Quotes by British Authors - Page 94

Love it will not betray you, dismay or enslave you. It will set your free.
Mumford and Sons
You are safe with me.""I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.
A.S. Byatt
People are idiots, Choo. Always remmber that: people are faithless, backstabbing, weak, creepy, stupid, lazy idiots.
Michael Grant
So here is my story, may it bringSome smiles and a tear or so,It happened once upon a time,Far away, and long ago,Outside the night wind keens and wails,Come listen to me, the Teller of Tales!
Brian Jacques
Have you ever noticed how ‘What the hell’ is always the right decision to make?
Terry Johnson
A man is rich not only by what he has, but also, and above all, by what he doesn't.
Neel Burton
The hardest of all is learning to be a well of affection and not a fountain to show them that we love them not when we feel like it but when they do.
Nan Fairbrother
His idleness was his refuge, and in this he was like many others in [occupied] France in that period; laziness became political.
Iain Pears
That is the trouble...You are a crowd of bits of boys all in the thing for what you will get. Demands, you call them. Well, I am against demands of any kind. You cannot reason with demand, and where there is no reason, there is no sense. As for your support, whatever you call it, some long word, what is the use of it?
Richard Llewellyn
For most normal people, politics is a distant, occasionally irritating fog.
Tony Blair
I should have known when I first saw that picture. For it is a very remarkable picture. It is the picture of a murderess painted by her victim-it is the picture of a girl watching her lover dies.
Agatha Christie
The one thing you should never do to a woman, whether you make love to her or fuck her, is apologise straight after.
Dianna Hardy
The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary dogmas and a special creed I shall speak later. But that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name.
G.K. Chesterton
The world has grown too large for one army of the nation, my brother. You will ride where I tell you to ride, conquer where I tell you to conquer. The world is yours, if you can put aside the base part of you that tells you to rule it all. That you may not have. Now give me an answer and your oath. Your word is iron, brother, and I will take it. Or I can just kill you now.
Conn Iggulden
Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.
Neil Gaiman
Brambleclaw dipped his head. “The battle is won,” he growled. “The clearing is ours. Do you concede or shall we fight for it again?”Blackstar flashed a look of burning hatred over his shoulder. “Take it,” he hissed. “It was never worth the blood that has been spilled here today.
Erin Hunter
You say your life is your own. But can you dare to ignore the chance that you are taking part in a gigantic drama under the orders of a divine Producer? Your cue may not come till the end of the play--it may be totally unimportant, a mere walking-on part, but upon it may hang the issues of the play if you do not give the cue to another player. The whole edifice may crumple. You as you, may not matter to anyone in the world, but you as a person in a particular place may matter unimaginably.
Agatha Christie
Therefore, since the world has stillMuch good, but much less good than ill,And while the sun and moon endureLuck's a chance, but trouble's sure,I'd face it as a wise man would,And train for ill and not for good.
A.E. Housman
Why spiders? Why couldn't it be 'follow the butterflies'?
J.K. Rowling
Bert knows it would take more than a little row to get between us. Because friends like us, like Bert and me, we'll always be together.
Jess Vallance
Huang Sung turned to the master and asked, "Master, will it come to pass?"The master looked up into the sky and then turned to Huang Sung, "When the sky is red from our tears and the earth is blackened by the ashes of our forefathers and then, when we look inwards to where our hearts once were, then we shall know that it has come to pass, but not in the time allotted to man."From a book that I am writing, called, "The Teachings of Huang Sung.
Anthony T.Hincks
The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
Samuel Johnson
That's the trouble with having the whole world love you. One day, you wake up and it's flirting with your best friend instead. And you don't know what to do. You're thrown.
Sophie Kinsella
So this, Harriet thought, gazing at her black-clad reflection, was what bearing up looked like. The eyes in the mirror stared at her, somehow, while fixing themselves far
Jude Morgan
Empowerment is the intentional absence of negativity.
Stephanie Lennox
Destiny is variable, not fixed; it is forever changing depending upon your free will to make choices for what you want your life to be.
Steven Redhead
Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood.
Tahir Shah
I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.
Bertrand Russell
Ambient sounds, especially with words, occupy about 5-10% of your intellectual bandwidth.By wearing ear protectors, you acoustically isolate yourself. This freed up bandwidth can now be focused on the desired task.It's a great deal. Just put on some earmuffs and you become 5-10% smarter.
Peter Rogers
It is of the very nature of partial seeing that we cannot see all the reconciliation of the parts we see, because it is only in the whole that they are one, and we do not see the whole. The word we form cannot wholly express God: only the Word He generates can do that. To be irked at this necessary darkness is as though we were irked at not being God.
Frank Sheed
If through no fault of his own the hero is crushed by a bulldozer in Act II, we are not impressed. Even though life is often like this—the absconding cashier on his way to Nicaragua is killed in a collision at the airport, the prominent statesman dies of a stroke in the midst of the negotiations he has spent years to bring about, the young lovers are drowned in a boating accident the day before their marriage—such events, the warp and woof of everyday life, seem irrelevant, meaningless. They are crude, undigested, unpurged bits of reality—to draw a metaphor from the late J. Edgar Hoover, they are “raw files.” But it is the function of great art to purge and give meaning to human suffering, and so we expect that if the hero is indeed crushed by a bulldozer in Act II there will be some reason for it, and not just some reason but a good one, one which makes sense in terms of the hero’s personality and action. In fact, we expect to be shown that he is in some way responsible for what happens to him.
Bernard Knox
The fear of what might happen stops people but the trauma process is so beautiful and transformational. There is nothing to fear in our emotions, they will not swallow you whole - they will speak to you in profound ways.
Adele Theron
It's just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you are one, is that it is not the grown man - the galumphing, unshaven, stinking, opinionated off-spring - you see before you, with his parking tickets and unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever been all rolled up into one.I look at him and see the baby I held in my arms, dewing besotted, unable to believe that I'd created another human being. I see the toddler, reaching for my hand, the schoolboy weeping tears of fury after being bullied  by some other child. I saw the vulnerabilities, the love, the history.
Jojo Moyes
Old age saves us from the realization of a great many fears.
Graham Greene
Perhaps grown women are beings of a good deal more complexity than cats
Jude Morgan
I asked for your heart and you gave me a stone.
Rachel Hore
There's a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khat-mandu There's a little marble cross below the town There's a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew And die yellow god forever gazes down.
J. Milton Hayes
Larry has been absorbed, as he wished, into that tumultuous conglomeration of humanity, distracted by so many conflicting interests, so lost in the world's confusion, so wistful of good, so cocksure on the outside, so diffident within, so kind, so hard, so trustful and so cagey, so mean and so generous, which is the people of the United States.
W Somerset Maugham
Love she had found, had a strange way of multiplying. Doubling, trebling itself, so that, as each child arrived, there was always more than enough to go around.
Rosamunde Pilcher
It's easy to forget that anything is possible with these guys. That there really are no limits.
Kevin Dutton
With a book he was regardless of time.
Jane Austen
...the more I felt that perhaps believing in fairies was more important than seeing them. In seeing, there is often question and doubt.
Hazel Gaynor
Some of the epidemic may overwhelm society as a physical expression of energy hysteria.
Lynne McTaggart
…each found her greatest safety in silence…
Jane Austen
Don't trust people who tell you other people's secrets.
Dan Howell
By all means continue destroying my possessions. I daresay I have too many.
J.K. Rowling
Of course, there were other sorts of literature -- theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical -- but they were just dry wanks.
Julian Barnes
And the two essential and indispensable things are first of all intelligence in the right most sense of that word and goodwill or the old fashion word charity/love, I mean these two things have to go hand in hand. Intelligence and knowledge without charity or goodwill would perhaps be inhuman and goodwill or charity undirected by intelligence or knowledge would be either impotent or misguided, the two have to go together.
Aldous Huxley
I wish I had never been born," she said. "What are we born for?" "For infinite happiness," said the Spirit. "You can step out into it at any moment...
C.S. Lewis
Lying bed, I listened to them, and I wonder now where in truth the real power rested that night: whether in the hands of men like Grimston, men like Edwards. Whether it slept with the King at Oxford in an ordinary bed, dormant, like a taint in the blood. Whether it rested on the waiting benches of the Commons, or whether it went home with their plain occupants, like a shilling in each of their pockets.I think the truth is that, rather than resting in any one of several places, all real power had gone loose by that night through the realm; and the land might have belonged to any man. Any man with the will to say, 'This is what we shall do.
Beth Underdown
Be interested yourself, and you will interest others.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence—‘This account of you we have from all quarters received.’ A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs.
Arthur Conan Doyle
God helps those who strut their stuff.
Dan Sofer
For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.
William Wordsworth
So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.
Iris Murdoch
Part of me wanted this more than anything else in the world—to have someone to hang out with, be like everyone else for a while. The rest of me screamed to get the hell out of there, not to get sucked in.
Rachel Ward
He would sit down and consider the situation carefully. Not only did this help to identify the solution to the problem, but it also gave him the opportunity to remind himself that things were not really as bad as they seemed; it was all a question of perspective. Sitting down and looking up at the sky for a few minutes--not at any particular part of the sky, but just at the sky in general--at the vast, dizzying, empty sky of Botswana, cut human problems down to size.
Alexander McCall Smith
Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.
Tom Stoppard
The lamp hummed:'Regard the moon,La lune ne garde aucune rancune,She winks a feeble eye,She smiles into corners.She smoothes the hair of the grass.The moon has lost her memory.A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,Her hand twists a paper rose,That smells of dust and old Cologne,She is aloneWith all the old nocturnal smellsThat cross and cross across her brain."The reminiscence comesOf sunless dry geraniumsAnd dust in crevices,Smells of chestnuts in the streets,And female smells in shuttered rooms,And cigarettes in corridorsAnd cocktail smells in bars.
T.S Eliot
There are three modes of bearing the ills of life: by indifference by philosophy and by religion.
Charles Caleb Colton