, with minimal movement of her jaw. "Things turn out the way they do.
Johnny Rich
I am an optimist... I choose to be. There is a lot of darkness in our world, there is a lot of pain and you can choose to see that or you can choose to see the joy. If you try to respond positively to the world, you will spend your time better.
Tom Hiddleston
Your mind will enchain you. Your heart will set you free
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Women, of their nature, crave for liberty; they will not be ordered around like servants.
Peter Ackroyd
Was this what it was going to be like? Was I turning into someone who had panic attacks about walking home from the tube or staying the night alone in the house without their boyfriend? No, fuck that. I would not be that person.
Ruth Ware
Welcome to fear, said Moist to himself. It's hope, turned inside out. You know it can't go wrong, you're sure it can't go wrong...But it might.
Terry Pratchett
In India, where there are no passports or identity discs, and where religions counts for so much- except among those few who have crossed the 'black water' - I believe that a man wearing a saffron robe, or carrying a beggar's bowl , or with silver crosses on his headgear and chest, could walk from Khyber Pass to Cape Comorin without once being questioned about his destination, or the object of his journey,
Jim Corbett
The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.
Alain de Botton
The river this November afternoonRests in an equipoise of sun and cloud:A glooming light, a gleaming darkness shroudIts passage. All seems tranquil, all in tune.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Oh, I simply can’t think. When I really want to depress myself, I think of all the brilliant men I know, married to their stupid wives. Enough to break your heart, it really is
Doris Lessing
Never in a million years would he have imagined her to look at him like that - eyelids batting of their own volition and her lips puckering in expectation as she leaned slightly forward. Yet here she was doing precisely that - it was much too comical to stop the smile crossing his face.And that was when she hit him.It wasn't a faint slap on the cheek. No, Alexandra put all her weight behind the right hook that landed squarely across his jaw, throwing him completely off balance.Damnation!
Sophie Barnes
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness," O'Brien had said to him. He knew what it meant, or thought he knew. The place where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one would never see, but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in.
George Orwell
There is no universal language in the jungles; each species has its own language, and though the vocabulary of some is limited, as in the case of porcupines and vultures, the language of each species is understood by all the jungle-folk.
Jim Corbett
It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.
D.H. Lawrence
An old man concludeth from his knowing mankind that they know him too and that maketh him very wary.
Lord Halifax