Quotes by British Authors - Page 141

There are all sorts of families," Tom's grandmother had remarked, and over the following few weeks Tom became part of the Casson family, as Micheal and Sarah and Derek-from-the-camp had done before him.He immediately discovered that being a member of the family was very different from being a welcome friend. If you were a Casson family member, for example, and Eve drifted in from the shed asking, "Food? Any ideas? Or shall we not bother?" then you either joined in the search of the kitchen cupboards or counted the money in the housekeeping jam jar and calculated how many pizzas you could afford. Also, if you were a family member you took care of Rose, helped with homework (Saffron and Sarah were very strict about homework), unloaded the washing machine, learned to fold up Sarah's wheelchair, hunted for car keys, and kept up the hopeful theory that in the event of a crisis Bill Casson would disengage himself from his artistic life in London and rush home to help.
Hilary McKay
I used to know Brian Howard well -- a dazzling young man to my innocent eyes. In later life he became very dangerous -- constantly attacking people with his fists in public places -- so I kept clear of him. He was consumptive but the immediate cause of his death was a broken heart.
Evelyn Waugh
And if there's bad behaviour," Mma Potokwane went on. "If there's bad behaviour, the quickest way of stopping it is to give more love. That always works, you know. People say we must punish when there is wrongdoing, but if you punish you're only punishing yourself. And what's the point of that?
Alexander McCall Smith
Maybe it's because I was an only child, but I've always wanted kids.
Benedict Cumberbatch
Poets sing our human music for us.
Carol Ann Duffy
He is smitten on the brain, -he reads and writes verses! I caught him in the act! Fools might say he was inspired; but I know it is the first and worst symptom of lunacy. All other maniacs have lucid intervals; some are curable; but the madness of poets, dogs, and musicians, is past hope. Earth possesses no remedy, science no cure.
Edward John Trelawny
Miltons were, on the whole, the most enthusiastic poet followers. A flick through the London telephone directory would yield about four thousand John Miltons, two thousand William Blakes, a thousand or so Samuel Colleridges, five hundred Percy Shelleys, the same of Wordsworth and Keats, and a handful of Drydens. Such mass name-changing could have problems in law enforcement. Following an incident in a pub where the assailant, victim, witness, landlord, arresting officer and judge had all been called Alfred Tennyson, a law had been passed compelling each namesake to carry a registration number tattooed behind the ear. It hadn't been well received--few really practical law-enforcement measures ever are.
Jasper Fforde
Adults are just making things up as they go along. And when they’re scared, adults have no more answers than us kids
Mike A. Lancaster
Poets can't march in protest or do that sort of thing. I feel that's against the rules, and pointless. If mankind wants a great big final bang, that's what it'll get. One should never protest against anything unless it's going to have an effect. None of those marches do. One should either be silent or go straight to the top.
Robert Graves
Rare-book people have this in common with poets: they too are born, not made.
E. Millicent Sowerby
Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
John Berger
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love.
Robert Graves
Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour.
W Somerset Maugham
Feminine psychology is admittedly odd, sir. The poet Pope...""Never mind about the poet Pope, Jeeves.""No, sir.""There are times when one wants to hear all about the poet Pope and times when one doesn't.""Very true, sir.
P.G. Wodehouse
Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives.
Thomas Hardy
For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top of St Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet
Virginia Woolf
I’m a maker of ballads right prettyI write them right here in the streetYou can buy them all over the cityyours for a penny a sheetI’m a word pecker out of the printersout of the dens of Gin LaneI’ll write up a scene on a counter- confessions and sins in the main, boysconfessions and sins in the mainThen you’ll find me in Madame Geneva’skeeping the demons at bayThere’s nothing like gin for drowning them inbut they’ll always be back on a hanging day, on a hanging dayThey come rattling over the cobblesthey sit on their coffins of blackSome are struck dumb, some gabbletop-heavy on brandy or sackThe pews are all full of fine fellowsand the hawker has set up her shopAs they’re turning them off at the gallowsshe’ll be selling right under the drop, boysselling right under the dropThen you’ll find me in Madame Geneva’skeeping the demons at bayThere’s nothing like gin for drowning them inbut they’ll always be back on a hanging day, on a hanging day
Mark Knopfler
Although Poets are vain and ambitious, their vanity and ambition are of the purest kind attainable in this world. They are ambitious to be accepted for what they altimately are as revealed in their poetry.
Stephen Spender
Poets make the best topographers.
W.G. Hoskins
Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.
George Eliot
Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.
Dorothy L. Sayers
He wanders, like a day-appearing dream,Through the dim wildernesses of the mind; Through desert woods and tracts, which seem Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.
Dudley Moore
The men and women of England who abolished slavery, created the educational system, or gave women the vote were not acting on the hypotheses of what the voters wanted. They were afire with faith in what people ought to want and in the end they persuaded their lethargic compatriots to give them enough support to warrant a change.
Geoffrey Vickers
Education is political.
Noel Castree
There is, in fact, no need to drag politics into literary theory: as with South African sport, it has been there from the beginning. I mean by the political no more than the way we organize our social life together, and the power-relations which this involves; and what I have tried to show throughout this book is that the history of modern literary theory is part of the political and ideological history of our epoch. From Percy Bysshe Shelley to Norman N. Holland, literary theory has been indissociably bound up with political beliefs and ideological values. Indeed literary theory is less an object of intellectual enquiry in its own right than a particular perspective in which to view the history of our times. Nor should this be in the least cause for surprise. For any body of theory concerned with human meaning, value, language, feeling and experience will inevitably engage with broader, deeper beliefs about the nature of human individuals and societies, problems of power and sexuality, interpretations of past history, versions of the present and hopes for the future. It is not a matter of regretting that this is so — of blaming literary theory for being caught up with such questions, as opposed to some 'pure' literary theory which might be absolved from them. Such 'pure' literary theory is an academic myth: some of the theories we have examined in this book are nowhere more clearly ideological than in their attempts to ignore history and politics altogether. Literary theories are not to be upbraided for being political, but for being on the whole covertly or unconsciously so — for the blindness with which they offer as a supposedly 'technical', 'self-evident', 'scientific' or 'universal' truth doctrines which with a little reflection can be seen to relate to and reinforce the particular interests of particular groups of people at particular times.
Terry Eagleton
If such things were not so dangerous one would laugh. But one recognizes the technique. Such propaganda always begins with words, but soon it proceeds to deeds. When there are no facts to support lies, facts must be made.
Eric Ambler
Broadcasting is really too important to be left to the broadcasters.
Tony Benn
but as long as he keeps the bad people rich and the good people scared no one will touch him
Christopher J. Nolan
Very few of the common people realize that the political and legal systems have been corrupted by decades of corporate lobbying.
Steven Magee
The Marxist analysis has got nothing to do with what happened in Stalin's Russia: it's like blaming Jesus Christ for the Inquisition in Spain.
Tony Benn
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.
C. K. Chesterton
We’re wasting our time trying to deal with Baghdad, It’s better to call for independence today.
Davan Yahya Khalil
A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, CRIMESTOP. CRIMESTOP means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.
George Orwell
The Nazis may write like schoolboys, but they're capable of anything. That's just why they're so dangerous. People laugh at them, right up to the last moment...
Christopher Isherwood
We and future generations should never forget them, Always remember them.
Davan Yahya Khalil
England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.
George Orwell
The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
George Orwell
Ladies and Gentlemen. I should like to inform you on behalf of the nation state of Guyana, that we are going to resign from being a country. We can't make it work. We have tried. We have done our best. It is not possible. The problems are insoluble. From midnight tonight, we shall cease trading. The country is now disbanded. We will voluntarily liquidate ourselves. The nation will disperse quietly, a little shamefaced but so what. We had a go.Different people have suggested different solutions. Do it this way. Try that. Let me have a go. Nothing works. We are at the mercy of the rich countries. A team of management consultants from the United States could not find the answer, and for not finding the answer, we had to pay them an amount that substantially increased our national debt. We give in, gracefully, but we give in."And then he imagined himself, quietly and with dignity, putting his papers in his briefcase, bowing to the hushed assembly, returning to clear out his office and going for a walk with his wife along the sea wall. (The Ventriloquist's Tale
Pauline Melville
What this country needs are more unemployed politicians.
Edward Langley
We believe that to govern perfectly it is necessary to avoid governing too much.
James Hilton
If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people.
Tony Benn
You can't condemn a whole group of people because of the actions of a few.
Justin Somper
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
George Orwell
No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?
George Orwell
Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
John Stuart Mill
I recall no arrangement, Mau, no bargain, covenant, agreement or promise. There is what happens, and what does not happen. There is no 'should
Terry Pratchett
This is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.
T.S Eliot
... and we held our breath, just for a moment, to see if the world had ended, but it hadn't, so we yawned and drank our champagne and carried on living, except for those of us who died, and everything continued such as before.
Neil Gaiman
Nature has granted man no better gift than the shortness of life. The senses grow dull, the limbs are numb, sight, bearing, gait, even the teeth and alimentary organs die before we do, and yet this period is reckoned a portion of life." - Pg. 82
Robert Harris
We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out.
Iris Murdoch
Take what life can give you, Ana, and do not trouble about the offerings which are laid in the tombs for time to crumble.
H. Rider Haggard
The neck in front of her came up. The head swivelled 180 degrees and the horse looked at Kin with bright insectile eyes.'YOUR WISH IS MY COMMAND,' it said inside Kin's head.'Hell!''THOSE ARE NOT MEANINGFUL CO-ORDINATES.
Terry Pratchett
I am just a leaf. Just a leaf falling from the tree so that a new bud may grow.
Gemma Malley
Death is not something you get over. It’s the rip that exposes life in a before and after chasm, and all you can do is try to exist as best you can in the after.
Lily Graham
Don’t you find it striking? The personality is constantly dying and it feels like continuity. Meanwhile, we panic about death, which we cannot ever experience. Yet it is this illogical fear that motivates our lives. We gore each other and mutilate ourselves for victory and fame, as if these might swindle mortality and extend us somehow. Then, as death bears down, we agonize over how little we have achieved.
Tom Rachman
But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it.
Iris Murdoch
Death and life were just adjacent verandas.
Salman Rushdie
Mourn for the living, the dead have got their camphor gardens.
Salman Rushdie