Quotes by British Authors - Page 191

Being a critic is a terrific method for killing your love of art
David Toop
As soon seek roses in December, ice in June,Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaffBelieve a woman or an epitaphOr any other thing that’s falseBefore you trust in critics.
George Gordon Byron
[If] you are ready enough to pull my knitting to pieces, but provide none of your own, the only sock is a sock in the jaw!
J.R. Ackerley
Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.
Virginia Woolf
How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.
Benjamin Disraeli
You sounded like Dolly parton on helium."(After kristy lee cook of season 7 on american idol,sang her country rendition of the Beatles'"Eight Days A Week.)
Simon Cowell
It was like orderin a hamburger and getting only the buns"(After Brooke White of season 7 on american idol sang the song 'Hero'by Mariah Carey)
Simon Cowell
People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.
W Somerset Maugham
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things. If it is heeded in time, danger may be averted; if it is suppressed, a fatal distemper may dev
Winston S. Churchill
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.
Winston S. Churchill
Anyhow, whether undergraduate or shop boy, man or woman, it must come as a shock about the age of twenty—the world of the elderly—thrown up in such black outline upon what we are; upon the reality; the moors and Byron; the sea and the lighthouse; the sheep’s jaw with the yellow teeth in it; upon the obstinate irrepressible conviction which makes youth so intolerably disagreeable—“I am what I am, and intend to be it,” for which there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one for himself. The Plumers will try to prevent him from making it. Wells and Shaw and the serious sixpenny weeklies will sit on its head.
Virginia Woolf
It is the absence of hope, which equals the despair that is the punishment.
James Fox
You can't just sit in a corner weeping or you'll die.
Elizabeth Wein
Idolatry involves putting the things we love in the place of God or seeing God as a means of getting the things that we want, and that's the second great struggle of our lives.
Colin S. Smith
Ruefully admitting we can neither remain children nor all become artists still less saints and mystics, we turn back, regretfully, but massively, to the time-ridden world.
Alan McGlashan
You must take the world as you find it, with a struggle to be something more honest than those around you. Phineas, as he preached himself this sermon, declared to himself that they who attempted more than this flew too high in the clouds to be of service to men an women upon the earth
Anthony Trollope
Like infants, when they are born into the world, God's children are not born again in the full possession of their spiritual faculties; and it is well and wisely ordered that it is so. What we win easily, we seldom value sufficiently. The very fact that believers have to struggle and fight hard before they get hold of real soundness in the faith, helps to make them prize it more when they have attained it. The truths that cost us a battle are precisely those which we grasp most firmly, and never let go.
J.C. Ryle
A man is a man is a man. His family threatened, his beliefs attacked, his way of life destroyed, his whole world coming to an end - he will kill. Make no mistake. He won't let the new order roll over him without a struggle.
Zadie Smith
In life we struggle to make sense of it all.When we should just except the way life is and make it better for all concerned.
Anthony T.Hincks
... Modern life is always experienced as a struggle: to impose one's individuality on the world, one has to work against the fabric of modern culture itself and uphold ultimate values in the face of purely instrumental and ever more 'rational' forces.
Nicholas Gane
I’m using Mao as my inspiration. “Cast away illusions. Prepare for struggle.” I’m back in business, baby. You don’t know you’re stuck until you get moving.
Hanif Kureishi
Writing is 90% struggle. The other 10% is up to you.
Iain Cameron Williams
I thought and pondered -- vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations,
Mary Shelly
Visit Cape Town and history is never far from your grasp. It lingers in the air, a scent on the breezy, an explanation of circumstance that shaped the Rainbow People. Stroll around the old downtown and it's impossible not to be affected by the trials and tribulations of the struggle. But, in many ways, it is the sense of triumph in the face of such adversity that makes the experience all the more poignant.
Tahir Shah
Written up in marker on a factory sign:I struggle with the feeling that my life isn't mine
Coldplay
Your own brain ought to have the decency to be on your side!
Terry Pratchett
It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary gray goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys.
Terry Pratchett
Our brains contain one hundred billion nerve cells (neurons). Each neuron makes links with ten thousand other neurons to form an incredible three dimensional grid. This grid therefore contains a thousand trillion connections - that's 1,000,000,000,000,000 (a quadrillion). It's hard to imagine this, so let's visualise each connection as a disc that's 1mm thick. Stack up the quadrillion discs on top of each other and they will reach the sun (which is ninety-three million miles from the earth) and back, three times over.
Nessa Carey
And since nothing whatever happens to us outside our own brain; since nothing hurt us or gives us pleasure except within the brain, the supreme importance of being able to control what goes on in that mysterious brain is patent.
Arnold Bennett
Psychopathy is like sunlight. Overexposure can hasten one’s demise in grotesque, carcinogenic fashion. But regulated exposure at controlled and optimal levels can have a significant positive impact on well-being and quality of life.
Kevin Dutton
Most people don't see half of what's in front of them. Your visual cortex does a shit load of imaging processing before the signal even gets to your brain, whose priorities are still checking the ancestral Savannah for dangerous predators, edible berries and climable trees. That's why a sudden cat in the night can make you jump and some people when distracted, can walk right out in front of a bus. Your brain just isn't interested in those large moving chunks of metal or the static heaps of brightly colored stuff that piles up in drifts around us. Never mind all that, says your brain, it's those silent fur-covered merchants of death you've got to watch out for.
Ben Aaronovitch
I had too many things to say, and too small a brain to sort them out with.
Hugh Laurie
The real functional "machinery" of the brain, for Edelman, consists of millions of neuronal groups, organized into larger units or "maps". These maps, continually conversing in everchanging, unimaginably complex, but always meaningful patterns, may change in minutes or seconds. One is reminded of C. S. Sherrington's poetic evocation of the brain as "an enchanted loom", where "millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns".
Oliver Sacks
When we look at a solid lump of iron or rock, we are 'really' looking at what is almost entirely empty space. It looks and feels solid and opaque because our sensory systems and brains find it convenient to treat it as solid and opaque. It is convenient for the brain to represent a rock as solid because we can't walk through it. 'Solid' is our way of experiencing things that we can't walk through or fall throug, because of the electromagnetic forces between atoms. 'Opaque' is the experience we have when light bounces off the surface of an object, and none of it goes through.
Richard Dawkins
In the Awakenings movie I found it very interesting that the most profound awakenings in the catatonic patients occurred in 1969, the year that the Aurora Borealis was seen from N.Y. to Louisiana. It seems the patients were getting environmental radiation stimulation in addition to their L-Dopa drug that year. L-Dopa plus radiation therapy may eventually be proven to be a very potent brain stimulant.
Steven Magee
It is the brain, not the heart or lungs, that is the critical organ
Roger Bannister
The problem with radio frequency (RF) exposure is not the small amount of brain tumors, is it the large amount of subtle alterations in the brain that lead to attention, confusion, insomnia and fatigue problems.
Steven Magee
I have felt that odd whirr of wings in the head.
Virginia Woolf
It might weigh little over a kilogram but, taken on its own scale, the brain is unimaginably vast. One cubic millimetre contains between twenty and twenty-five thousand neurons. It has eighty-six billion of these cells, and each one is complex as a city and is in contact with ten thousand other neurons just like it. Within just one cubic centimetre of brain tissue, there is the same number of connections as there are stars in the Milky Way. Your brain contains a hundred trillion of them. Information in the form of electricity and chemicals flows around these paths in great forking trails and in circuits and feedback loops and fantastical storms of activity tat bloom to life speeds of up to a hundred and twenty metres per second. According to the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, 'The number of permutations and combinations of activity that are theoretically possible exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.' And yet, he continues, 'We know so little about it that even a child's questions should be seriously entertained.
Will Storr
Science can now help us to understand ourselves in this way by giving factual information about brain structure and function, and how the mind works. Then there is an art of self knowledge, which each person has to develop for himself. This art must lead one to be sensitive to how his basically false approach to life is always tending to generate conflict and confusion. The role of art here is therefore not to provide a symbolism, but rather to teach the artistic spirit of sensitive perception of the individual and particular phenomena of one's own psyche. This spirit is needed if one is to understand the relevance of general scientific knowledge to his own special problems, as well as to give effect to the scientific spirit of seeing the fact about one's self as it is, whether on elikes it or not, and thus helping to end conflict.Such an approach is not possible, however, unless one has the spirit that meets life wholly and totally. We still need the religious spirit, but today we no longer need the religious mythology, which is now introducing an irrelevant and confusing element into the whole question.Itwould seem, then, that in some ways the modern person must manage to create a total approach to life which accomplishes what was done in earlier days by science, art and religion, but in a new way that is appropriate to the modern conditions of life. An important part of such an action is to see what the relationshipbetween science and art now actually is, and to understand the direction in which this relationship might develop.
David Bohm
Had his brain been constructed of silk, he would have been hard put to it to find sufficient material to make a canary a pair of cami-knickers.
P.G. Wodehouse
A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.
Arthur Conan Doyle
She always paid attention to fingers rather than faces because they told so much more. People remembered to guard their faces. They forgot their hands. Her own were small, though strong and supple from all the hours of piano playing, but what use was that now? For the first time she understood what real danger does to the human mind, as flat white fear froze the coils of her brain.
Kate Furnivall
Something I owe to the soil that grew--More to the life that fed--But most to Allah who gave me two Separate sides of my head. I would go without shirt or shoes, Friends, tobacco, or bread Sooner than for an instant lose Either side of my head.
Rudyard Kipling
That's all YOU know,' said Digory. 'It's because you're a girl. Girls never want to know anything but gossip and rot about people getting engaged.
C.S. Lewis
I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.
Arthur Conan Doyle
I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Because for Gonzo, anything which may explode at any moment is clearly a girl.
Nick Harkaway
Every new encounter provides a new mirror for me to view my own experiences through, and there is a level of selfishness during this period as I hunger to understand more about the girls' lives in order to understand mine. If I could figure out what had happened to them, perhaps I had a better chance of explaining it all to myself.
Rachel Lloyd
Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?
Salman Rushdie
Parvati positively beamed. Harry could tell that she was feeling guilty for having laughed at Hermione in Transfiguration. He looked around and saw that Hermione was beaming back, if possible even more brightly. Girls were very strange sometimes.
J.K. Rowling
The society of girls is a very delightful thing, Copperfield. It's not professional, but it's very delightful.
Charles Dickens
I suddenly felt the way Cinderella might have felt if she hadn’t had that convenient midnight curfew: my feet were hurting, my hair was slipping free from its pins, and my makeup was getting all smudged from sweat. I was unbelievably tired, undeniably depressed, and I just wanted charming.
J.M. Richards
This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.
Zadie Smith
A likely story indeed!" said the Pigeon, in a tone of the deepest contempt. "I've seen a good many little girls in my time, but never one with such a neck as that! No, no! You're a serpent; and there's no use denying it. I suppose you'll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!""I have tasted eggs, certainly," said Alice, who was a very truthful child; "but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.""I don't believe it," said the Pigeon; "but if they do, then they're a kind of serpent: that's all I can say.
Lewis Carroll
Some girls, deserves to have you treat her like a princess everyday, just like you always do to me." - Maisie Preston
Kirsty Moseley
She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
Zadie Smith
The demons were scary, but girls - Well, girls are really terrifying
Darren Shan
True beauty in a woman is reflected in the caring that she lovingly gives, the passion that she shows.
Audrey Hepburn
If I had a girl, I’d want her to know that she can be anything she wants and that she doesn't have to rely on her looks or clothes or hair or make-up to define who she is or to get respect from other people. I’d want her to know she has a right to be respected or noticed because she was born. I’m not talking about all the girl power nonsense, I’m talking about my girl growing up knowing she has the right to be treated decently simply because she was born.
Dorothy Koomson