Quotes by British Authors - Page 97

It seemed as though he had a fundamental belief that the merit of his argument depended on the strength of his feelings about the matter, and since he always felt uncontrollably passionate about everything, then clearly he was always right. This irrational claptrap, coming as it did from a swarthy, excitable, plump Celtic demi-dwarf, struck me not just as thoroughly impertinent but also as a noisy and ignorant attempt to undermine the most basic principles of the Enlightenment.
John Cleese
A woman's weapon is her tongue.
Anthony Trollope
Nature in everything demands respect, and those who violate her laws seldom violate them with impunity.
Mary Wollstonecraft
There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.
Arthur C. Clarke
A disloyal friend is no friend.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
But most of the time, with a contented resignation that comes normally to a man only at the end of a long and busy life, he sat before the keyboard and filled the air with his beloved Bach. Perhaps he was deceiving himself, perhaps this was some merciful trick of the mind but now it seemed to Jan that this what he had always wished to do. His secret ambition had at last dared to emerge into the full light of consciousness. Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world.
Arthur C. Clarke
Life took longer to reassemble than it did to blow apart, but that didn't mean it wouldn't be lovely, providing that one remembered to go for country walks, and to tune the wireless to music.
Chris Cleave
I needed somewhere that wasn't bad. I wanted to be light and happy like you, and I wanted never for you to see the dark. I was scared I would infect you with terrible feelings and pictures in my head of walking out in front of the traffic and - No. That's not for you, see? Not for you to hear. I needed you to be my sunlight, Bessi,' and here George paused and her words became very small, 'I lost mine, I lost it.
Diana Evans
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
Virginia Woolf
Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.
Neil Gaiman
What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die of course. Literally shit myself lifeless.
Bill Bryson
It's nice to be liked, but it's better to be respected.
Habeeb Akande
Venice, it's temples and palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
That's like being a hockey player born on January I.
Malcolm Gladwell
It wasn't love at first sight. They ran into each other one morning in a sunny clearing in the forest. A few moments of stunned silence. `Glockenspiel,' Adam pronounced, thinking (but with terrible doubt) he'd found another animal in search of a name. When Eve approached him, proffering a handful of elderberries, he threw a stick at her and ran away.
Glen Duncan
It doesn't matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.
Mrs. Patrick Campbell
The next thing Jordana says makes me realize that it's too late to save her. "I've noticed that when you light a match, the flame is the same shape as a falling tear." She's been sensitized, turned gooey in the middle. I saw it happening and I didn't do anything to stop it. From now on, she'll be writing diaries and sometimes including little poems and she'll buy gifts for her favourite teachers and she'll admire the scenery and she'll watch the news and she'll buy soup for homeless people and she'll never burn my leg hair again.
Joe Dunthorne
Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative—an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary... That day I had learned that it was much more. It was something which could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary and play tricks with the mind. Something which lurked inimically all around, stretching the nerves and twanging them with alarms, never letting one forget that there was no one to help, no one to care. It showed one as an atom adrift in vastness, and it waited all the time its chance to frighten and frighten horribly—that was what loneliness was really trying to do; and that was what one must never let it do...
John Wyndham
Humility is a teacher of itself. It is learnt by means of its practise.
Idries Shah
There remain times when one can only endure. One lives on one doesn't die and the only thing that one can do is to fill one's mind and time as far as possible with the concerns of other people. It doesn't bring immediate peace but it brings the dawn nearer.
Arthur Christopher Benson
Life is but a memory Happened long ago. Theatre full of sadness For a long forgotten show.
Nick Drake
Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone.
Gladys Browyn Stern
Don’t judge someone’s choices without first knowing their reason.
Robert Tew
Come, my child," I said, trying to lead her away. "Wish good-bye to the poor hare, and come and look for blackberries.""Good-bye, poor hare!" Sylvie obediently repeated, looking over her shoulder at it as we turned away. And then, all in a moment, her self-command gave way. Pulling her hand out of mine, she ran back to where the dead hare was lying, and flung herself down at its side in such an agony of grief as I could hardly have believed possible in so young a child."Oh, my darling, my darling!" she moaned, over and over again. "And God meant your life to be so beautiful!
Lewis Carroll
One sees great things from the valley only small things from the peak.
G.K. Chesterton
It is better to live ready than to get ready!
Smith Wigglesworth
My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and would do all the veshches I had done, yes perhaps even killing some poor starry forella surrounded with mewing kots and koshkas, and I would not be able to really stop him. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world...
Anthony Burgess
Like if Leonardo from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started being all bummed out about everything. How were we going to kick arse if our Leonardo was wearing a black eye-band instead of a blue one?
Dougie Poynter
If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.
George Eliot
All his court were cast down in slumber, and all the fires faded and were quenched; but the Silmarils in the crown on Morgoth's head blazed forth suddenly with a radiance of white flame; and the burden of that crown and of the jewels bowed down his head, as though the world were set upon it, laden with a weight of care, of fear, and of desire, that even the will of Morgoth could not support. Then Lúthien catching up her winged robe sprang into the air, and her voice came dropping down like rain into pools, profound and dark. She cast her cloak before his eyes, and set upon him a dream, dark as the outer Void where once he walked alone.
J.R.R. Tolkien
It doesnot matter; there’s many a heavenly body in the lot crowding upon us ofa night that mankind had never heard of, it being outside the sphereof its activities and of no earthly importance to anybody but to theastronomers who are paid to talk learnedly about its composition,weight, path--the irregularities of its conduct, the aberrations of itslight--a sort of scientific scandal-mongering.
Joseph Conrad
Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.
W Somerset Maugham
Her face was very beautiful, he thought. He hadn't been sure before, but he was now. The mind that lived behind it made it beautiful, the same way that the flame inside a lantern makes the lantern beautiful.
Philip Reeve
He who is fortunately enlightened [the Sufi]Knows that sophistry is from the devil and love from Adam.
Idries Shah
She never opened her mail in the middle of the day. Sometimes she forgot about it for a week or more until people rang to complain. Nor did she check her answering machine messages. In fact, it had only been in the last year that she had finally bought an answering machine, and she steadfastly refused to have a mobile, to the incredulity of all those around her, who didn’t believe that people could actually function without one. But Frieda wanted to be able to escape from incessant communications and demands. She didn’t want to be at anyone’s beck and call, and she liked cutting herself off from the urgent inanities of the world. When she was on her own, she liked to be truly alone. Out of contact and adrift.
Nicci French
If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!
Jackie Collins
The most satisfactory definition of man from the scientific point of view is probably Man the Tool-maker.
Kenneth Oakley
It is said that whomsoever the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. In fact, whomsoever the gods wish to destroy, they first hand the equivalent of a stick with a fizzing fuse and Acme Dynamite Company written on the side. It's more interesting, and doesn't take so long.
Terry Pratchett
There was no point in telling somebody not to cry, she had always thought; indeed there were times when you should do exactly the opposite, when you should urge people to cry, to start the healing that sometimes only tears can bring. But if there was a place for tears of relief, there might even be a place for tears of pride[.]
Alexander McCall Smith
The only kind of universe that I can even begin to conceive is an inconceivable one.
Ilyas Kassam
The empty vessel giveth a greater sound than the full barrel.
John Lyly
It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.
James Fenton
Loyalty looks simple... but it ain't.
David Mitchell
The quality of life that you have is determined solely by the effort you put into giving your life value, purpose and a reason.
Steven Redhead
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know
John Keats
It is easier to believe that there was nothing before there was something than that there was something before there was nothing.
Julian Huxley
My jaw went slack. Private rooms? Great, the button thing had been a step too far. Either he was totally getting the wrong impression—at least, not the impression I wanted to give—or…no. I didn’t want to consider the possibility he might know. People didn’t hide in forests in the middle of the night to protect themselves from a Binding. I was just weird like that. Rather, I had no choice, but…argh, what was I going to do now?!
Sam Dogra
I liked him, there was no doubt about that. But I wasn't sure if he was good for me or not. I didn't always stick to things that were good for me - positively railed against it sometimes - but he was a different type of not good for me. He did things to my mind and body that I hadn't ever experienced before.But it wasn't as if I could get him out of my head either: every moment I had free would suddenly be crammed with thoughts of him. His soft lips, the gentle urgency with which they'd kissed me. The intoxicating smell of his skin. His moss-green eyes that would follow everything I said, then would meet my eyes so we could share a smile. It was driving me slowly and pleasurably insane.
Dorothy Koomson
And not wretched sausages half full of bread and soya bean either, but real meaty, spicy ones, fat and piping hot and burst and just the tiniest bit burnt.
C.S. Lewis
The strongest human instinct is to impart information the second strongest is to resist it.
Kenneth Grahame
Underneath an artist's preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions that allow the forebrain to chatter) there is a soul tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world.
Lawrence Durrell
I am fascinated by the evolution of language, and how local versions diverge to become dialects like Cornish English and Geordie and then imperceptibly diverge further to become mutually unintelligible but obviously related languages like German and Dutch. The analogy to genetic evolution is close enough to be illuminating and misleading at the same time. When populations diverge to become species, the time of separation is defined as the moment when they can no longer interbreed. I suggest that two dialects should be deemed to reach the status of separate languages when they have diverged to an analogously critical point: the point where, if a native speaker of one attempts to speak the other it is taken as a compliment rather than as an insult.
Richard Dawkins
Over a billion people believe in Allah without truly knowing what Allah supposedly stands for or what he really demands of them. And the minority that do understand continue to be Moslems because they have redefined their morality and ethics to fit within the teachings of Islam, which are floridly lacking in morality. They therefore redefine what is good and evil in order to fit their lives into what is preached by Islam, instead of examining Islam to see if it fits within the good life. Backwards thinking, imposed by a backward religion.
Bertrand Russell
Finallya day will come whenwoken by the xylophoneof sunthroughblindsyou’ll realisethat the beach was not the placewhere horses tore the sandto ribbonthat the scent of him has liftedfrom the last of the sheetsthat he isn’t coming backthat it hasn’t rainedbut the birds are pretending that it hasso they can sing
Andrew McMillan
A fierce battle was raging inside Harry's
J.K. Rowling
High powered radio frequency (RF) transmitters really need to be reclassified as an industrial application and banned out of residential communities that have developing babies and children.
Steven Magee
At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.
P.G. Wodehouse
London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.
G.K. Chesterton
When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.
Virginia Woolf
Destiny isn't a path any cat follows blindly. It is always a matter of choice, and sometimes the heart speaks loudest. Listen to your heart, because that's where your true destiny lies.
Erin Hunter