Quotes by British Authors - Page 176

When I worked in astronomy, I routinely observed young college and university students working with liquid nitrogen and breathing nitrogen gas as they discharged it into the indoor environment at high altitude.
Steven Magee
Astronomy staff that routinely discharged industrial gas into the indoor environment at high altitudes did not wear oxygen deficiency monitors or protective breathing respirators.
Steven Magee
For most people the environment controls them rather than being in full control of experiences.
Steven Redhead
Look at all that rubbish," she said, watching the electric van slowly whirr from bin to bin, little men in gloves removing it all."They're taking it away," I said. "Where to?" she said. "It just gets moved around dearie, that's all.
Jeanette Winterson
The refusal to change by clinging onto superficial material wealth at any cost today, is a certain sentence of death tomorrow for all future priceless life entities we have come to love and know.
Alastair Agutter
Selling cakes and pies to raise money for research into cancer or any other health related issue, is like selling meat at a campaign to raise awareness about the environment.
Mango Wodzak
Find the environment that best suits what lifestyle is required.
Steven Redhead
There are always ways to control your environment.
Steven Redhead
The schedules are crammed with shows urging us to travel further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more, yet none of them are deemed to offend the rules, which really means that they don't offend the interests of business or the pampered sensibilities of the Aga class. The media, driven by fear and advertising, are hopelessly biased towards the consumer economy and against the biosphere.
George Monbiot
If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature.
Ronald Wright
When the last tree is cut and the last fish killed, the last river poisoned, then you will see that you can't eat money.
John May
[Jellyfish] are 97% water or something, so how much are they doing? Just give them another 3% and make them water. It's more useful.
Karl Pilkington
If we take all this actions and if it turns out not be true, we have reduced pollution and have better ways to live, the downside is very small. The other way around, and we don’t act, and it turns out to be true, then we have betrayed future generations and we don’t have the right to do that.
Tony Blair
It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.
Ian McEwan
She had forgotten his faults as we forgetthe sorrows of our departed childhood.
George Eliot
Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin. It is largely because of the books, films and reminiscences that have come between that the war of 1914-18 is now supposed to have had some tremendous, epic quality that the present one lacks.
George Orwell
I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt so wrapped up in someone that I saw only him, caring not a jot what onlookers might think. I ached with nostalgia for a younger, more responsive me, who seemed to feel things more intensely.
Catherine Sanderson
Strange, how the best moments of our lives we scarcely notice except in looking back.
Joe Abercrombie
Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy.
Evelyn Waugh
I hate being so nostalgic about the Sixties.
David Bailey
It's just odd being a guest at the wedding. When you dreamed about it for so long, even if you we're a different person, and it was years ago. Sounds so stupid. I was stupid.
Harriet Evans
She, who had never liked weddings, had allowed herself this fantasy. Her wedding day to Rory. A pretty church in Sussex, festooned with spring flowers. Rows of relatives, and her, Elle, floating down the aisle in cream silk to 'The arrival of queen Sheba', with eyes only for him... Rory, slightly rumpled, slightly scared, her love, her only one.But that wasn't how it had turned out. She knew she was OK, watching him, in fact she was happy for him, happy for Libby. But she couldn't help but feel a pang of sympathy for the girl she'd been, who'd loved him so much. She was still dreaming somewhere, hoping this day would come.
Harriet Evans
Apocalyptic saucer cults have started to spring up all over America. One small group, which has been receiving messages from outer space via Lake City housewife Mrs. Marian Keech, becomes the subject of a research team led by psychologist Leon Festinger. According to an alien entity named Sananda, the end of the world is due any day and under the most cataclysmic of circumstances. The group meets regularly to discuss the latest predictions from Sananda and the rest of the Space Brothers, all relayed to them by Mrs. Keech. Some members bake cakes in the shape of flying saucers to be consumed during their gatherings while local college football scores are closely debated.
Ken Hollings
Rocket Fever Grips Nation's Teenagers' cheers on enthusiastic newsreel, reflecting the nation's sudden reversal in attitude following the successful launch of Explorer-I into Earth orbit. Rather than being strange and threatening, outer space looks set to become the next big distraction after Elvis Presley and Davy Crockett hats. 'More and more teenagers are passing up rock and roll for a rocket role,' commentator Michael Fitzmaurice blithely remarks before very probably wishing he hadn't.
Ken Hollings
Whether the Eisenhower administration has underestimated the American people's interest in space exploration or Truman never full appreciated MacArthur, the Soviet Union's Sputnik program has created a public spectacle that even Disney and von Braun might envy.
Ken Hollings
The existence of flying saucers is unlikely to be verified by an accumulation of facts and figures, dates and times, which, if anything, tend to dull and distract the creative intelligence, obscuring more than they reveal.
Ken Hollings
The public's abiding fascination with flaying saucers, C.G. Jung suggests, 'may be a spontaneous reaction of the subconscious to fear of the apparently insoluble political situation in the world that may lead at any moment to catastrophe. At such times eyes turn heavenwards in search of help, and miraculous forebodings of a threatening or consoling nature appear from on high.
Ken Hollings
Reported sightings of UFOs are tailing off. With public interest declining and subscriptions dwindling, NICAP and APRO start to compete with each other over membership. The open-minded middle ground is stretched to breaking point, caught between the hardware of scientific detail and the extreme fantasies of contact.
Ken Hollings
We will never understand our world until we have come to terms with its future: it is the age in which we live. The Cold War depended upon internal division in order to maintain itself. Behind its various feints, games and strategies lay a perception of behavior as a form of enforced conformity. People would only do what they were prompted to do. This was the thinking that held the lonely crowd together, briefly connecting the forward thrust of material progress with the broader evolutionary curve.
Ken Hollings
If parents start to fear that monsters may have been let loose in their children's bedrooms, it may be because their children are the monsters. Consider what kind of world they are growing up in. It can all end tomorrow. Material progress no longer seems as closely meshed with human evolution as it once was; the anticipated leap into the future may not take place in a time or manner that can be so easily predicted. However, by now everyone from Richard Nixon to Chairman Mao knows that the only way to force the evolutionary curve to bend your way is by throwing larger numbers at it.
Ken Hollings
These were the kids who would take LSD for recreational purposes, who relied upon tape recorders to supply the weird studio effects their music required and who could repeat the cosmic wisdom of the Space Brothers as if it were the Pledge of Allegiance. Brought up on space heroes and super beings, as revealed to them in comic books and TV shows, the whole galaxy was their birthright, just as Mad magazine and cheap B-movies had shown them hows stupid and flimsy a construct daily life could be. To the subtle dismay of their parents, this was a generation capable of thinking the unthinkable as a matter of course. That their grand cosmological adventure should come to an end just as Neil Armstrong succeeded in bringing Suburbia to the Moon is another story and it will have to wait for another time.
Ken Hollings
It is not settled happiness but momentary joy that glorifies the past.
C.S. Lewis
She sighed, she snored, not that she was asleep, only drowsy and heavy, drowsy and heavy, like a field of clover in the sunshine this hot July day, with the bees going round and about and the yellow butterflies.
Virginia Woolf
The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story - of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It's like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you - and it can't, and it shouldn't, because something IS missing. That isn't of its nature negative. The missing part, the missing past, can be an opening, not a void. It can be an entry as well as an exit. It is the fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of Braille.
Jeanette Winterson
Long gone was the cheery welcome of the seaside hotelier, replaced by a weary nostalgia for the good old days.
Alan Gibbons
Anthony imagined a time before all that - a time when people sipped Earl Grey tea on a breeze cooled veranda and looked out upon endless countryside.
Alan Gibbons
Peter is suffering from an attack of nostalgia, she knows the symptoms. She mustn't join in otherwise she'll be swept away too, drowning in a quicksand of the past.
Elly Griffiths
Aegean Islands 1940-41Where white stares, smokes or breaks,Thread white, white of plaster and of foam,Where sea like a wall falls;Ribbed, lionish coast,The stony islands which blow into my mindMore often than I imagine my grassy home;To sun one's bones beside theExplosive, crushed-blue, nostril-opening sea(The weaving sea, splintered with sails and foam,Familiar of famous and deserted harbours,Of coins with dolphins on and fallen pillars.)To know the gear and skill of sailing,The drenching race for home and the sail-white houses,Stories of Turks and smoky ikons,Cry of the bagpipe, treadingOf the peasant dancers;The dark breadThe island wine and the sweet dishes;All these were elements in a happinessMore distant now than any date like '40,A. D. or B. C., ever can express.
Bernard Spencer
When the north wind blew across the tar ponds, voices were carried away.
Jonathan Campbell
What are days for?Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over.They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days?Ah, solving that questionBrings the priest and the doctor In their long coatsRunning over the fields.
Philip Larkin
It may be that writers in my position,exiles, or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutilated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must do in the knowledge - which gives rise to profound uncertainties- that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost, that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.
Salman Rushdie
The glories of the past compensated for the imperfections of the present.
Margaret MacMillan
Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves?
Ford Madox Ford
I had intended to visit the haunting ground of my school days. Subconsciously I wanted to be in a place where anxiety, responsibility and financial burden had yet to surface.
Joe Cawley
When shall I cease to regret you! – When learn to feel a home elsewhere! – Oh! Happy house, could you know what I suffer in now viewing you from this spot, from whence perhaps I may view you no more! – And you, ye well-known trees! – but you will continue the same. – No leaf will decay because we are removed, nor any branch become motionless although we can observe you no longer! – No; you will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any change in those who walk under your shade! – But who will remain to enjoy you?
Jane Austen
There was an irony and a paradox here: Franco thought of Pontito constantly, saw it in fantasy, depicted it, as infinitely desirable – and yet he had a profound reluctance to return. But it is precisely such a paradox that lies at the heart of nostalgia – for nostalgia is about a fantasy that never takes place, one that maintains itself by not being fulfilled. And yet such fantasies are not just idle daydreams or fancies; they press toward some fulfillment, but an indirect one - the fulfillment of art. These, at least, are the terms that D. Geahchan, the French psychoanalyst, has used. With reference in particular to the greatest of nostalgies, Proust, the psychoanalyst David Werman speaks of an 'aesthetic crystallization of nostalgia' - nostalgia raised to the level of art and myth.
Oliver Sacks
I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It's full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being 'objective.' Nostalgia for what? I don't know. Because I'd rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the 'Anna' of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
Doris Lessing
I think it's my memory of this period that makes me fantasise about living in the country. In reality I know there would be no shops and I would kill myself.
Frankie Boyle
Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world.
Simon Reynolds
Journey to the end of day, Come the fire-fly, Come the moon; Say a prayer for God's good grace And sleep with lore upon your face.
Clive Barker
Dark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children.
China Miéville
You may say, But wasn't this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.
Julian Barnes
And perhaps we have reason to be very grateful that, both as children and long afterwards, we are never allowed to guess how the absorbing pursuit of the moment will appear, not only to others, but to ourselves, a very short time hence.
Kenneth Grahame
PatriotismBreathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, 'This is my own, my native land!' Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd As home his footsteps he hath turn'dFrom wandering on a foreign strand? If such there breathe, go, mark him well; For him no Minstrel raptures swell; High though his titles, proud his name, Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;Despite those titles, power, and pelf, The wretch, concentred all in self, Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, shall go down To the vile dust from whence he sprung,Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung.
Walter Scott
The past is for learning from and letting go. You can't revisit it. It vanishes.
Adele Parks
Have you ever wondered how nostalgia isn"t what it used to be?
Jasper Fforde
I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. I do not believe that, on the balance, religious belief has been a force for good. Although I am prepared to admit that in certain times and places it has had some good effects, I regard it as belonging to the infancy of human reason, and to a stage of development which we are now outgrowing.
Bertrand Russell
It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. It is clear also that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search.
Bertrand Russell
Milena found Cilia outside, holding her bamboo box. Milena hugged her. ‘I’m sorry about your shins,’ she said. Milena lifted the lid of the box, and saw it, the precious paper, ruled in staves. People were generous. Milena had never believed that.
Geoff Ryman
They are not insincere when they say that they believe these things. They do believe them, as people believe what they have always heard lauded and never discussed. But in the sense of that living belief which regulates conduct, they believe these doctrines just up to the point to which it is usual to act upon them.
John Stuart Mill