Quotes by British Authors - Page 199

It is one of my decided opinions that married people ought to have no one, be the tie ever so close and dear, living permanently with them, to break the sacred duality — no, let me say the unity of their home.
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
The geek of the Earth are a tribe and they are mighty.
Ian McDonald
The unity of all science consists alone in its method, not in its material.
Karl Pearson
Slant narrowed his eyes. “Do the Clans walk alone into the final battle?”Half Moon flattened her ears. “Never alone!” She lifted her chin. “I will fight alongside Jayfeather.”Broken Shadow unsheathed her claws. “And I will fight alongside my son.”“I will fight beside Jagged Lightning and my kits to defeat this darkness.” Owl Feather’s eyes sparked.Bluestar thrashed her tail. “And I will die a tenth time to defend ThunderClan!”“These cats will never stand alone,” Half Moon declared. “We are with them just as we have always been.
Erin Hunter
It is as if the stuff of which we are made were totally transparent and therefore imperceptible and as if the only appearances of which we can be aware are cracks and planes of fracture in that transparent matrix. Dreams and percepts and stories are perhaps cracks and irregularities in the uniform and timeless matrix. Was this what Plotinus meant by an 'invisible and unchanging beauty which pervades all things'?
Gregory Bateson
It is in unity that we find strength, in unity we find hope, and in unity we can stand firm as the darkness approaches. Let us stand together – and stand firm – against the many faces of hate.
Nick Lowles
... I love him... not because he's handsome... but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same...
Emily Brontë
When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.
Winston S. Churchill
You say grace before meals. I say grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
G.K. Chesterton
Flora was in that state where the spirit may be willing but the flesh is weak and wishes to go on holiday - and where the flesh in most cases wins hands down with a packed suitcase. It did so now. So she did what many a researcher both great and insignificant does when they are stuck. She yawned while contemplating how to catch the Muse by surprising Her. Almost invariably, the Muse has seen it all before - and also yawns.
Mavis Cheek
It seemed to me then that to have published a book - any kind of book - would be the greatest possible happiness I could ask from life.
Christopher Isherwood
If you really have talent, you know, you'll go on writing - whatever people say to you.
Christopher Isherwood
To become a WRITER I had to learn to INTERRUPT, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then LOUDER, and then to just speak in my own voice which is NOT LOUD AT ALL.
Deborah Levy
It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.
Doris Lessing
It's good to write badly. Things can only get better.
Alan Dapre
I assure you, I've come to one of those natural breaks in the book, where one can walk away and let things go on working in the subconscious. It's true, don't look so unbelieving. It means I can afford to tear myself away from my view of the pigsties and go out on parole, as much as I like and you'll put up with.
Mary Stewart
Remove the comma, replace the comma, remove the comma, replace the comma...
R.D. Ronald
Publish a book before you’re too old to read it without glasses.
Fennel Hudson
Writing with a biro is the emotional equivalent of giving your loved one a plastic rose on Valentine’s Day.
Fennel Hudson
Proper writing ink comes in a bottle, can be swirled like brandy in a glass, and smells like apple blossom after rain.
Fennel Hudson
As with writing by candlelight, one’s greatest ideas come from ‘the flickering’ between darkness and light.
Fennel Hudson
Committing your thoughts and feelings to words is like putting your soul on a plate and hoping the diners will like what they eat.
Fennel Hudson
There is a fine line between fair criticism and jealous assault.
Fennel Hudson
If one were to include one-tenth of the remarkable people one knows, in one's fiction, no one would accept it. Real life remains one's private menagerie.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Rejection is no badge of honour.
Johnny Rich
A writer's knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character to life.
Graham Greene
Every year hundreds of books, many of considerable merit, pass unnoticed. Each one has taken the author months to write, he may have had it in his mind for years; he has put into it something of himself which is lost forever, it is heart-rending to think how great are the chances that it will be disregarded.
W Somerset Maugham
The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner - the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a sprint, and less heroic.
Graham Greene
A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
Cyril Connolly
Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.
Virginia Woolf
The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.
Martin Amis
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:"Fool!" said my muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write.
Philip Sidney
But you're dead," said Harry."Oh yes," said Dumbledore matter-of-factly."Then...I'm dead too?""Ah," said Dumbledore, smiling still more broadly. "That is the question, isn't it? On the whole, dear boy, I think not.”They looked at each other, the old man still beaming."Not?" repeated Harry."Not," said Dumbledore."But…" Harry raised his hand instinctively toward the lightning scar. It did not seem to be there. "But I should have died—I didn't defend myself! I meant to let him kill me!""And that," said Dumbledore, "will, I think, have made all the difference.
J.K. Rowling
I have a habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am now leading a posthumous existence.
John Keats
Just as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire, and my lamp is burning low, the horrible contraction will begin in my chest. I shall only have time to reach the bell, and pull it violently, before the sense of suffocation will come. No one will answer my bell. I know why. My two servants are lovers, and will have quarrelled. My housekeeper will have rushed out of the house in a fury, two hours before, hoping that Perry will believe she has gone to drown herself. Perry is alarmed at last, and is gone out after her. The little scullery-maid is asleep on a bench: she never answers the bell; it does not wake her. The sense of suffocation increases: my lamp goes out with a horrible stench: I make a great effort, and snatch at the bell again. I long for life, and there is no help. I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. 0 God, let me stay with the known, and be weary of it. I am content. Agony of pain and suffocation - and all the while the earth, the fields, the pebbly brook at the bottom of the rookery, the fresh scent after the rain, the light of the morning through my chamber window, the warmth of the hearth after the frosty air - will darkness close over them for ever?Darkness-darkness-no pain-nothing but darkness: but I am passing on and on through the darkness: my thought stays in the darkness, but always with a sense of moving onward ... ("The Lifted Veil")
George Eliot
GPs are almost the only doctors these days who understand all problems, can see the whole person…spend time with the dying…see things through to the end.
Jane Wilson-Howarth
The guard looked down at the scarlet bloodstains blooming on his chest. He appeared to think of something that he needed to say, but as his lips began to form the words, his knees gave up the strain of supporting his ruined bulk. He collapsed to the floor, his throat issuing a final sound like a bubbling casserole.
R.D. Ronald
You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead.
Zadie Smith
When I asked her what was the matter? answered, she didn't know; but she felt so afraid of dying!
Emily Brontë
It is a dreadful thing to wait and watch for the approach of death; to know that hope is gone, and recovery impossible; and to sit and count the dreary hours through long, long, nights - such nights as only watchers by the bed of sickness know. It chills the blood to hear the dearest secrets of the heart, the pent-up, hidden secrets of many years, poured forth by the unconscious helpless being before you; and to think how little the reserve, and cunning of a whole life will avail, when fever and delirium tear off the mask at last. Strange tales have been told in the wanderings of dying men; tales so full of guilt and crime, that those who stood by the sick person's couch have fled in horror and affright, lest they should be scared to madness by what they heard and saw; and many a wretch has died alone, raving of deeds, the very name of which, has driven the boldest man away.("The Drunkard's Death")
Charles Dickens
To take, for example, my own death: what I consider most likely to be true is that death will be the complete and utter end of my existence, with no successor existence of any kind that can be related to me as I now am. And if that is not the case, the next most likely scenario, it seems to me, is something along the lines indicated by Schopenhauer. But neither of these is what I most want. What I want to be true is that I have an individual, innermost self, a soul, which is the real me and which survives my death. That too could be true. But alas, I do not believe it.
Bryan Magee
This was how I would die. Strangled by an attractive, seminaked woman inside a fridge with a giant tarantula in the middle of a sea of carnivorous jam. As I blacked out, all I could think of was a fortune teller I'd spoken to a few years ago, and how full of shit she'd turned out to be.
Yahtzee Croshaw
Jakie, is it my birthday or am I dying?" (Seeing all her children assembled at her bedside in her last illness.)
Nancy Astor the Viscountess Astor
The thing with dying, well, with death really, is that there's a difference between being someone who knows they can really die at any time and someone who doesn't.
Jo Walton
But the sons of Men die indeed, and leave the world; wherefore they are called the Guests or the Strangers. Death is their fate, the gift of Illúvatar, which as time wears even the Powers shall envy.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Everything had life to me,’ he heard Enkidu murmur, ‘the sky, the storm, the earth, water, wandering, the moon and its three children, salt, even my hand had life. It’s gone. It’s gone.
Herbert Mason
But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.
Graham Greene
If God shall choose I shall love thee but better after death
Elizabeth Browning
What could be more intimate than dying with someone?
Sarah Lotz
Oh build your ship of death, oh build it in time and build it lovingly, and put it between the hands of your soul.
D.H. Lawrence
To Tiffany's surprise, Nanny Ogg was weeping gently. Nanny took another swig from her flagon and wiped her eyes. 'Cryin' helps sometimes,' she said. 'No shame in tears for them as you've loved. Sometimes I remember one of my husbands and shed a tear or two. The memories're there to be treasured, and it's no good to get morbid-like about it.
Terry Pratchett
Queenie Hennessy - "I am here to die."Sister Mary Inconnue - "Pardon me but you are here to live until you die. There is a significant difference.
Rachel Joyce
What’s it gonna be like, dying? To go to sleep and never, never, never wake up.Well, a lot of things it’s not gonna be like. It’s not going to be like being buried alive. It’s not going to be like being in the darkness forever.I tell you what — it’s going to be as if you never had existed at all. Not only you, but everything else as well. That just there was never anything, there’s no one to regret it — and there’s no problem. Well, think about that for a while — it’s kind of a weird feeling when you really think about it, when you really imagine.[The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are ]
Alan W. Watts
Hunter woke suddenly. A noise.It was a noise unlike anything he’d ever heard before. Close! Very close.Like it was on him. Like it was . . .Just in one ear.He twisted his head. It was full night. Black as black in the woods far from the starlight.He couldn’t see anything.But with his hands he could feel. The thing on his shoulder.His ear . . . gone!A terrible fear wrung a cry of horror from Hunter.He couldn’t feel it, his ear, or his shoulder, couldn’t feel with anything but his fingers and he felt, reached beneath his shirt, felt the flesh of his belly pulse and heave.Like something inside him.No, no, no, it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair!He was Hunter. The hunter. He was doing his best.He cried. Tears rolled down his cheeks.Who would bring meat for all the kids?It wasn’t fair.The sound of munching, crunching started again. Just in one ear.Hunter had only one weapon: the heat-causing power in his hands. He had used it many, many times to take the life of prey.He had fed the kids with that power. And in a moment of fear and rage he had accidentally taken the life of his friend, Harry.Maybe he could kill the thing that was eating his ear.But it was too late for that to help.Could he kill himself?He saw Old Lion’s head, eyes closed, hanging where he’d hung him for skinning. If Old Lion could die, so could Hunter.Maybe they would meet again, up in the sky.Hunter pressed both palms against his head.
Michael Grant
I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.
Oliver Sacks
Sometimes the fog in his eyes would clear, that fog caused by the pain and the killers of pain, and when it cleared, I saw regret and fear in those eyes swimming with tears and I was convinced that this was it, this was the end, this was surely the end.
Tony Parsons
Embrace death, dance with it a while, and finally fall prey to it.
Darren Shan
When humanity dies, what happens to all the people?
Anthony T.Hincks
Dying from an aggressive fatal brain tumor is like dying from Alzheimer's disease accelerated one hundred times.
Steven Magee
Apart from being dead its going to be necessary to die. And I'm dealing at the moment with the realization that at my age there is absoutely no way in which I can skirt the matter and come out on the other side.
Nathaniel Tarn