Quotes by British Authors - Page 146

We only listen to what we want to hear.
Anthony T.Hincks
Why is it that we want what we don't have, yet we can't see what we do have?
Anthony T.Hincks
If you only do what you want to do, you won't get there.
David Ferrers
I earned the right not to compete for a man.He wants me... Or... She is welcome to him...
Virginia Alison
In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.
George Eliot
I can understand, he said, that many people, many perfectly ordinary people, have an interesting story to tell. No one's experience of life is valueless.
Michael Frayn
All the while, when Nazneen turned to her prayers and tried to empty her mind and accept each new thing with grace or indifference, Chanu worked his own method. He was looking for the same essential thing. But he thought he could grab it from the outside and hold it against his chest like a shield...Where Nazneen turned in, he turned out; where she strove to accept, he was determined to struggle; where she attempted to dull her mind and numb her thoughts, he argued loud; while she wanted to look neither to the past nor to the future, he lived exclusively in both. They took different paths but they had journeyed, so she realized, together.
Monica Ali
I do not always know what I want, but I do know what I don't want.
Stanley Kubrick
Love must face realityIf it is to survive
Loretta Livingstone
As long as we encourage a culture of victim hood, said Monty, with the rhythmic smoothness of self-quotation, we will continue to raise victims. And so the cycle of underachievement continues.
Zadie Smith
My father told me by the time you die you'll be lucky if you have six people you called your friends to carry your coffin.I now realize and believe the truth is I thought if I had a dollar for every friend I in my life I'd be rich. The sad truth is if I had a penny for every true friend I have I wouldn't have a nickel.
Peter Fryer
To a great mind, nothing is little.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Typical of Hell, thought Chen: overdone and ostentatious and overwhelming, designed to cow an already beaten populace."Wow" he said. The demon grinned sympathetically."It is a bit excessive, isn't it?""Who does it belong to?""My employer is the First Lord of Banking. Head of the Ministry of Wealth.
Liz Williams
Because the world all twisted up and wrong, like distorted glass, only came back into focus if you looked at it through the bottom of a bottle.
Terry Pratchett
And there is an earlier Wilson cycle, too, a billion years old, entrapped alongside the Appalachians: the Grenville, which rises to the surface in Central Park, New York, to remind us that the human and urban is no more than foam on the sea of the past.
Richard Fortey
Not everyone is born to fulfill an heroic role. The only realistic ambition is to live in the present. And sometimes, quite often in fact, this is more than enough to keep one busy. Time, which was once squandered, must now be given over to the actual, the possible, and perhaps that evanescent hope of a good outcome which never deserts one, and which should never be abandoned.
Anita Brookner
That is the word of reality - need.
Agatha Christie
Your real world is inside of you.
Steven Redhead
What is held real is based upon personal beliefs that drive perception.
Steven Redhead
Leofric met her eye, his own gaze hard. He was clearly losing patience with her. “This is life,” he snapped. “It’s not sweet and it’s not pretty—but before you look at me with scorn remember I’ve just saved both our lives.
Jayne Castel
The Holy Grail is within you – find your Inner Treasure
Jay Woodman
Shasta's heart fainted at these words for he felt he had no strength left. And he writhed inside at what seemed the cruelty and unfairness of the demand. He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one.
C.S. Lewis
Lucy buried her head in his mane to hide from his face. But there must have been some magic in his mane. She could feel lion-strength going into her. Quite suddenly she sat up. "I'm sorry, Aslan," she said. "I'm ready now.""Now you are a lioness," said Aslan. "And now all Narnia will be renewed.
C.S. Lewis
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
J.R.R. Tolkien
If you walk out on me, i'm not walking out after you.
David Reeves
VIEW FROM A HILLI am not yet quite over it.I am lying down on top of it.Surveying behind me a wastelandOf dried-up promise.While the lights below twinkleWith dull mocking uncertainty.There isn't much left to look forward to,And the looking forward of the past has been belied.
John Tottenham
She has no regrets; she knows now he could never have made her happy, even though he has, apparently, joined AA, is doing better. But sobriety is his journey, not hers; he needs to do it for himself, alone. Still, she misses him hugely, doesn't feel ready for another relationship yet. But as time passes, she hopes that she might be, eventually, with someone new, easier, kinder.
Sarah Rayner
She was different. She liked hearing it, because she wanted to recall just enough of it to remember that she never wanted to go back to being the person she'd been before.
Harriet Evans
Elle wondered if he had regrets. But she didn't let herself wonder for too long. She had locked her heart up against him, and it would take something extraordinarily strong to break it open.
Harriet Evans
'Everything is temporary. Nothing lasts. We're born. We die. Life's all about loss and change. Things happen, we learn to adapt or we don't, but we move on in some way or another. Sometimes that's hard and takes longer than we'd like.'
Barbara Elsborg
Forgetting isn’t the key to moving on. Remembering is, because only once we’ve remembered can we forget.
Emma Hart
I'm not trying to upset you. I just think it's about time you move
Alexis Hall
There is something so special in the early leaves drifting from the trees - as if we are all to be allowed a chance to peel, to refresh, to start again.
Ruth Ahmed
As incredible as it seemed, time kept moving forward for the rest of the world.The rest of the world that wasn't waiting.
Patrick Ness
I could barely even say Will's name. And listening to their tales of family relationships, of thirty-year marriages, shared houses, lives, children, I felt like a fraud. I had been a carer for someone for six months. I'd loved him, and watched him end his life. How could these strangers possibly understand what Will and I had been to each other during that time? How could I explain the way we had so swiftly understood each other, the shorthand jokes, the blunt truths and raw secrets? How could I convey the way those short months had changed the way I felt about everything? The way he had skewed my world so totally that it made no sense without him in it?
Jojo Moyes
He was going to miss everything. But he guessed that was how everybody always felt. Everyone was losing things, leaving things behind, clinging to old memories as they rushed into the future. Everyone was a passenger on a runaway train.
Philip Reeve
So we got hold of him and cracked him with a few good horrorshow tolchocks, but he still went on singing.
Anthony Burgess
How are you, Rory?' [the Doctor] asked.I [Rory]... answered him. 'It's been odd being you.''Isn't it?' The Doctor's smile didn't quite reach his eyes.'How do you cope?''Ah...' The Doctor picked away at a scrap of loose paint on the door. 'Well, I just get as close as I can to a happy ending, then I shut the door behind me and move on.'I nodded.We shut the door behind us and moved on.
James Goss
Do the things that you always wanted to, without me there to hold you back, don't think just do, more than anything I want to see you go, take a glorious bite out of the whole world
Snow Patrol
I have always unswervingly held, that God, in our civilizing world, manifests Himself not in the miracles of biblical age, but in progress. It is progress that leads humanity up the ladder towards the God-head. No Jacob's ladder this, no, but rather Civilization's Ladder, if you will.
David Mitchell
Even today, some opt for the comforts of mystification, preferring to believe that the wonders of the ancient world were built by Atlanteans, gods, or space travelers, instead of by thousands toiling in the sun. Such thinking robs our forerunners of their due, and us of their experience. Because then one can believe whatever one likes about the past - without having to confront the bones, potsherds, and inscriptions which tell us that people all over the world, time and again, have made similar advances and mistakes.
Ronald Wright
Been thinking of my grandfather, whose wayward brilliance skipped my father’s generation. Once, he showed me an aquatint of a certain Siamese temple. Don’t recall its name, but ever since a disciple of the Buddha preached on the spot centuries ago, every bandit king, tyrant, and monarch of that kingdom has enhanced it with marble towers, scented arboretums, gold-leafed domes, lavished murals on its vaulted ceilings, set emeralds into the eyes of its statuettes. When the temple finally equals its counterpart in the Pure Land, so the story goes, that day humanity shall have fulfilled its purpose, and Time itself shall come to an end.To men like Ayrs, it occurs to me, this temple is civilization. The masses, slaves, peasants, and foot soldiers exist in the cracks of its flagstones, ignorant even of their ignorance. Not so the great statesmen, scientists, artists, and most of all, the composers of the age, any age, who are civilization’s architects, masons, and priests. Ayrs sees our role is to make civilization ever more resplendent. My employer’s profoundest, or only, wish is to create a minaret that inheritors of Progress a thousand years from now will point to and say, “Look, there is Vyvyan Ayrs!”How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.
David Mitchell
Old Rekohu’s claim to singularity, however, lay in its unique pacific creed. Since time immemorial, the Moriori’s priestly caste dictated that whosoever spilt a man’s blood killed his own mana - his honor, his worth, his standing & his soul. No Moriori would shelter, feed, converse with, or even see the persona non grata. If the ostracized murderer survived his first winter, the desperation of solitude usually drove him to a blowhole on Cape Young, where he took his life.Consider this, Mr. D’Arnoq urged us. Two thousand savages (Mr. Evans’s best guess) enshrine “Thou Shalt Not Kill” in word & in deed & frame an oral “Magna Carta” to create a harmony unknown elsewhere for the sixty centuries since Adam first tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. War was as alien a concept to the Moriori as the telescope is to the Pygmy. Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands. Who can deny Old Rekohu lay closer to More’s Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war-hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster? “Here,” declaimed Mr. D’Arnoq, “and where only, were those elusive phantasms, those noble savages, framed in flesh & blood!” (Henry, as we later made our back to the Musket confessed, “I could never describe a race of savages too backwards to throw a spear as ‘noble.
David Mitchell
There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated is what you did not understand.
Jeanette Winterson
Uninhibited, they wallowed with zest in the filth and mire of their political conceptions and needs, among the very leaders of their society, but nevertheless the very dregs of human civilisation and moral standards. A historian who finds excuses for such conduct by references to the supposed spirit of the times, or by omission, or by silence, shows thereby that his account of events is not to be trusted.
C.L.R. James
... civilization—a word that simply means "living in cities..."Excerpt From: Standage, Tom. “A History of the World In 6 Glasses.
Tom Standage
It (modernization) is just another jungle closing in.
Evelyn Waugh
Scientists are the true driving force of civilization.
James Burke
Anyone who has ever watched children amuse themselves will recognize that the scientific and technological face of civilization is precisely the result of play in its purest form. Just as children are constantly exploring, experimenting, testing and trying things out, for no conscious purpose except the sheer enjoyment of the game itself, so pure science and applied technology play with ideas and toy with the principles and substance of the world; all the time wondering ‘just suppose…’ and asking ‘what happens if…?
Paul Kriwaczek
Greek customs such as wine drinking were regarded as worthy of imitation by other cultures. So the ships that carried Greek wine were carrying Greek civilization, distributing it around the Mediterranean and beyond, one amphora at a time. Wine displaced beer to become the most civilized and sophisticated of drinks—a status it has maintained ever since, thanks to its association with the intellectual achievements of Ancient Greece.
Tom Standage
The constant tug between nature and civilization is what keeps on our toes. Though of course, that did rather beg the question of how you defined nature and how you defined civilization.
Julian Barnes
No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.
Niall Ferguson
Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually. - Pg. 195
Robert Harris
We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages.
William Golding
You're mad, you missionaries,' ejaculated Tai Haruru angrily. 'What good do you think you do, crawling out to the extremities of all the different world's ends and dying there like lizards spiked on sticks?'Brother Balaam jabbed his thumb over his shoulder at the church behind him. 'Ye'll get no civilization worth havin' in a new country unless ye lay down a few martyrs' bones for a foundation,' he said. 'They generate. Slow but sure.
Elizabeth Goudge
To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central human system of thought.
Robert Graves
Bell defined civilization in the language of a Bloomsbury connoisseur: ‘A taste for truth and beauty, tolerance, intellectual honesty, fastidiousness, a sense of humour, good manners, curiosity, a dislike of vulgarity, brutality, and over-emphasis, freedom from superstition and prudery, a fearless acceptance of the good things of life, a desire for complete self-expression and for a liberal education, a contempt for utilitarianism and philistinism, in two words – sweetness and light.’ Bell argued that ‘as a means to good and as a means to civility a leisured class is essential’. The Bloomsbury group was necessary because ‘It is only when there come together enough civilized individuals to form a nucleus from which light can radiate, and sweetness ooze, that a civilization becomes possible. The disseminators of civilization are therefore highly civilized men and women forming groups sufficiently influential to affect larger groups, and ultimately whole communities.
Richard Davenport-Hines
If you have heard that I am wild, you can contradict the rumour,(...) I am tame. I am quite tame; I am about the tamest beast that crawls. I drink too much of the same kind of whisky at the same time every night. I even drink about the same amount too much. I go to the same number of public-houses. I meet the same damned women with mauve faces. I hear the same number of dirty stories— generally the same dirty stories. You may assure my friends, Inglewood, that you see before you a person whom civilization has thoroughly tamed.
G.K. Chesterton
You've made a beast of yourself,- to the beasts you may go.
H.G.Wells
Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If our civilization goes on like this, only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest.
G.K. Chesterton