Quotes by British Authors - Page 103

Welcome to fear, said Moist to himself. It's hope, turned inside out. You know it can't go wrong, you're sure it can't go wrong...But it might.
Terry Pratchett
Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost. A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; his two-fold security.
Tom Stoppard
You're not really in control, not with this falling-for-people stuff. You don't plan who you're going to fall in love with. It's all random - chance accidents of time and place.
Julia Green
He thinks of the all steps that gathered this party and marvels at the weaverless looms of fortune.
David Mitchell
Study history, Alleluia. In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economics is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects. This Gibreel of yours: maybe he's how history happens to you.
Salman Rushdie
You are ass and I like class. I like diamonds, you are a glass. You brown mouse, I like black cats. You boy pussy but i like tom cats. Just because you got the dance, don't think you stand a fucking chance.
Salman Rushdie
Oh, many a shaft at random sentFinds mark the archer little meant!And many a word at random spokenMay soothe, or wound, a heart that's broken!
Walter Scott
There’s no such thing as probability," she says, slowly, with minimal movement of her jaw. "Things turn out the way they do.
Johnny Rich
Luck is sometimes merciful. The Game never is.
Claire North
And in friendship and still more here, in this central business of love, accident rules it seems to me almost altogether. What personalities you will encounter in life, and have for a chief interest in life, is nearly as much a matter of chance as the drift of a grain of pollen in the pine forest. And once the light hazard has blown it has blown, never to drive again.
H.G.Wells
Choice not chance will deliver your intuitive desires.
Steven Redhead
But was any future, anyone's future, unfraught by hazards of some sort? The only security was death. So long as one wanted to go on living on had to accept the risks. Well, she accepted them...
Winston Graham
If a coin comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal. But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart.
Philip Pullman
Yet, when these facts are seen side by side with other facts in the case, it is difficult not to become lost in superstitious awe. Their very absurdity seems to prohibit the use of the words 'chance' and 'coincidence.' For the sceptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman Law, it is administered with sub-human inefficiency.
Eric Ambler
I had to go outside. I had to let the element of chance in.
Mark Forsyth
Love I never associated with the senses, it was not even passion that I wanted; it was a conscious, subtle, elaborate sensuality, which I knew not how to procure.
Arthur Symons
Now, watching her sleep, and closing his eyes, he felt, in this particular intimacy - stowed beneath her duvet - that he was intruding. At the same time, he knew, settling down, you couldn´t dislike anyone you'd seen sleep
Hanif Kureishi
Yet velvet curtains, soft cheese, compelling work and boys who can run full-tilt—it isn't enough. And if it isn't, it isn't. There's no living with that. The world is made from our imagination; our eyes enliven it, as our hands give it shape. Wanting makes it thrive; meaning is what you put in, not what you extract. You only see what you are inclined to see, and no more. We have to make the new.
Hanif Kureishi
What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?
Jeanette Winterson
I sit on the bed and kick off my shoes, and he kneels before me and takes the riding boots, holding one open for my bare foot. I hesitate; it is such an intimate gesture between a young woman and a man. His smiling upward glance tells me that he understands my hesitation but is ignoring it. I point my toe and he holds the boot, I slide my foot in and he pulls the boot over my calf. He takes the soft leather ties and fastens the boot, at my ankle, then at my calf, and then just below my knee. He looks up at me, his hand gently on my toe. I can feel the warmth of his hand through the soft leather. I imagine my toes curling in pleasure at his touch.‘Anne, will you marry me?’ he asks simply, as he kneels before me.
Philippa Gregory
They stood together in a false intimacy, a nervous contact. And he was in love with her.
D.H. Lawrence
I know love is dark work; you have to get your hands dirty. If you hold back, nothing interesting happens. At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you; too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?
Hanif Kureishi
I can only think how good life on earth can be, at times. What grief two people can give to one another! And what pleasure!
Hanif Kureishi
My son, there may be a time when I explain these things to you, because there may be a time when I understand them.
Hanif Kureishi
Sometimes living with memory, with the thought of what friends, those who shared your soul and dreams, will do to you is worse than taking a bullet or having someone stab your flesh. There is a way of bleeding from one's soul.
Megan McKenna
He turned and pulled her in, placed his hands on the sides of her face and gazed into her eyes, his head moving closer and closer----she still couldn't say anything, couldn't think of anything other than his mouth landing on hers.
Jane Green
The instinct is not completely satisfied unless a man's whole being, mental quite as much as physical, enters into the relation. Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give; unconsciously, if not consciously, they feel this and the resulting disappointment inclines them towards envy, oppression, and cruelty.
Bertrand Russell
Intimacy, finally, had got the better of us.
Andrew Miller
The cabinets and shelves are a bright busy choreography of oils, shampoos, conditioners, scrubs, lotions, salts, unguents. Zinnia loves buying pots and bottles and tubes of alchemised essences that smell like yearning or intimacy on the skin.
Glenn Haybittle
I feel a thrill of excitement at this first tiny glimpse of self-revelation, of intimacy.
J.P. Delaney
Intimacy wasn't sex, she realized. It was knowing someone.
Sarah Morgan
...they knew each other as much as they knew themselves, and their intimacy, rather like too many suitcases, was a matter of perpetual concern; together they moved slowly, clumsily, effecting lugubrious compromises, attending to delicate shifts of mood, repairing breaches. As individuals they didn't easily take offense; but together they managed to offend each other in surprising, unexpected ways; then the offender - it had happened twice since their arrival - became irritated by the cloying susceptibilities of the other, and they would continue to explore the twisting alleyways and sudden squares in silence, and with each step the city would recede as they locked tighter into each other's presence.
Ian McEwan
Intimacy with one person could do this-empty the world of friendships, give a distaste for women's kisses and their bright chatter, make the ordinary world a little unreal and very uninteresting.
Graham Greene
Dear God, teach me to be careless.
Hanif Kureishi
Most beds aren't as intimate as people think they are.
Malcolm Bradbury
The French, it seems to me, strike a happy balance between intimacy and reserve. Some of this must be helped by the language, which lends itself to graceful expression even when dealing with fairly basic subjects.... And there's that famously elegant subtitle from a classic Western.COWBOY: "Gimme a shot of red-eye."SUBTITLE: "Un Dubonnet, s'il vous plait."No wonder French was the language of diplomacy for all those years.
Peter Mayle
That is a terrifically intimate thing, you know? Letting a stranger light your cigarette. Leaning forward so he can hold a flame to your lips. Pausing to breathe in before you pull back again.
Elizabeth Wein
The miraculous intimacy we shared did not have the time to generate into resentful emotional bondage
Josephine Hart
Banality is like boredom: bored people are boring people, people who think that things are banal are themselves banal.Interesting people can find something interesting in all things.
Idries Shah
Life has the habit of throwing curve balls to determine if you are paying attention.
Steven Redhead
Dickens writes that one of his characters, "listened to everything without seeming to, which showed he understood his business.
Charles Dickens
Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.
Charles Darwin
Life offers the ability to pursue what catches your attention.
Steven Redhead
The simple act of paying attention can take you a long way.
Keanu Reeves
Juliet, the dice were loaded from the start. / When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?
Mark Knopfler
Float beyond the world of trees. Out into the whispering breeze, past the rushes, past the weeds, past the marsh's waving reeds.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I drew a chair up beside her and sang. All I do is dream of you the whole night through . . . It was a horrible rendition, and I quite enjoyed attempting it, setting the notes free from the song as each one went farther and farther astray.
Helen Oyeyemi
Birds are sensitive to mispronunciation, even more sensitive than the French.
Alan Powers
For I am you and you are I.
Aldous Huxley
Then one day I found my head when I wasn't even trying.
Cat Stevens
I doubt it is your styleNot to get what you set out to acquireThe eyes are on fireYou are the unforecasted stormBrianstorm
Arctic Monkeys
Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn:It listens, listens. Taller trees beyondListen. The moon at the unruffled pondStares. And you sing, you sing.That star-enchanted song falls through the airFrom lawn to lawn down terraces of sound,Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground;And all the night you sing.My dreams are flowers to which you are a beeAs all night long I listen, and my brainReceives your song, then loses it againIn moonlight on the lawn.Now is your voice a marble high and white,Then like a mist on fields of paradise,Now is a raging fire, then is like ice,Then breaks, and it is dawn.
Harold Monro
The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties.
Neil Gaiman
Oh ... My twitchy witchy girl I think you are so nice, I give you bowls of porridge And I give you bowls of ice-cream.
Neil Gaiman
If you drive a car, I'll tax the street;if you try to sit, I'll tax your seat; if you get too cold, I'll tax the heat; if you take a walk, I'll tax your feet.
George Harrison
Everything changes, it all stays the same,Everyone guilty, no one to blame,Every way out, brings you back to the start,Everyone dies to break somebody's heart...
Motorhead
All good art cannot help but confront denial on its way to truth.
Pete Townshend
She had denied herself the pleasure of openly sharing life with the person she loved.
Jhumpa Lahiri
In his recent guest editorial, Richard McNally voices skepticism about the National Vietnam Veteran’s Readjustment Study (NVVRS) data reporting that over one-half of those who served in the Vietnam War have posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or subclinical PTSD. Dr McNally is particularly skeptical because only 15% of soldiers served in combat units (1). He writes, “the mystery behind the discrepancy in numbers of those with the disease and of those in combat remains unsolved today” (4, p 815). He talks about bizarre facts and implies many, if not most, cases of PTSD are malingered or iatrogenic. Dr McNally ignores the obvious reality that when people are deployed to a war zone, exposure to trauma is not limited to members of combat units (2,3). At the Operational Trauma and Stress Support Centre of the Canadian Forces in Ottawa, we have assessed over 100 Canadian soldiers, many of whom have never been in combat units, who have experienced a range of horrific traumas and threats in places like Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. We must inform Dr McNally that, in real world practice, even cooks and clerks are affected when faced with death, genocide, ethnic cleansing, bombs, landmines, snipers, and suicide bombers ...One theory suggests that there is a conscious decision on the part of some individuals to deny trauma and its impact. Another suggests that some individuals may use dissociation or repression to block from consciousness what is quite obvious to those who listen to real-life patients." Cameron, C., & Heber, A. (2006). Re: Troubles in Traumatology, and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory/Reply: Troubles in Traumatology and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory. Canadian journal of psychiatry, 51(6), 402.
Colin Cameron
In 2006, there is no army of recovered memory therapists, and Dr McNally’s assumptions about patients with PTSD and those working in this field are troubling. Owing to past debates, those working in the PTSD field are perhaps more knowledgeable than others about malingered, factitious, and iatrogenic variants.Why, then, does Dr McNally attack PTSD as a valid diagnosis, demean those working in the field, and suggest that sufferers are mostly malingered or iatrogenic, while giving little or no consideration is given to such variants of other psychiatric conditions? Perhaps the trauma field has been “so often embroiled in serious controversy” (4, p 816) for the same reason Dr McNally and others have trouble imagining the traumatization of a Vietnam War cook or clerk. One theory suggests that there is a conscious decision on the part of some individuals to deny trauma and its impact. Another suggests that some individuals may use dissociation or repression to block from consciousness what is quite obvious to those who listen to real-life patients."Cameron, C., & Heber, A. (2006). Re: Troubles in Traumatology, and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory/Reply: Troubles in Traumatology and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory. Canadian journal of psychiatry, 51(6), 402.
Colin Cameron