Quotes by British Authors - Page 183

Feeble human body, hey?” Mikael said it in the way that he had, that made everything sound slightly naughty and sexual. I aimed three quick jabs at his head, which wiped the innuendo off his face.
Melanie Cusick-Jones
Sometimes you need to loose in order to win.
Adele Rose
I can’t decide if Burt and Crazel are made for each other or if their joint mentalism could cause a tsunami.”Tea – Book 2 “Having it
Jamie Scallion
Robin Hood or my Robyn Hood - a legendary character known throughout the world. Why? Essentially the character is on the side of the poor, the oppressed, those who live in a society with very limited recourse to justice. Hence the attraction of an heroic figure who identifies with the poor and the needy and has the courage and ability to solve the problems. Often at the point of an arrow or sword? Why not. That gives the hero character an adventurous dimension to their actions.
John Reynolds
I was too proud to show him how hurt I was.
Kate le Vann
When our eyes made contact it was like being slapped, I just wanted to recoil
Kate le Vann
There is a coherent plan to the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for.
Fred Hoyle
What is the meaning of life?Life has the meaning that you give it.
Steven Redhead
To sit and contemplate - to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are.
Virginia Woolf
Love is a connection with another person, either through birth or through something else that I cannot even explain. It is often just an attraction at first. But it goes far deeper than that. It is a determination to care for the other person no matter what and to allow oneself to be cared for in return. It is a commitment to make the other happy and to be happy oneself. It is not possessive, but neither is it a victim. And it does not always bring happiness. Often it brings a great deal of pain, especially when the beloved is suffering and one feels impotent to comfort. It is what life is all about. It is openness and trust and vulnerability.
Mary Balogh
There are essentially two questions in life - a spiritual question and a material question. The spiritual question is 'Who am I?' The material question is 'What am I to do with my life?' One leads to the other.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
I wasn't getting better. I was getting worse.I did not go to the doctor because I didn't want pills. If this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. If this was the rest of my life I could not live.
Jeanette Winterson
In a sane world I should be a great man; as things are, in this curious establishment, I am nothing at all; to all intents and purposes I don't exist. I am just a Vox et preaterea nihil.
Aldous Huxley
Nor should they be, but everyone needs to feel they're part of something worthwhile. That, in the last analysis, their life has some meaning in a larger context. The questions is what am I part of? What have I done?
Julian Fellowes
It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words or their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his own heart. Always his course had been swayed by what he thought he should do and never by what he wanted with his whole soul to do. […] He had lived always in the future, and the present always, always had slopped through his fingers. His ideals? He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.
W Somerset Maugham
In every remark he found a meaning, but not always the true meaning, and his life, though vivid, was largely a dream.
E.M. Forster
It's all you can say, when the end comes: 'I did not waste my time.' I think that matters. I think it may be all that matters.
Conn Iggulden
Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?" "I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is.
Douglas Adams
Such is life, marked by the ticking of the clock and the call of the alarm until the day it all falls into perpetual silence. For most of us, certainly for this boy, life is not composed of great deeds, but of small actions, and that’s okay. It’s the best I can give and I like it this way.
Gillibran Brown
I suppose what I really am is restless. I want to go everywhere, see everything, do everything. I want to find something. Yes, that's it, I want to find something.
Agatha Christie
The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat in the window which opened on the terrace), that the men were happily talking; this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then, "How's that? How's that?" of the children playing cricket, had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, "I am guarding you––I am your support," but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow––this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.
Virginia Woolf
Do not weep. Being is enough. There, that is all. I am done...
Alan Moore
Every layer of complexity creates greater distance from life’s simple truths.
Fennel Hudson
And I think a long time ago there were big stories. Stories so big you could live your whole life in them. The Powerful Hands of the Gods and Fate. The Journey to Enlightenment. The March of Socialism. But they all died or the world grew up or grew senile or forgot them, so now we're making up our own stories. Little stories. But we've each got one.
Mark Ravenhill
Why endure verticality when you can be horizontal?
Tibor Fischer
If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good to come nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what I am here for and how in these circumstances I must conduct myself. Now the answer to one of these questions is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for living and life has no meaning. We are here, inhabitants for a little while of a small planet, revolving around a minor star which is in turn one of unnumbered galaxies... The astronomer tells us.... this planet will eventually reach a condition when living things can no longer exist upon it and at long last the universe will attain that final state of equilibrium in which nothing more can happen. Aeons and aeons before this man will have disappeared. Is it possible to suppose that it will matter then that he ever existed? He will have been a chapter in the history of the universe as pointless as the chapter in which is written the life stories of the strange creatures that inhabited the primeval earth.
W Somerset Maugham
A few years ago a practising Harley Street psychiatrist, who was dabbling in Buddhism, came to see me. I opened the conversation by saying 'At some time in his life, every intelligent man questions himself about the purpose of his existence.' Immediately, and with the most manifest disapproval, the psychiatrist replied 'Anybody who thinks such thoughts is mentally diseased.' Thus with a single gesture, he swept half-a-dozen major philosophers (some of whom have held chairs in universities—which guarantees their respectability if not their philosophy) into the lunatic asylum—the criminal lunatic asylum, to judge from his tone. I have never seen a man in such a funk.
Nanavira Thera
All life is a jest, Imhotep - and it is death who laughs last. Do you not hear it at every feast? Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die.
Agatha Christie
A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce - we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has done away with religion but not with religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives - money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough.
Jeanette Winterson
Ye know full well that the meaning of life is to find your gift. To find your gift is happiness. Never tae find it is misery.
Terry Pratchett
What is the meaning of it, Watson? said Holmes solemnly as he laid down the paper. "What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.
Arthur Conan Doyle
...‘All this suffering,’ I said, ‘and nothing but greed and violence to build on when the war is over.’‘Have another soda-mint,’ said Charles.I had one. Then I said, ‘Why are we here? That’s what I don’t understand. Why be here at all when it all has to be so beastly?’‘I suppose we just came, like mould on cheese.’‘Then why do we want to be happy? Mould on cheese doesn’t want to be happy.’ ...
Joyce Dennys
Anyone can get a job, but do you have a purpose?
Tom Butler-Bowdon
However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
Stanley Kubrick
We’re on this planet for too short a time. And at the end of the day, what’s more important? Knowing that a few meaningless figures balanced—or knowing that you were the person you wanted to be?
Sophie Kinsella
The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.
W Somerset Maugham
...and to-morrow looked in my face more steadily than I could look at it
Charles Dickens
I shall expect my husband to have no pleasures but what he shares with me; and if his greatest pleasure of all is not the enjoyment of my company - why - it will be the worse for him - that's all.''If such are your expectations of matrimony, Esther, you must, indeed, be careful whom you marry - or rather, you must avoid it altogether.
Anne Brontë
Water shrinks wool, urgency shrinks time.Shrinkage may be an advantage or the reverse, according to expectation.
Idries Shah
Does your reality match your expectations? If not it's time to change either your expectations or your reality.
Steven Redhead
All this, sadly enough, is truer of the more educated, higher-income, professional families. It is here that the competition is the greatest, the expectations most elevated. If the boy would be happier as a telephone linesman or a forest ranger, he is in a hopeless bind. His goals have been set for him by his milieu, and he cannot be his own man; so he simply refuses to play the game. He "does not try.
Sydney J. Harris
Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.
V.S. Naipaul
My father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret.
Evelyn Waugh
He's the man we were in search of, that's true, and yet he's not the man we were in search of. For the man we were in search of was not the man we wanted.
Thomas Hardy
People who expect too much are always disappointed. You would do well to remember that, my boy.
Charmian Hussey
The man who said, "Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed," put the eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth "Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised." The man who expects nothing sees redder roses than common men can see, and greener grass, and a more startling sun. Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall possess the cities and the mountains; blessed is the meek, for he shall inhereit the earth. Until we realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are.
G.K. Chesterton
Expect the unexpected like a chain smoking, hard drinking, monochrome world dwelling Noir Detective
Dean Cavanagh
Nothing in life or love slipped easily into the tidy little box of his expectations.
Dan Sofer
Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike, reverential; which an old woman could take from a young man without loss of dignity, and woe betide the girl––pray Heaven it was none of her daughters!––who did not feel the worth of it, and all that it implied, to the marrow of her bones!
Virginia Woolf
The thought of being whoever I want is a terrifying thing, because I have only ever been who everyone has wanted me to be.
Dianna Hardy
How did the Prince Charming of my childhood turn out to be such a crushing disappointment? Maybe he wasn't Prince Charming in the first place.
Paige Toon
And certainly both Horses were doing, if not all they could, all they thought they could; which is not quite the same thing.
C.S. Lewis
She’d struck Esk once before – the blow a baby gets to introduce it to the world and give it a rough idea of what to expect from life.
Terry Pratchett
One must not expect every thing.
Jane Austen
One forgets that part of one's performance is one's history—or sometimes the lack of it. You're playing against what an audience knows, what they expect. This seems to be true of all performers; there's baggage that gets carried into the venue that we can't see.
David Byrne
That was the trouble with people in general: they were surprisingly unrealistic in their expectations.
Alexander McCall Smith
I was sixteen, and I honestly believed I was due a love story.
Sara Barnard
we exceeded expectations just by turning up for the exams." - George Weasly
J.K. Rowling
On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Charles Babbage
I can't imagine going on when there are no more expectations.
Edith Evans