Quotes by British Authors - Page 104

A refusal on the part of psychiatrists and therapists to validate the horrors of their patients' tortured past implies a refusal to take seriously the unconscious psychological mechanisms that individuals need to use to protect themselves from the unspeakable. Such a denial is, however, no longer ethical, for it is in the human capacity to dissociate that lies part of the secret of both childhood abuse and the horrors of the Nazi genocide, both forms of human violence so often carried out by 'respectable' men and women.
Felicity De Zulueta
How can it be that Jane is with me, and says she loves me? Will she not depart as suddenly as she came? To-morrow, I fear I shall find her no more.
Charlotte Brontë
Like Pascal, Nietzsche, and Simone Weil, Kierkegaard is one of those writers whom it is very difficult to estimate justly. When one reads them for the first time, one is bowled over by their originality . . . and by the sharpness of their insights. . . . But with successive readings one’s doubts grow, one begins to react against their overemphasis on one aspect of the truth at the expense of all the others, and one’s first enthusiasm may all too easily turn to an equally exaggerated aversion. Of all such writers, one might say that one cannot imagine them as children. The more we read them, the more we become aware that something has gone badly wrong with their affective life; . . . it is not only impossible to imagine one of them as a happy husband or wife, it is impossible to imagine their having a single intimate friend to whom they could open their hearts.
W.H. Auden
It was that culture of denial that allowed my abuse to take place to start with. Did you know that it wasn't until 1984 that the Department of Health added the category of "sexual abuse" to its list of harms that can befall children? When I was being raped and made pregnant at the age of 11, it wasn't just my own dissociative process that told me that it wasn't happening; it was society too. "We don't have a category for that. Computer says no."͏
Carolyn Spring
She had been expecting me and was ready. She gave a long slow soundless headshake, merciful only in being inarticulate. This mercy didn't prevent its hurling at me the largest finest coldest 'Never!' I had yet, in the course of a life that had known denials, had to take full in the face. I took it and was aware that with the hard blow the tears had come into my eyes. So for a while we sat and looked at each other; after which I slowly rose. I was wondering if some day she would accept me; but this was not what I brought out. I said as I smoothed my hat: 'I know what to think then. It's nothing!
Henry James
And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall.
D.H. Lawrence
The distemper of which, as a community, we are sick, should be considered rather as a moral than a political malady.
William Wilberforce
She had locked something away,something deep inside.A truth that she had once known,but chose to forget.And she couldn't break free.So I decided to search for it.I went deep into the recess of her mindand found that secret place.And I broke in..
Christopher J. Nolan
Delay is the deadliest form of denial.
C. Northcote Parkinson
Till it does come, you know, we women never mean to have anybody. It is a thing of course among us, that every man is refused, till he offers.
Jane Austen
The generation that bought the most shoes and crippled the moral footing
Dean Cavanagh
If there is a moral to this part of the story, and I distrust morals in the same way that I distrust beginnings, it is simply this: know that with which you deal.
Neil Gaiman
Of course it is,’ said the Duchess, who seemed ready to agree to everythingthat Alice said; ‘there’s a large mustard-mine near here. And the moralof that is– “The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours.
Lewis Carroll
SIR DANIEL was a large man, broad of shoulder...his eyes were rather small above the double pouches and the look they fixed on Dalgliesh gave nothing away. Looking at his bland, unrevealing face sparked off for Dalgliesh a childhood memory. A multi-millionaire, in an age when a million meant something, had been brought to dinner at the rectory by a local landowner who was one of his father's churchwardens. He too had been a big man, affable an easy guest. The fourteen-year-old Adam [Dalgliesh] had been disconcerted to discover during the dinner conversation that he was rather stupid. He had then learned that the ability to make a great deal of money in a particular way is a talent highly advantageous to it possessor and possibly beneficial to others, but implies no virtue, wisdom or intelligence beyond expertise in a lucrative field.
P.D. James
Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture and very much to our credit.
Thomas Henry Huxley
She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world.
Jeanette Winterson
Things that are truly innocent don’t need to be labelled as such.
Zoë Heller
You have been so sheltered, Deeta - more even than your sisters. You know nothing of life or of people, in truth I think both scare you. You have little experience of anything but Tom and I and the children. You carved out a little niche for yourself with us, somewhere you were comfortable and safe. With each passing day I have watched you close yourself off from all that is new until it becomes impossible to answer the question of who you are because you do not know yourself. I think you have courage and that you are resourceful, maybe you are brave. But at this moment I see you look at upheaval and adventure with fright in your soul, so that you see only the bad and no good at all.
D.D. Chant
Innocence is an infinitely fragile thing and thought can sometimes injure, even destroy it. - Pg. 254
Ellis Peters
...[I]t is pain to think of innocence in ruin.
Richard Llewellyn
And who isn’t less innocent than they lead us to believe? That’s one of the fundamental truths about human nature.
Glenn Haybittle
People get it wrong when they talk about innocence: they think it’s something to do with ignorance about the facts of sex and all the nasty things that happen in the world. But facts don’t change people: it’s understanding how the facts feel that does.
Alexia Casale
I think the only reason I never lost my mind is that I knew I was innocent. That wasn't a happy thought, so the dementors couldn't suck it out of me...but it kept me sane and knowing who I am...helped me keep my powers...
J.K. Rowling
The innocent must not suffer.
Agatha Christie
Innocence must die young if it isn't to kill the souls of men
Graham Greene
Esteem for the army - never in this country regarded, in the continental manner, as a popular expression of the national will - implies a kind of innocence.
Anthony Powell
The ship told you the guilty systems recognizes no innocents. I'd say it does. It recognizes the innocence... only to violate it.
Ian M. Banks
Yet I believe, as I say, that it was precisely this underhand act that gave birth to her vitriol, for people are at their least forgiving when they themselves have been underhand, as though they would exact their innocence from you at any price.
Rachel Cusk
Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?
Graham Greene
To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.
Ouida
MCMXIVThose long uneven linesStanding as patientlyAs if they were stretched outsideThe Oval or Villa Park,The crowns of hats, the sunOn moustached archaic facesGrinning as if it were allAn August Bank Holiday lark;And the shut shops, the bleachedEstablished names on the sunblinds,The farthings and sovereigns,And dark-clothed children at playCalled after kings and queens,The tin advertisementsFor cocoa and twist, and the pubsWide open all day--And the countryside not caring:The place names all hazed overWith flowering grasses, and fieldsShadowing Domesday linesUnder wheat's restless silence;The differently-dressed servantsWith tiny rooms in huge houses,The dust behind limousines;Never such innocence,Never before or since,As changed itself to pastWithout a word--the menLeaving the gardens tidy,The thousands of marriages,Lasting a little while longer:Never such innocence again.
Philip Larkin
I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.
Anthony Burgess
The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass, but Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful. In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or for spring. No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lórien, there was no stain.
J.R.R. Tolkien
That was my first instinct -- to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
Graham Greene
How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!The world forgetting, by the world forgot.Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d
Alexander Pope
You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.
Lionel Shriver
Time travel is a terrifying weapon, far more powerful than anything ever before conceived,' he said grimly.'Mankind just isn't ready for that kind of knowledge. We're like children casually playing with an atom bomb.
Alex Scarrow
I was in '78 recently," he announced. "I brought you this."He handed me a single by the Beatles. I didn't recognize the title."Didn't they split in '70?""Not always. How are things?
Jasper Fforde
Running along the bank was a white rabbit wearing a waistcoat and looking worriedly at a clock. Appearing and disappearing at various points on both banks was a dark blue British police telephone booth, out of which a perplexed-looking man holding a screwdriver would periodically emerge. A group of dwarf bandits could be seen disappearing into a hole in the sky. "Time travelers," said Nobodaddy in a voice of gentle disgust. "They're everywhere these days.
Salman Rushdie
I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation.
H.G.Wells
Never rely upon a time machine to fix your problems, as everyone knows, they're much too faulty.
Lily O'Brien
In the Vortex that lies beyond time and space tumbled a police box that was not a police box.
Stephen Baxter
Well, that's it." I said after we had waited for another five minutes and found ourselves still in a state of pleasantly welcome existence. "The ChronoGuard has shut itself down and time travel is as it should be: technically, logically, and theoretically...impossible." "Good thing, too," reply Landon. "It always made my head ache. In fact, I was thinking of doing self help book for science-fiction novelists eager to write about time travel. It would consist of a single word: Don't.
Jasper Fforde
The best conversation I had was over forty million years ago,' continued Marvin.
Douglas Adams
Time travel? I believe there are people regularly travelling back from the future and interfering with our lives on a daily basis. The evidence is all around us. I’m talking about how every time we make an insurance claim we discover that somehow mysteriously the exact thing we’re claiming for is now precisely excluded from our policy.
Douglas Adams
So each generation set out to find more of its kind, and within just a few cycles of birth and death, the Club had spread not only through space, but also time, propagating itself forwards into the twentieth century and back into the Middle Ages, the death of each member spreading the word of what it was to the very extremes of the times in which they lived.
Claire North
In another place was a vast array of idols—Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian, Phoenician, every country on earth I should think. And here, yielding to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a steatite monster from South America that particularly took my fancy.
H.G.Wells
All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives - all that was over.
H.G.Wells
the only thing that really gets hurt when you try and change time is yourself.
Douglas Adams
Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.
C.S. Lewis
Shh! Listen! Someone’s coming! I think — I think it might be us!
J.K. Rowling
If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don't. It's like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don't hurt it. Not even major surgery if it's done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make.
Douglas Adams
But whenever I say that I will do this or that, it looks very different when the time comes.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Everyone I've ever met who was worth knowing was a bit different at school. You just need to find your people''Find my people?''Your tribe
Jojo Moyes
Yes, he wanted to do the right thing, but perhaps this time the right thing was something different.
Christopher Fowler
It’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.
Jony Ive
Comparable specification Windows 10 computers from multiple manufacturers can have very different performance between them.
Steven Magee
I don't live life to be different.I live life to be the same.
Anthony T.Hincks
Color speaks all languages.
Anthony T.Hincks
When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends - using my favourite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world - she just laughed. 'You like it,' she said. 'You say you're isolated, boyo, but you really think you're different.
John Fowles