Quotes by British Authors - Page 164

If he touches me, I will succumb. I know the power he wields over me and my traitorous body. I know.
E.L. James
...this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.
G.K. Chesterton
The world is full of lots of people play acting and hurling stuff about, unconscious of the effects. And there are large group karmic things going on through history that none of us should ever take personally. Rushing about trying to rectify the sins of the past is not productive. The best you can do is to be present as the new you in the now, holding your light as a steady candle to add to the beam of calm and love now spreading to help wake more and more people up. Hopefully we will evolve as a species to eventually cease the unnecessary conflict between different groups of ourselves.
Jay Woodman
He had a simple maxim for all competitive or adversarial situations: work out what the other party least wants you to do, and then do it. Relieving your feelings was fun, but the best course of action was to make things as difficult as possible for the person trying to make things difficult for you.
John Lanchester
I violently dislike you,' she said, and then she was gone, slamming the door and leaving a sort of shocked silence behind.
Kate Johnson
We all know it's safer to beat up on people who won't retaliate,' he told her, 'but it's a quick way to lose friends. You need to find ways of dealing with confrontation when it happens.
Minette Walters
Most parents hate to experience conflict, are deeply troubled when it occurs, and are quite confused about how to handle it constructively. Actually, it would be a rare relationship if over a period of time one person's needs did not conflict with the other's. When any two people (or groups) coexist, conflict is bound to occur just because people are different, think differently, have different needs and wants that sometimes do not match.
Thomas Gordon
Much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of (these) one-sided conflicts. Because the act of facing overwhelming odds, produces greatness and beauty.
Malcolm Gladwell
Conflict makes people feel alive.
H.W. Vivian
Modern war, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit and intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind.
H.G.Wells
it’s like the British in Ireland in 1916’ , says Oisir O’Dowd. ‘The repeated the ageless macho mantra, “Force is the only thing these natives understand,” so often that they ended up believing it . From that point they were doomed.
David Mitchell
A shell in the pit," said I, "if the worst comes to worst will kill them all."The intense excitement of the events had no doubt left my perceptive powers in a state of erethism. I remember that dinner table with extraordinary vividness even now. My dear wife's sweet anxious face peering at me from under the pink lampshade, the white cloth with it silver and glass table furniture—for in those days even philosophical writers had luxuries—the crimson-purple wine in my glass, are photographically distinct. At the end of it I sat, tempering nuts with a cigarette, regretting Ogilvy's rashness, and denouncing the shortsighted timidity of the Martians.So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless sailors in want of animal food. "We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear.
H.G.Wells
Gods, religions and national boundaries are absolutely imaginary. They don't tend to exist. As soon as you pull back half a mile and look down at the Earth there are no national boundaries. There aren't even national boundaries when you get down and walk around. They're just imaginary lines we draw on maps. I just get fascinated by people who assume that things that are imaginary have no relevance to their lives.
Neil Gaiman
Don’t become manipulated by the illusion of who you think you are, or who you think you should be.
Steven Redhead
You must return to the fairy cave while children sleep. Fairies only exist if children believe in Fairyland. If you return after they wake from their dreams, you could remain frozen between two worlds for all eternity.
Caz Greenham
If a fairy makes a wish to leave the fairy cave, she must return to the cave every year and always on her birthday to live as a tiny fairy on that day. If she fails to obey the Fairy Queen’s Rules, she’ll turn to fairy dust, forever.
Caz Greenham
I would wish that people would accept people for who they are, not be judgemental, allow people to live their lives and enjoy themselves and that would be my wish for people.
John Barrowman
But those coins are wishes! You’re stealing other people’s wishes!”The look Matteo gave her was so flinty, she could have chipped a tooth on it. “If you have money to waste on wishes, you don’t need the wishes as badly as I need the money.
Katherine Rundell
Life is not what you wish it to be , rather it’s what you make it.
Steven Redhead
I wish to be washed clean of my old life. To let go of my tide of sorrows and find my way to a new shore.
William Joyce
I think all wishes are the same, really," she continued. "Whether they ask for this, that, or the other, what they are really asking for is happiness.
William Joyce
You want some sweet and lovely things, Tessa, but be careful. Other people can't always give you what you want.
Jenny Downham
Old habits never die. And when you've once been in the business of granting wishes, the impulse never quite leaves you
Joanne Harris
If I could grant wishes do you think I would be driving a cab?
Neil Gaiman
Wishes are held to be ominous; according to which belief the order of the world is so arranged that if you have an impious objection to a squint, your offspring is more likely to be born with one; also, that if you happen to desire a squint, you would not get it. This desponding view of probability the hopeful entirely reject, taking their wishes as good and sufficient security for all kinds of fulfilment.
George Eliot
the whole point of the wish business was to see to it that what the client got was exactly what he asked for and exactly what he didn't really want.
Terry Pratchett
consider the implications. We think we know what we want, but we can never really know until we've got it. And sometimes when we have, we discover we never really wanted it in the first place - but then it's too late
Alexandra Potter
That's coral!" she cried in astonishment. "We must be down in the deeps of the sea!"Well, wasn't that what you wanted?" said the trout. "I thought you wished you could see the sea!"I did," said Jane, looking very surprised. "But I never expected the wish to come true."Great oceans! Why bother to wish it then? I call that simply a waste of time. But come on! Mustn't be late for the party!
P.L. Travers
Michael, "I never expected the wish to come true."The Trout, "Great Oceans! Why bother to wish it, then? I call that simply a waste of time.
P.L. Travers
We think that tomorrow, unless we surrender, they may drop the moon on us." "You're joking.""Wish I was.
Neil Gaiman
The moon was coming slowly up over the hill in front of them. The countryside was bathed in light, pale and cold and silvery. Everything could be seen quite plainly, and Lotta and Jimmy thought it was just like daytime with the colours missing.
Enid Blyton
That’s the moon,’ I said.‘Gran likes it like that,’ said Lettie Hempstock.‘But it was a crescent moon yesterday. And now it’s full. And it was raining. It is raining. But now it’s not.’‘Gran likes the full moon to shine on this side of the house. She says it’s restful, and it reminds her of when she was a girl,’ said Lettie. ‘And you don’t trip on the stairs.
Neil Gaiman
White in the moon the long road lies,The moon stands blank above;White in the moon the long road liesThat leads me from my love.Still hangs the hedge without a gust,Still, still the shadows stay:My feet upon the moonlit dustPursue the ceaseless way.The world is round, so travellers tell,And straight through reach the track,Trudge on, trudge on, 'twill all be well,The way will guide one back.But ere the circle homeward hiesFar, far must it remove:White in the moon the long road liesThat leads me from my love.
A.E. Housman
A stylized sun and moon, joined by a horizontal bar, floated above a country divided in two by a river that snaked between them.
Alan McCluskey
The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary dogmas and a special creed I shall speak later. But that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name.
G.K. Chesterton
She dabbed at the surface of the water with one paw, and the moon fluttered like silver wings before settling again as the water stilled. Letting out a faint mrrow of wonder, Half Moon dabbed again and again. However often she disturbed the surface, the moon was still there.“It doesn’t give up, does it?” Half Moon blinked at Jayfeather. “It’s always there, constant like the stones in this cave. Maybe we should be like the moon’s reflection, holding fast whatever happens?
Erin Hunter
Rose, the moon is incredible. Everything down on Earth relies on it. Rats jump for it. Tides rush out from it. Humans kiss under it. Without it there'd be nothing down there worth the light. And that just happened by chance -trillions of odd against it- one bit of stardust meets another bit of dust.
Gareth Roberts
Far above him a few white clouds were racing windily after a pale gibbous moon. Drink all morning, they said to him, drink all day. This is life!
Malcolm Lowry
I looked up from my writing, And gave a start to see,As if rapt in my inditing, The moon's full gaze on me.
Thomas Hardy
The lovelorn came, too. The alone. The lunatics-they were brought here, sometimes. Got their name from the moon, it was only fair the moon had a chance to fix things.
Neil Gaiman
She turned, and saw a great white moon looking at her over the hill. And her breast opened to it, she was cleaved like a transparent jewel to its light. She stood filled with the full moon, offering herself. Her two breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like a quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the moon.
D.H. Lawrence
I realised that the moon was not a safe place. It knew a thousand ways to kill you if you were stupid, if you were careless, if you were lazy, but the real danger was the people around you. The moon was not a world, it was a submarine. Outside was death. I would be sealed in with these people. There was no law, no justice: there was only management. The moon was the frontier, but it was the frontier to nothing. There was nowhere to run.
Ian McDonald
A little after moonrise Stephen woke. Extreme hunger had brought on cramps in his midriff again and he held his breath to let them pass: Jack was still sitting there, the tiller under his knee, the sheet in his hand, as though he had never moved, as though he were as immoveable as the Rock of Gibraltar and as unaffected by hunger, thirst, fatigue, or despondency. In this light he even looked rock-like, the moon picking out the salient of his nose and jaw and turning his broad shoulders and upper man into one massive block. He had in fact lost almost as much weight as a man can lose and live, and in the day his shrunken, bearded face with deep-sunk eyes was barely recognizable; but the moon showed the man unchanged.
Patrick O'Brian
The night became silver again; looking up, it was as if they saw the moon sailing through the clouds instead of the other way around; racing smoothly across the sky, passing puffs and wisps of cloud on either side, and yet never moving from its place.
Susan Cooper
Sometimes a high moon, liquid-brilliant, scudded across a hollow space and took cover under electric, brown-iridescent cloud-edges.
D.H. Lawrence
The moles came bearing their lamps and then the most ancient and magical creature that ever danced beneath the moon was lost in darkness once more.
Robin Jarvis
Every trace of the passionate plumage of the cloudy sunset had been swept away, and a naked moon stood in a naked sky. The moon was so strong and full, that (by a paradox often to be noticed) it seemed like a weaker sun. It gave, not the sense of bright moonshine, but rather of a dead daylight.
G.K. Chesterton
Perhaps the House had heard Harvey wishing for a full moon, because when he and Wendell traipsed upstairs and looked out the landing window, there--hanging between the bare branches of the trees--was a moon as wide and as white as a dead man's smile.
Clive Barker
Light died in the west. Night and tears took the Nation. The star of Water drifted among the clouds like a murderer softly leaving the scene of the crime.
Terry Pratchett
What was supposed to be so special about a full moon? It was only a big circle of light. And the dark of the moon was only darkness. But halfway between the two, when the moon was between the worlds of light and dark, when even the moon lived on the edge...maybe then a witch could believe in the moon.
Terry Pratchett
While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination." (from "The Third and Final Continent")
Jhumpa Lahiri
If there'd been an astronaut on the moon right then, I'm sure I could have seen him. Perhaps he could have looked down and seen me too... the only one who could.
Lucy Christopher
The rights we have as free individuals is the right to choose as we please.
Steven Redhead
In the end she just said..... All I did was to run away for a few minutes! All I wanted was to be free!
David Almond
Fly free with me.
Angie Sage
For one to be free there must be at least two.
Zygmunt Bauman
Sometimes what you’re most afraid of doing is the very thing that will set you free.
Robert Tew
I’ll not do anything, though you should swear your tongue out, except what I please!
Emily Brontë
Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don't care.
John Fowles
Ignoring phone calls leads to a simple life with more free time. Ignoring emails works well also! I do both when I am trying to get things done.
Steven Magee