Quotes by British Authors - Page 98

Don’t you find it striking? The personality is constantly dying and it feels like continuity. Meanwhile, we panic about death, which we cannot ever experience. Yet it is this illogical fear that motivates our lives. We gore each other and mutilate ourselves for victory and fame, as if these might swindle mortality and extend us somehow. Then, as death bears down, we agonize over how little we have achieved.
Tom Rachman
That's the way life takes us,' Elleke once said. 'It takes us like this, then it turns us over and takes us like that.' What she didn't say was that through it all we manage to cling to something that makes sense.
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Pioneers may be picturesque figures, but they are often rather lonely ones.
Nancy Astor the Viscountess Astor
I understood the life around me better, not from love, which everybody acknowledges to be a great teacher, but from estrangement, to which nobody has attributed the power of reinforcing insight
Nirad C. Chaudhuri
Tigerclaw stared in disbelief. Was the life of his son dependent on an ancient medicine cat and an arrogant kittypet?
Erin Hunter
And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?
Lewis Carroll
Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?
Jeanette Winterson
The tragedy of life is that sometimes we get what we want.
W Somerset Maugham
I am a mediocre being, a bit cunning.
Renée Vivien
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.
W.H. Auden
There is no better designer than nature.
Alexander McQueen
I want a man who knows something about himself. And is appalled. And has to forgive himself to get along.
C.P. Snow
We can only afford two children' is a squalid argument, but more acceptable in our society than 'we don't like children'.
Germaine Greer
Your grief is something to be admired – the pain of severance. A scar where something used to be.
Simon Van Booy
My freshness is spending its wavering shower in the dust.
Francis Thompson
Good does not exist without the evil and right does not hold weight without knowing the wrong.
Stephanie Hudson
Everybody has a story. It’s like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can’t say you haven’t got them. Same goes for stories.
Diane Setterfield
...he was not so much a human as a civil war.
H.G.Wells
The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said, When Allah loves a people, He tries them.
Leila Aboulela
When she turned I could see her face was plain and outwardly unremarkable, yet possessing of a bearing that showed inner strength and resolve. I stared at her intently with a mixture of feelings. I had realised not long ago that I was no beauty, and even at the age of nine had seen how the more attractive children gained favour more easily. But here in that young woman I could see how those principles could be inverted. I felt myself stand more upright and clench my jaw in subconscious mimicry of her pose
Jasper Fforde
All that night he thought like boomerangs fly: an idea would shoot way off into the distance, all the way to a caravan in Hollywood and, for a moment, when he had got as far away from school and reality as it was possible to go, he was reasonably happy; then it would begin the return journey, thump him on the head, and leave him in exactly the place he had started from. And all the time it got nearer and nearer to the morning.
Nick Hornby
For myself I couldn't care less, but I have a lover. Not a partner, Susannah, or a friend or a significant euphemism, but the love of my life. And he believes. And I've watched him tie himself in knots, as he struggles to find a place for himself in texts that were written thousands of years ago, with the deliberate aim of excluding him.
Michael Arditti
No social stability without individual stability.
Aldous Huxley
The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment He has scattered broadcast...The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God...Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.
C.S. Lewis
Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.
C.S. Lewis
Perhaps it also demonstrates that any young girl can live quite healthily on coarse bread and clear water – so long as she has fine clothes.
Ann Lawrence
Culture always tells you to look to illusions for answers. ‘Look at me’, it says, ‘I’ve worked it all out’. Celebrities grow too powerful because people mistake their colour for content. They allow them to create a hole at the heart of our culture, in which they then flourish.
Guy Mankowski
At present", Keynes said in 1926, "everything is politics, and nothing policies.
Richard Davenport-Hines
Larry sat with his arm stretched out along the top of the front seat. His shirt cuff was pulled back by his position and displayed his slim, strong wrist and the lower part of his brown arm lightly covered with fine hairs. The sun shone goldly upon them. Something in Isabel's immobility attracted my attention, and I glanced at her. She was so still that you might have thought her hypnotized. Her breath was hurried. Her eyes were fixed on the sinewy wrist with its little golden hairs and on that long, delicate, but powerful hand, and I have never seen on a human countenance such a hungry concupiscence as I saw then on hers. It was a mask of lust. I would never have believed that her beautiful features could assume an expression of such unbridled sensuality. It was animal rather than human. The beauty was stripped from her face; the look upon it made her hideous and frightening. It horribly suggested the bitch in heat and I felt rather sick.
W Somerset Maugham
My mother was a pathetic patchwork witch who had used magic so much to meddle in her own life that she had no integrity left and was nothing but a coil of hatreds consuming themselves in futility. We had already hedged her power, with the help of the fairies.
Jo Walton
Katy was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian's trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there's really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There's no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence.
Aldous Huxley
Didn’t somebody once say ‘Politics is the art of the possible’?” “Quite true—which is why only second-rate minds go into it. Genius likes to challenge the impossible.
Arthur C. Clarke
I follow my own methods, and tell as much or as little as I choose. That is the advantage of being unofficial.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Forget the myths you have heard about radical feminism, for only some of them are true. Instead, prepare to think about why so many lies are told about this particular brand of feminism, how it acts as a scapegoat for all that is most threatening about our social movement and how any revolutionary movement for change could really ever be anything but threatening. These are the women you were warned about; you can be too.
Finn Mackay
I don't write like this in order to show how clever and well read I am--though I am rather clever and well read as a matter of fact.
John Heath-Stubbs
In his last years Linacre gave up medicine for the Church and then for the first time read the gospels. On so doing he exclaimed, 'Either this is not the gospel or we are not Christians.
Roland H. Bainton
The clear stars before him took to shuddering and he knew why; they shuddered at sight of what was behind him. He had never divined before that strange Things hid themselves from men, under pretence of being snow-clad mounds of swaying trees; but now they came slipping out from their harmless covers to follow him, and mock at his impotence to make a kindred Thing resolve to truer form. He knew the air behind him was thronged; he heard the hum of innumerable murmurings together; but his eyes could never catch them - they were too swift and nimble; but he knew they were there, because, on a backward glance, he saw the snow mounds surge as they grovelled flatlings out of sight; he saw the trees reel as they screwed themselves rigid past recognition among the boughs.
Clemence Housman
Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though.
Richard Dawkins
How sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!
Arthur Conan Doyle
You’ve become a miserable bastard and I can’t deal with it anymore.”Bex on Egg – Book 2 “Having it
Jamie Scallion
There was no thunderbolt, no quickening of the heart, but there was a sense of recognition.A familiarity about his face..
Judith Kinghorn
Love is not a spaceship you construct and then fly off together into the stars. Love is a soap bubble that bursts in the air. Love is the first winter snowflake that falls into you palm, a mirage that glows in the sun and fades in the shadows.
Chloe Thurlow
Never compose anything unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you.
Gustav Hoist
History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.
Philip Guedalla
...there was something in the texture of the weave that felt happy: theecho of a memory so far down in his soul it was all emotion, aburst of colour and warmth, adrift from time and place.
Alexia Casale
No matter how few possessions you own or how little money you have, loving wildlife and nature will make you rich beyond measure.
Paul Oxton
Let us not take offence over small cheese, let things slide off when they don’t really matter, not take things personally, be free to make better use of our energy, to get on with something meaningful instead.
Jay Woodman
I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I'm going to be immoderate--and volatile--I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant.
Joanne Harris
Achieving your heart’s desires is the key to living a life of bliss.
Steven Redhead
Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,  One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,One more devils’-triumph and sorrow for angels,  One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!
Robert Browning
The best mathematics is serious as well as beautiful—‘important’ if you like, but the word is very ambiguous, and ‘serious’ expresses what I mean much better
G H Hardy
Me? Books and cleverness? There are more important things in life. Friendship, and bravery, and Harry, just be careful.
Hermoine Granger
Everything sacred begins with a circle of motion.
Glenn Haybittle
I know we can do this. I know it’s nothow you would have chosen it, but I know I can make you happy. And all I can say is that you make me … you make me into someone I couldn’t even imagine. You make me happy,even when you’re awful. I would rather be with you – even the you that you seem to think is diminished – than with anyone else in the world.
Jojo Moyes
If ever the adventure proves tiring, or you lose sight of your dream, look to the west at sunset. There, on days when the skies are clear, you might see upon the horizon a thin layer of amber mist. When it appears, you will know its purpose: it is the mist of believing.
Fennel Hudson
The old 'qualities' of masculinity - a narrow focus on life, domestic incompetence signalling a mind on higher things, emotional reserve and acts of endurance - have become absurdities, signs more of incompetence, insensitivity, lack of intelligence than of strength.
Rosalind Coward
I wasn't crying about mothers," he said rather indignantly. "I was crying because I can't get my shadow to stick on. Besides, I wasn't crying.
J.M. Barrie
Sluka shook her head. "We're talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It's like their only reason for existing was so they could die.
Alastair Reynolds
For what is love itself, for the one we love best? - an enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.
George Eliot
Death was an inverse Big Bang; an impossible magic trick where everything had become nothing in the very same instant, where one state had been replaced so completely by another that no evidence of the first could be detected, and where the catalyst had been vaporized by the sheer shock of the new.
Belinda Bauer