Quotes by British Authors - Page 14

I'm not the kind of person who likes to shout out my personal issues from the rooftops, but with my bipolar becoming public, I hope fellow sufferers will know it's completely controllable. I hope I can help remove any stigma attached to it, and that those who don't have it under control will seek help with all that is available to treat it.
Catherine Zeta-Jones
It was like I'd climbed Everest, had the summit in my sight, the flag in my hand, all ready to pierce it into the top of the mountain and say, "Whoopdedoo, I made it," and then an avalanche from out of nowhere swept me right back to the bottom of the mountain again. Was it worth bothering to try and climb it again? I was exhausted. I'd already climbed it. I didn't want to...but, then, what other choice was there?
Holly Bourne
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.
Nathaniel Lee
This is fantastically squalid," said Milo. "We may never get out of here alive.
R.J. Anderson
Luke is the sort of boy Taylor Swift could at least three songs out of.
Beth Garrod
How careless of me!" By which she meant that she had deduced that he had found [them] in his pocket and pitied him for needing to be forever in the right.
Tom Holt
Och, they suit you, Queenie! Promise me you'll wear them.
Elizabeth Wein
I ken who you are! You're Strathfearn's granddaughter. Julie Stuart, is it? Och, aye, Lady Julia! Well then, Lady Julia, tell me -- who don't you deserve a glass of water?
Elizabeth Wein
Have you noticed we can breathe in here too?Gosh, I wouldn't have picked up on that.
Dan Abnett
Strange though it is,Sarov still cares about you. He told me to leave you alone. But I think, this time, I must disobey the general. You are mine! And I intend to make you suffer...""Just talking to you makes me suffer," Alex said.
Anthony Horowitz
Your name?"The movements of the man's mouth didn't quite match what he was saying, so seeing him speak was a bit like watching a badly dubbed film."Alex Gardiner," Alex said. "Your real name?""I just told you.""You lied. Your real name is Alex Rider.""Why ask if you think you know?
Anthony Horowitz
What happened?" he demanded. "I heard an explosion!""Yeah.That was me. I set the boat alight.""What?""I set fire to the boat.""But we're on the boat!""I know.
Anthony Horowitz
Leaders set the context and create the conditions in which individuals and organizations thrive.
Bob Anderson
Jill!” I called to her through our connecting bathroom as I pulled on some jeans. “You realize I’ve been more than twenty-four hours without a shower, right?” “Oh, who cares,” she grumbled. “You look fine. Just put on some deodorant and a bra. I mean, aren’t we just going to be getting sweaty lugging your stuff down from storage anyway?
J.M. Richards
It was nearing 9 O'clock, and the fist duck was drawing down. Behind the trees, the first star pricked out, low and brilliant. The light breeze of the day had dropped, and the evening was very still. The stream sounded loud. I walked down to the gate and stood leaning on the top bar, enjoying the scent of the roses, and straining to listen for any sound from the lane or the road beyond.
Mary Stewart
Why are we sneaking out in the night?” Jack repeated.“I already explained,” Sam snapped. “If you don’t listen—”Taylor jumped in to say, “Because otherwise Astrid would find some way to stop him.” She mimicked Astrid’s voice, injecting it with steel and a tense, condescending tone. “Sam. I am the smartest, hottest girl in the world. So do what I tell you. Good boy. Down, boy. Down!”Sam remained silent, walking steadily just a few feet ahead.Taylor continued, “Oh, Sam, if only you could be as smart plus as totally goody-goody as I am. If only you could realize that you will never be good enough to have me, me, wonderful me, Astrid the Blond Genius.”“Sam, can I shoot her now?” Dekka asked. “Or is it too soon?”“Wait until we’re over the ridge,” Sam said. “It’ll muffle the sound.”“Sorry, Dekka,” Taylor said. “I know you don’t like talking about boy-girl things.”“Taylor,” Sam warned.“Yes, Sam?”“You might want to think about how hard it would be to walk if someone were to turn off gravity under your feet every now and then.”“I wonder who would do that?” Dekka said.Suddenly Taylor fell flat on her face.“You tripped me!” Taylor said, more shocked than angry.“Me?” Dekka spread her hands in a completely unconvincing gesture of innocence. “Hey, I’m all the way over here.”“I’m just saying: you can see where that could make a long walk just a lot longer,” Sam said.“You guys are so not fun,” Taylor grumped. She bounced instantaneously to just behind Sam. She grabbed his butt, he yelled, “Hey!” and she bounced away innocently.“To answer your question, Jack,” Sam said, “we are sneaking out at night so that everyone doesn’t know we’re gone and why. They’ll figure it out soon enough, but Edilio will have to have more of his guys on the streets if I’m not there playing the big, bad wolf. More stress for everyone.”“Oh,” Jack said.“The big, bad wolf,” Taylor said. She laughed. “So, when you play that fantasy in your head is Astrid Little Red Riding Hood or one of the Three Little Pigs?”“Dekka,” Sam said.“Hah! Too slow!
Michael Grant
I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning, I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry.
Virginia Woolf
Did I imagine the castle, the dungeon, the ritual orgies and violations? Did Lucy, Billy, Samuel, Eliza, Shirley and Kato make it all up? I went back to the industrial estate and found the castle. It was an old factory that had burned to the ground, but the charred ruins of the basement remained. I closed my eyes and could see the black candles, the dancing shadows, the inverted pentagram, the people chanting through hooded robes. I could see myself among other children being abused in ways that defy imagination. I have no doubt now that the cult of devil worshippers was nothing more than a ring of paedophiles, the satanic paraphernalia a cover for their true lusts: the innocent bodies of young children.
Alice Jamieson
Some alters are what Dr Ross describes in Multiple Personality Disorder as 'fragments', which are 'relatively limited psychic states that express only one feeling, hold one memory or carry out a limited task in the person's life. A fragment might be a frightened child who holds the memory of one particular abuse incident.' In complex multiples, Dr Ross continues, the `personalities are relatively full-bodied, complete states capable of a rang of emotions and behaviours.' The alters will have `executive control some substantial amount of time over the person life'. He stresses, and I repeat his emphasis, 'Complex MPD with over 15 alter personalities and complicated amnesic barriers are associated with 100 percent frequency of childhood physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
Alice Jamieson
As a child I had been taken to see Dr Bradshaw on countless occasions; it was in his surgery that Billy had first discovered Lego. As I was growing up, I also saw Dr Robinson, the marathon runner. Now that I was living back at home, he was again my GP. When Mother bravely told him I was undergoing treatment for MPD/DID as a result of childhood sexual abuse, he buried his head in hands and wept.Child abuse will always re-emerge, no matter how many years go by. We read of cases of people who have come forward after thirty or forty years to say they were abused as children in care homes by wardens, schoolteachers, neighbours, fathers, priests. The Catholic Church in the United States in the last decade has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for 'acts of sodomy and depravity towards children', to quote one information-exchange web-site. Why do these ageing people make the abuse public so late in their lives? To seek attention? No, it's because deep down there is a wound they need to bring out into the clean air before it can heal. Many clinicians miss signs of abuse in children because they, as decent people, do not want to find evidence of what Dr Ross suggests is 'a sick society that has grown sicker, and the abuse of children more bizarre'. (Note: this was written in the UK many years before the revelations of Jimmy Savile's widespread abuse, which included some ritual abuse)
Alice Jamieson
Altitude sickness, unregulated drugs and medical gas enabled workers to become drug abusers/addicts
Steven Magee
Not upholding a persons legal rights is a form of abuse. Unfortunately, USA government abuse of the general public is a normal state of affairs in many areas.
Steven Magee
There is a slave trade still in this country—yes, the real and horrific sex and human trafficking trade run by organised criminal gangs, which is appalling and must be stopped. But there's the hidden slavery too of children exploited and used within their own families, within organised and ritual abuse.
Carolyn Spring
Let us hush this cry of 'Forward', till ten thousand years have gone.
Alfred Tennyson
[To] mechanical progress there is apparently no end: for as in the past so in the future, each step in any direction will remove limits and bring in past barriers which have till then blocked the way in other directions; and so what for the time may appear to be a visible or practical limit will turn out to be but a bend in the road.(Opening address to the Mechanical Science Section, Meeting of the British Association, Manchester.)
Osborne Reynolds
Domestic terrorism is alive and well in the USA and it is masquerading as “Progress”.
Steven Magee
the euro, it seems, is stuck in a political no man's land – trapped between two opposing world views. And the battleground is not economics, but ethics.
Martin Cohen
Civilization on Earth planet was equated with selfishness and greed; those people who lived in a civilized state exploited those who did not. There were shortages of vital commodities on Earth planet, and the people in the civilized nations were able to monopolize those commodities by reason of their greater economic strength. This imbalance appeared to be at the root of thedisputes.
Cristopher Priest
Rosamond, accustomed from her childhood to an extravagant household, thought that good housekeeping consisted simply in ordering the best of everything––nothing else 'answered;' and Lydgate supposed that 'if things were done at all, they must be done properly'–he did not see how they were to live otherwise. If each head of household expenditure had been mentioned to him beforehand, he would have probably observed that 'it could hardly come to much,' and if any one had suggested a saving on a particular article–for example, the substitution of cheap fish for dear–it would have appeared to him simply a penny-wise, mean notion.
George Eliot
So much barbarism, however, still remains in the transactions of most civilized nations, that almost all independent countries choose to assert their nationality by having, to their inconvenience and that of their neighbors, a peculiar currency of their own.
John Stuart Mill
The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the 'capabilities' of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy—not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side.
Eric Hobsbawm
We fitted together like the two halves of an oyster-shell. I was Narcissus, embracing the pond in which I was about to drown. However much we had to hide our love, however guarded we had to be about our pleasure, I could not long be miserable about a thing so very sweet. Nor, in my gladness, could I quite believe that anybody would be anything but happy for me if only they knew.
Sarah Waters
Equally serious is the complaint that psychoanalysis as a medical practice is a form of oppressive social control, labelling individuals and forcing them to conform to arbitrary definitions of ‘normality’. This charge is in fact more usually aimed against psychiatric medicine as a whole: as far as Freud’s own views on ‘normality’ are concerned, the accusation is largely misdirected. Freud’s work showed, scandalously, just how ‘plastic’ and variable in its choice of objects libido really is, how so-called sexual perversions form part of what passes as normal sexuality, and how heterosexuality is by no means a natural or self-evident fact. It is true that Freudian psychoanalysis does usually work with some concept of a sexual ‘norm’; but this is in no sense given by Nature.
Terry Eagleton
After the dedication, Eleanor saw Bernard privately, probably at her own request. He came prepared to offer more spiritual comfort, thinking that she too might be suffering qualms of conscience over Vitry, but he was surprised to learn that she was not. Nevertheless, several matters were indeed troubling her, not the least the problems of her sister. She asked him to use his influence with the Pope to have the excommunication on Raoul and Petronilla lifted and their marriage recognised by the Church. In return, she would persuade Louis to make peace with Theobald of Champagne and recognise Pierre de la Chatre as Archbishop of Bourges. Bernard was appalled at her brazen candour. In his opinion, these affairs were no business of a twenty-two-year-old woman. He was, in fact, terrified of women and their possible effects on him. An adolescent, first experiencing physical desire for a young girl, he had been so filled with self-disgust that he had jumped into a freezing cold pond & remained there until his erection subsided. He strongly disapproved of his sister, who had married a rich man; because she enjoyed her wealth, he thought of her as a whore, spawned by Satan to lure her husband from the paths of righteousness, and refused to have anything to do with her. Nor would he allow his monks any contact with their female relatives. Now there stood before him the young, worldly, and disturbingly beautiful Queen of France, intent upon meddling in matters that were not her concern. Bernard's worst suspicions were confirmed: here, beyond doubt, was the source of that "Counsel of the Devil" that had urged the King on to disaster and plunged him into sin and guilt. His immediate reaction was to admonish Eleanor severely.
Alison Weir
...The fact that it's black transforms it. Has the same effect on women that black stockings have on men.
Daphne du Maurier
No mathematician should ever allow him to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game. … Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty. There have been men who have done great work later; … [but] I do not know of a single instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty. … A mathematician may still be competent enough at sixty, but it is useless to expect him to have original ideas.
G H Hardy
Old Deuteronomy's lived a long time;He's a Cat who has lived many lives in succession.He was famous in proverb and famous in rhymeA long while before Queen Victoria's accession.Old Deuteronomy's buried nine wivesAnd more – I am tempted to say, ninety-nine;And his numerous progeny prospers and thrivesAnd the village is proud of him in his decline.At the sight of that placid and bland physiognomy,When he sits in the sun on the vicarage wall,The Oldest Inhabitant croaks: "Well, of all … Things … Can it be … really! … No! … Yes! … Ho! hi!Oh, my eye!My mind may be wandering, but I confess I believe it is Old Deuteronomy!"Old Deuteronomy sits in the street,He sits in the High Street on market day;The bullocks may bellow, the sheep they may bleat,But the dogs and the herdsman will turn them away.The cars and the lorries run over the kerb,And the villagers put up a notice: ROAD CLOSED —So that nothing untoward may chance to disturbDeuteronomy's rest when he feels so disposedOr when he's engaged in domestic economy:And the Oldest Inhabitant croaks: "Well of all …Things … Can it be … really! … No! … Yes! …Ho! hi!Oh, my eye!My sight's unreliable, but I can guessThat the cause of the trouble is Old Deuteronomy!
T.S Eliot
It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
Virginia Woolf
As someone who has spent the last decade training young men and women for Christian service, I have been keen to help them see that the best kinds of ministry are, more often than not, long term and low key. I have tried to prepare them for a marathon, not a short, energetic sprint. In other words, to help them have a lifetime of sustainable sacrifice, rather than an energetic but brief ministry that quickly fades in exhaustion.
Christopher Ash
An unhappy woman with access to weed killer had to be watched carefully.
James Ruddick
I remember having an argument with Alan, I said the Queen's not just going to call the guy up and send him out to do it. And Alan says, well, how would a monarch give orders to her assassin.
Eddie Campbell
Police intentionally murdering a mentally unstable person will always be unacceptable when there are numerous other non-lethal options available to them.
Steven Magee
While police internal affairs is allowed to protect corrupt police officers that engage in unethical behaviors, illegal activities or murder, there will always be a genuine mistrust by the common people.
Steven Magee
It starts innocently. Casually. You turn up at the annual spring fair full of beans, help with the raffle tickets (because the pretty red-haired music teacher asks you to) and win a bottle of whiskey (all school raffles are fixed), and, before you know where you are, you're turning up at the weekly school council meetings, organizing concerts, discussing plans for a new music department, donating funds for the rejuvenation of the water fountains—you're implicated in the school, you're involved in it. Sooner or later you stop dropping your children at the school gates. You start following them in.
Zadie Smith
This was the real thing, boys in the flesh. All the prohibitions, especially the ones that stayed unvoiced, had made boys much more exotic; it was as though we'd never met one. The whole school hummed with excitement and the headmistress's aspect softened with anticipation, for she was about to let the dangerous genie of adolescent sex out of its bottle and tame it. She spoke in veiled, suggestive terms in assembly of freedom and responsibility, and we giggled uneasily - it was all vaguely shocking, like being tickled by a policeman.
Lorna Sage
The house-cat is a four-legged quadruped, the legs as usual being at the corners. It is what is sometimes called a tame animal, though it feeds on mice and birds of prey. Its colours are striped, it does not bark, but breathes through its nose instead of its mouth. Cats also mow, which you all have heard. Cats have nine liveses, but which is seldom wanted in this country, coz' of Christianity. Cats eat meat and most anythink speshuelly where you can't afford. That is all about
Helen Exley
There is no equality while privileges enjoyed by the many are denied to the few.
Robert Cubitt
I had a very clear vision, of Selina with her hair about her shoulders, a crimson hat upon her head, a velvet coat, ice-skates - I must have been remembering some picture. I imagined myself beside her, the air coming sharply into our mouths. I imagined how it would be if I took her, not to Italy, but only to Marishes, to my sister's house; if I sat with her at supper, and shared her room, and kissed her -
Sarah Waters
The hyping of disabled athletes into superhuman status by Channel 4 only deepens our wounds, inflicted by continual assaults on our daily lives. It truly seems that the only acceptable disabled person is a Paralympian – and then only for a few weeks.
Penny Pepper
Desires kept within the mind are simply unrealised dreams.
Steven Redhead
Besides, immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control things.
E.L. James
And then there was
Dianna Hardy
People with Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) are known to put their computer equipment several feet away from them with a large monitor on a big font and they use a wired USB keyboard and mouse to control it.
Steven Magee
Behind the facade of elected government are a bunch of corporate controlled gangsters running the country.
Steven Magee
Avoid letting circumstances control your decisions and dictate your actions, thereby controlling your life.
Steven Redhead
The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.
George Orwell
If you would have a boy to despise his mother, let her keep him at home, and spend her life in petting him up, and slaving to indulge his follies and caprices.
Anne Brontë
In daylight and up close, he was merciless, all smiles and freckles, the brightest, boldest flame a moth could wish for.
Alexis Hall
When people who remember her better than me talk of her, she is always described as headstrong and irresponsible, which, if you think about it, are just different words for untameable. The wind is untameable, and so are rivers, and there is something poetic in that.
Claire Wong
Inspector Milne's suspicious prying appeared to have awakened her inner Bolshevik, and so I discovered my own lady mother is not above quietly circumventing the law.
Elizabeth Wein