Quotes by British Authors - Page 127

I'm independent and strong, but sometimes...just sometimes, it's nice to be taken case of. It's nice to be made to feel like a lady
Samantha Towle
Am I just a mosaic of myself, held in the shape of a whole person?
Emma Newman
Whenever a homeless person speaks to me in the USA, I always assume that I am speaking to a police officer and play along with the suspected charade.
Steven Magee
A very excellent and worthy person, thoroughly reliable in every particular.
P.L. Travers
He sat watching what went forward with the quiet outward glance of healthy old age.
George Eliot
There, too, she would sit for hours gazing seawards. No tiniest speck of sail that crossed the waters could escape her watchful eyes, and as she watched she dreamed that some day one of these distant sails should bear down towards her, and one should come, in whose hand she would lay her own, and they two would flee to the far East. But as the changeless years went by and brought him not, the girl grew sullen, and a sense of wrong possessed her, for the older she grew, the clearer became her consciousness of a world beyond her, and the greater her longing to seek it.("The Serpent's Head")
Emilia Francis Strong Dilke
But Jeanie had just gone through the motions. No one would have realized, except perhaps her too-perceptive son-in-law, but that was one of the few perks of maturity: you knew how to dissemble.
Hilary Boyd
She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care.
China Miéville
Sixty is heaven," she [bohemian Aunt Norma] told Jeanie as they sat having tea. "The world is done with you, you become to all intents and purposes invisible, particularly if you are a woman. I like to think of it as your third life. There's childhood, then adult conformity - work, family, responsibility - then just when everyone assumes it's all over and you're on the scrap heap of old age, freedom! You can finally be who you are, not what society wants you to be, not who 'you' think you ought to be.
Hilary Boyd
Damson was also old enough to know that you can never rely on other people to act as you would in almost any circumstance.
Josa Young
Mary, it must be remembered, was very nearly of the same age as Frank; but, as I and others have so often said before, 'Women grow on the sunny side of the wall.
Anthony Trollope
She was at that period of her life that almost everyone must pass through, when childhood is done with and a faux maturity, untrammeled by experience, gives one a sense that anything is possible until the arrival of real adulthood proves conclusively that it is not.
Julian Fellowes
Growth occurs when we discover how to remain authentically ourselves in the presence of potentially threatening things. Maturity is the possession of coping skills: we can take in our stride things that previously would have knocked us off course. We are less fragile, less easily shocked and hence more capable of engaging with situations as they really are
Alain de Botton
MaturityA stationary sense . . . as, I suppose,I shall have, till my single body grows        Inaccurate, tired;Then I shall start to feel the backward pullTake over, sickening and masterful —         Some say, de
Philip Larkin
It's funny: one starts off thinking one is shrinkingly sensitive & intelligent & always one down & all the rest of it: then at thirty one finds one is a great clumping brute, incapable of appreciating anything finer than a kiss or a kick, roaring our one's hypocrisies at the top of one's voice, thick skinned as a rhino. At least I do.
Philip Larkin
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
C.S. Lewis
One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.
Virginia Woolf
You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
Doris Lessing
When I am in the vibration of prosperity and abundance I am cosmically connected to my world and the Universe.
Debbie A. Anderson
There's truths you have to grow into.
H.G.Wells
How can a man’s candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind—impetuous, arm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian.
George Eliot
I should prefer that you do not mention my name at all in connection with this case, as I choose to be only associated with those crimes which present some difficulty in their solution.
Arthur Conan Doyle
If I lost all, at least I would have played for it. It had always been my philosophy that one must play, or be a loser two-fold.
Anna Freeman
Modesty is only arrogance by stealth.
Terry Pratchett
Don't you dare call me arrogant!If ever I had any at all-which I deny!- how much could I possibly have left after having been ridden over rough-shod by you and Thomas, do you imagine?
Georgette Heyer
I'm not a snob. Ask anybody. Well, anybody who matters.
Simon Le Bon
It was a sacrifice worthy of her and dreams are made to be killed.
David Louden
He looked along the line of children, exhibits A to C of his existence and heirs to the twisted throne of his corrupt genetics.
David Louden
So you’re the little smart ass from Poleglass.”I wanted to point out he sounded like Dr. Seuss but bit my lip and remembered the warning the old lady gave me.
David Louden
He was a shadow of the man that once intimidated us out of our home, a shell of a human being, a fragment of a father.
David Louden
The worst of anything she could do to me would be to make me like her. That's why I ran away.
Jo Walton
The next thing Jordana says makes me realize that it's too late to save her. "I've noticed that when you light a match, the flame is the same shape as a falling tear." She's been sensitized, turned gooey in the middle. I saw it happening and I didn't do anything to stop it. From now on, she'll be writing diaries and sometimes including little poems and she'll buy gifts for her favourite teachers and she'll admire the scenery and she'll watch the news and she'll buy soup for homeless people and she'll never burn my leg hair again.
Joe Dunthorne
Ryan had read half his book, listened to all his music, eaten two packets of biscuits and an apple, played seventy-two games of Donkey Kong, completing all the levels, and counted every Italian sports car they’d passed in the last hundred miles. Twenty-four hours of groggy sticky travel, twenty-four hours stuck in this overheated tin can on wheels, and he finally knew what it was like to be utterly and unendingly bored. He propped an elbow on the car window frame and stuck his arm out of the opening. Combing his hand through the slipstream, he let the cool air tickle his fingers as he watched the countryside stream past.
Peter Bunzl
We love each other. You love me, you do.” His eyes beseech me to believe it, to remember it, to feel it.
Siobhan Davis
All I can think about is how I wanted to share those firsts with Logan and how I never knew it was an impossibility because it had already been taken away from me.
Siobhan Davis
Answer me one thing,” she says in a rigidly controlled voice. “Do you love Logan?”Perhaps I should lie, but in that moment, after what I’ve just witnessed, I’m incapable of expressing anything but the truth of what’s in my heart. “With all my heart,” I sob.
Siobhan Davis
Logan must survive. That is the only truth. The only goal. My sole mission.
Siobhan Davis
Everyone's always scared for someone else's generation
Holly Bourne
Some things are hard to imagine. Can you conceive of excessive contentment, for example? Or an over pleasant evening? Too much happiness?
Alan Moore
Give a bull grass, sweet water and a willing heifer and he is happy. But a man is never content. If no gadflies of worry exist he will invent them.
Alison Fell
If you are foolish enough to be contented, don't show it, but grumble with the rest; and if you can do with a little, ask for a great deal. Because if you don't you won't get any.
Jerome K. Jerome
Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.
Julian Barnes
The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.
P.D. James
I was so nearly happy. There remained only a tiny something, something unexplained and inexplicable that buzzed in my ear when the lights were out, like a malarial mosquito.
Jennie Rooney
Watching too much TV can triple our hunger for more possessions, while reducing our personal contentment by about 5 percent for every hour a day we watch.
David Niven
We found a smooth inviting boulder under a vast banyan tree, and sat in companionable silence. There unexpectedly, on that rock, I saw the secret of contentment. True happiness is only ever possible if you have been unhappy. And there, at that moment, I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt so peaceful. It wouldn’t have been possible for me to take in any more happiness. Moti turned to me and smiled as if she knew. I realised then that this moment and this wonderful feeling would sustain me for a long, long time.
Jane Wilson-Howarth
She had the experience to suffer with discretion.
John le Carré
Where other powers of entertainment are wanting, the true philosopher will derive benefit from such as are given.
Jane Austen
If consumers found fulfillment at any meaningful level, she extemporized, corpocracy would be finished.
David Mitchell
Perhaps...I could not be content with mere contentment!
Angela Carter
A thankful and a contented spirit is a continual feast. We ought to be contented, and we shall be contented, if we are in the habit of seeing God in everything, and living upon Him day by day. Oh, for a spirit of true thankfulness!
Ashton Oxenden
...are you happy?""I am content.""What is the difference?""Between happiness and contentment? Ah, there you have me. It is not easy to put into words. Contentment is a state of mind and body when the two work in harmony, and there is no friction. The mind is at peace, and the body also. The two are sufficient to themselves. Happiness is elusive--coming perhaps once in a life-time--and approaching ecstasy.""Not a continuous thing, like contentment?""No, not a continuous thing. But there are, after all, degrees of happiness.
Daphne du Maurier
My modus operandi is that I'll be content with anything, as long as I know that it's the best that's possible.
Russell Brand
Don’t Seek Happiness - Happiness is like an orgasm: if you think about it too much, it goes away. Keep busy and aim to make someone else happy, and you might find you get some as a side effect. We didn’t evolve to be constantly content. Contented Australopithecus Afarensis got eaten before passing on their genes.
Tim Minchin
Happiness is achieving your goals. Contentment is not having any.
Chloe Thurlow
I didn't feel like I was missing anything. Nor did I feel ambitious any more. It all seemed stupid wanting to be better than the others in the same ring, shallow, pointless.
Jackie Kay
Well, aren't you just saying it's better to be neurotic, sensitive, and miserable than unimaginative, adjusted and content? Is it really better?
Malcolm Bradbury
We call bad one who rejects the fruit he is given for the fruit he is expecting or the fruit he was given last time.
C.S. Lewis
Cottage of content was better than the Palace of cold splendour, and that where love was, all was.
Charles Dickens
In the Salem of our peaceful hearts, the name of Jesus is great beyond compare: He has won our love, and He shall wear it.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon