Quotes by British Authors - Page 19

No journey out of grief was straightforward. There would be good days and bad days.
Jojo Moyes
Like Mom, Zoe thought–like Mom used to. And that’s where they differed, for Zoe wrote quiet poetry suffused with twilight and questions. It’s not even good poetry, she thought. I don’t have talent, it’s her. I should be the one ill; she has so much to offer, so much life. “You’re a dark one,” her mother said sometimes with amused wonder. “You’re a mystery.
Annette Curtis Klause
It is not triumph which defines a man, but tragedy. Triumph always brings out the best in men, but tragedy shows us what we are made of.
Jocelyn Murray
The beauties of the North seemed to be intensified by the loss we had experienced there, and they drew us back to them.
David Almond
Life becomes involuntary repetitive when you suffer from short term memory loss.
Steven Magee
God forgives us, as—when—we forgive them who injure us—and ourselves. These last weeks I think I have understood what many times in the past I thought I knew—but we never know—we never reach the end of understanding—the understanding of God—the mystery of his love...
Lucy Beckett
The Queen (Victoria) wrote generously to her mother, 'I quite understand your feelings on the occasion of Sir John Conroy's death. . . I will not speak of the past and the many sufferings he entailed on us by creating divisions between you and me which could never have existed otherwise, they are buried with him.. For his poor wife and children I am truly sorry." Thanking the Queen for her letter the Duchess of Kent wrote 'Yes, Sir John Conroy's death was a most painful shock. I shall not try and excuse the many errors that unfortunate man committed, but it would be very unjust if I allowed all the blame to be thrown on him. I am in justice bound to accuse myself. . . I erred in believing blindly, in acting with out refection. . . I allowed myself unintentionally to be led led to hurt you, my dearest child, for whom I would have given at every moment my life! Refection came always too late, but not the deserved punishment! My sufferings were great, very great. God be praised that those terrible times are gone by and that only death can separate me from you My beloved Victoria.
Cecil Woodham-Smith
On the canvas of life,Every sweep of the brush matters,Counts for something…
Scott Hastie
I am sad, like the hot dust on the streetsAnd the music of fresh fallen leavesCaught in a sliding summer breeze.
Scott Hastie
For myself, I favored the abstract. I collected not just obsolete terms and words, but ideas.
Jasper Fforde
She said, 'It is filled with all the words for how I want you.
Sarah Waters
We never stop loving,No matter what we say,because we say just empty words,to keep our hurt away.
Anthony T.Hincks
Jess couldn't stop spitting out words, because they were words like blades to hurt, and if she swallowed them, she'd be scraped hollow.
Helen Oyeyemi
The parrot had a range of phrases. His own name ('Niko, Niko'), the name of his original owner and now 'Stavros'. Occasionally he would also say 'Panagia mou', which could be an expression of piety but also a gentle expletive, depending on how it was said. With the parrot it was hard to tell. It did not sound pious.
Victoria Hislop
She had thought of literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) as something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightning; something errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold, literature was an elderly gentleman in a grey suit talking about duchesses…Orlando then came to the conclusion (opening half-a-dozen books)…that it would be impolitic in the extreme to wrap a ten-pound note round the sugar tongs when Miss Christina Rossetti came to tea…next (here were half-a-dozen invitations to celebrate centenaries by dining) that literature since it all these dinners must be growing very corpulent; next (she was invited to a score of lectures on the Influence of this upon that; the Classical revival; the Romantic survival, and other titles of the same engaging kind) that literature since it listened to all these lectures must be growing very dry; next (here she attended a reception given by a peeress) that literature since it wore all those fur tippets must be growing very respectable; next (here she visited Carlyle’s sound-proof room at Chelsea) that genius since it needed all this coddling must be growing very delicate…
Virginia Woolf
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, and of the heart.
Salman Rushdie
Publishers are businesses and I don’t blame them for that. If they didn’t make money by publishing books, there wouldn’t be any books.
Johnny Rich
The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof.
Ashley Montagu
Believe in the potential of obtaining or achieving a desire.
Steven Redhead
Civilization is always threatened from below, by patterns of belief and emotion that may once have been useful to our ancestors, but that are useful no longer.
Roger Scruton
I do not believe in God. It seems to me that theists of all kinds have very largely failed to make their concept of a deity intelligible; and to the extent that they have made it intelligible, they have given us no reason to think that anything answers to it.
A.J. Ayer
For as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it’s true or not.
Neil Gaiman
The future begins today.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Q: When is the perfect time? A: Who can say, but probably somewhere between haste and delay - and it's usually most wise to start today.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like our Earth.
Christopher Wren
Each age selects its own geniuses from the past to suit its own needs. It's always been that way.
Seb Kirby
The most obvious and the most distinctive features of the History of Civilisation, during the last fifty years, is the wonderful increase of industrial production by the application of machinery, the improvement of old technical processes and the invention of new ones, accompanied by an even more remarkable development of old and new means of locomotion and intercommunication. By this rapid and vast multiplication of the commodities and conveniences of existence, the general standard of comfort has been raised, the ravages of pestilence and famine have been checked, and the natural obstacles, which time and space offer to mutual intercourse, have been reduced in a manner, and to an extent, unknown to former ages. The diminution or removal of local ignorance and prejudice, the creation of common interests among the most widely separated peoples, and the strengthening of the forces of the organisation of the commonwealth against those of political or social anarchy, thus effected, have exerted an influence on the present and future fortunes of mankind the full significance of which may be divined, but cannot, as yet, be estimated at its full value.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Learn from the past, log the lessons from the past, butleave the past!
Elizabeth George
All life is preoccupied with death. Death is the only certain future. Yet in the face of reason, everyone holds out hope for the highly improbable.
Johnny Rich
I grew up in an era that was a golden age of the blockbuster, when something we might call a family film could have universal appeal. That's something I want to see again. In terms of the tone of the film, it looks at where we are as a people and has a universality about human experience.
Christopher J. Nolan
To be honest, I’ve always made films and I never really stopped, starting with little stop-motion experiments using my dad’s Super 8 camera. In my mind, it’s all one big continuum of filmmaking and I’ve never changed.
Christopher J. Nolan
Dolorita Hunsickle says that the chipmunks tell your fortune if you catch them but I never did. She says a chipmunk told her she would grow up to be a famous ballerina and that she would die of consumption unloved in a boardinghouse in Prague.
Neil Gaiman
Don't you be thinking,' she says, 'on things that are done and can't be changed. All right, dear girl? You think of the time to come.
Sarah Waters
The future of the next generation relies on astronomers obtaining a full understanding ofthe rapidly changing human environmental conditions and the halting of biologically toxic corporategovernment policies. The overloading of the electromagnetic environment is one of these disastrouspolicies that must stop.
Steven Magee
In 1949, neurologist Egas Moniz (1874-1955) received a Nobel Prize for his discovery of ‘the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses’. Today, prefrontal leucotomy is derided as a barbaric treatment from a much darker age, and it is to be hoped that, one day, so too might antipsychotic drugs.
Neel Burton
There is so much to say about a past. It's a vein of gold through a mountain, leading to an incontrovertible stone heart of truth. But the future is a horizon - a faintly visible line that will promise much, and always remain to far away to touch.
Aliya Whiteley
You ask a lot of little kids today what they want to be when they grow up and they say "I want to be famous." You ask them for what reason and they don't know or care. I think Andy Warhol got it wrong: in the future so many people are going to become famous that one day everybody will end up being anonymous for fifteen minutes.
Banksy
Unfortunately, the board of directors that the middle managers report to generally make them aggressive. Imagine being hired into a company and then being told that you have to ignore the emerging health and safety issues (This is illegal!) and not inform the workers that the system is known to be dangerous (This is illegal!). You have two options: To go to jail for illegal activities sometime in the future, or to lose your job now and have all your USA workplace rights removed for recognizing the illegal activities that your Directors want you to engage in. Welcome to the corporate America management team!
Steven Magee
He could not afford to indulge misery, to live in the past and stumble through life facing backwards.
Jonathan Renshaw
Numbers and more numbers...the future of mankind has come down to decimals. I guess you will figure that out, eventually.
Anthony T.Hincks
Welcome to Hollywood. Here you can be whatever you want! That's the secret of American success! Fake it till you make it!
Lily Amis
It is the artist who tries to gradually accustom people to the possibilities of a better state of things.
Catherine Amy Dawson Scott
Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.
Jeanette Winterson
I admit to being prone to deep thinking, which – given that I’m emerging from dark times – can take me to some very sombre or profound places. But this is no bad thing. I always resurface wiser and with a way of viewing things that is different to before.
Fennel Hudson
Over-mastered by some thoughts, I yeelded an inckie tribute unto them.
Philip Sidney
This is the crux of being a Creative Mother. It is more than how many jumpers you have knitted, or having an exhibition in a fancy gallery, or a bookshelf of your own books. It is about the act of living authentically whilst honoring your mother self and creative self. About saying yes to life, every part of your life, and finding how to weave them all together.
Lucy H. Pearce
The misfortune of a young man who returns to his native land after years away is that he finds his native land foreign; whereas the lands he left behind remain for ever like a mirage in his mind.However, misfortune can itself sow seeds of creativity.---- Afterword to "Hothouse" Brian Aldiss
Brian W. Aldiss
You have the right to chose your destiny, otherwise you will be left to live someone else's idea of what your life should be.
Steven Redhead
Nothing in life is a foregone conclusion unless and until it is foregone and concluded
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Emotion,' she told him, 'is not a reliable guide for our words and actions.''There you are wrong,' he said. 'Deep, true emotion is our surest guide. We make our greatest mistake when we allow our heads to rules ours hearts.''Emotion is our human weakness.,' she said, 'reason our strength.''And love,' he said, 'is our destiny.
Mary Balogh
Who am I? The shell-selling Lace girl, the attendant of Lady Arilou, Mother Govrie’s other daughter, the thing of dust, the victim, the revenger, the diplomat, the crowd-witch, the killer, the rescuer, the pirate?I am anything I wish to be. The world cannot choose for me. No, it is for me to choose what the world shall be.
Frances Hardinge
ego promenades, flounces, pushes in unwanted places, trips, stands on others, whereas a sense of destiny grounds - you just do what you do
Jay Woodman
the only source whence any thing like consolation or composure could be drawn, was in the resolution of her own better conduct, and the hope that, however inferior in spirit and gaiety might be the following and every future winter of her life to the past, it would yet find her more rational, more acquainted with herself, and leave her less to regret when it were gone.
Jane Austen
Wherever sufficiently numerous series of the remains of any given group, which has endured for a long space of time, are carefully examined, their morphological relations are never in discordance with the requirements of the doctrine of evolution, and often afford convincing evidence of it. At the same time, it has been shown that certain forms persist with very little change, from the oldest to the newest fossiliferous formations; and thus show that progressive development is a contingent, and not a necessary result, of the nature of living matter.
Thomas Henry Huxley
He wore his medals. He had a surprising number of them, the real kind, not the ones you got for turning up. Although turning up was no mean thing, some days.
Nick Harkaway
You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.
Neil Gaiman
Environmental radiation research is the rent I pay for living on this planet.
Steven Magee
Emma felt frightened, apprehensive, yes, but also elated and excited, her feelings all tumbled and mixed together like a stew of varied ingredients tossed into the same pot. She was aware of the blood coursing through her veins, the beat of her heart, the breath in her lungs. Was aware, too, of that clenched knot that hung in the pit of her stomach. This was what it was to be alive, to be at the edge, facing survival eye to eye, knowing, KNOWING, you would win.
Helen Hollick
We have the greatest power through love that can be known. It overcomes everything with its fierce and steady truth, if you can continue to stand in it.You can call love to you, directly from the original stream of consciousness, anytime you feel weak or fearful, and you will be given strength and courage.You can call love to you, directly from the original stream of consciousness, anytime you feel sad or alone, and you will feel embraced and comforted.Call love to you if you feel vulnerable. Feel its purity come to you from the universe and flow round you like a miraculous mother cradling its innocent child.Breathe love in. Say to yourself as you breathe deeply “I love. I am loved.” Say it over and over as you breathe it into yourself and out to the universe, until you really feel and believe that you ARE LOVE.Feel love pour into your lungs as you breathe. Feel it circulate round your body to fill every organ, every limb, and every cell. Vibrate with its radiance, and share it.
Jay Woodman
The humanitarian philosophies that have been developed (sometimes under some religious banner and invariably in the face of religious opposition) are human inventions, as the name implies - and our species deserves the credit. I am a devout atheist - nothing else makes any sense to me and I must admit to being bewildered by those, who in the face of what appears so obvious, still believe in a mystical creator. However I can see that the promise of infinite immortality is a more palatable proposition than the absolute certainty of finite mortality which those of us who are subject to free thought (as opposed to free will) have to look forward to and many may not have the strength of character to accept it.Thus I am a supporter of Amnesty International, a humanist and an atheist. I believe in a secular, democratic society in which women and men have total equality, and individuals can pursue their lives as they wish, free of constraints - religious or otherwise. I feel that the difficult ethical and social problems which invariably arise must be solved, as best they can, by discussion and am opposed to the crude simplistic application of dogmatic rules invented in past millennia and ascribed to a plethora of mystical creators - or the latest invention; a single creator masquerading under a plethora of pseudonyms. Organisations which seek political influence by co-ordinated effort disturb me and thus I believe religious and related pressure groups which operate in this way are acting antidemocratically and should play no part in politics. I also have problems with those who preach racist and related ideologies which seem almost indistinguishable from nationalism, patriotism and religious conviction.
Harry W. Kroto