Quotes by British Authors - Page 95

The point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. That's concrete individuality: an individuality that it owes its existence to a kind of communal respect on the part of all the other individualities, and that it had better therefore respect them similarly.
China Miéville
The beautiful illusion of fiction is that everything makes sense and that there was a purpose, that there was a point to it all. And that's the best possible lie because it may even be true.
Neil Gaiman
However angry I was with him, however much I wanted to humiliate Terry, I suddenly saw such humanity in his eyes, and in the way he tried to smile - such innocence in the way he wanted to understand me, and such possibility of pain, along with the implicit assumption that he wouldn't be harmed - that I pulled away.
Hanif Kureishi
Rather than looking for explanations for why all people deserve to be treated with compassion and respect, we ought to be working at creating a world in which people are treated with compassion and respect. Human rights aren’t lying around waiting to be discovered. They’re made, not found.
David Livingstone Smith
I kissed her and forgot death.
Jeanette Winterson
I wash off the night in the water, my scrapes and aches numbed by the sea. My bones have become boughs, all scarred knees and gnarled kuckles. None of us are the same person we once were, since the human body replaces itself every seven years; there have been at least six different mes.
Philip Hoare
Via self-talk we give our mind instructions on what we expect of ourselves and so behave accordingly. Change the instructions and we change the outcomes.
Sam Owen
It'll be no use their putting their heads down and saying, 'Come up again, dear!' I shall only look up and say, 'Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up -- if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else' -- but, oh, dear!
Lewis Carroll
My mum and dad had worked incredibly hard to afford me an education.
Benedict Cumberbatch
Bread is a second cause; the LORD Himself is the first source of our sustenance. He can work without the second cause as well as with it; and we must not tie Him down to one mode of operation. Let us not be too eager after the visible, but let us look to the invisible God.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature -- a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.
Robert Macfarlane
As a travel writer I've specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader's hair stick on end.
Tahir Shah
And new physical problems are arising almost daily. I'm getting problems from a painful trapped nerve in my shoulder, where my rucksack strap has been pinching it, and I can't straighten my arm above shoulder level - soon I will be limping like Richard III. By now my back is covered with eczema, the result of a perpetually sodden shirt and rucksack pressed against it day after day in this heat. In one place my pack has rubbed a painful hole in my skin through the eczema; carrying my rucksack was unpleasant before, but now it is purgatory. This eczema must be partly due to eating bad food for so long - I never had this problem at home. I'm expecting my teeth and hair to start falling out before long, and I've got more or less a permanent acid indigestion from eating so much junk. Week after week I've lived on lukewarm Coca-Cola, stale buns and doughnuts, slurps, green bananas, powdered milk and far too many cigarettes. With all the rubbishy food and sugar soft drinks I've been consuming, I'll see the east coast through a hypoglycaemic haze.
Fran Sandham
My father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret.
Evelyn Waugh
She reflected she must be completely besotted with Peter, if his laughter could hallow an aspidistra.
Dorothy L. Sayers
The old ways are dead. And you need people around you who concur. That means hanging out more with the creative people, the freaks, the real visionaries, than you're already doing. Thinking more about what their needs are, and responding accordingly. Avoid the dullards; avoid the folk who play it safe. They can't help you anymore. Their stability model no longer offers that much stability. They are extinct, they are extinction.
Hugh MacLeod
The only test is what you see when you look in a mirror.
Steve Backley
Canadians are generally indistinguishable from Americans and the surest way of telling the two apart is to make the observation to a Canadian.
Richard Staines
It is a scene of Satyrs and Nymphs, of pursuits and captures, provocative resistances followed by the enthusiastic surrender of lips to bearded lips, of panting bosoms to the impatience of rough hands, the whole accompanied by a babel of shouting, squealing and shrill laughter
Aldous Huxley
The solution of logical problems must be neat for they set the standard of neatness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
IF WE DIE FOR THEM, I'LL KILL YOU, HARRY!
J.K. Rowling
To lose your own language was like forgetting your mother, and as sad, in a way.
Alexander McCall Smith
A boddhisattva is someone who is on the way to becoming a buddha. All of us become boddhisattvas as soon as we start to take our Zen work seriously and the work we do contributes to creating a world in which all good actions become more efficacious.
David Brazier
There are little pockets of old time in London, where things and places stay the same, like bubbles in amber,” she explained. “There’s a lot of time in London, and it has to go somewhere—it doesn’t all get used up at once.” “I may still be hung over,” sighed Richard. “That almost made sense.
Neil Gaiman
.... just find your way, like a river settling into its bed, and the sigh of the wind over a lake, light but restful... content with the joy in the arc of an arm throwing a ball for a dog to fetch, the ease of the grassy slope stretching away, birds in the trees singing sweet high notes, flowers growing close in the ditch.
Jay Woodman
Pausing on the threshold, he looked in, conscious not so much of the few familiar sticks of furniture - the trucklebed, the worn strip of Brussels carpet, the chipped blue-banded ewer and basin, the framed illuminated texts on the walls - as of a perfect hive of abhorrent memories.That high cupboard in the corner, from which certain bodiless shapes had been wont to issue and stoop at him cowering out of his dreams; the crab-patterned paper that came alive as you stared; the window cold with menacing stars; the mouseholes, the rusty grate - trumpet of every wind that blows - these objects at once lustily shouted at him in their own original tongues.("Out Of The Deep")
Walter de la Mare
Well, you know, that was the worst of it - this suspicion of not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.
Joseph Conrad
The survivor movements were also challenging the notion of a dysfunctional family as the cause and culture of abuse, rather than being one of the many places where abuse nested. This notion, which in the 1990s and early 1980s was the dominant understanding of professionals characterised the sex abuser as a pathetic person who had been denied sex and warmth by his wife, who in turn denied warmth to her daughters. Out of this dysfunctional triad grew the far-too-cosy incest dyad. Simply diagnosed, relying on the signs: alcoholic father, cold distant mother, provocative daughter. Simply resolved, because everyone would want to stop, to return to the functioning family where mum and dad had sex and daughter concentrated on her exams. Professionals really believed for a while that sex offenders would want to stop what they were doing. They thought if abuse were decriminalised, abusers would seek help. The survivors knew different. P5
Beatrix Campbell
I’m not really one to write simplistic and jovial lyrics, and while on the surface I can see how “Bros” is a happy song – a celebration of friendship and one’s younger years – I see a panic in the words. Particularly the bridge, which I think expresses the fear I had, not of growing up, but of growing up without Sadie. I don’t know which one of us started having trouble entering the Fourth World first – I’d like to think it was me because I was a year older, but I don’t think our age difference was mirrored in our maturity. Either way, I worried that once we entered reality as budding adults – no longer pretending to be “raised by wolves and other beasts” – we wouldn’t be together all the time.
Ellie Rowsell
Right, you've got a crooked sort of cross..." He consulted Unfogging the Future. "That means you're going to have 'trials and suffering' — sorry about that — but there's a thing that could be the sun... hang on... that means 'great happiness'... so you're going to suffer but be very happy...""You need your Inner Eye tested, if you ask me," said Ron, and they both had to stifle their laughs as Professor Trelawney gazed in their direction.
J.K. Rowling
My cock has been hiding since the day she arrived," Bjarni had said, but only when he was sure she was out of earshot, which was a full day after she left. "You worry for nothing brother," Bjorn had said, "for even a seiðr-wife (witch) cannot put a spell on something she can't see. It would be like trying to hit a louse with a spear-throw.
Giles Kristian
She should pull away, even though she had begged for it with her smart mouth. She should punish him for every crime he’d perpetrated. For being too good-looking, too sexy, too everything. But the kiss was like him—just too damn good. Warm and brutal, providing answers to questions she never knew she had. He teased with his tongue along the seam of her mouth, seeking that last nudge of acceptance as if it was his God-given right.She parted her lips, and like a predator hinged on her threshold, he took.
Kate Meader
I believe in the possible. I believe, small though we are, insignificant though we may be, we can reach a full understanding of the universe. You were right when you said you felt small, looking up at all that up there. We are very, very small, but we are profoundly capable of very, very big things.
Stephen Hawking
Even if God had created us, He would never have admitted it.
George Hammond
One consequence of ignorance is that it misdirects anger.
Glenn Haybittle
Everyone has it within their heart to be vegan, but each time they eat anything from an animal they deny that this is so, they deny that they have enough love in their hearts to show these animals mercy and free them from our tyranny.This is a blatant lie that they keep telling themselves, time and time again. They would rather argue that they don't care about animals and find excuses to justify and continue harming them, than acknowledge any 'sissy' ability they might have to feel compassion for them.What they don't understand is, that they hurt themselves by not acknowledging this latent ability within their hearts though, and with this they deny themselves love too, for what is given out always comes back multifold.
Mango Wodzak
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question. I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.—Jane EyreFrom Gradesaver.com
Charlotte Brontë
I thought, gazing at the beauty of the landscape again, it is as though the fiend has prevailed against the angels, and fixed his throne in a heaven, to rule it as though it were Hell.
Tom Holland
Scholars discern motions of history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules, only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts and virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief.
David Mitchell
I joined the Pass Mods. class and studied the cyropaedia and Livy's Wars with a resentful feeling that there was quite enough war in the world without having to read about it in Latin
Vera Brittain
The revolutionary woman knows the world she seeks to overthrow is precisely one in which love between equal human beings is well nigh impossible. We are still part of the ironical working-out of this, our own cruel contradiction. One of the most compelling facts which can unite women and make us act is the overwhelming indignity or bitter hurt of being regarded as simply ‘the other’, ‘an object’, ‘commodity’, ‘thing’. We act directly from a consciousness of the impossibility of loving or being loved without distortion. But we must still demand now the preconditions of what is impossible at the moment. It is a most disturbing dialectic, our praxis of pain.
Sheila Rowbotham
To live in a state of liberty is not to live apart from law. It is, on the contrary, to live under the highest law, the only law that can really profit a man, the law which is consciously and deliberately imposed by himself on himself.
Auberon Herbert
The point is, what sort of a time can a man give a woman? Can he give her a damn good time, or can't he? If he can't he's no right to the woman...
D.H. Lawrence
If you have nothing left to want, then you just wait. Until there's nothing left to wait for.
Neil Gaiman
An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.
Francis Crick
As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance.
C.S. Lewis
There is nothing more lovely in life than the union of two people whose love for one another has grown through the years, from the small acorn of passion, into a great rooted tree
Vita Sackville-West
(Speaking of the Cistercian monks) A grim fraternity, passing grim lives in that sweet spot, that God had made so bright! Strange that Nature's voices all around them--the soft singing of the waters, the wisperings of the river grass, the music of the rushing wind--should not have taught them a truer meaning of life than this. They listened there, through the long days, in silence, waiting for a voice from heaven; and all day long and through the solemn night it spoke to them in myriad tones, and they heard it not.
Jerome K. Jerome
What humanity wants most is crude sensation.Really? I thought what humanity wanted most was dignity.
Christopher Fowler
Have you thought of an ending?""Yes, several, and all are dark and unpleasant.""Oh, that won't do! Books ought to have good endings. How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?""It will do well, if it ever came to that.""Ah! And where will they live? That's what I often wonder.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Hearing voices no one else can hear isn't a good sign, even in the wizarding world.
J.K. Rowling
I guess they're called moments because they don't last very long.
Sarra Manning
For I know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of merriment in the soul of a sane man.
Hilaire Belloc
Christ's death is the Christian's life. Christ's cross is the Christian's title to heaven. Christ "lifted up" and put to shame on Calvary is the ladder by which Christians "enter into the holiest," and are at length landed in glory.
J.C. Ryle
Very few Englishmen ever ask a woman anything about themselves. They choose instead to lecture their dinner neighbors on a new and better route to the M5, or to praise their own professional achievements. So is a man does express any curiosity about a woman sitting next to him, about her feelings, about the life she is leading, she will generally tell him anything he cares to know.
Julian Fellowes
Let us make sure that the supreme fact of the 20th century is that they tread the same path.
Winston Churchill
My grandfather used to wear a black hat and coat. You are my children. You are my jewels. We old ones invest our future in you.
Diane Samuels
If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another name?
Graham Greene
If you are at school you must be royalty because you have lots of subjects.
Anthony T.Hincks
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of treesand changing leaves.
Virginia Woolf