Quotes by British Authors - Page 135

The devil steps up to the podium, clears his throat and taps out time with his baton: in come the monstrous iron kettle drums of artillery, joined by a woodwind section of whistling bullets and shrieking shells, the ever-crackling light percussion of rifle fire.
Matthew De Abaitua
The curious double strands in Farfrae's thread of life - the commercial and the romantic - were very distinct at times. Like the colours in a variegated cord those contrasts could be seen intertwisted, yet not mingling.
Thomas Hardy
I never knew anyone actually buy cakes when they were hot ...
Ruth Rendell
I couldn't decide what kind of person she was, whether she was one of those insects that look exactly like wasps but aren't . . . I just wanted to know if she would sting.
Olivia Sudjic
In the last week I felt her withdrawing. What was once everywhere, an ocean I imagined myself to be drowning in, was now barely deep enough to bathe in. I saw her warmth draining away and I couldn't stop it.
Olivia Sudjic
I saw a doctor. I went in case there were any remnants of the summer inside me—sticky, slender fish bones that needed to be scraped into the bin. He was dismissive of my concerns and said my body would have let me know by now. Did I have what was known as female intuition? I said I'd had my feminine intuition somewhat scrambled in the past.
Olivia Sudjic
In the morning, when she walked to the consulate, carefully watching her sandals on the pavement, she glanced up and saw a Negro wearing a stack of panama hats. Maybe twelve. She never forgot the bandoeon of brims, the perfect stutter of hat.
Craig Raine
Mori looked across and was, briefly, a languageless, inhuman thing rescued from the sea and asked for an impious favour.
Natasha Pulley
The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that is itself and more. the associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact word wide. The word not whore nor cenobite. The word unlied.
Jeanette Winterson
What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!
George Eliot
We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.
Maggie O'Farrell
Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like ared flag to a bu... was like putting something very annoying in front ofsomeone who was annoyed by it.
Terry Pratchett
Some regard private enterprise as if it were a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look upon it as a cow that they can milk. Only a handful see it for what it really is--the strong horse that pulls the whole cart.
Winston S. Churchill
She navigated away from the Parish Council message board and dropped into her favorite medical website, where she painstakingly entered the words "brain" and "death" in the search box.The suggestions were endless. Shirley scrolled through the possibilities, her mild eyes rolling up and down, wondering to which of these deadly conditions, some of them unpronounceable, she owed her present happiness.
J.K. Rowling
But it would be broadcast, and in the great public theatre of his age; that unregulated market of braying narcissists, that Wild West of disinformation and fraud, that infinite sea of piracy, the great electorate where the constituency of billions voted their approval with a click of a mouse. The internet. It brought governments down and rewrote history...
Adam Nevill
The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.
Lionel Shriver
The dangerous charm of GPC was that everything in the world could be called up; if you didn't look out, a couple of sessions might turn you from a serious enquirer into a mere gape-mouthed browser.
Julian Barnes
Potentially, anyone writing on the Web can reach a global audience. In practice, hardly anyone ever does.
Nick Cohen
The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information.
Tim Berners-Lee
Are we all, at heart, just Internet trolls?
Sarah Lotz
You know, what I've always done is take a look through a book, look at the paper stock, the printing, the publisher, the actual content, and, taking everything into account, I price it. . . . And now I can't. The fact that I can check this book . . . — the fact that I can check this book on the Internet means that I have to check this book on the Internet.
Deborah Meyler
I kept remembering something Michael Fertik had said to me at the Village Pub in Woodside. 'The biggest lie,' he said, 'is "The Internet is about you." We like to think of ourselves as people who have choice and taste and personalized content. But the Internet isn't about us. It's about the companies that dominate the data flows of the Internet.
Jon Ronson
Millions of us daily take advantage of [Skype], delighted to carry the severed heads of family members under our arms as we move from the deck to the cool of inside, or steering them around our new homes, bobbing them like babies on a seasickening tour. Skype can be a wonderful consolation prize in the ongoing tournament of globalization, though typically the first place it transforms us is to ourselves. How often are the initial seconds of a video's call takeoff occupied by two wary, diagonal glances, with a quick muss or flick of the hair, or a more generous tilt of the screen in respect to the chin? Please attend to your own mask first. Yet, despite the obvious cheer of seeing a faraway face, lonesomeness surely persists in the impossibility of eye contact. You can offer up your eyes to the other person, but your own view will be of the webcam's unwarm aperture. ... The problem lies in the fact that we can't bring our silence with us through walls. In phone conversations, while silence can be both awkward and intimate, there is no doubt that each of you inhabits the same darkness, breathing the same dead air. Perversely, a phone silence is a thick rope tying two speakers together in the private void of their suspended conversation. This binding may be unpleasant and to be avoided, but it isn't as estranging as its visual counterpart. When talk runs to ground on Skype, and if the purpose of the call is to chat, I can quickly sense that my silence isn't their silence. For some reason silence can't cross the membrane of the computer screen as it can uncoil down phone lines. While we may be lulled into thinking that a Skype call, being visual, is more akin to a hang-out than a phone conversation, it is in many ways more demanding than its aural predecessor. Not until Skype has it become clear how much companionable quiet has depended on co-inhabiting an atmosphere, with a simple act of sharing the particulars of a place -- the objects in the room, the light through the window -- offering a lovely alternative to talk.
Laurence Scott
Creating our own realities is nothing new, but now it’s easier than ever to become trapped in echo chambers of our own making.
Jamie Bartlett
Part of living in a free society is accepting that no idea is beyond being challenged or ridiculed, and that nothing is more stifling to free expression than being afraid to upset or offend.
Jamie Bartlett
Rule 36: There is always more fucked-up shit than what you just saw.
Jamie Bartlett
We're all connected now, I think as I send it off into cyberspace. Everyone and everything.
J.P. Delaney
I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course--the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end.
Douglas Adams
Some say the Internet is for porn but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam.
Charles Stross
My Google-fu is strong.
China Miéville
The internet was supposed to liberate knowledge, but in fact it buried it, first under a vast sewer of ignorance, laziness, bigotry, superstition and filth and then beneath the cloak of political surveillance. Now...cyberspace exists exclusively to promote commerce, gossip and pornography. And of course to hunt down sedition. Only paper is safe. Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar, you have to hold it, you have to read it.
Ben Elton
He found a set of encyclopedias—like Wikipedia, but paper and very bulky.
Michael Grant
If you're insulting people on the internet, you must be ugly on the inside.
Phil Lester
WILDE: Oh — Bosie! (He weeps.) I have to go back to him, you know. Robbie will be furious but it can't be helped. The betrayal of one's friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betrayal of oneself is a lifelong regret. Bosie is what became of me. He is spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented, but these are merely the facts. The truth is he was Hyacinth when Apollo loved him, he is ivory and gold, from his red rose-leaf lips comes music that fills me with joy, he is the only one who understands me. 'Even as a teething child throbs with ferment, so does the soul of him who gazes upon the boy's beauty; he can neither sleep at night nor keep still by day,' and a lot more besides, but before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself. Then we saw what we had made — the piece of ice in the fist you cannot hold or let go. (He weeps.)
Tom Stoppard
The optimist sees the doughnut but the pessimist see 452 calories and a shed load of sugar ...
James Minter
To lose one parent might be considered a misfortune, or a reason to deny God’s existence at the least. To lose two looks like He may be up to something.
Johnny Rich
England is seen at its worst when it has to deal with men like Wilde. In Germany Wilde and Byron are appreciated as authors: in England they still go pecking about their love-affairs. Anyone who calls a book ‘immoral’ or 'moral’ should be caned. A book by itself can be neither. It is only a question of the morality or immorality of the reader. But the English approach all questions of vice with such a curious mixture of curiosity and fear that it’s impossible to deal with them.
Charles Hamilton Sorley
Du Bois sighed theatrically. “It’s as if Oscar Wilde never died for our sins.
Gavin G. Smith
Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, on the 15th October, 1856, so that he is now about twenty-six years of age, but brief as has been his career, it has been full of promise for the future. The son of highly intellectual parents, he has had an exceptional education, has travelled much in wild and remote, through classic lands, and in the course of these journeys has learnt to appreciate the beauties of the old authors, in whose works whilst at college he attained exceptional proficiency. But his naturally enthusiastic temperament teaches him to hope for better in the future than has been achieved in the past, and to see how vast will be the influence of Art and Literature on the coming democracy of Intellect, when education and culture shall have taught men to pride themselves on what they have done, and not alone on the deeds of their ancestors.
Walter Hamilton
Oscar Wilde: "I wish I had said that." Whistler: "You will, Oscar; you will.
James McNeill Whistler
A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.
Zadie Smith
For one crazy moment he had the notion of a vanished tribe of librarians, lost in the deep underground caverns of the Bodleian, a wild and savage tribe that fed on unwary travellers.
Lavie Tidhar
Library-denigrators, pay heed: suggesting that the Internet is a viable substitute for libraries is like saying porn could replace your wife.
Joanne Harris
If peace had a smell,it would be the smell of a library full of old, leather-bound books.
Mark Pryor
I'd like to be born the son of a duke with 90,000 pounds a year, on an enormous estate.... And I'd like to have the most enormous library, and I'd like to think that I could read those books forever and forever, and die unlamented, unknown, unsung, unhonored - and packed with information.
Richard Francis Burton
Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small slim volumes of literary criticism.
Terry Pratchett
Defending the library service from the predations of ideologically-motivated public schoolboys who had immensely privileged childhoods isn’t ‘whining,’ it is the pursuit of passionately held beliefs.
Alan Gibson
He liked bookstores, and libraries too. They had a sacred, peaceful hush, like graveyards without the shadow of death.
Garrett Leigh
Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment. The putting of dispersed sets of volumes together, or the turning right way up of those which the dusting housemaid has left in an apoplectic condition, appeals to them as one of the lesser Works of Mercy. Happy in these employments, and in occasionally opening an eighteenth-century octavo, to see 'what it is all about,' and to conclude after five minutes that it deserves the seclusion it now enjoys, I had reached the middle of a wet August afternoon at Betton Court...-the beginning of the story "A Neighbor's Landmark
M.R. James
The Bodleian above anything else made Oxford what it was . . . There was something incommunicably grand about it, something difficult to understand unless you had spent your evenings there or walked past it on the way to celebrate the boat race, a magic that came from ignoring it a thousand times a day and then noticing its overwhelming beauty when you came out of a tiny alley and it caught you unexpectedly. A library--it didn't sound like much, but it was what made Oxford itself. The greatest library in the world.
Charles Finch
During this time (at high school) I discovered the Public Library... It was here that I found a source of knowledge and the means to acquire it by reading, a habit of learning which I still follow to this day. I also became interested in chemistry and gradually accumulated enough test tubes and other glassware to do chemical experiments, using small quantities of chemicals purchased from a pharmacy supply house. I soon graduated to biochemistry and tried to discover what gave flowers their distinctive colours. I made the (to me) astounding discovery that the pigments I extracted changed their colours when I changed the pH of the solution.
Sydney Brenner
Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book.
Jane Austen
As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I'm still looking for the door.
David Mitchell
I was born, and then I was quietly resentful of that fact for a few years...but then I went to a library and it was okay.
Helen Oyeyemi
At certain rare moments, a library is a kind of mind.
David Mitchell
In the end, I go where I always go when I need information on something baffling, poisonous, or terrifying: the library.
Caitlin Moran
We were all serious readers, sitting on wooden chairs at rows of lecterns, turning the pages, united in mutual love of isolation.
Michael Moorcock
An exile, said Zafar, is a refugee with a library.
Zia Haider Rahman
He wanted to say: how could you be so nice and yet so dumb? The best thing you could do with the peasents was to leave them alone. Let them get on with it. When people who can read and write start fighting for those who can't, you just end up with another kind of stupidity. If you want to help them, build a big library or something somewhere and leave the door open.
Terry Pratchett
A library is thought in cold storage.
Lord Samuel