Quotes by British Authors - Page 197

Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.
G.K. Chesterton
To be as vehement as he is is to be almost non-committal.
John Osborne
You say your life is your own. But can you dare to ignore the chance that you are taking part in a gigantic drama under the orders of a divine Producer? Your cue may not come till the end of the play--it may be totally unimportant, a mere walking-on part, but upon it may hang the issues of the play if you do not give the cue to another player. The whole edifice may crumple. You as you, may not matter to anyone in the world, but you as a person in a particular place may matter unimaginably.
Agatha Christie
-while beyond the barrier Maurice wandered, the wrong words on his lips and the wrong desires in his heart, and his arms full of air.
E.M. Forster
Tony smothered the life that me and Ma had built, a furry mould growing over a sweating slab of cheese.
Kerry Hudson
We left the nursery in silence, Ma smoking a roll-up, looking like she hadn’t slept in a week or maybe like she had slept for a whole week. When the nursery was just a grubby finger smudge behind us Ma looked down at me and said in her poshed-up telephone voice: “Will you speak to Janie about swearing? Fuckin’ busybody!”I laughed and swung our linked hands.“Aye, fuckin’ busybody.”Pleas of laughter escaped us and spiraled up into the hot, blue Scottish sky. We laughed all the way home
Kerry Hudson
The intoxication with the theatre, with its limelight, costumes, and masks, and with its passions and conflicts, accords well with the adolescence of a man who was to act his role with an intense sense of the dramatic, and of whose life it might indeed be said that its very shape had the power and pattern of classical tragedy.
Isaac Deutscher
- Ay! Thornton o' Marlborough Mill, as we call him.- He is one of the masters you are striving with, is he not? what sort of master is he? - Did yo' ever see a bulldog? Set a bulldog on hindlegs, and dress him up in coat and breeches, and yo'n just getten John Thornton.
Elizabeth Gaskell
I knew exactly when the fever had struck. I had been reading Hamlet in an English class at school. Everyone else stumbled, puzzling over the strange words. Then it had been my turn, and the language had suddenly woken in me, so that my heart and lungs and tongue and throat were on fire. Later, I understood that this was why people spoke of Shakespeare as a god. At the time, I felt like weeping. Somebody had released me from dumbness, from utter isolation. I knew that I could live inside these words, that they would give me a a shape, a shell. I had no idea, then, that I would never play Hamlet…. I’m an actor, and in a good year I earn eleven thousand pounds for dressing up as a carrot.
Amanda Craig
I will take what I can from Edward. And then I will let them fade into history, all the characters in this drama. Emma Matthews and the men who loved her, who became obsessed with her. They're not important to us now.
J.P. Delaney
O, thou art fairer than the evening air     Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;     Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter     When he appear'd to hapless Semele;     More lovely than the monarch of the sky     In wanton Arethusa's azur'd armsExcerpt From: Christopher Marlowe. “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
Christopher Marlowe
If you live a long life and get to the end of it without ever once having felt crushingly depressed, then you probably haven’t been paying attention.
Duncan MacMillan
Drama is based on the Mistake.
W.H. Auden
the more you stared up crap the more it's going to smell (/)
Mary Sumner
Has anybody ever seen a drama critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.
P.G. Wodehouse
If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.
George Orwell
But what are kings, when regiment is gone,But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?- Edward II, 5.1
Christopher Marlowe
Only half a page left now. Shall I fill it with 'I love you, I love you'-- like father's page of cats on the mat? No. Even a broken heart doesn't warrant a waste of good paper.
Dodie Smith
I have really sinned. I am going to pause now, and sit here on the mound repenting in deepest shame...
Dodie Smith
Stray voltage/current/frequency is the most serious form of exposure. Electrocution kills very few people per year. Stray voltage/current/frequency exposure is suspected to be making people sick in the millions!
Steven Magee
It has been known for many years that a subset of the population cannot tolerate the radiation emitted by transmitting utility meters and sickness results in these people.
Steven Magee
I once tried to give him a friendly little "drugs chat". He politely corrected me on every single fact, then said he'd noticed I drank above the recommended guidelines of Red Bull and did I think I might have an addiction? That was the last time I tried to act like the older sister.
Sophie Kinsella
Overeating is the addiction of choice of carers, and that's why it's come to be regarded as the lowest-ranking of all the addictions. It's a way of fucking yourself up while still remaining fully functional, because you have to. Fat people aren't indulging in the "luxury" of their addiction making them useless, chaotic, or a burden. Instead, they are slowly self-destructing in a way that doesn't inconvenience anyone. And that's why it's so often a woman's addiction of choice. All the quietly eating mums. All the KitKats in office drawers. All the unhappy moments, late at night, caught only in the fridge light.
Caitlin Moran
I didn't want to take it. I knew it was a powerful drug, but I also knew it was a catabolic drug that consumed the body.
David Millar
Are you addicted if there is simply no reason for you to do anything else?
Nick Harkaway
The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant.
G.K. Chesterton
[On writing Jeeves and Wooster stories]:You tell yourself that you can take Jeeves stories or leave them alone, that one more can't possibly hurt you, because you know you can pull up whenever you feel like it, but it is merely wish-full thinking. The craving has gripped you and there is no resisting it.You have passed the point of no return.
P.G. Wodehouse
Sometimes being a nice person is all about knowing when to be an asshole.
John Cheese
Alcoholism is a choice... not a life sentence.
David Norman
I have resisted temptation for two and a half minutes at least: my redemption is sure.
Malcolm Lowry
Your only vice is yourself. The worst of all. The really incurable one.
Alfred Hayes
Remember what I used to tel you when you were a little girl? ‘A fool and her money soon part.’ Current-day translation? Stop pissing away your assets at Bloomingdale’s.
Sophie Kinsella
Alcoholism is above all a disease of denial.
David Stafford
I have never heard of an electromagnetically hypersensitive person recovering from the condition using shielding and Faraday cages, they just seem to become social lepers due to their increasing reactivity to the city environment and addicts to their shielded environment.
Steven Magee
Drink a bottle of cheap champagne. Mix with orange juice. A large Glenmorangie. Milk and blackish toast. Half a bottle of Blue Nun. Budweiser. Budweiser. Go to church. Say I do etc. Budweiser. Murphy’s. Jameson. Budweiser. Stella. Stella. Cake. Stella. Jameson. Stella. Vodka and orange. Vodka and black. Speech, speech. Vodka. Vodka. Double Jameson. Double vodka. Double vodka. Get carry-outs of barley wine. Say goodbye to aunties. Uncles. Mothers etc. Stop car on M18. Vomit. Sleep. Dream of dim-lit hallways and a black door. Wake up between Scarborough and Robin Hood’s Bay. Her not saying much. Driving.
Dean Lilleyman
That night, I dream. And when I wake up I remember watching a film with Nannan about a ventriloquist who went mad, his dummy coming to life and speaking for itself. My dream is like the end of the film where the ventriloquist and the dummy are in the madhouse, all these mad devil-faces pressed against the iron bars of the cell door, laughing as the dummy gets up off his chair and walks towards the ventriloquist who screams. The dummy strangles him. I can’t remember in the dream if I was the ventriloquist or the dummy. I’m in a funny mood all day. I don’t say much. I don’t feel like it.
Dean Lilleyman
In this cell you are small. They’ve taken your belt and your shoelaces. You break a little. You put your hands over your face so they don’t see. They don’t listen when you shout for water, Please. Your tongue is so dry it feels too big for your mouth. You don’t sleep. Someone behind the door shouts BASTARDS BASTARDS. You think you can see an old man crouched and watching you in that dark corner over there. You try and make spit to drink but you can’t. In the morning they give you half a plastic cup of warm water. Across your tongue they drag a cotton bud which they drop into a plastic bag with your name on it. They take your fingerprints, your photograph, and then when you get home, she tells you she’s pregnant.
Dean Lilleyman
I can’t imagine what other people think cold turkey is like. It is fucking awful. On the scale of things, it’s better than having your leg blown off in the trenches. It’s better than starving to death. But you don’t want to go there. The whole body just sort of turns itself inside out and rejects itself for three days. You know in three days it’s going to calm down. It’s going to be the longest three days you’ve spent in your life, and you wonder why you’re doing this to yourself when you could be living a perfectly normal fucking rich rock star life. And there you are puking and climbing walls. Why do you do that to yourself? I don’t know. I still don’t know. Your skin crawling, your guts churning, you can’t stop your limbs from jerking and moving about, and you’re throwing up and shitting at the same time, and shit’s coming out your nose and your eyes, and the first time that happens for real, that’s when a reasonable man says, “I’m hooked.” But even that doesn’t stop a reasonable man from going back on it.
Keith Richards
I don’t think I’ve ever met an addict in long-term recovery who hasn’t gone through at least one traumatic childhood experience. Research indicates that one traumatic event in childhood is as grave as continuous combat in a war zone. A traumatic event during childhood can leave a grave imprint on the human body.
Christopher Dines
Tragically, because many addicts are not given sufficient love, nurturing and non-shaming dialogue at crucial stages in their early emotional development, they are on a quest to find contentment from a source outside of themselves. Their parents might have provided bountifully for them; however, their parents were never fully emotionally present while parenting, which made their children feel starved of emotional nourishment.
Christopher Dines
Some addicts do not even have basic parenting and instead are beaten, sexually abused, left to be looked after by a dysfunctional ‘carer’, put in orphan homes or rejected by their community. If you calculate the millions of emotionally neglected children and observe them growing up together trying to ‘get by in life’, you will understand why many adults (adult children) have addictive personalities.
Christopher Dines
Regardless of the different stages in our human development, unless we learn how to create loving and fulfilling relationships (with ourselves and others), addiction will follow – not necessarily as a manifestation of substance misuse but in the form of codependence, compulsive thinking, unhealthy relationships, sex and love addictions, overeating, insidious incarnations of self-harm and so on.
Christopher Dines
Scores of high-powered men and women are addicted to substances or destructive addictive patterns of behaviour. As a matter of fact, it is easier to hide one’s addiction while maintaining a high-powered position compared to the addicts and alcoholics we see sleeping on street corners.
Christopher Dines
Drug and alcohol addiction almost killed me. I was a grave substance misuser in my teens. I started drinking at ten, smoking at eleven and by the time I attended high school aged twelve, I was regularly smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol on weekends. I was a full-blown alcoholic at thirteen. Tragically, I had my stomach pumped at fourteen and although I promised my family I would never drink again, I started less than two weeks later. I was completely hooked on alcohol.
Christopher Dines
If we are continuing to attract partners that are emotionally unavailable, then it’s essential that we observe our own addictive patterns rather than focusing on theirs.
Christopher Dines
The Karpman drama triangle is a classic model of codependent behaviour. First of all, a codependent will rescue someone. Then, when their ‘brave and charitable’ work hasn’t been acknowledged, they become very angry at the person they have attempted to rescue. And finally, they start to feel like a victim. They feel sorry for themselves and complain how the person they rescued never appreciated them. The important thing to learn here is that if a person wants to change, it’s because they have made a decision to do so.
Christopher Dines
Healthy and non-shaming mirroring is an important part of the process. We can gain this from a highly emotionally intelligent and effective peer group that has our best interests at heart.
Christopher Dines
A sex addict is also emotionally anorexic – they must be in order to continue participating in isolated behaviour such as being addicted to pornography and being promiscuous or having multiple affairs. All of these secretive behaviour patterns affect a family and home.
Christopher Dines
It was only when I started to reconnect with my inner child four years into recovery (I was over four years clean and sober off drugs and alcohol) and started to attend a love addiction support group that I was able to trust again and have faith that there are just as many honest and trustworthy women as there are women who are not interested in monogamy. However, it was after ten years of continuous recovery that I started to really dig deep into my childhood grief work and was finally able to reclaim my inner child. I started to take risks again. On a practical level, you can’t get very far in this world if you resent and distrust the opposite sex and, sadly, many men and women suffer in this area. Rather than celebrating the opposite sex, they fear them. Empathy and self-compassion has helped me in this area too.
Christopher Dines
Isms’ are described as transference of addictive patterns of dysfunctional behaviour, passed down from generation to generation. For instance, if a mother was an alcoholic who never made it into recovery, her behaviour would leave a mark on her children, husband, etc. Unless her adult children join some sort of recovery programme and adopt the mindfulness practice, they will have very similar behaviour traits to their mother but minus the alcohol abuse. There is a strong possibility that they will become codependent and form relationships with other codependents or alcoholics.
Christopher Dines
Love addicts often pick partners who are emotionally unavailable because deep down, they don’t feel worthy of having a healthy, loving relationship. A love addict craves and obsesses about becoming enmeshed or ‘one’ with another human being at all costs, even if it means putting themselves in potential danger.
Christopher Dines
Think of an untreated sex addict who spends hours every night until the early hours watching pornography on the internet instead of spending that time with their wife or husband, and then becomes so tired due to the late nights that their professional life suffers. The sex addict’s behaviour will cause resentment, destroy trust and create economic insecurities in the family and home.
Christopher Dines
It’s important to be aware that many families are dysfunctional, but we can change the patterns. Even if a child grew up in an aggressive or addictive household, they can heal and move past that with immense emotional resilience, wisdom and gratitude. This is what recovery can offer anyone who, like you, is open-minded, willing and ready to explore self-awareness and take action.
Christopher Dines
Mental stories can literally spoil a human life. It took me a long time to become aware of my mental commentary, such as: “Everything always goes wrong”, “I won’t be accepted”, “I’m a failure” or “What’s the point?” Those fears were deep-rooted and triggered many upsetting addictive patterns of behaviour
Christopher Dines
In the addiction recovery community, we recognise that addicts can starve themselves of receiving social, sexual or emotional nourishment. Sex and love addicts starve themselves of a healthy, personal relationship and, consequently, deliberately avoid wholesome relationships with other human beings. We’re getting quite deep now, but there are many papers and books published on sexual and emotional anorexia. I have also suffered from emotional anorexia. It’s no myth!
Christopher Dines
When we seek to escape from inner conflict and pain, we are running away from unresolved childhood trauma or original pain. Most people with serious addictive natures who are in the process of recovery have found that trauma played a huge role in escalating their addictions. It certainly did for me.
Christopher Dines
Top lines to a human being who tends to isolate (an avoidant) would mean they make an effort to talk to another human being when the opportunity arises. A top line can also mean that, whether we feel like it or not, we are committed to our recovery and to improving our emotional and professional life. The idea of ‘top lines’ is not to be hard on ourselves or to put us in a position where we feel unsafe or burnt out. It’s a way to avoid missing opportunities to learn, serve and grow.
Christopher Dines
Bottom lines are addictive behaviours that we make a conscious choice not to repeat. For example, a recovering cocaine addict would create a bottom line that they will not use a mind- or mood-altering substance to deliberately get high. A recovering sex addict might create a bottom line not to watch pornography or not to have sex without any emotional or spiritual connection. Bottom lines are a symbol of our intentions and are very useful at a practical level to address addictions. In many recovery communities, twelve-step fellowships and addiction rehabs, there is also a concept called ‘top lines’.
Christopher Dines
Adiction to reading....There are worse things in the world to be Addicted to.
Christy Mair
As the uneasiness and... reluctance to face [his problems] cut him off more and more from all real happiness... habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo... All the healthy and outgoing activities [he shouldn't want to avoid] can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may... "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked." The Christians describe [Heavenly Father] as one "without whom Nothing is strong." And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in [dire] sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them... in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
C.S. Lewis