Quotes by British Authors - Page 113

However, although you might think this is the time of year to take some time off, you must never transgress one of the allotment rules: 'Thou shan't go on holiday in summer!
Mitchell Beazley
We were enjoying one of those rare summers of utter freedom – no financial responsibility, no debts, no time owing to anybody.
Jojo Moyes
The summer stretched out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless sequence of dead moments.
China Miéville
DaffodowndillyShe wore her yellow sun-bonnet, She wore her greenest gown;She turned to the south wind And curtsied up and down.She turned to the sunlight And shook her yellow head,And whispered to her neighbor: "Winter is dead.
A.A. Milne
It was a beautiful summer afternoon, at that delicious period of the year when summer has just burst forth from the growth of spring; when the summer is yet but three days old, and all the various shades of green which nature can put forth are still in their unsoiled purity of freshness.
Anthony Trollope
Sitting in seat 14A, in the sun, I float on a full-moon, tidal joy unlike anything I've ever experienced. I am getting incredibly high on a single, astounding fact: that it's always sunny above the clouds. Always. That every day on Earth- every day I have ever had- was secretly sunny after all....I feel like I've just flown 600 miles per hour head-on into the most beautiful metaphor of my life: If you fly high enough, if you get above the clouds, it's never-ending summer.
Caitlin Moran
In June we picked the clover,And sea-shells in July:There was no silence at the door,No word from the sky.A hand came out of AugustAnd flicked his life away:We had not time to bargain, mope,Moralize, or pray.
Cecil Day-Lewis
It is not summer, England doesn't have summer, it has continuous autumn with a fortnight's variation here and there.
Natasha Pulley
Perhaps it is always summer, in the place where we are young.
Lavie Tidhar
Spring flew swiftly by, and summer came; and if the village had been beautiful at first, it was now in the full glow and luxuriance of its richness. The great trees, which had looked shrunken and bare in the earlier months, had now burst into strong life and health; and stretching forth their green arms over the thirsty ground, converted open and naked spots into choice nooks, where was a deep and pleasant shade from which to look upon the wide prospect, steeped in sunshine, which lay stretched out beyond. The earth had donned her mantle of brightest green; and shed her richest perfumes abroad. It was the prime and vigour of the year; all things were glad and flourishing.
Charles Dickens
Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying goodbye.
David Mitchell
Cricket to us was more than play,It was a worship in the summer sun.
Edmund Blunden
SUMMER DEEP""Summer deep is in the hills again His lady is a lioness Winds of birds blow through the fields again Invaders from the true worlds A coat of grapes is on my back again I ride upon my zebra Pterodactyl beak hat on my brow The truth is like a stranger Be like you could All my friends say.
Marc Bolan
A thin grey fog hung over the city, and the streets were very cold; for summer was in England.
Rudyard Kipling
The end-of-summer winds make people restless.
Sebastian Faulks
Family's the most important thing.
Sophie Kinsella
I'm so loud, as if I know what I'm on about,but deep inside, I'm so insecure.Just a little girl.
Katie Price
See, some guys prefer assesSome prefer titsAnd I’m not saying that I don’t like those bitsBut what’s more importantWhat supersedesIs a girl a with passion, wit and dreamsSo I want a girl who reads.
Mark Grist
My jaw went slack. Private rooms? Great, the button thing had been a step too far. Either he was totally getting the wrong impression—at least, not the impression I wanted to give—or…no. I didn’t want to consider the possibility he might know. People didn’t hide in forests in the middle of the night to protect themselves from a Binding. I was just weird like that. Rather, I had no choice, but…argh, what was I going to do now?!
Sam Dogra
I've always jumped on sentiment—and here I am being more sentimental than anybody. What idiots girls are! I've always thought so. I suppose I shall sleep with his photograph under my pillow, and dream about him all night. It's dreadful to feel you've been false to your principles.
Agatha Christie
I hate to be what is called a clever girl—there are too many of that sort now!
Thomas Hardy
My problem is that I want to smoke the cigar and for someone else to light it. I want to blow out smoke. Like a volcano. Like a monster. I want to fume. I do not want to be the girl whose job it is to wail in a high-pitched voice at funerals.
Deborah Levy
Sam,” Astrid yelled. “Quick.”Sam thought he was too far gone to respond, but he somehow started his feet moving again and went up to where Little Pete was standing and Astrid kneeling.There was a girl lying in the dirt. Her clothing was a mess, her black hair ratty. She was Asian, pretty without being beautiful, and little more than skin and bones. But the first thing they noticed was that her forearms ended in a solid concrete block.Astrid made a quick sign of the cross and pressed two fingers against the girl’s neck. “Lana,” Astrid cried.Lana sized up the situation quickly. “I don’t see any injuries. I think maybe she’s starving or else sick in some other way.”“What’s she doing out here?” Edilio wondered. “Oh, man, what did someone do to her hands?”“I can’t heal hunger,” Lana said. “I tried it on myself when I was with the pack. Didn’t work.”Edilio untwisted the cap from his water bottle, knelt, and carefully drizzled water across the girl’s cheek so that a few drops curled into her mouth.“Look, she’s swallowing.”Edilio broke a tiny bite from one of the PowerBars and placed it gently into the girl’s mouth. After a second the girl’s mouth began to move, to chew.“There’s a road over there,” Sam said. “I think so, anyway. A dirt road, I think.”“Someone drove by and dumped her here,” Astrid agreed.Sam pointed at the dirt. “You can see how she dragged that block.”“Some sick stuff going on,” Edilio muttered angrily. “Who would do something like this?
Michael Grant
You don't talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages.
Thomas Hardy
But you shouldn't have let her. That's the only way with these fanciful women that chaw high--innocent or guilty. She'd have come round in time. We all do! Custom does it! It's all the same in the end! However, I think she's fond of her man still--whatever he med be of her. You were too quick about her. I shouldn't have let her go! I should have kept her chained on-- her spirit for kicking would have been broke soon enough! There's nothing like bondage and a stone-deaf taskmaster for taming us women. Besides, you've got the laws on your side. Moses knew.
Thomas Hardy
Oh God, I'm sorry I bring trouble on people. I don't mean to, you know that, you know that. And don't punish me by taking Ned. Keep him safe that's all I ask. That's all I'll ever ask again, just keep him safe.
Catherine Cookson
You make your son out to be to be almost an idiot; well let me tell you something, Mrs Loan, if he were a complete idiot, drooling at the mouth, he'd still be a better person then you.
Catherine Cookson
If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.
David Mitchell
Spackle!” Manchee barks, tho he’s too chicken to attack now that I’ve held back. “Spackle! Spackle! Spackle!”“Shut up, Manchee,” I say.“Spack
Patrick Ness
Anybody can lose,' cautioned Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. 'You need to remember that every time you win.
Alexander McCall Smith
And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
Douglas Adams
I have won.
Erin Hunter
TODD!" I shout again -And he looks at me -And I hear my name in his Noise -And I know it -I know it in my heart -Right now -Todd Hewitt -There's nothing we can't do toge
Patrick Ness
Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
C.S. Lewis
The cup of life was poisoned forever, and although the sun shone upon me, as upon the happy and gay of heart, I saw around me nothing but a dense and frightful darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes that glared upon me.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Ferranti's thoughts had been his. As before he had understood his remorse so now he understood the mental chains that had imprisoned him. The poor wretch could not move. Misery had become apathy and apathy had brought the inevitable paralysis of the will.
Elizabeth Goudge
Then he took the pages, smoothed them with the palm of his hand, and fixed them with pins to the walls. So that now, if he sat looking down upon Grape Street, the letters and images encircled him. And it was while he sat here, scarcely moving, that he was in hell and no one knew it. At such times the future became so clear that it was as if he were remembering it, remembering it in place of the past which he could no longer describe. But there was in any case no future and no past, only the unspeakable misery of his own self.
Peter Ackroyd
You shall not leave me in that temper.I should be miserable all night, and I won’t be miserable for you!
Emily Brontë
She went indoors in that peculiar state of misery which is not exactly grief, and which especially attends the dawnings of reason in the latter days of an ill-judged, transient love. To be conscious that the end of the dream is approaching, and yet has not absolutely come, is one of the most wearisome as well as the most curious stages along the course between the beginning of a passion and its end.
Thomas Hardy
Some of my favorite songs: 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart' by Neil Young; 'Last Night I Dreamed That Somebody Loved Me' by the Smiths; 'Call Me' by Aretha Franklin; 'I Don't Want to Talk About It' by anybody. And then there's 'Love Hurts' and 'When Love Breaks Down' and 'How Can You Mend a Broken Heart' and 'The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness' and 'She's Gone' and 'I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself 'and . . . some of these songs I have listened to around once a week, on average (three hundred times in the first month, every now and again thereafter), since I was sixteen or nineteen or twenty-one. How can that not leave you bruised somewhere? How can that not turn you into the sort of person liable to break into little bits when your first love goes all wrong? What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person? People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands, of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.
Nick Hornby
Those of us who have the luck to enjoy good health forget about this vast parallel universe of the unwell-their daily miseries, their banal ordeals. Only when you cross that frontier into the world of ill-health do you recognize its quiet, massive presence, its brooding permanence.
William Boyd
He wanted to imprison his nameless misery in words.
Aldous Huxley
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations of misery.
Aldous Huxley
... 'Many waters cannot quench love' was said of divine, not human, love, which the Dean knew was not always tough enough to survive the indifference of misery. That was one of the chief reasons why he struggled to do away with misery.
Elizabeth Goudge
He started to draw. He drew from memory. He had a good memory, something which, all things considered, was far from a blessing.The pencils moved quickly across the paper, scratching back and forth in deepening shades of grey. He leaned low over the paper, concentrating all his energy on his work. The candles flickered and dripped wax, having nothing better to do.Eventually he lifted his head and looked at his creation. The face of a young woman stared back at him from the paper, a slight smile playing on her lips. She looked as if she was about to say something, and that once she had you would laugh. She looked happy.Seven stared at the picture, his strange eyes unreadable – eyes that, now he made no effort to mask them, were from edge to edge only the deep blue of the dead ocean. He swallowed hard, as if he was trying to imbibe something foul tasting but necessary, like a child sipping medicine, and pulled another sheet of paper from his desk.
F.D. Lee
All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.
Theodore Dalrymple
From a night of more sleep than she had expected, Marianne awoke the next morning to the same consciousness of misery in which she had closed her eyes.
Jane Austen
Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.
George Orwell
Black is the absence of all color. White is the presence of all colors. I suppose life must be one or the other. On the whole, though, I think I would prefer color to its absence. But then black does add depth and texture to color. Perhaps certain shades of gray are necessary to a complete palette. Even unrelieved black. Ah, a deep philosophical question. Is black necessary to life, even a happy life? Could we ever be happy if we did not at least occasionally experience misery?
Mary Balogh
You are young, and in love," said Primus. "Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived.
Neil Gaiman
If Thou canst do something with us and through us, then please, God, do something without us! Bypass us and take up a people who now know Thee not!
Leonard Ravenhill
Faith in Christ leaped from person to person like some divine epidemic, not of disease but of spiritual health.
John Charles Pollock
The one surefire key to victory as a Christian in this fallen world is to be filled with the Holy Spirit—that is, to be completely submitted to and empowered by him.
Pedro Okoro
I do not know why there is this difference, but I am sure that God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do enter your room, you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for light: and of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and paneling.
C.S. Lewis
Those in whom the Spirit comes to live are God's new Temple. They are, individually and corporately, places where heaven and earth meet.
N.T. Wright
For Christians it's always a love game ... that He is love itself ... Indeed, some have suggested that one way of understanding the Spirit is to see the Spirit as the personal love which the Father has for the Son and the Son for the Father.
N.T. Wright
I thought I loved him when he went away; I love him now in another degree: he is more my own. [ . . . ] Oh! a thousand weepers, praying in agony on waiting shores, listened for that voice, but it was not uttered--not uttered till; when the hush came, some could not feel it: till, when the sun returned, his light was night to some!
Charlotte Brontë
This is the worst thing about waiting for someone. You have to look good all the time because they could turn up at any minute and see you before you've seen them
Mark Mason
Waiting never makes things easier or less troublesome.
Steven Redhead