Quotes by British Authors - Page 165

I am not angry at Microsoft, as they did give me Windows 10 for free! I do feel a little misled about its reliability on older computers never certified for its installation by the manufacturer though.
Steven Magee
I had my first amendment rights removed by a USA judge for a video that I recorded in the public sidewalk. The right to free speech and freedom of the press only partially exists in the USA.
Steven Magee
Sometimes I think you're still a prisoner. You're not free of this place in your head, Nathan. And you're definitely not free of those people. They haunt you.
Sally Green
We are not such fools as to pay for reading inferior books, when we can read superior books for nothing.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Why is it," she asked, snuggling closer, "that I so often imagine myself running away and running free?
Mary Balogh
The important thing is to convince people to make and share useful things. Fighting with greedy douches who don't share doesn't do that. Making more, living under conditions of abundance, that does it.
Cory Doctorow
..A hawk soared over our carriage, letting out a high, piercing cry of defiance, and I wanted to jump out of the window and fly with it
Stephanie Burgis
I was not born to be free---I was born to adore and obey.
C.S. Lewis
My mum translated this in her head to "witchfinder," which was good because like most West Africans, she considered witchfinding a more respectable profession than policeman.
Ben Aaronovitch
In Narnia a girl might ring a bell in a deserted temple and feel the chime in her eyes, pure as the freeze that forces tears. Then when the sound dies out, the White Witch wakes. It was like, I want to touch you, and I can touch you, now what next, a dagger?
Helen Oyeyemi
It might have interested Newt to know that, of the thirty-nine thousand women tested with the pin during the centuries of witch-hunting, twenty-nine thousand said “ouch,” nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine didn’t feel anything because of the use of the aforesaid retractable pins, and one witch declared that it had miraculously cleared up the arthritis in her leg.
Terry Pratchett
Tiffany jumped when she saw a balloon sail up above the trees, catch the wind, and swoop away, but it turned out to be just a balloon and not a lump of excess Brian. She could tell this because it was followed by a long scream of rage mixed with a roar of complaint: “AAaargwannawannaaaagongongonaargggaaaaBLOON!” which is the traditional sound of a very small child learning that with balloons, as with life itself, it is important to know when not to let go of the string. The whole point of balloons is to teach small children this.
Terry Pratchett
But a girl starting out in life might well say to herself: 'Is this it? You worked hard and denied yourself things and what you got at the end was hard work and self-denial?
Terry Pratchett
Here you are. Would you like some pickles?”“Pickles gives me the wind something awful.”“In that case—”“Oh, I wasn’t saying no,” Mistress Weatherwax said, taking two large pickled cucumbers.
Terry Pratchett
My mother was a pathetic patchwork witch who had used magic so much to meddle in her own life that she had no integrity left and was nothing but a coil of hatreds consuming themselves in futility. We had already hedged her power, with the help of the fairies.
Jo Walton
That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure. It’s not malice, or wickedness - well, perhaps it is wickedness, for most women love that - but certainly not malice, not wanting to plague cattle and make horrid children spout up pins and - what is it? - “blight the genial bed.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
The English, by and large, being a crass and indolent race, were not as keen on burning women as other countries in Europe.
Terry Pratchett
Even the pious Scots, locked throughout history in a long-drawn-out battle with their arch-enemies the Scots, managed a few burnings to while away the long winter evenings.
Terry Pratchett
I'm not a lady, I'm a witch.
Terry Pratchett
We ain’t going to curse anyone,” said Granny firmly. “It hardly ever works if they don’t know you’ve done it.
Terry Pratchett
We got the spell exactly right. Except for the ingredients. And most of the poetry. And it probably wasn’t the right time. And Gytha took most of it home for the cat, which couldn’t of been proper.
Terry Pratchett
Witches just aren’t like that,” said Magrat. “We live in harmony with the great cycles of Nature, and do no harm to anyone, and it’s wicked of them to say we don’t. We ought to fill their bones with hot lead."The other two looked at her with a certain amount of surprised admiration. She blushed, although not greenly, and looked at her knees.“Goodie Whemper did a recipe,” she confessed. “It’s quite easy. What you do is, you get some lead, and you—”“I don’t think that would be appropriate,” said Granny carefully, after a certain amount of internal struggle. “It could give people the wrong idea.”“But not for long,” said Nanny wistfully.
Terry Pratchett
At last the magic caught, and she managed to vault clumsily onto it before it trundled into the night sky as gracefully as a duck with one wing missing.
Terry Pratchett
Gossiping's part of witchcraft,' said Tiffany. 'They're checking to see if they've gone batty yet.
Terry Pratchett
For a witch stands on the very edge of everything, between the light and the dark, between life and death, making choices, making decisions so that others may pretend no decisions have even been needed. Sometimes they need to help some poor soul through the final hours, help them to find the door, not to get lost in the dark.
Terry Pratchett
No,' she said. 'No, I don't reckon that's what I do now. Are you watchin', Mrs Gogol? Are you watchin' real close?' Her gaze travelled the room and rested for just a fraction of a second on Magrat. Then she reached over, carefully, and thrust her arm up to the elbow into the burning torch. And the doll in Erzulie Gogol's hands burst into flame. It went on blazing even after the witch had screamed and dropped it on to the floor. It went on burning until Nanny Ogg ambled over with a jug of fruit juice from the buffet, whistling between her teeth, and put it out. Granny withdrew her hand. It was unscathed.
Terry Pratchett
Look, daddy, Mel gave me a pet!” The boy said excitedly. “He’s called Incy.”Hunter looked down and inhaled sharply at the sight of a large spider in Adam’s little hand. His eyes snapped up to Mel, who was sitting silent and serene in the middle of the floor, obviously pleased with her present.“A spider?” Hunter asked with exasperation. “Fine. Why don’t you get Mel to teach it tricks.
K.S. Marsden
You couldn't escape the pointy hat, though. There was nothing magical about a pointy hat except that it said that the woman underneath it was a witch. People paid attention to a pointy hat.
Terry Pratchett
Of course no one accused the old woman of being a witch. But she was foreign. Her words percolated up the tunnel of her throat , espresso-thick and strong. Bad weather had eroded her face. Some believed that the sun had crisped her skin into coriaceous pleats. Others blamed the chaw of a wintry climate. No one knew where she came from, though lots of people privately thought that perhaps she ought to go back.
Carys Bray
I’m a witch. It’s what we do. When it’s nobody else’s business, it’s my business.
Terry Pratchett
And people think she killed him?" said Miss Tick. She sighed. "They probably think she cooked him in the oven, or somet
Terry Pratchett
You don't need none of that," she said. "You need headology.
Terry Pratchett
In the Scotland of the early seventeenth century, an old woman living alone in Kirkcudbrightshire was accused of witchcraft and on conviction was rolled downhill in a blazing tar barrel. One of the charges against her was that she walked withershins round a well near her cottage which was used by other people. The well was afterwards known as the Witch's Well. These episodes must surely serve as cautionary tales to anyone tempted to transgress the usual custom of walking deasil round a holy well.
Colin Bord
Miles away, down through an opening in the hills, he could catch glimpses of a road where motor-cars sometimes passed, and yet here, so removed from the arteries of the latest civilization, was a bat-haunted old homestead, where something unmistakably like witchcraft seemed to hold a very practical sway.
Saki
Blessings be on this house," Granny said, perfunctorily. It was always a good opening remark for a witch. It concentrated people's minds on what other things might be on this house.
Terry Pratchett
Your average witch is not, by nature, a social animal as far as other witches are concerned. There's a conflict of dominant personalities. There's a group of ringleaders without a ring. There's the basic unwritten rule of witchcraft, which is 'Don't do what you will, do what I say.' The natural size of a coven is one. Witches only get together when they can't avoid it.
Terry Pratchett
If you really want to upset a witch, do her a favor which she has no means of repaying. The unfulfilled obligation will nag at her like a hangnail.
Terry Pratchett
Verence would rather cut his own leg off than put a witch in prison, since it'd save trouble in the long run and probably be less painful.
Terry Pratchett
A witch who is bored might do ANYTHING.People said things like 'we had to make our own amusements in those days' as if this signified some kind of moral worth, and perhaps it did, but the last thing you wanted a witch to do was get bored and start making her own amusements, because witches sometimes had famously erratic ideas about what was amusing.
Terry Pratchett
Most witches don’t believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don’t believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.
Terry Pratchett
My darling," she said at last, are you sure you don't mind being a mouse for the rest of your life?""I don't mind at all" I said.It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.
Roald Dahl
I know of witches who whistle at different pitches, calling things that don't have names.
Helen Oyeyemi
Witches never existed, except in people’s minds. All there was in the olden days was women and some men who believed in herbal cures and in folklore and in the wish to fly. Witches? We’re all witches in one way or another. Witches was the invention of mankind, son. We’re all witches beneath the skin.
Ian Rankin
Perhaps I am the only person who, asked whether she were a witch or not, could truthfully say, "I do not know. I do know some very strange things have happened to me, or through me."Lady Alice Rowhedge
Norah Lofts
One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that - to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to by others.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Is it that they think it a duty to be continually talking,' pursued she: 'and so never pause to think, but fill up with aimless trifles and vain repetitions when subjects of real interest fail to present themselves? - or do they really take a pleasure in such discourse?''Very likely they do,' said I; 'their shallow minds can hold no great ideas, and their light heads are carried away by trivialities that would not move a better-furnished skull; - and their only alternative to such discourse is to plunge over head and ears into the slough of scandal - which is their chief delight.
Anne Brontë
Most people have some appreciation of mathematics, just as most people can enjoy a pleasant tune; and there are probably more people really interested in mathematics than in music. Appearances suggest the contrary, but there are easy explanations. Music can be used to stimulate mass emotion, while mathematics cannot; and musical incapacity is recognized (no doubt rightly) as mildly discreditable, whereas most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity
G H Hardy
The stupidest man I ever met had a favourite saying.It was:'What do you think I am, stupid, or something?
Idries Shah
It is so pleasant to come across people more stupid than ourselves. We love them at once for being so.
Jerome K. Jerome
CUSTOMER (to their friend): God, the Famous Five titles realy were crap, weren’t they? Five Go Camping. Five Go Off in a Caravan.... If it was Five Go Down To a Crack House it might be a bit more exciting.
Jen Campbell
Men are pigs, darling. I really have every sympathy for women that they actually have to choose one of these arrogant, stupid morons to settle down with and marry.
Michael Winner
Silly,' he said with mock serenity, 'isn't a word you should ever apply to people. They may be totally stupid, in fact, but if you call them silly you've lost their vote.
Dick Francis
Was he, after all, really a bad man doing a brilliant impersonation of an idiot? It was hard to tell. The connections between stupidity and malice were so tangled and so dense.
Edward St. Aubyn
So this is what men are like. Well, that's it, then - I am going to be a lesbian.
Louise Rennison
And secretly I fell prey to the one of the besetting sins of western intellectuals, which normally I abhor: I began to experience envy of suffering, that profoundly dishonest emotion which derives from the foolish notion that only the oppressed can achieve righteousness or - more importantly - write anything profound.
Theodore Dalrymple
...It was borne in upon her audience that the outside of Jane's charming head was distinctly superior to the inside.
Agatha Christie
Most people are idiots
Christopher G. Nuttall
The sad thing about true stupidity is that you can do absolutely nothing about it.
John Cleese
That God should allow good people to be as bestially stupid as that--rose against me like a towering blasphemy.
G.K. Chesterton
Remember, when you are dead, you do not know you are dead. It is only painful for others.The same applies when you are stupid.
Ricky Gervais