Quotes by British Authors - Page 86

When we've got a common philosophy and a common objective; then we can advance in open order. We shall be a great team. But we've got to make sure of that common set of ideas. Maybe we shall find our formulae difficult for some of these new types. If we keep our minds open, we may find that they are right and that our formulae have to be modified. Probably -- it's a thought that shouldn't dishearten us -- but probably we don't know everything.
H.G.Wells
None of it is real, though, because reality lies in a different, more evanescent realm. These are only the names of some of the places in the archipelago of dreams. The true reality is the one you perceive around you, or that which you are fortunate enough to imagine for yourself.
Christopher Priest
For my last birthday, Dad bought me a pocket-sized Collins English Dictionary. It would only fit in a pocket that had been specially designed.
Joe Dunthorne
It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself.But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple.
Terry Pratchett
These mental and physical components of self­ belief are closely interlinked. They are used to slowly interweave the per­sonal narratives that very effectively create a powerful sense of identity.
David Amerland
I don't deserve you. I'm not made for relationships. I know I'm going to fuck this up. I'm going to drive you away or do something to hurt you, and you'll be added to my list of people I screwed over. You should walk away now.
M.A. Stacie
There is, I believe, no person, however insignificant in the world, but, if an account of his life and adventures were committed to paper, would be entertaining in some degree: the follies of our own life, and those we are liable to be drawn into by others, will constantly afford matter for serious reflection.
Henry Spencer Ashbee
We didn't need light & shade, irony or humor. An iconic Daltrey bellow could convey an extrodinary range of human emotion; withering sadness, self pity, loneliness, abandonment, spiritual desperation, the loss of childhood, as well as the more obvious rage & frustration, joy & triumph.
Pete Townshend
And I have to say, books haven’t helped much with all this. Because whenever you read anything about love, whenever anyone tries to define it, there’s always a state or an abstract noun, and I try to think of it like that. But actually, love is… Well, it’s just you. And when you go, it’s gone. Nothing abstract about it.
Nick Hornby
The voices of cold reason were talking, as usual, to deaf ears.
Ellis Peters
We are all artists painting our desires on the canvas of life.
Steven Redhead
I have produced no children of my own and my husband is dead," she replied, an acid tone in her voice. "Thus I am more to be pitied than revered. I am expected to give up the shop to my nephew, who will then be able to afford to bring a very good wife from Pakistan. In exchange, I will be given houseroom and no doubt, the honor of taking care of several small children of other family members."The Major was silent. He was at once appalled and also reluctant to hear any more. This was why people usually talked about the weather.
Helen Simonson
The Unexpected GiftTorn asunder from her slumberin the hour of half past threeThe child knew the tyrannical regimeand followed instinctively.-(slice from Enigmatic Evolution)
Muse
Well, the lion is a big ol’ coward, mostly. If you want trouble, you want to tangle with the lioness. They’re killers, and they hunt together. It’s the same everywhere. If you want big grief, look to the ladies.
Terry Pratchett
We left the nursery in silence, Ma smoking a roll-up, looking like she hadn’t slept in a week or maybe like she had slept for a whole week. When the nursery was just a grubby finger smudge behind us Ma looked down at me and said in her poshed-up telephone voice: “Will you speak to Janie about swearing? Fuckin’ busybody!”I laughed and swung our linked hands.“Aye, fuckin’ busybody.”Pleas of laughter escaped us and spiraled up into the hot, blue Scottish sky. We laughed all the way home
Kerry Hudson
They sounded really professional because they had two Vox AC 30 amplifiers. I also had an AC 30, so when you looked at it, three AC 30s, three Fenders - bloody hell, it must be a great band!
Tony Iommi
Prayer did not come easily to me for I always feel that prayer is a silent things, and opening of the heart. To ask for earthly benefits, to reel out a list of requirements and expect them to be supplied is not prayer. It is putting God in the same category as an intelligent grocer.
D.E. Stevenson
Everything is what it is because it got that way.
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
Growing older does not seem to make you more certain. It simply presents you with more reasons for doubt.
Jessie Burton
I heard your whispered fantasies so clear Softly told in my earI opened my eyes you weren't thereSo real my dream, I was so awareBut we'll meet again so certainlyIn our whispered fantasy
Astrid Brown
I'm not a snob. Ask anybody. Well, anybody who matters.
Simon Le Bon
I think we all mistake certain things for happiness. I think we mistake comfort for happiness and we mistake pleasure for happiness, and entertainment for happiness, when really these are just things we use as proxies for our happiness.We use them to cheer us up or try and achieve brief happiness, when really happiness is something much more profound and long lasting and exists within us.
Simon Pegg
There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost every attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all BEGIN freely--a slight preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement. In nine cases out of ten a women had better show MORE affection than she feels. Bingley likes your sister undoubtedly; but he may never do more than like her, if she does not help him on.
Jane Austen
His eminence was due to the flatness of the surrounding landscape.
John Stuart Mill
For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.
Jeanette Winterson
[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art--novels, poems, plays, paintings or films--can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world.
Alain de Botton
As suddenly the whole world would slip back into a mollifying, untormented dark; their aching bodies knew its calm.
David Jones
Champions realise that defeat - and learning from it even more than from winning - is part of the path to mastery.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Oh build your ship of death, oh build it in time and build it lovingly, and put it between the hands of your soul.
D.H. Lawrence
I really am a little afraid, my dear,” hinted the cherub meekly, “that you are not enjoying yourself?”“On the contrary,” returned Mrs. Wilfer, “quite so. Why should I not?”“I thought, my dear, that perhaps your face might—““My face might be a martyrdom, but what would that import, or who should know it, if I smiled?”And she did smile; manifestly freezing the blood of Mr. George Sampson by so doing. For that young gentleman, catching her smiling eye, was so very much appalled by its expression as to cast about in his thoughts concerning what he had done to bring it down upon himself.
Charles Dickens
The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it's your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you
Christopher Hitchens
I'm the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.
Iris Murdoch
Only what you willingly accept can continue to be part of your life.
Steven Redhead
Demographics is destiny
Arthur Kemp
Their banter was rich and comfortable, their teasing intimate and profound; their 'I love you' without the use of those startling words.
Sarah Winman
It is not the strength of the body that counts, but the strength of the spirit.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
J.K. Rowling
You'll never understand me as long as you're looking at me through society's lenses.
Robert Tew
Tom has a theory that homosexuals and single women in their thirties have natural bonding: both being accustomed to disappointing their parents and being treated as freaks by society.
Helen Fielding
I have no talent; it's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.
Graham Greene
Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one's dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction. However, in those days, choice between dignity and unsatisfied curiosity was less clear to me as a cruel decision that had to be made.
Anthony Powell
If there seems no answers then create and apply them.
Steven Redhead
Except that love - that mysterious, vast, all-encompassing power - could not possibly be contained in a single word.
Mary Balogh
Most of didn’t know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out.
Rachel Cusk
Not a clue – and, no, I don’t touch drugs. The world’s unstable enough without scrambling your brain for kicks.
David Mitchell
Hermione: You! You foul, loathsome, evil little cocroach!Ron: Hermione, no! He's no worth it.
J.K. Rowling
I think you'll be a great teacher," said Gary. That's his role in my life: blind encourager and ambassador of false senses of security.
Matthew Norman
I’m using Mao as my inspiration. “Cast away illusions. Prepare for struggle.” I’m back in business, baby. You don’t know you’re stuck until you get moving.
Hanif Kureishi
Myths have a very long memory.
Bryan Sykes
Maid of Athens ere we part Give oh give me back my heart!
Lord Byron
It hadn’t always been this way, that’s a cliché, but it is a cliché for a reason. It’s not like anyone starts a relationship with nothing to say to the other person. No-one wants to feel like a complete stranger and live together because it’s easier than trying to remember who owns the copy of Almost Famous – which was mine by the way.
David Louden
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen
Integrity of life is fame's best friend,Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end.
John Webster
The one thing you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked…that’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.
Neil Gaiman
Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.
Bill Bryson
We cannot control other people and their actions but we can control how we act and react to them.
Elizabeth George
People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark.
Tom Stoppard
He was about to go home, about to return to the place where he had had a family. It was in Godric’s Hollow that, but for Voldemort, he would have grown up and spent every school holiday. He could have invited friends to his house. . . . He might even have had brothers and sisters. . . . It would have been his mother who had made his seventeenth birthday cake. The life he had lost had hardly ever seemed so real to him as at this moment, when he knew he was about to see the place where it had been taken from him.
J.K. Rowling
Zombies are the liberal nightmare. Here you have the masses, whom you would love to love, appearing at your front door with their faces falling off; and you’re trying to be as humane as you possibly can, but they are, after all, eating the cat. And the fear of mass activity, of mindlessness on a national scale, underlies my fear of zombies.
Clive Barker
The end of the persecutions was, paradoxically, a source of disappointment for many Christians. In the new climate of imperial favour, bishops were increasingly at war with their congregations and with one another, arguing about matters ranging from the mundane to the mystical. Money was often at the root of the problem, and this was distressing.
Kate Cooper