Quotes by British Authors - Page 9

...every time you make a rule you take away a choice and choice, with all of its illuminating repercussions, is the fuel for learning.
Marcus Buckingham
I love cats, they're great; intelligent, affectionate, lovable, and this one was particularly nice, so picking it up and giving it a few slaps and a bit of a rough time was galling, even though it was unfortunately necessary. See, if you're hiding in someone's spare bedroom waiting for them to turn in for the night, the last thing you need is a cat meowing at the door trying to get in to see you because you've been stroking it all day. A bit of a shake and a growl in the cat's face and that's all that's usually needed for it to give the spare room and the horrible bastard inside a wide berth for the rest of the night.
Danny King
For the night Shows stars and women in a better light.
Lord Byron
Men die in battle women die in childbirth.
Philippa Gregory
It is infinitely more useful for a child to hear a story told by a person than by computer. Because the greatest part of the learning experience lies not in the particular words of the story but in the involvement with the individual reading it.
Frank Smith
I was hot and horny as hell. Which was typical of me. I’m twenty-five, and I’m healthy, and a healthy girl is always thinking about sex.
Fiona Thrust
A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce - we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has done away with religion but not with religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives - money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough.
Jeanette Winterson
She's a skilled and swift fight, and I know she'll pass on her training on to you.
Erin Hunter
Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.
J.G. Ballard
Her blue eyes sought the west afar For lovers love the western star.
Walter Scott
God help us for we knew the worst too young.
Rudyard Kipling
The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.
G.K. Chesterton
Water, wind and birdsong were the echoes in this quiet place of a great chiming symphony that was surging around the world. Knee-deep in grasses and moon daisies, Stella stood and listened, swaying a little as the flowers and trees were swaying, her spirit voice singing loudly, though her lips were still, and every pulse in her body beating its hammer strokes in time to the song.
Elizabeth Goudge
he inadvertently opened the door to a storeroom on the station and found it full of aircrew uniforms on hangers. He thought they must be replacement issue until he looked more closely and saw the brevets and stripes and ribbon medals and realized they had come off the bodies of the dead and injured. The empty uniforms would have provided a poetic image if he hadn’t more or less relinquished poetry by then.
Kate Atkinson
I am an ordinary person but carried to extremes.
Fay Weldon
Commander, I always used to consider that you had a definite anti-authoritarian streak in you.”“Sir?”“It seems that you have managed to retain this even though you are authority.”“Sir?”“That’s practically zen.
Terry Pratchett
You have dwelt overmuch upon pain. Pain is a swift distress; it ends and is forgotten. Without memory and fear pain is nothing, a contradiction to be heeded, a warning to be taken. Without pain what would life become? Pain is the master only of craven men. It is in man's power to rule it.
H.G.Wells
Working hard for something we don't care about is called stress: Working hard for something we love is called passion.
Simon Sinek
I did not want to tell her what happened, but I had to now. I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.
Chris Cleave
It is better to arm and strengthen your hero than to disarm and enfeeble your foe.
Anne Brontë
Beneath that arch of unmoved and eternal lights: some, so remote from this little earth that the learned tell us it is doubtful whether their rays have been yet discovered it, as a point in space where anything is suffered or done: the shadows of the night were broad and black.
Charles Dickens
Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.
G.K. Chesterton
Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave man and women in bleak and remote penal colonies were reduced to thinking day by day of nothing else beyond their own survival?
Ian McEwan
Thou art standing all this while at the door of eternity, and death is waiting to open the door, and put thee in(247).
Richard Baxter
War! Someone's making a hell of a lot of money.
Anthony T.Hincks
Writer's block? I've heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write, yes? Then that person isn't a writer anymore. I'm sorry, but the job is getting up in the fucking morning and writing for a living.
Warren Ellis
Virtue comes through contemplation of the divine, and the exercise of philosophy. But it also comes through public service. The one is incomplete without the other. Power without wisdom is tyranny; wisdom without power is pointless.
Iain Pears
The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use; it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion; and as the boat sets off again, we return to our normal activity: scurrying from one telescope to another, seeing the sharpness fade in one, waiting for the blur to clear in another. And when the blur does clear, we imagine that we have made it do so all by ourselves.
Julian Barnes
When a man does a queer thing, or two queer things, there may be a meaning to it, but when everything he does is queer, then you begin to wonder
Arthur Conan Doyle
What praise is more valuable than the praise of an intelligent servant?
Jane Austen
At two o'clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen,You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun.And the trees in the Shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten,And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.
Rudyard Kipling
Struck by lightning! Struck by lightning!
J.R.R. Tolkien
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
As the darkness deepened, the sky was streaked with veins of red, the last low beats of a dying sun. Against this scarlet canopy the hulk of the Rust Road's twin peaks stood tall, mountains of metal, unnaturally jagged. Their sharp pinnacles pierced the sky, and Jacob could not help but wonder if that explained the blood there.
Dean F. Wilson
As I walked over the loose fragments of stone, which lay scattered and surveyed the sublimity and grandeur of the ruins, I recurred, by a natural association of ideas, to the times when these walls stood proudly in their original splendor, when the halls were the scenes of hospitality and festive magnificence, and when they resounded with the voices of those whom death had long since swept from earth. "Thus," said I, "shall the present generation - he who now sink in misery - and he who now swim in pleasure, alike pass away and be forgotten.
Ann Radcliffe
The objects of the present life fill the human eye with a false magnification because of their immediacy.
William Wilberforce
My days I devote to reading and experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope.
H.G.Wells
If someone thinks that peace and love are just a cliche that must have been left behind in the 60s, that's a problem. Peace and love are eternal.
John Lennon
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it or offer your own version in return.
Salman Rushdie
Nobody has to do anything wrong to end up living a life that feels like it’s not their own, all they have to do is take a step back, and hope for the best.
Craig Stone
There are no innocent people in a guilty nation.
Nadeem Aslam
The best things in life are things you have to fight for.
Mila Gray
It's natural for a man to defend what's dear to him: his own life, his home, his family. But in order to make him fight on behalf of his rulers, the rich and powerful who are too cunning to fight their own battles-in short to defend not himself but people whom he's never met and moreover would not care to be in the same room with him-you have to condition him into loving violence not for the benefits it bestows on him but for its own sake. Result: the society has to defend itself from its defenders, because what's admirable in wartime is termed psychopathic in peace. It's easier to wreck a man than to repair him. Ask any psychotherapist. And take a look at the crime figures among veterans.
John Brunner
You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Neil Gaiman
Luck in all its moods had to be loved and not feared Bond saw luck as a woman, to be softly wooed or brutally ravaged, never pandered to or pursued. But he was honest enough to admit that he had never yet been made to suffer by cards or by women. One day, and he accepted the fact he would be brought to his knees by love or by luck.
Ian Fleming
We can depend on nobody in this world, and sometimes we even betray ourselves
Dean Cavanagh
How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.
Julian Barnes
To repeat some of the most basic facts: women still do not have the equal political power they have long sought, since only one in five MPs is a woman. They do not have economic equality, since the pay gap is still not only large but actually widening. They do not have the freedom from violence they have sought, and with the conviction rate in rape cases standing at just 6 percent, they know that rapists enjoy an effective impunity in our society.
Natasha Walter
It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
E.M. Forster
Or he was simply pretending—like many drinkers, he liked to think each new day drew a line under the day before.
Ian McEwan
Cradle of SolitudeFor we know not why our tribulationsare given as suchour fragile formscreated from the dust...
Muse
She was wise enough to hold her tongue. As this is the only instance known of a Woman's ever having done so, it was judged worthy to be recorded here.
Matthew Lewis
Choosing to accept yourself is a political act. An act of liberation.
Francesca Martínez
It's all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out.
Niall Ferguson
And all the winds go sighing, For sweet things dying
Christina Rossetti
That's all I wanted to do as a kid. Play a guitar properly and jump around. But too many people got in the way.
Syd Barrett
Adventure should be 80 percent 'I think this is manageable,' but it's good to have that last 20 percent where you're right outside your comfort zone. Still safe, but outside your comfort zone.
Bear Grylls
The wonder of life shouldn't be squandered on insignificant or unbeneficial experiences.
Steven Redhead
All that is gold does not glitter,Not all those who wander are lost;The old that is strong does not wither,Deep roots are not reached by the frost.From the ashes a fire shall be woken,A light from the shadows shall spring;Renewed shall be blade that was broken,The crownless again shall be king.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Every vice leads to cruelty. Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice, leads through anger to cruelty. Most atrocities are stimulated by accounts of the enemy's atrocities; and pity for the oppressed classes, when separated from the moral law as a whole, leads by a very natural process to the unremitting brutalities of a reign of terror.
C.S. Lewis