Quotes by British Authors - Page 193

Dreams so often become nightmares. Family can so easily become foes. And people are always more stupid than you give them credit for.
Mike A. Lancaster
It's like that quote: 'If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.' The choice between a duty or a principle, you know?
Zadie Smith
You can't stay here any more. My fears have been irrational and they've forced me to make unwise decisions and accept the unacceptable.
Dorothy Koomson
And there it was, on a shabby bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd of ignorant and excited people, broken and wounded, betrayed and unpitied, that Griffin, the first of all men to make himself invisible, Griffin, the most gifted physicist the world has ever seen, ended in infinite disaster his strange and terrible career.
H.G.Wells
Never trust a promise
Jill Hucklesby
Don't give it to them all at once, make them work for it. Confuse them with detail, leave things out, go back on your tracks. Be testy, be cussed, be difficult. Drink like a fish; don't give way on the ideology, they won't trust that. They want to deal with a man they've bought; they want the clash of opposites, Alec, not some half-cock convert.
John le Carré
A man betrayed by life's rats either hates and seeks eternal revenge, or forgives and seeks eternal distance; A man honored by life's faithful builds, and builds, and builds. A man indifferent to betrayal is not a man.
Mark Donnelly
Heroes betray us. By having them, in real life, we betray ourselves.
Michael Moorcock
A warning to you both - choose to follow me or oppose me and I will kill you.-Connor Kenway
Oliver Bowden
You can like people and still betray them, if it was for a cause you believed in passionately enough. You have to betray other people rather than betray yourself--if that's what it comes to.
Anne Perry
If anything should take place behind closed doors, it was cruelty and betrayal.
Edward St. Aubyn
1225International big business has made revolutions before now to safeguard its interests. At one time it made them … in the name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Now, with Socialism to fight, it makes them in the name of Law and Order and Sound Finance. Assassination? If an assassination is going to be good for business, then there will be an assassination.
Eric Ambler
But to betray her with battalion... That is against decency, against Nature...And for him, Christopher tietjens, to come down to the level of the men you met here!
Ford Madox Ford
So the fox killed his brother, the wolf. (Mother Scaer)
Joe Abercrombie
As a general rule. it's a comfort issue, literally and metaphorically. And intimacy issue. It's a big step, putting on foreign underwear. Like betrayal, or emigration.
Lee Child
...for to be sunk, though but for an hour in your esteem is a humiliation to which I know not how to submit. -Susan
Jane Austen
He had found that jealousy – or perhaps the fear of betrayal – was no respecter of age. Indeed, if anything, he thought getting older simply made it worse; he felt more vulnerable now.
Kathy Shuker
After he's gone Greer sits for a long time. She rests her head on her knees and weeps - not because she loved Blake and not because she's lost him. But because she did not care of herself. She knew Blake's nature the moment she met him, just as she knew the philandering fiancé. She knew them and she knew herself. Greer thinks of the story of the scorpion and the frog, and she knows she cannot blame these men for her messy life, they only did what she always knew they would do. No, this is not about crushed hopes and broken dreams. This is about trusting her own heart. Hope doesn't even enter into it.
Menna van Praag
She's cuckoo, laying her egg in my nest.
Paula Hawkins
There are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it.
Jeanette Winterson
How I should have raised all her terrible destruction to the surface like a shipwrecked boat dredged up from the sea floor. But that would have given the fracture a shape, a dimension--a definite perimeter to the ruin. This way has a subtle cruelty. This way will torment. She will spend years trying to map the rift she caused and sound the damage. She will push on the bruise and grow frantic trying to repair the creeping remoteness. It is the unkindest thing I have ever done. And I will not relent. I will not do otherwise.
Priya Parmar
But to begin again? No, Virginia. There can be no beginning again. Love and forgiveness are not the same thing.
Priya Parmar
Because the greater the love, the more devastating the sense of betrayal.
Jill Mansell
If I had wanted to be a pawn in a game, I would have taken up chess...
Virginia Alison
O cousin Kate, my love was true,Your love was writ in sand:If he had fooled not me but you,If you had stood where i stand,He'd not have won me with his love,Nor bought me with his land;I would have spit into his faceAnd not have taken his hand.Yet I have a gift you have not got,And seem not like to get:For all your clothes and wedding-ringI've little doubt you fret.My fair-haired son, my shame, my pride,Cling closer, closer yet:Your father would give lands for oneto wear his coronet
Christina Rossetti
The most frightening blazing anger was alive in her now. It was not only Elizabeth that she could have killed but Ross. She could have thrown every piece of crockery at him, and knives and forks too. Indeed she could have attacked him knife in hand. Fundamentally there was nothing meek or mild about her. She was a fighter, and it showed now.
Winston Graham
There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of Men for this treachery.
J.R.R. Tolkien
And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?
Jean Rhys
Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.
John le Carré
Love does not last forever, then?""He asked me the same thing this morning," she said. "No, it does not - not love that has been betrayed. One realizes that one has loved a mirage, someone who never really existed. Not that love dies immediately or soon, even then. But it does die and cannot be revived.
Mary Balogh
She would see it as betrayal. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Samantha Young
Why shouldn't I hate her? She did the worst thing to me that anyone can do to anyone else. Let them believe that they're loved and wanted and then show them that it's all a sham.
Agatha Christie
It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.
William Blake
There’s more to being a warrior than killing. A true warrior — the best warrior — isn’t cruel or mean. He doesn’t claw an enemy who can’t fight back. Where’s the honor in that?
Erin Hunter
What were they thinking?' we ask about our ancestors, but we know that, a century hence, our descendents will ask the same thing about us. Who knows what will strike them as strangest? The United States incarcerates 1 percent of its population and subjects many thousands of inmates to years of solitary confinement. In Saudi Arabia, women are forbidden to drive. There are countries today in which homosexuality is punishable by life in prison or by death. Then there's the sequestered reality of factory farming, in which hundreds of millions of mammals, and billions of birds, live a squalid brief existence. Or the toleration of extreme poverty, inside and outside the developed world. One day, people will find themselves thinking not just that an old practice was wrong and a new one right but that there was something shameful in the old ways. In the course of the transition, many will change what they do because they are shamed out of an old way of doing things. So it is perhaps not too much to hope that if we can find the proper place for honor now, we can make the world better.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
One man in a thousand, Solomon says.Will stick more close than a brother.And it's worth while seeking him half your daysIf you find him before the other.---The Thousandth Man
Rudyard Kipling
The statesman received us with that old-fashioned courtesy for which he is remarkable, and seated us on the two luxuriant lounges on either side of the fireplace. Standing on the rug between us, with his slight, tall figure, his sharp features, thoughtful face, and curling hair prematurely tinged with gray, he seemed to represent that not too common type, a nobleman who is in truth noble.
Arthur Conan Doyle
You will stay and help defend our cave against all comers, protect those weaker than yourself and honor our code. Always use the sword to stand for good and right, never do a thing you would be ashamed of, and never let your heart rule your mind ... And never let another creature take this sword from you, not as long as you live. When the time comes, pass it on to another, maybe your own son. You will know instinctively if he is a warrior. If not, hide the sword where only a true warrior who is brave of heart would dare to go and find it. Swear this to me, Martin.
Brian Jacques
[Alexander von Humboldt was the] greatest scientific traveller who ever lived.
Charles Darwin
Virtue is the fount whence honor springs.
Christopher Marlowe
The inimitable stories of Tong-King never have any real ending, and this one, being in his most elevated style, has even less end than most of them. But the whole narrative is permeated with the odour of joss-sticks and honourable high-mindedness, and the two characters are both of noble birth.
Ernest Bramah
Exactly. Since it is morally justifiable, I have only to consider the question of personal risk. Surely a gentleman should not lay much stress upon this, when a lady is in most desperate need of his help?
Arthur Conan Doyle
The man attempted to salute and Renius forced himself to smile, biting back his temper at the sloppy manners. He watched the fat figure run away into the buildings and wiped the first beads of sweat from his brow. Strange that such men as that should understand loyalty where so many others threw it aside at the first hint of freedom.
Conn Iggulden
In the vestibule of the Manchester Town Hall are placed two life-sized marble statues facing each other. One of these is that of John Dalton ... the other that of James Prescott Joule. ... Thus the honour is done to Manchester's two greatest sons—to Dalton, the founder of modern Chemistry and of the atomic theory, and the laws of chemical-combining proportions; to Joule, the founder of modern physics and the discoverer of the Law of Conservation of Energy.One gave to the world the final proof ... that in every kind of chemical change no loss of matter occurs; the other proved that in all the varied modes of physical change, no loss of energy takes place.
Henry Enfield Roscoe
Maybe in death you’ll understand that love, and all other needs take a backseat when the one thing you want, stands against all that you swear to protect.
Charles Lee
Vanity Fair--Vanity Fair! Here was a man, who could not spell, and did not care to read--who had the habits and the cunning of a boor: whose aim in life was pettifogging: who never had a taste, or emotion, or enjoyment, but what was sordid and foul; and yet he had rank, and honours, and power, somehow: and was a dignitary of the land, and a pillar of the state. He was high sheriff, and rode in a golden coach. Great ministers and statesmen courted him; and in Vanity Fair he had a higher place than the most brilliant genius or spotless virtue.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Ours is a world controlled by the warrior and the sword.
Jayne Castel
There is another life both for you and for me,’ said I. ‘If it be the will of God that we should sow in tears now, it is only that we may reap in joy hereafter. It is His will that we should not injure others by the gratification of our own earthly passions; and you have a mother, and sisters, and friends who would be seriously injured by your disgrace; and I, too, have friends, whose peace of mind shall never be sacrificed to my enjoyment, or yours either, with my consent; and if I were alone in the world, I have still my God and my religion, and I would sooner die than disgrace my calling and break my faith with heaven to obtain a few brief years of false and fleeting happiness—happiness sure to end in misery even here—for myself or any other!
Anne Brontë
After breakfast, determined to pass as little of the day as possible in company with Lady Lowborough, I quietly stole away from the company and retired to the library. Mr. Hargrave followed me thither, under pretence of coming for a book; and first, turning to the shelves, he selected a volume, and then quietly, but by no means timidly, approaching me, he stood beside me, resting his hand on the back of my chair, and said softly, ‘And so you consider yourself free at last?’‘Yes,’ said I, without moving, or raising my eyes from my book, ‘free to do anything but offend God and my conscience.
Anne Brontë
Honor is kind of what you get when you weaponize manners
Jasper Fforde
Fed by neither Heaven nor by Earth he was going forward . . . He hadn't a God or a lover--the two usual incentives to virtue. But on he struggled with his back to ease, because dignity demanded it. There was no one to watch him, nor did he watch himself, but struggles like his are the supreme achievements of humanity, and surpass any legends about Heavan.
E.M. Forster
There is no honor in cruelty.
Jocelyn Murray
It isn't about being or not being dead, it's about what you leave behind
Martin McDonagh
Honour to Agamemnon is a thing / That he can pick, pick up, put back, pick up again, / A somesuch you might find beneath your bed.
Christopher Logue
I will honor my ancestors in StarClan, but not those who have ever walked in the Dark Forest. Guide my steps wisely, warriors of the past. And warriors of now.
Erin Hunter
Those who remember, remembered live on; those who forget, forgotten are gone.
Jonathan Clark
Honour was like a coat: sometimes one did not have time to put it on.
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Love and honor. They are the two great things, and now they’re dimmed and blighted. Today, love is just sex and sentimentality. Love is really a recognition of truth, a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that is compatible with — that makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other. That’s what love is. It’s a recognition of singularity… And love is giving and giving and giving … not looking for any return. Until you do that, you can’t love.
Robert Graves
His soul swayed in a vertigo of moral indecision. He had only to snap the thread of a rash vow made to a villainous society, and all his life could be as open and sunny as the square beneath him. He had, on the other other hand, only to keep his antiquated honour, and be delivered inch by inch into the power of this great enemy of mankind, whose very intellect was a torture-chamber. Whenever he looked down into the square he saw the comfortable policeman, a pillar of common sense and common order. Whenever he looked back at the breakfast-table he saw the President still quietly studying him with big, unbearable eyes.
G.K. Chesterton
Am I then more of an American than those who drew their first breath on American Ground?
Alexander Hamilton