Quotes by British Authors - Page 11

No-one ever built a statue of a critic.
David Nicholls
Idolatry involves putting the things we love in the place of God or seeing God as a means of getting the things that we want, and that's the second great struggle of our lives.
Colin S. Smith
... Modern life is always experienced as a struggle: to impose one's individuality on the world, one has to work against the fabric of modern culture itself and uphold ultimate values in the face of purely instrumental and ever more 'rational' forces.
Nicholas Gane
Our brains contain one hundred billion nerve cells (neurons). Each neuron makes links with ten thousand other neurons to form an incredible three dimensional grid. This grid therefore contains a thousand trillion connections - that's 1,000,000,000,000,000 (a quadrillion). It's hard to imagine this, so let's visualise each connection as a disc that's 1mm thick. Stack up the quadrillion discs on top of each other and they will reach the sun (which is ninety-three million miles from the earth) and back, three times over.
Nessa Carey
Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?
Salman Rushdie
Parvati positively beamed. Harry could tell that she was feeling guilty for having laughed at Hermione in Transfiguration. He looked around and saw that Hermione was beaming back, if possible even more brightly. Girls were very strange sometimes.
J.K. Rowling
I suddenly felt the way Cinderella might have felt if she hadn’t had that convenient midnight curfew: my feet were hurting, my hair was slipping free from its pins, and my makeup was getting all smudged from sweat. I was unbelievably tired, undeniably depressed, and I just wanted charming.
J.M. Richards
I've got two daughters who will have to make their way in this skinny-obsessed world, and it worries me, because I don't want them to be empty-headed, self-obsessed, emaciated clones; I'd rather they were independent, interesting, idealistic, kind, opinionated, original, funny – a thousand things, before 'thin'. And frankly, I'd rather they didn't give a gust of stinking chihuahua flatulence whether the woman standing next to them has fleshier knees than they do. Let my girls be Hermiones, rather than Pansy Parkinsons. Let them never be Stupid Girls.
J.K. Rowling
A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation?
China Miéville
Most USA citizens never realize that the systems of public protection are essentially useless until they try to use them. At that point they learn the hard way that government agencies like OSHA, FCC, FDA, police internal affairs, disability, and the like do not work for them.
Steven Magee
Dreams so often become nightmares. Family can so easily become foes. And people are always more stupid than you give them credit for.
Mike A. Lancaster
[Alexander von Humboldt was the] greatest scientific traveller who ever lived.
Charles Darwin
In the vestibule of the Manchester Town Hall are placed two life-sized marble statues facing each other. One of these is that of John Dalton ... the other that of James Prescott Joule. ... Thus the honour is done to Manchester's two greatest sons—to Dalton, the founder of modern Chemistry and of the atomic theory, and the laws of chemical-combining proportions; to Joule, the founder of modern physics and the discoverer of the Law of Conservation of Energy.One gave to the world the final proof ... that in every kind of chemical change no loss of matter occurs; the other proved that in all the varied modes of physical change, no loss of energy takes place.
Henry Enfield Roscoe
Love and honor. They are the two great things, and now they’re dimmed and blighted. Today, love is just sex and sentimentality. Love is really a recognition of truth, a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that is compatible with — that makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other. That’s what love is. It’s a recognition of singularity… And love is giving and giving and giving … not looking for any return. Until you do that, you can’t love.
Robert Graves
It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones who win in the lifelong race.
Robert W. Service
That is our Shield Ring, our last stronghold; not the barrier fells and the totter-moss between, but something in the hearts of men.
Rosemary Sutcliff
That spring was the start of everything, for me. Before then, I might have been half-asleep, drifting through life.
Lucy Foley
Now the city is at its loveliest. The crowds of summer and autumn have gone, the air has a new freshness, the light has that pale-gold quality unique to this time of year. There have been several weeks of this weather now, without a drop of rain.
Lucy Foley
Once in a very blue moon, John Tallow imagined his younger self standing down the timeline of his present life, bare toes curling in teenage beach sand, looking ahead to today and watching his future life collapse in on itself like a dying star. His future life becoming small and dark and dense, its gravity apparently grim and inescapable.Once in a very blue moon, John Tallow spent some cash on a bottle of vodka and drank it at home within an hour.
Warren Ellis
The children will come to no harm.""Except for the older ones. Like that poor kid down there.""Mr. Scoresby, that is the way this world works. And if you want to put an end to cruelty and injustice, you must take me farther on. I have a job to do.""Seems to me—" Lee said, feeling for the words, "seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed.
Philip Pullman
When a presidential candidate is publicly requesting help from the Russians, you know that there is something seriously going wrong in the USA.
Steven Magee
Has Orc shown up here?” But neither Caine nor Diana answered. Both were staring at Drake, who sauntered toward them, all his cockiness restored, no longer the ragged scarecrow who had wept when he saw the melted stump of his hand lying on the tile floor. “Drake,” Caine said. “We thought you were dead.”“I’m back,” Drake said. “And better than ever.”The red tentacle unwrapped itself from around his waist, like a python releasing its victim.“Like it, Diana?” Drake asked.The arm, that impossible bloodred snake, coiled above Drake’s head, swirled, writhed. And then, so fast that the human eye could barely register the movement, it snapped like a bullwhip.The sound was a loud crack. A mini–sonic boom.Diana cried out in pain. Stunned, she stared at the cut in her blouse and the trickle of red from her shoulder.“Sorry,” Drake said with no attempt at sincerity. “I’m still working on my aim.”“Drake,” Caine said and, despite the blood, despite Diana’s wound, he grinned. “Welcome back.”“I brought some help,” Drake said. He extended his left hand, and Caine shook it awkwardly with his right. “So. When do we go take down Sam Temple?
Michael Grant
Have you seen Sam?” Mary asked.“What do you want with Sam?”“I can’t take care of all those littles with just John to help me.”Howard shrugged. “Who asked you to?”That was too much. Mary was tall and strong. Howard, though a boy, was smaller. Mary took two steps toward him, pushing her face right into his. “Listen, you little worm. If I don’t take care of those kids, they’ll die. Do you understand that? There are babies in there who need to be fed and need to be changed, and I seem to be the only one who realizes it. And there are probably more little kids still in their homes, all alone, not knowing what’s happening, not knowing how to feed themselves, scared to death.”Howard took a step back, tentatively lifted the bat, then let it fall. “What am I supposed to do?” he whined.“You? Nothing. Where’s Sam?”“He took off.”“What do you mean, he took off?”“I mean him and Quinn and Astrid took off.”Mary blinked, feeling stupid and slow. “Who’s in charge?”“You think just because Sam likes to play the big hero every couple years that makes him the guy in charge?”Mary had been on the bus two years ago when the driver, Mr. Colombo, had had his heart attack. She’d had her head in a book, not paying attention, but she had looked up when she felt the bus swerve. By the time she had focused, Sam was guiding the bus onto the shoulder of the road.In the two years that followed, Sam had been so quiet and so modest and so not involved in the social life of the school that Mary had sort of forgotten that moment of heroism. Most people had.And yet she hadn’t even been surprised when it was Sam who had stepped up during the fire. And she had somehow assumed that if anyone was going to be in charge, it would be Sam. She found herself angry with him for not being here now: she needed help.“Go get Orc,” Mary said.“I don’t tell Orc what to do, bitch.”“Excuse me?” she snapped. “What did you just call me?”Howard gulped. “Didn’t mean nothing, Mary.”“Where is Orc?”“I think he’s sleeping.”“Wake him up. I need some help. I can’t stay awake any longer. I need at least two kids who have experience babysitting. And then I need diapers and bottles and nipples and Cheerios and lots of milk.”“Why am I going to do all that?”Mary didn’t have an answer. “I don’t know, Howard,” she said. “Maybe because you’re really not a complete jerk? Maybe you’re really a decent human being?”That earned her a skeptical look and a derisive snort.“Look, kids will do what Orc says,” Mary said. “They’re scared of him. All I’m asking is for Orc to act like Orc.”Howard thought this over. Mary could almost see the wheels spinning in his head.“Forget it,” she said. “I’ll talk to Sam when he gets back.”“Yeah, he’s the big hero, isn’t he?” Howard said, dripping sarcasm. “But hey, where is he? You see him around? I don’t see him around.”“Are you going to help or not? I have to get back.”“All right. I’ll get your stuff, Mary. But you better remember who helped you. You’re working for Orc and me.”“I’m taking care of little kids,” Mary said. “If I’m working for anyone, it’s for them.”“Like I say, you remember who was there when you needed them.” Howard turned on his heel and swaggered away.
Michael Grant
People cannot help their predilections, although they may conceal them.
Antonia Fraser
In the seven years or so that had passed since I had last seen him, Sir Magnus Donners had grown not so much older in appearance, as less like a human being.
Anthony Powell
In good truth he had started in London with some vague idea that as his life in it would not be of long continuance, the pace at which he elected to travel would be of little consequence; but the years since his first entry into the Metropolis were now piled one on top of another, his youth was behind him, his chances of longevity, spite of the way he had striven to injure his constitution, quite as good as ever. He had come to that period of existence, to that narrow strip of tableland, whence the ascent of youth and the descent of age are equally discernible - when, simply because he has lived for so many years, it strikes a man as possible he may have to live for just as many more, with the ability for hard work gone, with the boon companions scattered, with the capacity for enjoying convivial meetings a mere memory, with small means perhaps, with no bright hopes, with the pomp and the circumstance and the fairy carriages, and the glamour which youth flings over earthly objects, faded away like the pageant of yesterday, while the dreary ceremony of living has to be gone through today and tomorrow and the morrow after, as though the gay cavalcade and the martial music, and the glittering helmets and the prancing steeds were still accompanying the wayfarer to his journey's end. Ah! my friends, there comes a moment when we must all leave the coach with its four bright bays, its pleasant outside freight, its cheery company, its guard who blows the horn so merrily through villages and along lonely country roads. Long before we reach that final stage, where the black business claims us for its own speecial property, we have to bid goodbye to all easy, thoughtless journeying and betake ourselves, with what zest we may, to traversing the common of reality. There is no royal road across it that ever I heard of. From the king on his throne to the laborer who vaguely imagines what manner of being a king is, we have all to tramp across that desert at one period of our lives, at all events; and that period is usually when, as I have said, a man starts to find the hopes, and the strength, and the buoyancy of youth left behind, while years and years of life lie stretching out before him. The coach he has travelled by drops him here. There is no appeal, there is no help; therefore, let him take off his hat and wish the new passengers good speed without either envy or repining. Behld, he has had his turn, and let whosoever will, mount on the box-seat of life again, and tip the coachman and handle the ribbons - he shall take that journey no more, no more for ever. ("The Banshee's Warning")
Charlotte Riddell
It has been known for many years that a subset of the population cannot tolerate the radiation emitted by transmitting utility meters and sickness results in these people.
Steven Magee
Stray voltage/current/frequency is the most serious form of exposure. Electrocution kills very few people per year. Stray voltage/current/frequency exposure is suspected to be making people sick in the millions!
Steven Magee
Sometimes being a nice person is all about knowing when to be an asshole.
John Cheese
Alcoholism is above all a disease of denial.
David Stafford
I have never heard of an electromagnetically hypersensitive person recovering from the condition using shielding and Faraday cages, they just seem to become social lepers due to their increasing reactivity to the city environment and addicts to their shielded environment.
Steven Magee
In this cell you are small. They’ve taken your belt and your shoelaces. You break a little. You put your hands over your face so they don’t see. They don’t listen when you shout for water, Please. Your tongue is so dry it feels too big for your mouth. You don’t sleep. Someone behind the door shouts BASTARDS BASTARDS. You think you can see an old man crouched and watching you in that dark corner over there. You try and make spit to drink but you can’t. In the morning they give you half a plastic cup of warm water. Across your tongue they drag a cotton bud which they drop into a plastic bag with your name on it. They take your fingerprints, your photograph, and then when you get home, she tells you she’s pregnant.
Dean Lilleyman
But there are some born to do penance by nature. Maybe they lift the load for some of us who take it quite comfortably that we're humankind, and not angels.
Ellis Peters
[T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.
Christopher Hitchens
Writing with a biro is the emotional equivalent of giving your loved one a plastic rose on Valentine’s Day.
Fennel Hudson
But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.
Graham Greene
Hunter woke suddenly. A noise.It was a noise unlike anything he’d ever heard before. Close! Very close.Like it was on him. Like it was . . .Just in one ear.He twisted his head. It was full night. Black as black in the woods far from the starlight.He couldn’t see anything.But with his hands he could feel. The thing on his shoulder.His ear . . . gone!A terrible fear wrung a cry of horror from Hunter.He couldn’t feel it, his ear, or his shoulder, couldn’t feel with anything but his fingers and he felt, reached beneath his shirt, felt the flesh of his belly pulse and heave.Like something inside him.No, no, no, it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair!He was Hunter. The hunter. He was doing his best.He cried. Tears rolled down his cheeks.Who would bring meat for all the kids?It wasn’t fair.The sound of munching, crunching started again. Just in one ear.Hunter had only one weapon: the heat-causing power in his hands. He had used it many, many times to take the life of prey.He had fed the kids with that power. And in a moment of fear and rage he had accidentally taken the life of his friend, Harry.Maybe he could kill the thing that was eating his ear.But it was too late for that to help.Could he kill himself?He saw Old Lion’s head, eyes closed, hanging where he’d hung him for skinning. If Old Lion could die, so could Hunter.Maybe they would meet again, up in the sky.Hunter pressed both palms against his head.
Michael Grant
Learning how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them. Harder, maybe. There'd be a sight more frogs in this world if I didn't know how not to turn people into them. And big pink balloons, too.
Terry Pratchett
Even gods decay. Like, in 1890 somebody sold off thousands of mummified Ancient Egyptian sacred cats - _for fertilizer_. Get the point? Constancy isn't.
Jonathan Gash
Cats don’t have names,” it said.“No?” said Coraline.“No,” said the cat. “Now, you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.”There was something irritatingly self-centered about the cat, Coraline decided. As if it were, in its opinion, the only thing in any world or place that could possibly be of any importance.Half of her wanted to be very rude to it; the other half of her wanted to be polite and deferential. The polite half won.
Neil Gaiman
It takes me a while to drag him out, he's got himself stuck to the axle, and by the time I am done and stand over the body something strange has started to happen. The alley's filled with a half-dozen cats, runty little things with their ribs showing and their tails worn high like they're pointing to the moon. I stand there, breathing froth into the snowflakes and watch them gather round me, soft kitty paws, and now and then a patrol car rolls past in the distance. The cats are circling us, tails cocked at the moon, their muzzles bloodied by the tail lights' glow. They are vicious bastards, let me tell you: frost on their whiskers, eyes like cut glass, a half-dozen pairs, on me and the dead man. And then they start licking. Licking at the snow I mean, the blood in the snow, they lap it up like mother's milk. And all the while from their throats, from their whole bodies, there issues this sound, you hear it with your skin, it's like an engine running under your palm. That's when I realize they are purring, man, purring as they feed on the midget's death.
Dan Vyleta
The white saucer like some full moon descendsAt last from the clouds of the table above;She sighs and dreams and thrills and glows,Transfigured with love.She nestles over the shining rim,Buries her chin in the creamy sea;Her tail hangs loose; each drowsy pawIs doubled under each bending knee.A long, dim ecstasy holds her life;Her world is an infinite shapeless white,Till her tongue has curled the last holy drop,Then she sinks back into the night,Draws and dips her body to heapHer sleepy nerves in the great arm-chair,Lies defeated and buried deepThree or four hours unconscious there.
Harold Monro
With Cats, some say, one rule is true:Don’t speak till you are spoken to.Myself, I do not hold with that —I say, you should ad-dress a Cat.But always keep in mind that heResents familiarity.I bow, and taking off my hat,Ad-dress him in this form: O Cat!But if he is the Cat next door,Whom I have often met before(He comes to see me in my flat)I greet him with an oopsa Cat!I think I've heard them call him James —But we've not got so far as names.
T.S Eliot
There can't be that many individual souls. Not souls like mine. There isn't room. There can't be.
Stephen Fry
[M]an is not permitted without censure to follow his own thoughts in the search of truth, when they lead him ever so little out of the common road.
John Locke
I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish.
Edith Sitwell
Oh, this time I was doing the gossiping. You should really dismiss me for disloyalty, not to mention the disrespect I'm showing right now by talking to you like this.
Jayne Bauling
For the space of half a year, the gunpowder lay as harmless as sand, because no fire came near to explode it.
Emily Brontë
The hiss of the quenched element, the breakage of the pitcher which I had flung from my hand when I had emptied it, and, above all, the splash of the shower-bath I had liberally bestowed, roused Mr Rochester at last though it was dark, I knew he was awake; because I heard him fulminating strange anathemas at finding himself lying in a pool of water. 'Is there a flood?' he cried
Charlotte Brontë
Fire’s the sun, unwindin’ itself out o’ the wood.
David Mitchell
It's a poem about moths. But it's also a poem about psychopaths.I get it copied. And stick it in a frame. And now it glowers redoubtably above my desk:an entomological keepsake of the horizons of existence.And the brutal, star-crossed wisdom of those who seek them out.i was talking to a moththe other eveninghe was trying to break intoan electric bulband fry himself on the wireswhy do you fellowspull this stunt i asked himbecause it is the conventionalthing for moths or whyif that had been an uncoveredcandle instead of an electriclight bulb you wouldnow be a small unsightly cinderhave you no senseplenty of it he answeredbut at times we get tiredof using itwe get bored with routineand crave beautyand excitementfire is beautifuland we know that if we gettoo close it will kill usbut what does that matterit is better to be happyfor a momentand be burned up with beautythan to live a long timeand be bored all the whileso we wad all our life upinto one little rolland then we shoot the rollthat is what life is forit is better to be part of beautyour attitude toward lifeis come easy go easywe are like human beingsused to be before they becametoo civilized to enjoy themselvesand before i could argue himout of his philosophyhe went and immolated himselfon a patent cigar lighteri do not agree with himmyself i would rather havehalf the happiness and twicethe longevitybut at the same time i wishthere was something i wantedas badly as he wanted to fry himself
Kevin Dutton
Is that not the Promethean fable, that the fire stolen from the gods will light men their way even while it burns their hands?
Zia Haider Rahman
When I was commissioning a brand new solar photovoltaic utility site, I came across metal tubes installed into the fuseholders that were marked up as 100 amp fuses on the diagram. Needless to say, it had already gone on fire.
Steven Magee
The very first thing I saw was his eyes, bluer and brighter than the sea itself. They gazed at me, so dazzling, and for an instant I couldn't even feel the pain. I was too overcome by the handsomeness of this sandy haired boy
Rebecah McManus
And I figured that he can be my ears and I can be his eyes. A good trade-off, don't you think?
Alison Jackson
For some reason Canon Fenneau made me feel a little uneasy. His voice might be soft, it was also coercive. He had small eyes, a large loose mouth, the lips thick, a somewhat receding chin. The eyes were the main feature. They were unusual eyes, not only almost unnaturally small, but vague, moist, dreamy, the eyes of a medium. His cherubic side, increased by a long slightly uptilted nose, was a little too good to be true, with eyes like that. In the manner in which he gave you all his attention there was a taste for mastery.
Anthony Powell
You took my heart and you held it in your mouthAnd, with a word all my love came rushing outAnd, every whisper, it's the worst, emptied out by a single wordThere is a hollow in me now...And Every whisper, every sighEats away at this heart of mineAnd there is a hollow in me now.So I put my faith in something unknownI'm living on such sweet nothingBut I'm trying to hope with nothing to holdI'm living on such sweet nothing.
Florence Welch
When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold, wafted backwards and forwards as if in an invisible process of air conditioning, creating a pervasive physical disturbance.
Anthony Powell
Personally, I think, so what? Money's just a thing and things change. That's what I've found. One minute something's really there, right next to you, and you can cuddle up to it. The next it just melts away, like a Hershey's kiss.
Frank Cottrell Boyce
I just like to say I'm from London, I don't have any specific area I represent. I'm not representing for a small group of people. I'd like everybody to be able to relate to a nerd, because everybody's a bit nerdy. I'm more interested in that than in where they're from. I'm more interested in what people do.
Craig Taylor