Quotes by British Authors

Courage is the lovely virtue-the rib of Himself that God sent down to His children.
J.M. Barrie
To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a new whereby to catch something else.
C.S. Lewis
Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk.
David Mitchell
I love rain because tears can not be seen in rain.
Charlie Chaplin
Time went on grey, uncloured, like a long journey where she sat unconscious as the landscape unrolled beside her.
D.H. Lawrence
Don't for God's sake speak as saint to sinner, but as you yourself to me myself - poor me!
Thomas Hardy
There it was, happiness in a backward glance: happiness and the certainty of hope.
Samantha Bruce-Benjamin
this grimy fragment of another world, the forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings....the merry dance of death and trade goes on
Joseph Conrad
The world had seen so many Ages: the Age of Enlightenment; of Reformation; of Reason. Now, at last, the Age of Desire. And after this, an end to Ages; an end, perhaps, to everything.
Clive Barker
If I have to face the end of human existence, I want to look totally smoking when it happens. Now shut the hell up.
Angeline Trevena
The hugest changes were the ones that could not be seen – that’s where the real apocalypse lay: in people’s hearts, their souls, their beings.
Dianna Hardy
He’s going to kill everyone on this planet, reduce the human race to dust. There will be no one to stop him. You are the only one who can. - Aiden Deverill
Alexandra May
There was an inevitability about the road towards each other which encouraged meandering along the route.
Zadie Smith
Most kids grow up leaving something out for Santa at Christmas time when he comes down the chimney. I used to make presents for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Jeanette Winterson
But this was not quite the right kraken apocalypse.
China Miéville
We grab handfuls of bottles and climb up onto the roof of the house. She stumbles and her foot slips into the gutter sopped with dead leaves. I grab her wrists and pull her clear – sure, she's not the person I'd choose to do this with, but she's my only option so I might as well be nice. Plus I don't want her to drop the vodka.
Kirsty Logan
Should have taken warning it's justPeople mourningRunning, hiding, lostYou can't find, find a place to go, so it'sRed skies at nightRed skies at night, whoa oh, oh oh oh, oh-oh-oh-oh-oh... red skies at night, red skies at night, whoa oh, oh oh oh...Someone's taking over, and it look like they're aiming right at you...Someone said we'll be dead by morning...Someone cries, leaving... red skies at night, whoa oh-h-h
Cy Curnin The Fixx
No amount of expertly choreographed PR could prevail, in the end, against Armageddon. It strolled over the barricades and took its pleasure.
M.R. Carey
The seal of Reason, made impregnable:_ The seal of Truth, immeasurably splendid:The seal of Brotherhood, man's miracle:_ The seal of Peace, and Wisdom heaven-descended:The seal of Bitterness, cast down to Hell:_ The seal of Love, secure, not-to-be-rended:The seventh seal, Equality: that, broken,God sets His thunder and earthquake for a token.
Aleister Crowley
You know, Alexia started, “I will be deeply disappointed if the apocalypse starts in Portsmouth.
Gavin G. Smith
We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretense of understanding. We paper over the voids of our comprehension with science and religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across the surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us.The biggest lies we save for ourselves. We play a game in which we are gods, in which we make choices, and the current follows in our wake. We pretend a separation from the wild. Pretend that a man’s control runs deep, that civilization is more than a veneer, that reason will be our companion in dark places.
Mark Lawrence
Maybe we've been too silly to deserve a world like this.
Nevil Shute
Songs remain. They last...A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's the power of songs.
Neil Gaiman
I sat in the dark and thought: There’s no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.
Neil Gaiman
After one of the lectures in Philadelphia, a woman asked Chesterton what made women talk so much, to which he replied, briefly, 'God, Madam'.
Ian Ker
In Morocco," said Osman, "word spreads like a fire tearing through the depths of Hell.
Tahir Shah
Oh, you mean fairy gossip, Eric,” she giggled. “I get the picture,” she said fluttering her lacy wings. “Don’t look so sad, Eric. There isn’t a day that passes when your nosy beak doesn’t find its way into someone’s business. I’m sure you’ll find the best-ever story before
Caz Greenham
Never speak about private affairs for the general public to hear.
Habeeb Akande
Spreading rumours is our national past time
Monica Ali
There isn't no call to go talking of pushing and pulling. Boats are quite tricky enough for those that sit still without looking for further for the cause of trouble.
J.R.R. Tolkien
First law of gossip - there's no point knowing something if somebody else doesn't know you know it.
Ben Aaronovitch
Knowledge is currency here....
Joanne Harris
You and your husband have, I think, been very fortunate to know so little, by experience, in your own case or in that of your friends, of the wicked recklessness with which people repeat things to the disadvantage of others, without a thought as to whether they have grounds for asserting what they say. I have met with a good deal of utter misrepresentation of that kind. And another result of my experience is the conviction that the opinion of "people" in general is absolutely worthless as a test of right and wrong. The only two tests I now apply to such a question as the having some particular girl-friend as a guest are, first, my own conscience, to settle whether I feel it to be entirely innocent and right, in the sight of God; secondly, the parents of my friend, to settle whether I have their full approval for what I do. You need not be shocked at my being spoken against. Anybody, who is spoken about at all, is sure to be spoken against by somebody: and any action, however innocent in itself, is liable, and not at all unlikely, to be blamed by somebody. If you limit your actions in life to things that nobody can possibly find fault with, you will not do much
Lewis Carroll
Since even the most fastidious among us can rarely escape hearing salacious local gossip, it is as well to enjoy what cannot be avoided.
P.D. James
I’ll tell you a piece of news--I hope you have not heard it before: for good, bad, or indifferent, one always likes to be the first to tell.
Anne Brontë
Tale-bearing emits a threefold poison; for it injures the teller, the hearer, and the person concerning whom the tale is told.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Never engage in gossip, it kills your soul, and wounds another’s heart
Steven Aitchison
I never gossip - but after all, a tongue is given one to speak with, and I'm not deaf mute.That you most certainly are not. A tongue, Henet, may sometimes be a weapon. A tongue may cause a death - may cause more than one death. I hope your tongue, Henet, has not caused a death.
Agatha Christie
We cannot help the way in which people speak of us . . .
George Eliot
Knowing themselves to be faultless, they make it their mission to detect the myriad faults in others, against which they wage incessant tongue.
Heron Carvic
Gossip till the cows come home.
John le Carré
This is a rumour-filled society and if people want to sit around and talk about whom I've dated, then I'd say they have a lot of spare time and should consider other topics. Or masturbation. - Johnny Depp
Nigel Goodall
Ideas are interesting, but people are vastly more so.
Sarah Bakewell
... go down to the country, take a house, get interested in local politics, in local scandal, in village gossip. Take an inquisitive and violent interest in your neighbours.
Agatha Christie
Mr. Pilates was a bully and a narcissist and a dirty old man; he and Christopher got along very well. When Christopher was doing his workout, Pilates would bring one of his assistants over to watch, rather as the house surgeon brings an intern to study a patient with a rare deformity. ‘Look at him!’ Pilates would exclaim to the assistant, ‘That could have been a beautiful body, and look what he’s done to it! Like a birdcage that somebody trod on!’ Pilates had grown tubby with age, but he would never admit it; he still thought himself a magnificent figure of a man. ‘That’s not fat,’ he declared, punching himself in the stomach, ‘that’s good healthy meat!’ He frankly lusted after some of his girl students. He used to make them lie back on an inclined board and climb on top of them, on the pretext that he was showing them an exercise. What he really was doing was rubbing off against them through his clothes; as was obvious from the violent jerking of his buttocks.
Christopher Isherwood
At school, the news that Pia Kolvenbach was moving to England and that her parents were divorcing had circulated with lightening speed. Suddenly I was no longer ostracized for being the Potentially Exploding Girl, but the new attention was worse. I could tell that the girls who sidled up to me and asked with faux-sympathetic smiles whether it was true were doing it on the basis of discussions they had heard between their own parents, to who they would report back like scouts. Soon there would be nothing left of me at all, nothing real: I would be a walking piece of gossip, alternatively tragic and appalling and, worse of all, a poor thing.
Helen Grant
What was really unfair about the whole thing was that Oma Kristel hadn't so much exploded as spontaneously combusted. But Gossip is Baron Münchhausen's little sister, and never lets the truth get in the way of a good story.
Helen Grant
My life might have been so different, had I not been known as the girl whose grandmother exploded. And had I not been born in Bad Munstereifel. If we had lived in the city -- well, I"m not saying the event would have gone unnoticed, but the fuss would probably only have lasted a week before public interest moved elsewhere. Besides, in a city you are anonymous; the chances of being picked out as Kristel Kolvenbach's granddaughter would be virtually zero. But in a small town -- well, small towns everywhere are rife with gossip, but in Germany they raise it to an art form.
Helen Grant
I thought I would like a job where inquiring about everyone else's private business was considered perfectly routine.
Joanna Cannon
...[She] was not nearly so intrusive. If she happened to observe the comings and goings of her friends out of the corner of her eye (which she could hardly fail to do, given the nature of her favorite sitting-place) and chanced to be able to remember when she had seen them and where they had been going, it was simply a tribute to her keen powers of observation and recall. Conscious spying was beneath her altogether.
Tom Holt
Men's tongues in some things outrun women's.
Winston Graham
Mon cher docteur! Do you not think I know the female mentality? The village gossip, it is based always, always on the relations of the sexes. If a man poisons his wife in order to travel to the North Pole or to enjoy the peace of a bachelor existence—it would not interest his fellow-villagers for a minute!
Agatha Christie
I'm really not quite as frippery a fellow as you seem to think! I own that in my grasstime I committed a great many follies and extravagances, but, believe me, I've long since out-grown them! I don't think they were any worse than what nine out of ten youngsters commit, but unfortunately I achieved, through certain circumstances, a notoriety which most young men escape. I was born with a natural aptitude for the sporting pursuits you regard with so much distrust, and I inherited, at far too early an age, a fortune which not only enabled me to indulge my tastes in the most expensive manner imaginable, but which made me an object of such interest that everything I did was noted, and talked of. That's heady stuff for greenhorns, you know! There was a time when I gave the gossips plenty to talk about. But do give me credit for having seen the error of my ways!
Georgette Heyer
Everything about everybody was very soon known by everybody else.
Jude Morgan
Rumours began with the whispered gossip of native servants and spread quickly to the rest of the population.
Paul Scott
You know I don’t listen to market gossip,” she began,“but it is hard not to hear it when my daughter’s name is mentioned.
Tracy Chevalier
No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.
Bertrand Russell
Nobody can buy a hat without gossiping.
Diana Wynne Jones
Even as individuals become families and families become communities, and communities become nations, so eventually must the nations draw together in peace.
Marjorie Watts
The Scripture can only be read intelligently by inspired men and women. The value we get from our reading is in direct proportion to the measure in which we are filled with God's Spirit. We also need a regular systematic study of the Scriptures. We cannot maintain our spiritual life without it any more than we can maintain our physical bodies without proper nourishment. We also need to let what we study become a vital part of our daily lives. Take it to the store, the office, the school room, etc. Take it, and apply it wherever you go.
G. Campbell Morgan