Quotes by British Authors - Page 92

In my inmost heart I believed that I could succeed where others failed, and now I had the opportunity to test myself.
Arthur Conan Doyle
How could you die and not be old enough to hear about premarital sex? How could you die and still not be allowed to fall in love or be honest? Surely not everything had to wait for university and a good job. Passion and truth had to trump even those things.
Zen Cho
You are giving up nothing! You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Liz Hemingway
I tried to think outside the box but couldn't open the lid.
Alan Dapre
I love people who play guitars on roofs!" said Rose, hopping along the pavement in one of her sudden happy moods. "Don't you?""Never knew anyone else who did it!""Don't you like Tom?""Of course I do. But I don't know about all the other guitar-on-roof players! They might be really awful people, with just that one good thing about them. Playing guitars on roofs... or bagpipes... Or drums... Sarah would like that, and Saffy could have the bagpipes! Caddy could have a harp.... What about Mum?""One of those gourds filled with beans!" said Rose at once. "And Daddy could have a grand piano. On a flat roof. With a balcony and pink flowers in pots around the edge! And I'll have a very loud trumpet! What about you?""I'll just listen," said Indigo.
Hilary McKay
Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and abusrd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.
John Fowles
A securely attached child will store an internal working model of a responsive, loving, reliable care-giver, and of a self that is worthy of love and attention and will bring these assumptions to bear on all other relationships. Conversely, an insecurely attached child may view the world as a dangerous place in which other people are to be treated with great caution, and see himself as ineffective and unworthy of love. These assumptions are relatively stable and enduring: those built up in the early years of life are particularly persistent and unlikely to be modified by subsequent experience.
Jeremy Holmes
Oh, most unhappy man,' he cried, 'try to be happy! You have red hair like your sister.'My red hair, like red flames, shall burn up the world,' said Gregory.
G.K. Chesterton
It's scented! Your wedding invitations are scented?""It's meant to be lavender.""No, Dex - it's money. It smells of money.
David Nicholls
To know yourself you must know the transience of your self.
Ilyas Kassam
The clock’s pendulum catches the firelight, and in the rattle-breathed final moments of Jacob de Zoet, amber shadows in the far corner coagulate into a woman’s form. She slips between the bigger, taller onlookers unnoticed … … and adjusts her headscarf, the better to hide her burn. She places her cool palms on Jacob’s fever-glazed face.Jacob sees himself, when he was young, in her narrow eyes. Her lips touch the place between his eyebrows. A well-waxed paper door slides open.
David Mitchell
Talent is a spring from which fresh water is constantly flowing. But this spring loses its value if it is not used in the right way.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas.
Christopher Fowler
Order is heaven's first law.
Alexander Pope
He continued to attack the gate. His arm started to ache. The hammer was designed for neither brute nor force. "Are you all right up there?" asked Eleanor. "Want me to go see if I can find a small child to give you a lift?" "Maybe if we swapped positions and you condescended at the gate, we'd get through faster?
Gary Meehan
We can easily manage if we will only take each day the burden appointed to it. But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday's burden over again today and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it.
John Newton
She whispers in my ear: ‘"Tell me that you wan' fuck me hard, make me sweat." In the excitement, she misses out a word. "I want to fuck you so hard that your body drips with sweat," I say, grammatically.
Joe Dunthorne
Don't beat yourself up for not knowing the answers. You don't always have to know who you are. You don't have to have the big picture, or know where you're heading. Sometimes, it's enough just to know what you're going to do next.
Sophie Kinsella
A lady who sets her heart upon a lad in uniform must prepare to change lovers pretty quickly, or her life will be but a sad one.
William Makepeace Thackeray
So then, let "Deserved" be written on the door of hell, but on the door of Heaven and life, "The free gift" (68).
Richard Baxter
I guess to their wide, innocent eyes it all seemed like normal family life because they had never known any different. In fact, I was the only one who had lived with anyone else, the only one that realized that life didn't have to be this terrifying and this painful all the time
Joe Peters
Realism without naturalism... is a leading motif in Modern Art. There is a move away from the struggle to perfect the reflection of Nature in Art's mirror, which I attribute to the all-pervading effects of photography...You must serve the tradition without being its slave. Remember you are an artist, not a draughtsman.
Tom Holt
A waft of wind came sweeping down the laurel-walk, and trembled through the boughs of the chestnut: it wandered away-away-to an indefinite distance-it died. The nightingale's song was then the only voice of the hour: in listening to it, I again wept.
Charlotte Brontë
The New Age movement, for all the validity of its protest and the value of some of its recommendations, is in truth a very old blind alley. There is a very long history to remind us of what happens when nature is our ultimate point of reference . . . . Nature knows no ethics. There is no right and wrong in nature; the controlling realities are power and fertility.
Lesslie Newbigin
From space this Earth is incandescent with abominations - the gods write their signature in our entrails
Steve Aylett
You want to meet your gods, you filthy cockroaches? Tell the evil sods that Molly Templar says hello when you see them.
Stephen Hunt
But this city is a world of its own, a country within a country. People are used to taking the old and making it news; and used, too, to taking the new and making it old. Every glass of water from its taps, it is said, has passed six times through the kidneys of another, and every scrap of its land has been trodden on, fought over, dug up and broken down for centuries.
Amanda Craig
this is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity...You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.
Dorothy L. Sayers
The Secret of Happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.
F.H. Bradley
One Said, 'My grandfather once planted a Langra tree but, before he could eat the fruit, he had to marry it to another tree. A tamarind. Custom decreed it.''I know about that custom,' said a colleague. 'The jasmine is considered a suitable bride for a mango.
Alexander Frater
When I saw your strand of hair I knew that grief is love turned into an eternal missing.
Rosamund Lupton
There are many men in London, you know, who, some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals. It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one. Save in the Stranger's Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed, and three offenses, if brought to the notice of the committee, render the talker liable to expulsion. My brother was one of the founders, and I have myself found it a very soothing atmosphere.
Arthur Conan Doyle
She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
Jane Austen
When you see the truth for the first time, it is what people call a peak moment, or a moment of clarity. You get a larger percentage of what each moment of life actually contains; you are filled with life. Your mind is the gatekeeper of life, and sometimes it lets a little true life in, but most of the time it does not.Without the mind blocking life, you receive all of life, true life, and reflect it all back out.Seeing Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon for the first time is a peak moment for most people. Why does it make you feel so alive? Nothing really happens to you. Why doesn’t it feel as good the second time you see it? You are seeing the same thing. The reason is, your mind opens up when something is special.The truth is, every moment of life is special, and you can be completely open to life most of the time. You have to see the truth to see true life.
Michael Smith
There are kisses and kisses, I am told, and this must have been quite the other sort from Millie's resonant signals of regard.
H.G.Wells
Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It’s like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most part, you get skeletons. Skeletons are good shit.
Cory Doctorow
No one will ever understand like I do. You’re so different with me, baby. You take care of me. You make me feel safe. You’re not who you think you are. Didn’t you once tell me that people aren’t just one thing? You’re so much more to me than anything you might have done in the past.
Samantha Young
Love is both wondrous and yet full of peril. Love is a gateway through which hatred - disguised and unrecognized - can pass.
David Gemmell
When he asked if he was mine, tears in his eyes, I think he knew what he would do, what he would have to do, and he was mourning us. He was mourning us the whole time.
Emma Forrest
Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming
David Bowie
The sky is grey, with a thin TV-static drizzle that hangs in the air like it's been freeze-framed.
Scarlett Thomas
There is perfect love in Heaven!
Anne Brontë
There is no power like that of prevailing prayer - of Abraham pleading for Sodom, Jacob wrestling in the stillness of the night, Moses standing in the breach, Hannah intoxicated with sorrow, David heartbroken with remorse and grief, Jesus in sweat and blood. Add to this list from the records of the church your personal observation and experience, and always there is cost of passion unto blood. Such prayer prevails. It turns ordinary mortals into men of power. It brings power. It brings fire. It brings rain. It brings life. It brings God.
Samuel Chadwick
We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.
Bertrand Russell
The only good deed I’ll be doing tonight is for the angels.”“The angels?”“Haven’t you heard? Every time I make you come, an angel gets his wings.”Brady dropped his smoky gaze to Gage’s mouth for a beat. “We really need to leave. Now.
Kate Meader
It matters not what goal you seek Its secret here reposesYou've got to dig from week to week To get Results or Roses.
Edgar A. Guest
There was a brief silence in which the distant echo of Hagrid smashing down a wooden front door seemed to reverberate through the intervening years.
J.K. Rowling
I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.
Vita Sackville-West
Dare to be as physically robust and varied as you always were.
Susie Orbach
When you're locked up in here for life, you learn to welcome the little freedoms.
Alexander Gordon Smith
After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.
Terry Eagleton
Secrets had the power to kill a marriage,she said. Nonsense, Sylvie said,it was secrets that could save a marriage.
Kate Atkinson
All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself.
Charles Dickens
The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife? And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad.
Hilary Mantel
The difference between reading a good book and Facebook, is that a good book is always hard to put down, whereas on Facebook it's become too easy to put anyone down.
Anthony T.Hincks
When a man only rings you late at night, when he only wants to see you late at night, when he doesn't take you out for dinner, or introduce you to his friends, or spend any time or attention on you, then this is not a relationship. This is sex.
Jane Green
It was a nasty look. It made me feel as if I were something the dog had brought in and intended to bury later on, when he had time.
P.G. Wodehouse
What a man dares to do, he should dare to confess- unless he is a coward.
Rafael Sabatini
So long divided and so differently situated, the ties of blood were little more than nothing.
Jane Austen