Quotes by British Authors - Page 206

to love is to destroy
Cassie Clare
Why do we put our self esteem in the hands of complete strangers?
Helena Bonham Carter
The hunger inside us must be fed to be controlled.
Darren Shan
How true is the saying that the very highest in rank are always the most simple and kindly. It is from you half-and-half sort of people that you get pomposity and vulgarity
H. Rider Haggard
Go lovingly into each moment and experience your infinite being as you truly are. Feel, learn, play!
Jay Woodman
It's like they've forgotten everything important, isn't it? I mean, forgotten things like cats and dancing exist.
Katherine Rundell
Personally, I think, so what? Money's just a thing and things change. That's what I've found. One minute something's really there, right next to you, and you can cuddle up to it. The next it just melts away, like a Hershey's kiss.
Frank Cottrell Boyce
Love conquers all," murmured Kim. "I heard it in a song, so it must be true.
Simon R. Green
Sim sighed. "like Ross always said: Wish in one hand,shit in the other,and see which hand fills up first.
Keith Gray
When you've earned something, I mean really earned it, no one can make you doubt that you deserve it. They can't say it isn't yours. There's something about getting a thing that you've bled and fought for that makes the getting that much sweeter.
Rachael Allen
Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you; not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.
George Orwell
Somewhere within the meeting of our eyes, our souls were bonding, even if our day to day lives were far apart.
Carol Drinkwater
It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particuarly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.
Neil Gaiman
many men are neither worthy of their wives, nor of their dogs.
Charlotte Mary Yonge
Well packaged, even a falsehood may seem true or feasible.
Steven Redhead
That is the secret of happiness and virtue - liking what you've got to do.
Aldous Huxley
I just like to say I'm from London, I don't have any specific area I represent. I'm not representing for a small group of people. I'd like everybody to be able to relate to a nerd, because everybody's a bit nerdy. I'm more interested in that than in where they're from. I'm more interested in what people do.
Craig Taylor
I wish creatures wouldn't be so easily offended!", "You'll get used to it in time," said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah into its mouth and began smoking again.
Lewis Carroll
After all, what more does a true genius want? The mind itself is the palace where all the real treasures, the works of art, the indulgences exist.
Alex Scarrow
Why do I find it hard to write the next line?
Gary Kemp
No, she learned that true love was epic stuff, as told by Mary.
Harriet Evans
Could a love of that magnitude die? If it was true love, could it ever die? Was there such a thing as true love?
Mary Balogh
How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?
Mary Wollstonecraft
A letter?” repeated Professor McGonagall faintly, sitting back down on the wall. “Really Dumbledore, you think you can explain all this in a letter? These people will never understand him! He’ll be famous—a legend—I wouldn’t be surprised if today was known as Harry Potter day in the future—there will be books written about Harry—every child in our world will know his name! ...
J.K. Rowling
Most true things are kind of corny, don’t you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment.
Michel Faber
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
Virginia Woolf
Worse than madness. Sanity.
William Golding
Our love had begun in folly, and ended in madness!
Charles Dickens
In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.
George Orwell
...My point is, I went crazy. When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was. I went crazy as a coot! I admit it! Why can't you?
Alan Moore
Bedlam: an institution with a history so fearsome it gave its name to a synonym for chaos and pandemonium.
Jon Ronson
... your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me...
Charlotte Brontë
When life is this dull, you have to invent purpose. Collecting torn-up newspaper gives you a hobby, provides an anchoring intimacy with your surroundings, keeps the streets clean. Or so you think. Then one day you wake up and realise that it was all a con: what you had thought was an escape from madness was in fact the arrival.
Alexander Masters
An exaltation of spirit lifted me, as it were, far above the earth and the sinful creatures crawling on its surface; and I deemed myself as an eagle among the children of men, soaring on high, and looking down with pity and contempt on the grovelling creatures below.
James Hogg
Jessie had never heard you could inherit madness. She thought madness was something that just happened to people in Shakespeare when the wind got up.
Lynne Truss
And from the coffin of your madness there is no escape.
Angela Carter
The day was ill-omened from the beginning; one of those unlucky days when every little detail seems to go wrong and one finds oneself engaged in a perpetual and infuriating strife with inanimate objects. How truly fiendish the sub-human world can be on these occasions! How every atom, every cell, every molecule, seems to be leagued in a maddening conspiracy against the unfortunate being who has incurred its obscure displeasure!
Anna Kavan
He was walking around in circles, the smell of the old furniture suddenly very distinct. There was a newspaper in his hand and he started reading it, paying particular attention to the headlines which seemed to be floating towards him so that now a band of black print encircled his forehead. He was curled upon the bed, hugging his knees, when the next horror came upon him: those who heard him last night would now have to report his theft, and his employer would call the police. He saw how the policeman took the telephone call at the station; how his name and address were spoken out loud; how he looked down at the floor as they led him away; how he was in the dock, forced to answer questions about himself, and now he was in a cell and had lost control of his own body. He was staring out of the window at the passing clouds when it occurred to him that he should write to his employer, explaining his drunkenness and confessing that he invented the story of theft; but who would believe him? It was always said that in drink there was truth, and perhaps it was true that he was a convicted thief. He began to sing,One fine day in the middle of the night,Two dead men got up to fightand then he knew what was meant by madness.
Peter Ackroyd
I wondered what sort of woman loved a man like that.
Jon Ronson
Madness, genius, originality - it's all the same thing; it's a breaking of our normal value structure and the substitution of another one.
Malcolm Bradbury
He was clearly not the murderer whom Hawksmoor was seeking, but it was generally the innocent who confessed: in the course of many enquiries, Hawksmoor had come across those who accused themselves of crimes which they had not committed and who demanded to be taken away before they could do more harm. He was acquainted with such people and recognised them at once - although they were noticeable, perhaps, only for a slight twitch in the eye or the awkward gait with which they moved through the world. And they inhabited small rooms to which Hawksmoor would sometimes be called: rooms with a bed and a chair but nothing besides, rooms where they shut the door and began talking out loud, rooms where they sat all evening and waited for the night, rooms where they experienced blind panic and then rage as they stared at their lives. And sometimes when he saw such people Hawksmoor thought, this is what I will become, I will be like them because I deserve to be like them, and only the smallest accident separates me from them now.
Peter Ackroyd
Some say that you should turn your face from the light of the moon. They say it makes you mad.I turn my face towards it and I laugh.Make me mad, I whisper. Go on, make Mina mad.I laugh again.Some people think that she's already mad, I think.
David Almond
How bizarre, i think to myself, to be on a train and to actually not want to arrive anywhere? What kind of madness is that?
Jackie Kay
Do you think that too," she said, "that I have slept too long in the moonlight?
Jean Rhys
Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result.
Jeanette Winterson
All habits are bad habits. (...) Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
G.K. Chesterton
Relationships are nine parts intuition, one part madness.
Chloe Thurlow
We are all subjected to two distinct natures in the same person. I myself have suffered grievously in that way.
James Hogg
Madness is a matter of perspective, little dreamer.
Samantha Shannon
There's a pleasure being mad that only the madman knows.
Elly Griffiths
(On the communist regime of Ceaușescu)"Romania," said Eugene, "was twenty million people living inside the imagination of a madman.
Jon Ronson
Oh the madness of battle! We fear it, we celebrate it, the poets sing of it, and when it fills the blood like fire it is a real madness. It is joy! All the terror is swept away, a man feels he could live for ever, he sees the enemy retreating, knows he himself is invincible, that even the gods would shrink from his blade and his bloodied shield. And I was still keening that mad song, the battle song of slaughter, the sound that blotted out the screams of dying men and the crying of the wounded. It is fear, of course, that feeds the battle madness, the release of fear into savagery. You win in the shield wall by being more savage than your enemy, by turning his savagery back into fear.
Bernard Cornwell
Never had a decent report in his life!" Tony repeated, hardly able to believe the words. He was thinking, in shocked surprise, that even Tante Bettina did not know how mad the English could be.
Constance Savery
Run mad as often as you choose but do not faint
Jane Austen
The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane.
G.K. Chesterton
It would be superfluous todrive us mad, my dear Watson
Arthur Conan Doyle
But these people _announced_ their madness . . . they flaunted their insanity, they weren't half mad and half not, curled around a door frame. They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it.
Zadie Smith
I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves.
Jeanette Winterson
His own naivety taunted him like a flicker of madness.
Jane Harper
Make me a shadow on the wall!
Kate Griffin