Quotes by British Authors - Page 154

I have never deceived anyone, for I have never belonged to anyone. My independence was all my wealth: I have known no other happiness.
Cora Pearl
I love your independence, I love that you don't swoon, I love that you'll fight me with your last breath if you think I'm wrong, and if I ever have to catch you, I swear I'll make sure you're standing on your feet as quickly as you can manage it.
Dianna Hardy
Suddenly an unexpected series of sounds began to be heard in this place up against the starry sky. They were the notes of Oak´s flute. It came from the direction of a small dark object under the hedge - a shephard´s hut - now presenting an outline to which an unintiated person might have been puzzled to attach either meaning or use. ... Being a man not without a frequent consciousness that there was some charm in this life he led, he stood still after looking at the sky as a useful instrument, and regarded it in an appreciative spirit, as a work of art superlatively beautiful. For a moment he seemed impressed with the speaking loneliness of the scene, or rather with the complete abstraction from all its compass of the sights and sounds of man. ... Oak´s motions, though they had a quiet energy, were slow, and their deliberateness accorded well with his occupation. Fitness being the basis of beauty, nobody could have denied tha his steady swings and turns in and about the flock had elements of grace. His special power, morally, physically, and mentally, was static. ... Oak was an intensely human man: indee, his humanity tore in pieces any politic intentions of his which bordered on strategy, and carried him on as by gravitation. A shadow in his life had always been that his flock should end in mutton - that a day could find a shepherd an arrant traitor to his gentle sheep.
Thomas Hardy
We talk of independence. No man is independent. We are all interdependent; and we shall only rise as we carry others with us, and as we are assisted by others.
James E. Talmage
I despise women who rely on men entirely for their own existence.
Lindsey Davis
The greatest gift a parent can leave a child is that parent's own independence.
Rosamunde Pilcher
Nowadays all over the world fighting goes on for freedom and independence but it is hard to find anyone to whom the mystery of the godlike freedom of children of the Heavenly Father has been revealed.
Sophrony Sakharov
I help those who can help themselves.
Agatha Christie
Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women do when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
Thomas Hardy
Elinor retreated to the terrace where the night air on her skin felt like a hot bath. She was hurt, it had been such an onslaught. All the things she'd achieved in the past four years, the independent life she'd built for herself, seemed to count for nothing here. The only thing that mattered to her mother was finding a husband. As for painting, well, nice little hobby, very suitable, but you won't have much time for that when the children arrive.
Pat Barker
The notion that I had walked twelve hundred miles since Rotterdam filled me with a legitimate feeling of something achieved. But why should the thought that nobody knew where I was, as though I were in flight from bloodhounds or from worshipping corybants bent on dismemberment, generate such a feeling of triumph? It always did.
Patrick Leigh Fermor
Kurdistan has a long and turbulent history. Today, it faces a future branching in directions that could lead it towards success or disaster, freedom or renewed oppression.
Davan Yahya Khalil
We Kurd must do everything in our power to create structures which prevent the repeat of mass murder by our adversaries,And It’s better to call for independence.
Davan Yahya Khalil
The history of Kurdistan doesn’t just tell us why it hasn’t become independent so far. It also helps to make the case for Kurdistan’s independence. It is a desire founded, not just on some passing modern whim in that direction, or on spurious claims to natural and obvious borders, but on a sustained historical focus and desire by its people, on pre-existing promises, on the need for protection from the kind of atrocities that have historically been perpetrated against the Kurds, and on the rather artificial way in which Kurdistan has been denied its existence in the past.
Davan Yahya Khalil
I'll walk where my own nature would be leading. It vexes me to choose another guide.
Charlotte Brontë
…But so few of us think clearly about our own private incomes, and admit that independent thoughts are in nine cases out of ten the result of independent means.
E.M. Forster
It is not difficult to stand above the conventions when we leave no hostages among them; men can always be more unconventional than women, and a bachelor of independent means need encounter no difficulties at all.
E.M. Forster
There, did you think to kill me? There's no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There's only an idea.Ideas are bulletproof. Farewell.
Alan Moore
Should you ever feel too lonely...listen for the roar of the sea- for in it are all those who've been and all those who are to come.
Simon Van Booy
The plane banked, and he pressed his face against the cold window. The ocean tilted up to meet him, its dark surface studded with points of light that looked like constellations, fallen stars. The tourist sitting next to him asked him what they were. Nathan explained that the bright lights marked the boundaries of the ocean cemeteries. The lights that were fainter were memory buoys. They were the equivalent of tombstones on land: they marked the actual graves. While he was talking he noticed scratch-marks on the water, hundreds of white gashes, and suddenly the captain's voice, crackling over the intercom, interrupted him. The ships they could see on the right side of the aircraft were returning from a rehearsal for the service of remembrance that was held on the ocean every year. Towards the end of the week, in case they hadn't realised, a unique festival was due to take place in Moon Beach. It was known as the Day of the Dead......When he was young, it had been one of the days he most looked forward to. Yvonne would come and stay, and she'd always bring a fish with her, a huge fish freshly caught on the ocean, and she'd gut it on the kitchen table. Fish should be eaten, she'd said, because fish were the guardians of the soul, and she was so powerful in her belief that nobody dared to disagree. He remembered how the fish lay gaping on its bed of newspaper, the flesh dark-red and subtly ribbed where it was split in half, and Yvonne with her sleeves rolled back and her wrists dipped in blood that smelt of tin.It was a day that abounded in peculiar traditions. Pass any candy store in the city and there'd be marzipan skulls and sugar fish and little white chocolate bones for 5 cents each. Pass any bakery and you'd see cakes slathered in blue icing, cakes sprinkled with sea-salt.If you made a Day of the Dead cake at home you always hid a coin in it, and the person who found it was supposed to live forever. Once, when she was four, Georgia had swallowed the coin and almost choked. It was still one of her favourite stories about herself. In the afternoon, there'd be costume parties. You dressed up as Lazarus or Frankenstein, or you went as one of your dead relations. Or, if you couldn't think of anything else, you just wore something blue because that was the colour you went when you were buried at the bottom of the ocean. And everywhere there were bowls of candy and slices of special home-made Day of the Dead cake. Nobody's mother ever got it right. You always had to spit it out and shove it down the back of some chair. Later, when it grew dark, a fleet of ships would set sail for the ocean cemeteries, and the remembrance service would be held. Lying awake in his room, he'd imagine the boats rocking the the priest's voice pushed and pulled by the wind. And then, later still, after the boats had gone, the dead would rise from the ocean bed and walk on the water. They gathered the flowers that had been left as offerings, they blew the floating candles out. Smoke that smelt of churches poured from the wicks, drifted over the slowly heaving ocean, hid their feet. It was a night of strange occurrences. It was the night that everyone was Jesus......Thousands drove in for the celebrations. All Friday night the streets would be packed with people dressed head to toe in blue. Sometimes they painted their hands and faces too. Sometimes they dyed their hair. That was what you did in Moon Beach. Turned blue once a year. And then, sooner or later, you turned blue forever.
Rupert Thomson
She saw the deepness that was at the edge of France and it made the beach under her feel like a ledge on a cliff.
J.M. Ledgard
And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.
Joseph Conrad
Although I was an imaginative child, prone to nightmares, I had persuaded my parents to take me to Madame Tussauds waxworks in London, when I was six, because I had wanted to visit the Chamber of Horrors, expecting the movie-monster Chambers of Horrors I'd read about in my comics. I had wanted to thrill to waxworks of Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolf-man. Instead I was walked through a seemingly endless sequence of dioramas of unremarkable, glum-looking men and women who had murdered people - usually lodgers and members of their own families - and who were then murdered in turn: by handing, by the electric chair, in gas chambers. Most of them were depicted with their victims in awkward social situations - seated about a dinner table, perhaps, as their poisoned family members expired. The plaques that explained who they were also told me that the majority of them had murdered their families and sold the bodies to anatomy. It was then that the word anatomy garnered its own edge of horror for me. I did not know what anatomy was. I knew only that anatomy made people kill their children.
Neil Gaiman
so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again...
Virginia Woolf
I looked upon the sea, it was to be my grave
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
It was the forty-fathom slumber that clears the soul and eye and heart, and sends you to breakfast ravening. They emptied a big tin dish of juicy fragments of fish- the blood-ends the cook had collected overnight. They cleaned up the plates and pans of the elder mess, who were out fishing, sliced pork for the midday meal, swabbed down the foc'sle, filled the lamps, drew coal and water for the cook, an investigated the fore-hold, where the boat's stores were stacked. It was another perfect day - soft, mild and clear; and Harvey breathed to the very bottom of his lungs.
Rudyard Kipling
I was afraid of the sea when I was a girl. Someone said it went on forever and that frightened me. I wondered why my parents had chosen to live at the beginning and the end of the world.
Simon Van Booy
It is as if we find ourselves on a ship in the middle of the ocean, with the captain making the point that we are free to leave.
Peter Cave
Then all was quiet, except for that murmurous half telling, half withholding of tremendous secrets that the sea would keep up all night. Each little wave seemed to say, “I’ll tell you-” and then pull back with a smothered “Oh!” to be followed by another wave saying, “Then I will say-” but whatever it was remained unsaid and unsayable.
L.M. Boston
His mind has the clearness of the deep sea, the patience of its rocks, the force of its billows.
Charlotte Brontë
If you ever want to see how small you are in the plan of God, just stand at the edge of an ocean.
Patrick Ness
Live in a cosmic ocean, singing sweet hallucinations, dreams of many worlds, all flowing into one.... inner / outer mirrored love.
Jay Woodman
The enormous vermilion sun was dropping toward the sea, its reflected glow making a blazing path across the water to the very beach, where the last ripple was spangled with garnets. Otherwise, the sea was periwinkle purple, spilling and whispering and sidling with an easy going prattle of foam round the steeper rocks.
L.M. Boston
Something grey surged out of the ship’s wake, and Mouana reached for her pistol, then swore softly as she saw it was only a porpoise. The animals were playing in the engine wash, spinning in the air as they arced through the crashing foam. They were not albino, nor rotten, nor tentacled—just porpoises. The sight of the things brought hope back again; whatever mess they were in, at least they weren’t in Ocean.
Nate Crowley
Do not think to swim below. The ocean is already pushing into ears, sinuses, temples, the softness of eyes, and the harpsichord strings behind the kneecaps.
J.M. Ledgard
The ocean stands for God, the sole substance, and individual beings are like waves - which are modes of the sea. Each wave has its own shape that it holds for a certain time, but the wave is not separate from the sea and cannot be conceived to exist independently of it. Of course, this is only a metaphor; unlike an infinite God, an ocean has boundaries, and moreover the image of the sea represents God only in the attributes of extension. But maybe we can also imagine the mind of God - that is to say, the infinite totality of thinking - as like the sea, and the thoughts of finite beings as like waves that arise and then pass away.
Clare Carlisle
Just outside Dover we stopped at an inn and I snatched a taste of dainty fried fish named smelts, and some herrings served with their tails in their mouths. Afterwards, me and Mr Loveday went out to take a view of the ocean. The wind was blowing so strong it whistled through my teeth and the sea was horrible; a vast plain of water ceaselessly moiling like a simmering pot. At last my head cold had cleared enough to taste the sea on my tongue; it had a strange salted vegetable tang.
Martine Bailey
Reluctant to return to the empty rooms of Bluebell Cottage, Olivia ate fish and chips on the harbor wall, dangling her legs over the side just like she used to as a little girl, even though it made her mam anxious.The breeze nipped at the back of her neck and whipped up a fine sea spray that settled on her hands, leaving sparkling salt crystals as it dried. Fairy dust, she used to call it. She breathed in the fresh air and absorbed the view: tangerine sky and dove-gray sea, ripples on the surface of both, like dragon scales. She savored the sharp tang of vinegar on her tongue, letting her thoughts wander as the sun slowly melted into the sea, turning it to liquid gold.
Hazel Gaynor
I could be blindfolded and dropped into the deepest ocean and I would know where to find you. I could be buried a hundred miles underground and I would know where you are.
Neil Gaiman
Shearwater sighed, like a whale in the night.
Aldous Huxley
Increasingly, we will be faced with a choice: whether to keep the oceans for wild fish or farmed fish. Farming domesticated species in close proximity with wild fish will mean that domesticated fish always win. Nobody in the world of policy appears to be asking what is best for society, wild fish or farmed fish. And what sort of farmed fish, anyway? Were this question to be asked, and answered honestly, we might find that our interests lay in prioritizing wild fish and making their ecosystems more productive by leaving them alone enough of the time.
Charles Clover
The children had had an argument once about whether there was more grass in the world or more sand, and Roger said that of course there must be more sand because of under the sea; in every ocean all over the world there would be sand, if you looked deep down. But there could be grass too, argued Deborah, a waving grass, a grass that nobody had ever seen, and the colour of that ocean grass would be darker than any grass on the surface of the world, in fields or prairies or people's gardens in America. It would be taller than tress and it would move like corn in the wind. ("The Pool
Daphne du Maurier
The deep roar of the ocean.The break of waves on farther shores that thought can find.The silent thunders of the deep.And from among it, voices calling, and yet not voices, humming trillings, wordlings, and half-articulated songs of thought.Greetings, waves of greetings, sliding back down into the inarticulate, words breaking together.A crash of sorrow on the shores of Earth.Waves of joy on--where? A world indescribably found, indescribably arrived at, indescribably wet, a song of water.A fugue of voices now, clamoring explanations, of a disaster unavertable, a world to be destroyed, a surge of helplessness, a spasm of despair, a dying fall, again the break of words.And then the fling of hope, the finding of a shadow Earth in the implications of enfolded time, submerged dimensions, the pull of parallels, the deep pull, the spin of will, the hurl and split of it, the fight. A new Earth pulled into replacement, the dolphins gone.Then stunningly a single voice, quite clear."This bowl was brought to you by the Campaign to Save the Humans. We bid you farewell."And then the sound of long, heavy, perfectly gray bodies rolling away into an unknown fathomless deep, quietly giggling.
Douglas Adams
It was surely one thing to respect the Dark Arts as a dangerous enemy, another to speak of them with a loving caress in his voice?
J.K. Rowling
Then we still have time!” I gasp. “It’s not too late. We know what he’s going to do. We’ll return to the cave and figh
Darren Shan
I stop reading after half an hour. I’ve had enough. Humanity has hit a brick wall. We’re facing our end, like the dinosaurs millions of years before us. The only difference is we’ve got journalists on hand to document every blow and setback, cataloguing our rapid, painful downfall in vibrant, vicious detail. Personally, I think the dinosaurs had the better deal. When it comes to impending, unavoidable extinction, ignorance is bliss.
Darren Shan
I've never met a politician who didn't deserve to be tossed into a pit full of Kallin," Beranabus grunts.
Darren Shan
As we write we summon little demons.
Neil Gaiman
If the demons lived anywhere it was here.
Jeanette Winterson
When I was small I dreamed of demons. I thought they were under my bed, but you said, it can't be so, you don't get demons our side of the river, the guards won't let them over London Bridge.
Hilary Mantel
Demons run when a good man goes to war.Night will fall and drown the sun,When a good man goes to war.Friendship dies and true love lies,Night will fall and the dark will rise,When a good man goes to war.Demons run, but count the cost.The battle's won but the child is lost.
Steven Moffat
It was hard to describe what she had sensed, but it had been distinct and clear, like the shape of a leafless tree against the sky, or a crow flying across a ploughed field. She hesitated to close her eyes again, for it had risen up close to her face like something appalling.
Jessica Rydill
I dinna want to disappoint ye, but we's in a cellar right here, and it's full o' tatties.'After a while a voice said: 'So where izzit?''Maybe it's got the day off?''What's a demon need a day off for?''Tae gae an' see its ol' mam an' dad, mebbe?''Oh, aye? Demons have mams, do they?
Terry Pratchett
She was Lilith, First Wife of Adam, Queen of the Night, Mother of Demons, Stealer of Children, and he was her Revenant - her undead warrior. And she would use him, and the power of his spear, to destroy her enemies and punish her wayward children.,
Alan Kinross
Being human was a lot more difficult than it looked. Demon was easy. Demon was simple. Human was…terrifying." Muse
Pippa DaCosta
Azhrarn, Lord of Terrors, terrified.
Tanith Lee
Never trust a demon. He has a hundred motives for anything he does ... Ninety-nine of them, at least, are malevolent.
Neil Gaiman
People shouldn't call for demons unless they really mean what they say.
C.S. Lewis
Most people today couldn't tell a bombardier from a brigadier" - said during a lecture in aid of the Army Benevolent Fund in 2009
Richard Holmes
Reinette: One may tolerate a world of demons for the sake of an angel.
Steven Moffat