Quotes by British Authors - Page 169

If you think that your hardest problem is what color shoes to wear.You should get out more!
Anthony T.Hincks
It's when I'm feeling blue that I think of my little color pink.
Anthony T.Hincks
Sometimes I think that we're the aliens.
Anthony T.Hincks
Censorship: It allows you not to think for yourself.
Anthony T.Hincks
The problem with doing cutting edge research is that the masses think that you are nuts!
Steven Magee
Think of exercise as medicine and take your daily prescription.
Steven Magee
I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.
Henry James
And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild struggling to push himself forwards! It was just insanity. And it was getting worse, really maniacal.Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at least, Clifford was shifting his grip from her on to Mrs Bolton. He did not know it. Like many insane people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was not aware of, the great desert tracts in his consciousness.
D.H. Lawrence
It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.
Ian McEwan
Each generation ... rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as 'the lunatic fringe.
Christopher Hill
Ridcully sighed.'All right, you fellows,' he said. 'No magic at Table, you know the rules. Who's playing silly buggers?'The other senior wizards stared at him.'I, I, I don't think we can play it any more,' said the Bursar, who at the moment was only occasionally bouncing off the sides of sanity, 'I, I, I think we lost some of the pieces...
Terry Pratchett
She had always enjoyed the carte blanche accorded to mobsters, aristocrats, circus clowns, and lunatics
Simon Doonan
But in Ward 9 the air had a real quality, it clamped itself over your face like a pad of cotton wool, soaked through with the sweet chloroform of utter sadness. - Ward 9
Will Self
If human equality is to be for ever averted — if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently — then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.
George Orwell
Yes," Mustapha Mond was saying, "that's another item in the cost of stability. It isn't only art that's incompatible with happiness; it's also science. Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.
Aldous Huxley
...[I]f I don't get going soon, the whole impetus may die---and if that happens, well, I really shall consider a long, restful plunge into insanity. Sometimes the abyss yawns very attractively.
Dodie Smith
He didn't seem conventionally insane in any way that I could understand. But there was no way of comprehending him. In some eerie and fundamental way, he didn't appear to belong to our world. But that didn't seem the same as being mad.
Marcel Theroux
Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.
Philip Larkin
There is already enough chattering nonsense on the ground. Do we really need aviaries in pressurised tin cans at 30,000 feet as well ?
Alex Morritt
Men who leave their mark on the world are very often those who, being gifted and full of nervous power, are at the same time haunted and driven by a dominant idea, and are therefore within a measurable distance of insanity.
Francis Galton
What a thing it is to have music that plays your terrible thoughts. I imagined that one piece could drive more delicate women than myself to insanity.
Jackie Kay
That's what everyone forgets these days: there's a fine line between sanity and insanity. Lots of people are on the edge. We can't be in perfect balance all the time.
Poppy Adams
Religious fanaticism is the most dangerous form of insanity.
Robert Graves
Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming?
Charles Dickens
Insanity is a gradual process - don't rush it.
Douglas Adams
A psychologist would probably diagnose insanity for a nation that spends more on its military than the next 8 nations combined, while its poor are starving.
Steven Magee
At night I locked my bedroom door, because [my father] could not sleep and would insist on talking to me, endlessly, without making sense. But there was a small window over the door which could not be locked. One night I woke up to see him slithering through the tiny aperture and jumping nimbly to the floor. But he paid no attention to me. He aimlessly picked up various pieces of heavy mahogany furniture and let them drop with seemingly little effort. In his insanity he had become superhumanly agile and powerful. Staying with him was a nightmare.
Jung Chang
To be sure, this is what generally happens when one eats cake; but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.
Lewis Carroll
I regard the USA mass population routinely flip-flopping between the Republican and Democratic parties as a form of insanity.
Steven Magee
People who would refuse to share their bread shared their insanity instead.-Three Daughters of Eve
Elif Shafak
have you taken leave of your senses
Charles Dickens
The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the [lunatic] is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.
G.K. Chesterton
By all means. Swords have ever been the best servants of crazy men.
Piers Anthony
When one contemplates the streak of insanity running through human history, it appears highly probable that homo sapiens is a biological freak, the result of some remarkable mistake in the evolutionary process. The ancient doctrine of original sin, variants of which occur independently in the mythologies of diverse cultures, could be a reflection of man's awareness of his own inadequacy, of the intuitive hunch that somewhere along the line of his ascent something has gone wrong.
Arthur Koestler
The only really sane person in there is Igor, and possibly the turnip. And I'm not sure about the turnip.
Terry Pratchett
This is a lovely party," said the Bursar to a chair, "I wish I was here.
Terry Pratchett
I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.
G.K. Chesterton
Do you know why you’re here? Shall I tell you why we brought you here? To cure you.To make you sane.
George Orwell
He laughed a little, in an odd, nervous kind of way. "Because if I don't get going soon, the whole impetus may die--and if that happens, well, I really shall consider a long, restful plunge into insanity. Sometimes the abyss yawns very attractively.
Dodie Smith
Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
George Eliot
and then I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks.
Douglas Adams
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun; today, to believe the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.
George Orwell
There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness - seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized.
Zoë Heller
I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don't want to be sane.
Neil Gaiman
Did I do anything last night that suggested I was sane?
Terry Pratchett
Insanity is catching.
Terry Pratchett
Innocence is a kind of insanity
Graham Greene
He took my hand and held it against his chest, "Feel that? It beats for you.
Karli Perrin
You’re his normality. You’re a part of him, and he is a part of you. That’s what makes this frightening, but that’s what makes it right.
Becky Wicks
Love isn't all sparks and firecrackers. Sometimes it’s more subtle than that.
Becky Wicks
I want to hear one more of your storiesTangle up in your dreams, give up the fight‘Pour one more glass of that wineAnd I might not go home tonight...
Becky Wicks
She really liked you, Noah,''Yeah, well, maybe I'm just an asshole.'I realize my hand is still in his hair and I retract it quickly. He grabs it, holds it against him. You're not an asshole I'm thinking, but for some reason I can't say it. It would be like admitting something else; like the fact that he's an asshole to every girl who likes him, but never to me. And then I'd have to really think about why that is and that's not something I'll ever be comfortable with at all, even though his eyes are like maps and his words are like anchors and his songs are like personal messages and I love all that.- Chloe
Becky Wicks
Okay, on my first night, he tried to chat me up. You know how the story goes. ‘You have the most beautiful eyes, I’m very rich, want to see my bedroom?’ Blah, blah, blah.”“And because you turned him down, he’s more determined than ever,” Will guessed, with amazing accuracy. “You did turn him down, right?”“Of course,” I told him, insulted by the insinuation I would drop my knickers for a glass of wine. “Do you think I’d risk my job for a quick tumble in the sheets with him?
Kyra Lennon
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that I’d stumbled across the kind of man I used to find irresistible, or that he’d managed to stare right inside my head to locate my weaknesses. The thrill of being wanted while pretending not to be interested was a game I’d played over and over during my youth. I’d thrived on it. I’d done more than my share of getting mixed up with men who were all ego and muscles, and Radleigh McCoy reminded me exactly why I’d given them up. Danger, the chase. It was never worth the pain in the end.Unfortunately, my body hadn’t got the memo yet.
Kyra Lennon
The way to Braden's heart is through his dick. It's just wrapped up in latex and usually between some girl's legs.
Emma Hart
At dawn the waves looked like mountain ranges tipped with gold as sunbeams slanted low under burgundy clouds.
David Mitchell
A mile below the lowest cloud, rock breaches water and the sea begins.It has been given many names. Each inlet and bay and stream has been classified as if it were discrete. But it is one thing, where borders are absurd. It fills the space between stones and sand, curling around coastlines and filling trenches between the continents.
China Miéville
Pour, varlet, pour the waterThe water steaming hot!A spoonful for each man of usAnother for the pot!
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Water - a thoroughly underrated drink.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Meltwater (from the book Blue Bridge)Up here. A faceLoses its linesI look to seeThe colour of your eyes …They have turnedTo water.I lean forwardTo catchThe scent of your hair –All I smell is heather.I touch your handAnd all I feel is earth and stones.There is nothing leftBut the hillside’s breastYour flesh and bonesHave vanished.
Jay Woodman