Quotes by British Authors - Page 205

Love hurts. Love is fragile. Love comes like a breath of magic, then departs leaving us feeling empty, alone, a paper cup blowing on the wind.
Chloe Thurlow
Love and being in love are not the same. A woman takes the man she loves into her body and absorbs his oils and essence. A part of him enters her and becomes a part of her.
Chloe Thurlow
Sometimes love is pastel. Sometimes love is black. And sometimes love is fiery red and you feel as if you are going to burn in the flames.
Chloe Thurlow
Well, have you ever known someone who is nice and nasty, who makes you love them one minute and hate them the next? Who makes you feel wonderful and terrible and you never know which one it is going to be?
Daisy Goodwin
Sometime the worst type of weapon in the world is love.
Jane Austen
He couldn't tell Zeke how they would be tomorrow, because he didn't know that answer yesterday, did he?
Clare London
I've been in love and you'll never know
Sam Smith
You took my heart and you held it in your mouthAnd, with a word all my love came rushing outAnd, every whisper, it's the worst, emptied out by a single wordThere is a hollow in me now...And Every whisper, every sighEats away at this heart of mineAnd there is a hollow in me now.So I put my faith in something unknownI'm living on such sweet nothingBut I'm trying to hope with nothing to holdI'm living on such sweet nothing.
Florence Welch
But despite such energetic mental exercise, the ghosts of time present would intrude and drive his dreams away. It was Ann who had robbed him of his peace, Ann who had once made the present so important and taught him the habit of reality, and when she went there was nothing.
John le Carré
However much you wanted someone to want you, there was nothing you could do to make it happen. Whatever you did for them, whatever you gave them, whatever you let them take, it could never be enough. Never enough to be sure. Never enough to satisfy them. Never enough to stop them walking away.Never enough to make them love you.
Manna Francis
I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.
C.S. Lewis
I will bestir myself,' was her resolution, 'and try to be wise if I cannot be good.
Charlotte Brontë
If Innocent is happy, it is because he is innocent. If he can defy the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments. It is just because he does not want to kill but to excite to life that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy. It is just because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet his neighbour's goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all long for it!), the trick of coveting his own goods. It is just because he does not want to commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex; it is just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons.
G.K. Chesterton
No,' said Gould, with an unusual and convincing gravity; 'I do not believe that being perfectly good in all respects would make a man merry.' 'Well,' said Michael quietly, 'will you tell me one thing? Which of us has ever tried it?
G.K. Chesterton
We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty, lovingkindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love.
C.S. Lewis
A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.
Agatha Christie
Benevolence is often very peremptory.
W Somerset Maugham
(...)because Miss Temple has generally something to say which is newer than my own reflections; her language is singularly agreeable to me, and the information she communicates is often just what I wished to gain.”“Well, then, with Miss Temple you are good?”“Yes, in a passive way: I make no effort; I follow as inclination guides me. There is no merit in such goodness.”“A great deal: you are good to those who are good to you. It is all I ever desire to be. If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and sothey would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should—so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.”“You will change your mind, I hope, when you grow older: as yet you are but a little untaught girl.”“But I feel this, Helen; I must dislike those who, whatever I do to please them, persist in disliking me; I must resist those who punish me unjustly. It is as natural as that I should love those who show me affection, or submit to punishment when I feel it is deserved.”“Heathens and savage tribes hold that doctrine, but Christians and civilised nations disown it.” “How? I don’t understand.”“It is not violence that best overcomes hate—nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury.”“What then?”“Read the New Testament, and observe what Christ says, and how He acts; make His word your rule, and His conduct your example.”“What does He say?”“Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate you and despitefully use you.
Charlotte Brontë
I don’t know how to talk to you, Mrs. Huntingdon . . . you are only half a woman--your nature must be half human, half angelic. Such goodness overawes me; I don’t know what to make of it.
Anne Brontë
There is no excess of goodness. You cannot go too far in the right direction.
C.S. Lewis
It's like in the great stories Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn't want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end it's only a passing thing this shadow, even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines it'll shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something even if you were too small to understand why. But I think Mr. Frodo, I do understand, I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going because they were holding on to something.
J.R.R. Tolkien
There is always more goodness in the world than there appears to be because goodness is of its very nature modest and retiring.
Evelyn Beatrice Hall
There is always more goodness in the world than there appears to be, because goodness is of its very nature modest and retiring.
Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.
F.H. Bradley
Badness is only spoiled goodness.
C.S. Lewis
And this is the eternal law. For, Evil often stops short at istelf and dies with the doer of it! but Good, never.
Charles Dickens
My only companion from the outside world during nineteen years of isolation has been my personal hatred of Thursday Next. It's kind of like the old me suddenly taking over, and I promised myself that this was how I would act if I ever saw you.' 'I have the same thing, but with Tom Stoppard,' I said. 'You'd kill Tom Stoppard?' 'Not at all. I promised myself many years ago that I would throw myself at his feet and scream "I'm not worthy!" if I ever met him, so now if we're ever at the same party or something, I have to be at pains to avoid him. It would be undignified, you see—for him and for me.
Jasper Fforde
Gandalf: Often does hatred hurt itself!
J.R.R. Tolkien
When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold, wafted backwards and forwards as if in an invisible process of air conditioning, creating a pervasive physical disturbance.
Anthony Powell
Don't waste hate on pink geranium.
Elizabeth Goudge
If you want to strengthen an enemy and make him exult - hate him.
Idries Shah
I hate nobody except Hitler--and that is professional.
Winston S. Churchill
That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!
Iris Murdoch
[Football] has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.
George Orwell
And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.
George Orwell
No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.
George Gordon Byron
Demonise one of them and the sympathisers will melt away.
Philippe Blenkiron
If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.
Rachel Cusk
The genocide [in Rwanda] was not a spontaneous eruption of tribal hatred, it was planned by people wanting to keep power. There was a long government-led hat campaign against the Tutsis.
Jonathan Glover
If you hate, you lose who you are.
Louisa Reid
The great poets are full of bullshit. Love has nothing on hatred's capacity to give a man purpose.
Luke Scull
It was not for the piano-tuner to know that in this still, grey, winter-gripped dining-room, this apparent mortuary of desire and passion (in which the lift rumbled and knives and forks scraped upon plates), waves were flowing forward and backward, and through and through, of hellish revulsion and unquenchable hatred!
Patrick Hamilton
I seeIn many an eye that measures meThe mortal sickness of a mindToo unhappy to be kind.Undone with misery, all they canIs to hate their fello
A.E. Housman
Hatred is a curse that only love can cure.
Anthony T.Hincks
Hatred may last a lifetime, but love is ever lasting.
Anthony T.Hincks
He spoke in hard and angry earnest, if a man ever did," replied the girl, shaking her head. "He is an earnest man when his hatred is up. I know many who do worse things; but I'd rather listen to them all a dozen times, than to that Monks once.
Charles Dickens
It is hard, she thought, it is hard for us to think of people who dislike us because none of us, in our heart, believes that we deserve the hatred of others.
Alexander McCall Smith
There was something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle of these frail old morsels of humanity consecrating their last flickering energies to the task of making each other wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one faculty which had survived in undiminished vigor where all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay.
Saki
Now, in their love, which was stronger, there were the seeds of hatred and fear and confusion growing at the same time: for love can exist with hatred, each preying on the other, and this is what gives it its greatest fury.
T.H. White
I also believe in cigarettes, cholesterol, alcohol, carbon monoxide, masturbation, the Arts Council, nuclear weapons, the Daily Telegraph, and not properly labeling fatal poisons, but above all else, most of all, I believe in the one thing that can come out of people's mouths: vomit.
Dennis Potter
... that kind of patriotism which consists in hating all other nations ...
Elizabeth Gaskell
Hatred is so much easier to win than love - and so much harder to get rid of.
Enid Blyton
This misfortune you find is of your own manufacture.Keep hold of what you have, it will harm no other,for hatred comes home to the hand that chose it.
Simon Armitage
No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred.
George Orwell
Thos who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.
Stephen Fry
Change is the most beneficial power available to you, simply change the things you don't like, replacing them with your true desires.
Steven Redhead
She shook her head and whispered, "No. No! That can't be true. Impossible!""You think things have to be possible? Things have to be true!
Philip Pullman
If we really feared the crash, most of us would be unable to look at a car, let lone drive one.
J.G. Ballard
I wake in the night. Or sometimes I don't wake in the night. It hardly seems to make a difference.
Nicci French
If you cannot say what you mean, your majesty, you will never mean what you say and a gentleman should always mean what he says.
Reginald Fleming 'R.J.' Johnston - The Last Emperor