Quotes by British Authors - Page 2

The Greatest” is a bite-your-tongue-book. Ultimately a tragic tale it is also immensely uplifting and easily the best footballer biography I have ever read.
Mike Parry
I'm not Mickey Mouse, I'm a human being.
Mitch Winehouse
Perhaps the most difficult thing about loving and helping an addict, which most people who haven't been through it don't understand, is this: every day the cycle continues is your new worst day. When looked at from the outside it seems endless, the same thing over and over again; but when you're living it, it's like being a hamster on a wheel. Every day there's the chronic anxiety of waiting for news, the horrible rush when it turns out to be bad, the overwhelming sense of déjà vu - and the knowledge that, despite your best efforts, you'll probably be here again. Even so-called good days are not without their drawbacks. You enjoy them as much as you can, but in the back of your mind there's the lurking fear that tomorrow you could be back to square one again, or worse.
Mitch Winehouse
Gregor flushed as he went on: "The entire content of the Confesions could be put into one single sentence in the book: when Augustine addresses God, saying: 'Thou hast made us for Thyself and our heart is unquiet until it rests in Thee.' This sentence, my lords and friends, is immortal. It contains the very heart of religion.
Louis de Wohl
For a once renowned woman who loved telling tales of dodging bullets, wielding grenades and subverting dogs trained to kill, Christine's story is, surprisingly, little known today.
Clare Mulley
She could do anything with dynamite, except eat it.
Clare Mulley
The difference between doing something and not doing something is doing something.
James Corden
It doesn't help anyone to judge their happiness or career by looking at where others may or may not be. Dad said it best: 'All the time you're looking left and right at other people, you're neglecting what's in front of you.If you focus on looking straight ahead, you can take the odd glance at the future.' He's got a way of saying things sometimes that just puts everything into perspective.
James Corden
It's strange how things seem to come full circle. You know what I mean? I'm sure you do. The way your life seems to drift along with no set path, then something good happens to you and you can trace the line that brought you there back to a specific disappointment or rejection you suffered in the past. It's nice that things can level out that way.
James Corden
Tolkien came to regard the tale of Beren and Tinuviel as 'the first example of the motive (to become dominant in Hobbits) that the great policies of world history, "the wheels of the world", are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak'. Such a worldview is inherent in the fairy-tale (and Christian) idea of the happy ending in which the dispossessed are restored to joy; but perhaps Tolkien was also struck by the way it had been borne out in the Great War, when ordinary people stepped out of ordinary lives to carry the fate of nations.
John Garth
Whatever you believe, and however, each of us deals with these events in our lives, one thing is for certain the truism, time is a great healer, is of no consolation at that moment of intense, all-consuming grief.From GLASS HALF FULL
Sarah Jane Butfield
May be you find out I could be useful getting people out of camps and prisons in Germany - just before they got shot. I should love to do it and I like to jump out of a plane even every day.
Christine Granville
Maybe he'd never come across anybody as well versed at objectifying body parts as I was. In my defense, this was an occupational hazard; one of the tricks of my trade was the ability to work with whatever was at hand. Over the years I'd learned to pinpoint my focus to the width of a pubic hair if there was nothing else to work with. (...) Before my eyes -or, more precisely, in my mind- Rasher became Lovely Bum Man.
Aiden Shaw
The Ritz Hotel was grand, sophisticated, and established, unlike me. The only thing we had in common was façade. Mine may not have been as ornate but it was equally phony. I was presenting myself as an escort; I advertised as one, negotiated like one on the phone, and I identified as one to whoever was interested. I even simulated sex for escort rates.
Aiden Shaw
Maybe he'd never come acrross anybody as well versed at objectifying body parts as I was. In my defense, this was an occupational hazard; one of the tricks of my trade was the ability to work with whatever was at hand. Over the years I'd learned to pinpoint my focus to the width of a pubic hair if there was nothing else to work with. (...) Before my eyes -or, more precisely, in my mind- Rasher became Lovely Bum Man.
Aiden Shaw
Once undressed I felt less exposed. (...) Naked was my uniform. (...) There was no pressure to conform.
Aiden Shaw
A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living': so too with the biography of that self. And just as lives don't stay still, so life-writing can't be fixed and finalised. Our ideas are shifting about what can be said, our knowledge of human character is changing. The biographer has to pioneer, going 'ahead of the rest of us, like the miner's canary, testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions'. So, 'There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation'. She is talking about the story of Shelley, but she could be talking about her own life-story. (Virginia Woolf, p. 11)
Hermione Lee
Mechanically I carried on across the Irish Sea, noticing with a jaundiced eye that it had suddenly lost the sinister threat of no-man's-land and was transformed into a placid highway where ferry-steamers would soon chug peacefully over the unmarked graves of gallant seamen.
Jackie Moggridge
She had privacy, and the privilege of walking up and down the same battlements as the sentries.
John Peter Nettl
Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.
Leonard Woolf
I only read books I know I will like
Vicky Unwin
Wherever he went he left footprints so firm that nobody could later efface or blur them, not even he himself, when on rare occasions he was tempted to do so.
Isaac Deutscher
Give me a fucking pre-med you fuckers, I'm a personal friend of Sir Lancelot Spratt.
Vivian Mackerrell
Lastly, Spurgeon reminds us that piety and devotion to Christ are not preferable alternatives to controversy, but rather that they should - when circumstances demand it - lead to the latter. He was careful to maintain that order. The minister who makes controversy his starting point will soon have a blighted ministry and spirituality will wither away. But controversy which is entered into out of love for God and reverence for His Name, will wrap a man's spirit in peace and joy even when he is fighting in the thickest of battle. The piety which Spurgeon admired was not that of a cloistered pacifism but the spirit of men like William Tyndale and Samuel Rutherford who, while contending for Christ, could rise heavenwards, jeopardizing 'their lives unto the death in the high places of the field'. At the height of his controversies Spurgeon preached some of the most fragrant of all his sermons.
Iain H. Murray
[Admiral Sir Erasmus Gower] 'No other contemporary officer approached his accumulated experience...' From Champion of the Quarterdeck: Admiral Sir Erasmus Gower 1742-1814.
Ian M Bates
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
Charles Dickens
But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the less ready shall we be to make use of the word ‘artificial.’ Nothing in the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many works of art are branded with artificiality because the exhibit vanity and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental thing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in darkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around him. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity is a voice out of the abyss.
G.K. Chesterton
There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism
Alexander Hamilton
In their vanity men focus on what they wish to hear and miss the hidden meaning, the lurking threat.
David Hewson
Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character; vanity of person and of situation. He had been remarkably handsome in his youth; and, at fifty-four, was still a very fine man. Few women could think more of their personal appearance than he did; nor could the valet of any new-made lord be more delighted with the place he held in society. He considered the blessing of beauty as inferior only to the blessing of a baronetcy; and the Sir Walter Elliot, who united these gifts, was the constant object of his warmest respect and devotion.
Jane Austen
If I really seem vain, it is that I am only vain in my ways—not in my heart. The worst women are those vain in their hearts, and not in their ways.
Thomas Hardy
Hairspray and blusher, eyelash curlers, eye-shadow palettes the size of tea-trays. Even before they left school it was as if they were already rehearsing for some witless kind of womanhood.
Alison Fell
He wil sooner lose his best friend, then his least jest.
Ben Jonson
How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?
Christopher Hitchens
It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch one another and find sympathy. We differ widely enough in our nobler qualities. It is in our follies that we are at one.
Jerome K. Jerome
Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken, themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.
Samuel Johnson
Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.
Jane Austen
Mirrors are dangerous things. They can just as easily tell us what we don't like as what we do. Yet in truth you can't tell anything from a reflection, as a reflection is actually empty.
Susie Staplehurst
I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.
Bertrand Russell
He [Old Mr. Turveydrop] was a fat old gentleman with a false complexion, false teeth, false whiskers, and a wig. He had a fur collar, and he had a padded breast to his coat, which only wanted a star or a broad blue ribbon to be complete. He was pinched in, and swelled out, and got up, and strapped down, as much as he could possibly bear.
Charles Dickens
She [Mrs. Badger] was surrounded in the drawing-room by various objects, indicative of her painting a little, playing the piano a little, playing the guitar a little, playing the harp a little, singing a little, working a little, reading a little, writing poetry a little, and botanizing a little. She was a lady of about fifty, I should think, youthfully dressed, and of a very fine complexion. If I add to the little list of her accomplishments that she rouged a little, I do not mean that there was any harm in it.
Charles Dickens
But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker, I knew equally well. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?
Charles Dickens
He could see her planting violets on his grave, a solitary figure in a grey cloak. What a ghastly tragedy. A lump came to his throat. He became quite emotional thinking of his own death. He would have to write a poem about this. --from a Difference in Temperament
Daphne du Maurier
She seemed to be lovely still to herself, as if no amount of looking into mirrors could ruin her illusion.
Elizabeth Taylor
he talked until their food arrived, littering his chat with references to ‘ninety k’ and ‘a quarter of a mill’, and every sentence was angled, like a mirror, to show him in the best possible light: his cleverness, his quick thinking, his besting of slower, stupider yet more senior colleagues...
Robert Galbraith
Humility is the only defence against vanity
Steven Aitchison
I just don't get it. You've been in love with this bloke since you were a kid, and he's never once got his hair cut short enough that it doesn't poke him in the damn eye.
Kristina Adams
Sorry we’re late. Liam had to make sure his hair fell just right.
Kristina Adams
What a situation!' cried Miss Squeers; '...What is the reason that men fall in love with me, whether I like it or not, and desert their chosen intendeds for my sake?' 'Because they can't help it, miss,' replied the girl; 'the reason's plain.' (If Miss Squeers were the reason, it was very plain.)
Charles Dickens
[He] didn’t like to think of himself as vain, but there were definitely times when he wished there was someone on hand to take his photograph.
David Nicholls
So might we ourselves look down into some rock-pool where lowly creatures repeat with naive zest dramas learned by their ancestors æons ago.
Olaf Stapledon
I hope the artist who illustrates this work will take care to do justice to his portrait. Mr. Clive himself, let that painter be assured, will not be too well pleased if his countenance and figure do not receive proper attention.
William Makepeace Thackeray
The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it; for, however absurd it may be thought to boast an honour by an act which shows that it was conferred without merit, yet most men seem rather inclined to confess the want of virtue than of importance.
Samuel Johnson
I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.
Lionel Shriver
But I begin to fancy you don't like me. How strange! I thought, though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me. (Catherine Linton, nee Earnshaw)
Emily Brontë
She also considered very seriously what she would look like in a little cottage in the middle of the forest, dressed in a melancholy gray and holding communion only with the birds and trees; a life of retirement away from the vain world; a life into which no man came. It had its attractions, but she decided that gray did not suit her.
A.A. Milne
I was sorry for her; I was amazed, disgusted at her heartless vanity; I wondered why so much beauty should be given to those who made so bad a use of it, and denied to some who would make it a benefit to both themselves and others.But, God knows best, I concluded. There are, I suppose, some men as vain, as selfish, and as heartless as she is, and, perhaps, such women may be useful to punish them.
Anne Brontë
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.
Joseph Conrad
Lockhart'll sign anything if it stands still long enough.
J.K. Rowling
So what did you do when death came to your house? We continued in the same way as before. What is that, a failure of the imagination? Are you in denial? This is not wholly true; we continue in the same way as before but in parenthesis. My thinking has switched its grammar. The present continuous is its single operational tense. Uncertainty is our present and our future.
Marion Coutts