Quotes by British Authors - Page 89

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.
David Mitchell
I revel in flowers without let,An atom at random in space;My soul dwells in regions ethereal,And the world is my dreaming-place.
L. Cranmer-Byng
A phased decision can avoid there being a key moment when the moral issue about killing civilians has to be confronted.
Jonathan Glover
When I become God, I'm going to put stars in everyone's eyes; rainbows in everyone's life;love into everyone's heart and a smile on everyone's face.
Anthony T.Hincks
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--Not in lone splendour hung aloft the nightAnd watching, with eternal lids apart,Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite.
John Keats
He did not go much further, but sat down on the cold floor and gave himself up to complete miserableness, for a long while. He thought of himself frying bacon and eggs in his own kitchen at home - for he could feel inside that it was high time for some meal or other; but that only made him miserabler.
J.R.R. Tolkien
A shell in the pit," said I, "if the worst comes to worst will kill them all."The intense excitement of the events had no doubt left my perceptive powers in a state of erethism. I remember that dinner table with extraordinary vividness even now. My dear wife's sweet anxious face peering at me from under the pink lampshade, the white cloth with it silver and glass table furniture—for in those days even philosophical writers had luxuries—the crimson-purple wine in my glass, are photographically distinct. At the end of it I sat, tempering nuts with a cigarette, regretting Ogilvy's rashness, and denouncing the shortsighted timidity of the Martians.So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless sailors in want of animal food. "We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear.
H.G.Wells
The evolution of the human race will not be accomplished in the ten thousand years of tame animals, but in the million years of wild animals, because man is, and always will be, a wild animal.
Charles Galton Darwin
The instinct of the thief is most strongly marked in the Skua tribe, and I am afraid that the mere love of thieving alone actuates them on many occasions.
George Murray Levick
...I’m insane, Jorie thought. She saw herself lying in a hospital bed, her wallet and valuables gone. When asked why she got into a car with a woman she didn’t know, her reply would land her in the psych ward. Well, you see, I have this fantasy lover because, frankly, they’re so much easier to deal with. She never makes a mess, loves my demonic cat, always says the right thing at the right time. I saw this woman, and she was my dream come to life, so I just had to get into the car with her because I’m an idiot...
Robin Alexander
Remember what I done for you here today,' he shouted and passed out.
Charlie Higson
When you've made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand - she's as good as any other; they be all alike in groundwork: 'tis only in the flourishes there's a difference.
Thomas Hardy
Homo sapiens! The name itself was an irony. They had not been wise at all, but incredibly stupid. Lords of the Earth with their great gray brains, their thinking minds had placed them above all other forms of life. Yet it had not been thought that compelled them to act, but emotion. From the dawn of their evolution they had killed, and conquered, and subdued. They had committed atrocities on others of their kind, ravaged the land, polluted and destroyed, left millions to starve in Third World countries, and finished it all with a nuclear holocaust. The mutants were right. Intelligent creatures did not commit genocide, or murder the environment on which they were dependent.
Louise Lawrence
Perhaps she wasn't ill at all in the end, but simply more revealed.
Charles Lambert
Poetry destroyed? Genius banished? No! Mediocrity, no: do not let envy prompt you to the thought. No; they not only live, but reign, and redeem: and without their divine influence spread everywhere, you would be in hell--the hell of your own meanness.
Charlotte Brontë
How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?
Christopher Hitchens
I don't want to be alone, I want to be left alone.
Audrey Hepburn
Some folks rail against other folks, because other folks have what some folks would be glad of.
Henry Fielding
I can see how, with enough false education, enough widespread illusion and error, men can, while remaining men, believe this and commit the most unspeakable crimes.
Isaiah Berlin
He feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them.
Julian Barnes
I don't ask you - fribble!' snapped his lordship, rounding on him, with the speed of a whiplash. 'You may keep your tongue between your teeth!'"Yes, sir - happy to!' uttered Claud, dismayed. 'No wish to offend you! Thought you might like to be set right!''Thought I might like to be set right?''No, no! Spoke without thinking!' said Claud hastily. ' I know you don't!
Georgette Heyer
Not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point which means at the point of highest reality.
C.S. Lewis
I ken who you are! You're Strathfearn's granddaughter. Julie Stuart, is it? Och, aye, Lady Julia! Well then, Lady Julia, tell me -- who don't you deserve a glass of water?
Elizabeth Wein
I couldn't make it out - why you ever let me, I mean. I understand now. Things like that happen when you're in love with the wrong person. Worse things. Things you never forgive yourself for.
Dodie Smith
Failure is a part of life. Success teaches you nothing, but failure teaches you resilience. It teaches you to pick yourself up and try again.
Sarah Morgan
You chase off every man that’s ever been interested, and you do it without even trying.
Dianna Hardy
Joshua Joseph has no real hatred of modern technology - he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces, and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine. Above all, he mistrusts duplication. A rare thing becomes a commonplace thing. A skill becomes a feature. The end is more important than the means. The child of the soul gives place to a product of the system....For anything really important, Joe prefers something with a history, an item which can name the hand which assembled it and will warm to the one that deploys it. A thing of life, rather than one of the many consumer items which humans use to make more clutter; strange parasitic devices with their own little ecosystems.
Nick Harkaway
My father says there are more than twenty thousand turned out for the king. It seems that most men think that we will win, that York will be captured and killed, though the king in his tender heart has said he will forgive them all if they will surrender.~Will there be another battle?~Unless York decides he cannot face the king in person. It is one sort of sin to kill your friends and cousins, quite another to order your bowmen to fire at the king's banner and him beneath it. What if the king is killed in battle? What if York brings his broadsword down on the king's sanctified head?
Philippa Gregory
Some people react to suffering by denying the very possibility of God's existence
Michael Ots
Let my worship be within the heart that rejoices, for behold, all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals. Therefore, let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you.
Doreen Valiente
The warm night claimed her. In a moment it was part of her. She walked on the grass, and her shoes were instantly soaked. She flung up her arms to the sky. Power ran to her fingertips. Excitement was communicated from the waiting trees, and the orchard, and the paddock; the intensity of their secret life caught at her and made her run. It was nothing like the excitement of ordinary looking forward, of birthday presents, of Christmas stockings, but the pull of a magnet - her grandfather had shown her once how it worked, little needles springing to the jaws - and now night and the sky above were a vast magnet, and the things that waited below were needles, caught up in the great demand. ("The Pool")
Daphne du Maurier
What made him most attractive was that he was attracted to her. Another’s interest can be a powerful stimulant. She could feel his eyes on her as an almost physical pressure.
Tracy Chevalier
Exuberance is beauty.
William Blake
The hardest thing about getting what you want is knowing what to do with it.
Patrick Hennessey
The wisest man I have ever known once said to me: 'Nine out of every ten people improve on acquaintance ' and I have found his words true.
Frank Swinnerton
The best way to achieve a wonderful life is to have wonderful desires.
Steven Redhead
Two things form the bedrock of any open society — freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free cou
Salman Rushdie
Rootlessness," I opine, "is the twenty-first century norm.""You're not wrong and that's why we're in the shit we're in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker's toss about anywhere?
David Mitchell
But when reality was hopeless, fantasy became more and more necessary.
Michael Grant
Of whom can we think well when it is believed that if nothing bad is done to you, this has been a kindness?
Idries Shah
The intentions of a tool are what it does. A hammer intends to strike, a vise intends to hold fast, a lever intends to lift. They are what it is made for. But sometimes a tool may have other uses that you don't know. Sometimes in doing what you intend, you also do what the knife intends, without knowing.
Philip Pullman
Self-knowledge is power.
David Cohen
Some who grow dull religious straight commenceAnd gain in morals what they lose in sense.
Alexander Pope
The sunrise was the colour of bad blood. It leaked out of the east and stained the dark sky red, marked the scraps of the cloud with stolen gold. Underneath it the road twisted up the mountainside towards the fortress of Fontezarmo - a cluster of sharp towers, ash-black again the wounded heavens. The sunrise was red, black and gold.The colours of their profession.
Joe Abercrombie
Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat.Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats.Guildenstern: No, no, no--what you've been is not on boats.
Tom Stoppard
History was not simply a catalogue of the dead and buried and benighted, but rather a vast new world to be pioneered; ...if you approached the past generously, so to speak—its people as humans, not facts, as modern in their time as we were in ours, who thought and felt as we do, the dead would live again, our equals, not our old-fashioned, hopelessly unenlightened, and backward inferiors. Humanity, to be fully known, had to be seen as changeless as well as ever changing.
Tony Hendra
If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.
Kazuo Ishiguro
The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.
George Orwell
I am reading Henry James… and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
Virginia Woolf
Style is when they're running you out of town and you make it look like you're leading the parade.
William Battie
I got this to say. You're acting like a crowd of kids.
William Golding
In a world of chemically induced sanity, a little lunacy confers immense advantages.
Iain Pears
If you cannot say what you mean, your majesty, you will never mean what you say and a gentleman should always mean what he says.
Reginald Fleming 'R.J.' Johnston - The Last Emperor
Like many another materialist, that is, he lied cleverly on the basis of insufficient knowledge, because the knowledge supplied seemed to his own particular intelligence inadmissible.("The Wendigo")
Algernon Blackwood
I'll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one'll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you... We'll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams... And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they wont' just be able to take one, they'll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we'll be joined so tight...
Philip Pullman
The neck in front of her came up. The head swivelled 180 degrees and the horse looked at Kin with bright insectile eyes.'YOUR WISH IS MY COMMAND,' it said inside Kin's head.'Hell!''THOSE ARE NOT MEANINGFUL CO-ORDINATES.
Terry Pratchett
By the time she had interpreted Harry's dreams at the top of her voice (all of which, even the ones that involved eating porridge, apparently foretold a gruesome and early death), he was feeling much less sympathetic toward her.
J.K. Rowling
You are what you share.
Charles W. Leadbeater
Being your authentic self reassures the people you meet.
Sam Owen
True evil is always petty and often incompetent.
Claire Chilton