Quotes by British Authors - Page 157

An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.
Francis Crick
Miracles are like murders. After the first one, each becomes easier than the last for, with each success, the miracle-worker's certainty in himself becomes stronger.
Karen Maitland
Actually, the “leap of faith”—to give it the memorable name that Soren Kierkegaard bestowed upon it—is an imposture. As he himself pointed out, it is not a “leap” that can be made once and for all. It is a leap that has to go on and on being performed, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary. This effort is actually too much for the human mind, and leads to delusions and manias. Religion understands perfectly well that the “leap” is subject to sharply diminishing returns, which is why it often doesn’t in fact rely on “faith” at all but instead corrupts faith and insults reason by offering evidence and pointing to confected “proofs.” This evidence and these proofs include arguments from design, revelations, punishments, and miracles. Now that religion’s monopoly has been broken, it is within the compass of any human being to see these evidences and proofs as the feeble-minded inventions that they are.
Christopher Hitchens
Don't you believe people when they tell you that people sought for a sign, and believed in miracles because they were ignorant. They did it because they were wise, filthily, vilely wise—too wise to eat or sleep or put on their boots with patience.
G.K. Chesterton
Dew settles without the fanfare of thunder or patter of falling rain, yet our wet feet in the morning still tell us there is something there. Sometimes miracles are like that. There is no overwhelming proof, but deep inside we know.
Chris Stewart
But when first the two black dragons sprang out of the fog upon the small clerk, they had merely the effect of all miracles – they changed the universe. He discovered the fact that all romantics know – that adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the cord of monotony is stretched most tight, it it breaks with a sound like song.
G.K. Chesterton
Claims for theoccurrence of miraculous events will have to be evaluated ona case-by-case basis. There can be no general theory to coverthe character of unique events, but the refusal to contemplatethe possibility of revelatory disclosures of an unprecedentedkind would be an unacceptable limitation, imposed arbitrarilyon the horizons of religious thought.
John Polkinghorne
It was to be a day of queer experiences. He had never realized with how many miracles mere everyday life is besieged.
Walter de la Mare
The previously unloved may find it hard to believe that they are now loved; that is such a miracle, they feel; such a miracle.
Alexander McCall Smith
My life and most people's lives are a series of little miracles -- strange coincidences which spring from uncontrollable impulses and give rise to incomprehensible dreams. We spend a lot of time pretending that we are normal, but underneath the surface each one of us knows that he or she is unique.
Colin Clark
Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
C.S. Lewis
But, astonishingly, I'm not broken. I'm not destroyed. Terrified witless, shaking, retching with fear, yes. But no longer insecure. Because during my search for how you died, I somehow found myself to be a different person. ... Living my life. And it wouldn't be my grief for you that toppled the mountain, but love.
Rosamund Lupton
The mind is constantly open to repetitive influences.
Steven Redhead
Avoid letting outside influences have a chance to affect your thoughts.
Steven Redhead
Imagine your body becoming that of a stranger. Imagine the sensation of it being not yours, as you discover what it feels like to do this, or to have this happen to you, for the very first time. Imagine it happening with sickening slowness, or with shocking speed, that discovery. And then imagine knowing it has come too late.
Neil Bartlett
Satnav will get us quickly and all-too-predictably from A to B, but the path of life is more interesting when we’re allowed to explore the side streets.
Fennel Hudson
If four of you are playing hide and seek you'll only ever find the other three. For you are already right here. So what on earth is it that you're looking for? You are the very thing that you seek.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
After a few months she left off speculating about the villagers. She admitted that there was something about them which she could not fathom, but she was content to remain outside the secret, whatever it was. She had not come to Great Mop to concern herself with the hearts of men. Let her stray up the valleys, and rest in the leafless woods that looked so warm with their core of fallen red leaves, and find out her own secret, if she had one; with autumn it might come back to question her. She wondered. She thought not. She felt that nothing could ever again disturb her peace. Wherever she strayed the hills folded themselves round her like the fingers of a hand.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
I didn't just wake up one morning and think, "I'm a boy!" It sort of crept up on me and tapped me on the shoulder a few times before I started to pay attention I began to think that the word "girl" didn't quite fit me. It was like a shoe that was too small -- it pinched me.
Cat Clarke
If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.
Quentin Crisp
In ourselves our safety must be sought. By our own right hand it must be wrought.
William Wordsworth
You rile this gal and she'll go wildcat on your ass. Patti (Pat) Canella- Dockland murders/Ghosts of your past.
Alan Place
Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.
Lewis Carroll
The vase was placed upon my desk, and there were orange-blossoms in it—orange-blossoms, in an English winter!
Sarah Waters
Southampton's barrage balloons floated gleaming in the moonlight like the ghosts of elephants and hippos.
Elizabeth Wein
You don't get the good shots sitting on your ass in the bad weather- Mark Johnson
Alan Place
No ghosts need
Arthur Conan Doyle
Libraries are full of ghosts, books being the most haunted things of all.
Maya Panika
I believe ghost story writing is a dying art.
H. Russell Wakefield
He knows different now. It's the living that chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives. Thomas More had spread the rumor that Little Bilney, chained to the stake, had recanted as the fire was set. It wasn't enough for him to take Bilney's life away; he had to take his death too.
Hilary Mantel
He does love prophesying a misfortune, does the average British ghost. Send him out to prognosticate trouble to somebody, and he is happy. Let him force his way into a peaceful home, and turn the whole house upside down by foretelling a funeral, or predicting a bankruptcy, or hinting at a coming disgrace, or some other terrible disaster, about which nobody in their senses would want to know sooner than they could possible help, and the prior knowledge of which can serve no useful purpose whatsoever, and he feels that he is combining duty with pleasure. He would never forgive himself if anybody in his family had a trouble and he had not been there for a couple of months beforehand, doing silly tricks on the lawn or balancing himself on somebody's bedrail.("Introduction" to TOLD AFTER SUPPER)
Jerome K. Jerome
After breakfast the host takes the young man into a corner, and explains to him that what he saw was the ghost of a lady who had been murdered in that very bed, or who had murdered somebody else there - it does not really matter which: you can be a ghost by murdering somebody else or by being murdered yourself, whichever you prefer. The murdered ghost is, perhaps, the more popular; but, on the other hand, you can frighten people better if you are the murdered one, because then you can show your wounds and do groans.("Introduction" to TOLD AFTER SUPPER)
Jerome K. Jerome
When you go out hunting wicked spirits, it's the simple things that matter most. The silvered point of your rapier flashing in the dark; the iron filings scattered on the floor; the sealed canisters of best Greek Fire, ready as a last resort... But tea bags, brown and fresh and plenty of them, and made (for preference) by Pitkin Brothers of Bond Street, are perhaps the simplest and best of all. OK, they may not save your life like a sword-tip or an iron circle can, and they haven't the protective power of a sudden wall of fire. But they do provide something just as vital. They help keep you sane.
Jonathan Stroud
London was a city of ghosts, some deader than others. Thorne knew that in this respect, it wasn't unlike any other major city - New York or Paris or Sydney - but he felt instinctively that London was .... at the extreme. The darker side of that history, as opposed to the parks, palaces and pearly kings' side that made busloads of Japanese and American tourists gawk and jabber. The hidden history of a city where the lonely, the dispossessed, the homeless, wandered the streets, brushing shoulders with the shadows of those that had come before them. A city in which the poor and the plague-ridden, those long-since hanged for stealing a loaf or murdered for a shilling, jostled for position with those seeking a meal, or a score, or a bed for the night.A city where the dead could stay lost a long time
Mark Billingham
I finally found my way to the Really Restricted Section, where they keep the kind of books most scholars aren't even supposed to know exist. I knocked on the closed door, said the proper passwords, and the door opened before me. I walked in, and the ghost of the Head Librarian, a thin, dusty presence, with dark eyes and a disapproving look, appeared before me, blocking my way. (He had been eaten by a book, then brought back by the other books, apparently because they approved of him. Because even though he didn't have much time for people, he loved books.)
Simon R. Green
Mrs. Rouncewell holds this opinion because she considers that a family of such antiquity and importance has a right to a ghost. She regards a ghost as one of the privileges of the upper classes, a genteel distinction to which the common people have no claim.
Charles Dickens
I am empty of everything. I am empty of everything but the thin, frail ghosts in my room.
Jean Rhys
It lingers in this room like the voices that still echo here, some belonging to a man who’d once been alive, and the rest belong to others who’ve never drawn breath.
J. Christopher Wickham
Some ghosts tried to be showy. These were the kinds to avoid.
Lesley Howarth
I slept badly that night, my vivid dreams populated by ghosts. As much as it revived ailing spirits in day light, the fizzy energy of NY seemed to feed on human frailty at night.
Pete Townshend
Twas now the very witching time of night,When churchyards groan, and graves give up their dead,And many a mischievous, enfranchised spriteHad long since burst his bonds of stone or lead,And hurried off, with schoolboy-like delight,To play his pranks near some poor wretch's bed,Sleeping, perhaps serenely as a porpoise,Nor dreaming of this fiendish Habeas Corpus.
Thomas Ingoldsby
The ego of a god, the wit of a goldfish.
Shah Wharton
There was a profound silence, abruptly broken by an enormously loud rumble from George's stomach. Plaster didn't actually fall from the ceiling, but it was close.
Jonathan Stroud
Ghosts are the only ones who never have to feel scared. Because the worst thing in the world has already happened to them.
Simon R. Green
Out in the shadows of the city, in the houses and cellars, in the secret rooms and locked attics, a stirring cold be sensed. The ghosts and spirits-of-place whispered and muttered on the edge of hearing, glided and flowed on the edge of sight. They were pleased with the turn of events; it was they who had driven the small garrison of Polypontian troops out to die in the snow. It was they who’d haunted their movements through the cities. And it was they who had joined them on watch in the dark of the night, filling their minds with a slow-growing fear, which had evolved into a terror that had driven them mad… The Queen had returned, and some of the people, and the rest of the folk would one day come back and they could slip back into their minds, becoming the warp and the weft of the legend and stories. Becoming the fireside companions of long winter nights, living their lives for a while in the minds of the breathing, in the blood that still flowed, in the feelings that still thrilled to nerves that still sensed.
Stuart Hill
Ghosts were created when the first man woke in the night
J.M. Barrie
Do not fear the ghosts in this house; theyare the least of your worries.Personally I find the noises they make reassuring,The creaks and footsteps in the night,their little tricks of hiding things,or moving them, I findendearing, not upsettling. It makes the placefeel so much more like a home.Inhabited.
Neil Gaiman
There are various levels above and below the human through which the individual soul may pass in the course of its reincarnations—the angelic, the titanic, the animal, the purgatories, and the realm of the frustrated ghosts.
Alan W. Watts
The only ghosts, I believe, who creep into this world, are dead young mothers, returned to see how their children fare. There is no other inducement great enough to bring the departed back. They glide into the acquainted room when day and night, their jailers, are in the grip, and whisper, "How is it with you, my child?" but always, lest a strange face should frighten him, they whisper it so low that he may not hear. They bend over him to see that he sleeps peacefully, and replace his sweet arm beneath the coverlet, and they open the drawers to count how many little vests he has. They love to do these things. What is saddest about ghosts is that they may not know their child. They expect him to be just as he was when they left him, and they are easily bewildered, and search for him from room to room, and hate the unknown boy he has become. Poor, passionate souls, they may even do him an injury. These are the ghosts that go wailing about old houses, and foolish wild stories are invented to explain what is all so pathetic and simple. I know of a man who, after wandering far, returned to his early home to pass the evening of his days in it, and sometimes from his chair by the fire he saw the door open softly and a woman's face appear. She always looked at him very vindictively, and then vanished. Strange things happened in this house. Windows were opened in the night. The curtains of his bed were set fire to. A step on the stair was loosened. The covering of an old well in a corridor where he walked was cunningly removed. And when he fell ill the wrong potion was put in the glass by his bedside, and he died. How could the pretty young mother know that this grizzled interloper was the child of whom she was in search? All our notions about ghosts are wrong. It is nothing so petty as lost wills or deeds of violence that brings them back, and we are not nearly so afraid of them as they are of us.
J.M. Barrie
Did you ever feel a creeping,That awoke you from your sleeping,That made your pulses flutter and bristled all your hair;While a horrid stealthy crawlingPrevented you from calling,And something seemed to tell you that a ghost was coming there?
Amelia B. Edwards
Of all ghosts, the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.
Arthur Conan Doyle
People who ask you if you’ve ever seen a ghost are always people who believe in ghosts. They’re limbering up to tell their own ghost story. These are always remarkably tedious efforts about feeling as if someone had brushed past them but nobody being there. I always think that if you’re lying anyway you should at least make it interesting.
Frankie Boyle
You hear about ghosts: sad ghosts, angry ghosts.I'll tell you, the worst is when they laugh, and the worst sort are the ones whose faces I've forgotten.
Richard Smyth
Love was like swallowing a cili padi whole.
Zen Cho
It's Halloween,The night we all play,Trick or treat,We won't go away.Be we ghoul or goblin, ghost,We'll knock on your door,To see who scares you the most.But cringe not in fear,Or cry out in pain,Cause it's only a game,Oh, what a shame.But don't despair,In the cold night air,Because we'll be back,And then you'll be scared!But not just one,Or even two.And so we bid you,A sweet adieu.
Anthony T.Hincks
Herr Schiller? Are there really any such things as ghosts?' The old man did not even show surprise at the question. He heaved a sigh. 'Yes Pia, there are. But never the ones you expect.
Helen Grant
Graveyards were the one place Belladonna never saw ghosts.
Helen Stringer
It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.
A.S. Byatt
A house with old furniture has no need of ghosts to be haunted.
Hope Mirrlees
Lockwood gave a sudden exclamation; when I looked at him, his eyes were shining. 'On second thoughts, we can scrap my last suggestion,' he said. 'Stuff the mingling. Who wants to do that? Boring. George - this library. Where is it?
Jonathan Stroud