Quotes by British Authors - Page 91

These rocks are too heavy, can't carry them any more,don't know why i ever picked them up before,going to have to put them down where they don't belong,'cause i can't get them back to where they came from.These rocks belong to no one, except history.Somewhere between the desert and the rolling sea,or maybe up in the mountains blue and tall,I picked them but now i'm going to let them fall.
Jay Woodman
There is something magical about young love, when you still think that the world is your oyster and you have your whole life ahead of you.
Jane Green
Humans make their own history, but not under circumstances of their choosing.
John Lanchester
Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun.
Jeanette Winterson
The things that one most wants to do are the things that are probably most worth doing.
Winifred Holtby
The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.
Charlotte Brontë
Scarce was the verdict spoken,When that still calm was broken,A childish form hath burst into the throng;With tears and looks of sadness,That bring no news of gladness,But tell too surely something hath gone wrong!
Lewis Carroll
The business man who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. "Yes, I see, dear; it's about halfway between," Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility
E.M. Forster
Another year passed on . The waves of time seemed long since to have swept away all trace of poor Mary Barton. But her husband still thought of her, although with a calm and quiet grief, in the silent watches of the night :And Mary would start from her hard-earned sleep,and think in her half dreamy, half awakened state, she saw her mother stand by her bed-side ,as she used to do 'in the days of long-ago'; with shaded candle and an expression of ineffable tenderness, while she looked on her sleeping child.
Elizabeth Gaskell
Apart from my absolute belief in National Socialism and my conviction of Hitler's superhuman heroism, I had always been attracted to Germany.
Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce)
Let no one who loves be called altogether unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow.
J.M. Barrie
Women are prevented by the threat and reality of male violence from entering public space on equal terms with male citizens.
Sheila Jeffreys
When they have something to hide, they put it in the F.O.I. cabinet.
Anthony T.Hincks
Whenever we use our religion, as individuals, or as groups within the church, to act in tandem with political and economic groups that arrest the voice of truth or destroy others, then we are Judas.
Megan McKenna
Man armed with science is like a baby with a box of matches.
J.B.S. Haldane
As to the mouth, it delights at times in laughter; it is disposed to impart all that the brain conceives; though I daresay it would be silent on much the heart experiences. Mobile and flexible, it was never intended to be compressed in the eternal silence of solitude: it is a mouth which should speak much and smile often, and have human affection for its interlocutor.
Charlotte Brontë
Do one thing well. It's enough.
David Hieatt
Demonstrative proof is lacking, but if we thought only about those things about which such proof were available, our minds would be empty most of the time.
Theodore Dalrymple
... In view of the violence of political power responsibility must always prevail. The only possible synthesis between conviction and responsibility is thus one in which passion is subordinated to responsibility, so that political responsibility is the primary value to be pursued with passion, thereby engendering what H. H. Bruun terms a 'responsible ethic of conviction.' Weber states: 'To be sure, mere passion, however genuinely felt, is not enough. It does not make a politician, unless passion as devotion to a "cause" also makes responsibility to this cause the guiding star of action.
Nicholas Gane
I lived through all these times, these great events, without caring very much, concerned with my own aging rather than the world's. Most of us do likewise. History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. We're not especially interested in what it consists of. We wait, more or less patiently, for it to pause, so that we can get to the liquor store or the laundromat or the burger bar
Mal Peet
Bad habit, lunch. A banana and a water biscuit is all any sane healthy man should need in the middle of the day.
Agatha Christie
Twas now the very witching time of night,When churchyards groan, and graves give up their dead,And many a mischievous, enfranchised spriteHad long since burst his bonds of stone or lead,And hurried off, with schoolboy-like delight,To play his pranks near some poor wretch's bed,Sleeping, perhaps serenely as a porpoise,Nor dreaming of this fiendish Habeas Corpus.
Thomas Ingoldsby
Join us. Play the game. It will bring you an untold number of rewards and you will finally have some direction and purpose in your lives. Take control of yourselves and those around you. Bend them to your will and all worldly pleasures will be yours...
Martin Hopkins
It is a sea of blood. We come from the sea, Tim; our blood is salt, and strange tides ebb and flow within us all.
Neil Gaiman
The academic and writer Sara Ahmed has written brilliantly about the idea of the feminist killjoy, and why it should be embraced – because feminism isn’t about making everyone around the table feel comfortable. It’s about being disruptive, challenging, and changing the terms of the debate, so that, over time, almost certainly with discomfort and backlash, everyone becomes freer.
Kira Cochrane
I look into my glass,And view my wasting skin,And say, 'Would God it came to passMy heart had shrunk as thin!
Thomas Hardy
I read the novel I had been writing for several months with an odd sense that it was the work of a stranger. I usually work in the dead hours of night and surprising the manuscript mid-morning revealed the flaws and excesses it was trying to conceal.
Chloe Thurlow
Man had created God in his own image, not the other way around. He had done it through sheer terror, and who could blame him? Unfortunately he had made too good a job. The god he had invented was just as cruel and careless as man himself. Not a deity to whom one should seriously address a prayer.
Richard Herley
There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy
Hisham Matar
She always wanted to believe in things.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Between the Bible and the Holy Spirit, you have everything you need to grow spiritually. And the more you grow, the more God can use you.
Elizabeth George
I'll show you how," Peter said. "Stop hiding behind your ignorance.
Diana Wynne Jones
She resented being told constantly that she was stupid, when she knew she wasn't.
Roald Dahl
Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
Alain de Botton
The happiest people on Earth are the ones who know love.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.
Richard Dawkins
I'm Cinderella. No, I'm better than Cinderella, because she only got the prince, didn't she? I'm Cinderella with fab teeth and a shit-hot job.
Sophie Kinsella
Though I cannot entirely agree with you in supposing that extreme study has been the cause of my late indisposition, I must yet confess that the hill of science, like that of virtue, is in some instances climbed with labour. But when we get a little way up, the lovely prospects which open the eye make infinite amends for the steepness of the ascent. In short, I am wedded to these pursuits, as a man stipulates to take his wife; viz., for better, for worse, until death us do part. My thirst for knowledge is literally inextinguishable. And if I thus drink myself into a superior world, I cannot help it.
Augustus Toplady
When my late father died — now I'm in mourning for my late mother — that sense of grief and bereavement suddenly taught me that so many things that I thought were important, externals, etc., all of that is irrelevant. You lose a parent, you suddenly realize what a slender thing life is, how easily you can lose those you love. Then out of that comes a new simplicity and that is why sometimes all the pain and the tears lift you to a much higher and deeper joy when you say to the bad times, "I will not let you go until you bless me.
Jonathan Sacks
One minute he stood transfixed, the next he uttered a crushing oath, and took a hasty stride forward. Mr Ringwood, recovering from his own stupefaction, closed with him, just as George, flushing vividly, sprang to his
Georgette Heyer
The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.
Bertrand Russell
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
Winston S. Churchill
Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined?...Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side?...And when you think of this, and think that most of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees, have you ever felt a certain sinking of the heart?...Is not the great defect of our education today---a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned---that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils "subjects," we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Life is a brief shot at something incredible
Melanie Gow
I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.
Virginia Woolf
We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.
George Eliot
I thought that exile meant you had to leave your country and you could go anywhere--somewhere in the sun, a tropical island, say, or America. But exile doesn't mean that; it means you are banished to a specific place, and guess what, that place isn't in the sun and is no paradise, it's not even America. It's some cold, miserable place like Siberia, where you don't know anyone and you can barely survive. It's another prison.
Sally Green
Give serious thought to why your company should care about your strategy. Specifically, find problems that the board wants to be solved. What are senior managers scared of? Part of becoming a credible strategic thinker is learning effective approaches to selling ideas for your situation. You’ll know that you’re getting better at selling (or pitching) strategy when managers start coming to you when there is strategic thinking to be done.
Max McKeown
It was his subconscious which told him this---that infuriating part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.
Douglas Adams
If "Manners maketh man," as someone saidThen he's the hero of the dayIt takes a man to suffer ignorance and smileBe yourself, no matter what they
Sting
I know what I'm giving up for Lent: my New Year's resolutions.
Henny Youngman
I go backwards and forwards, recapturing the past, wondering about the future—and, most unreasonably, I find myself longing for the past more than for the future.
Dodie Smith
Nothing goes on forever. If it did, there wouldn't be anything else, would there?
M.R. Carey
I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.
George Orwell
Promise me you’ll look after yourself … stay out of trouble …’‘I always do, Mrs Weasley,’ said Harry. ‘I like a quiet life, you know me.
J.K. Rowling
The greatest admission a human can make is that perhaps he does not have the intelligence, the vision, the grasp to fully understand the universe, and that perhaps no human ever will. To put it all down to some omnipotent deity is a cop-out. Factor in fairy tales of an afterlife and it becomes a comforting cop-out.
Neal Asher
You may not need to do it all, design it all or direct it all. But when it comes to making things you want to happen to happen you may well have to inspire and drive it all.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
If mankind's destined to bite the bullet, let's bite it and be damned.
Darren Shan
I would rather burn out than rust out.
Amy Carmichael
The further you get away from yourself, the more challenging it is. Not to be in your comfort zone is great fun.
Benedict Cumberbatch