Quotes by British Authors - Page 26

Studying the world's oldest writing for the first time compels you to wonder about what writing is and how it came about more than five thousand years ago and what the world might have looked like without it. Writing as I would define it serves to record language by means of an agreed set of symbols that enable a message to be played back like a wax cylinder recording. The reader's eye runs over the signs and tells the brain how each is pronounced and the inner message springs into life.
Irving Finkel
...if we were to associate the genius of a place with one particular thing – the Russians with literature, say, or the Germans with music, the Dutch and Spanish with painting – we would have to say that the true genius of Ancient India was language.
Aatish Taseer
To lose your own language was like forgetting your mother, and as sad, in a way.
Alexander McCall Smith
Difficult for actors to extemporise in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs, who speak that way anyway.
Emma Thompson
Tragedy's language stresses that whatever is within us is obscure, many faceted, impossible to see. Performance gave this question of what is within a physical force. The spectators were far away from the performers, on that hill above the theatre. At the centre of their vision was a small hut, into which they could not see. The physical action presented to their attention was violent but mostly unseen. They inferred it, as they inferred inner movement, from words spoken by figures whose entrances and exits into and out of the visible space patterned the play. They saw its results when that facade opened to reveal a dead body. This genre, with its dialectics of seen and unseen, inside and outside, exit and entrance, was a simultaneously internal and external, intellectual and somatic expression of contemporary questions about the inward sources of harm, knowledge, power, and darkness.
Ruth Padel
In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage.
Ian McEwan
A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.
W Somerset Maugham
I was going to dine at the television company’s expense with one of the most beautiful women in show business and some television producer with an inferiority complex. In my experience, there’s always a price.
V.T. Davy
The four most expensive word in the English language are 'This time it's different.
John Templeton
Windows 10 could only have been a worse experience if I had paid for it!
Steven Magee
As anyone who has experienced it will know, war is many contradictory things. There is brutality and heroism, comedy and tragedy, friendship, hate, love and boredom. War is absurd yet fundamental, despicable yet beguiling, unfair yet with its own strange logic. Rarely are people 'back home' exposed to these contradictions — society tends only to highlight those qualities it needs, to construct its own particular narrative.
Tim Hetherington
Beware of anything to do with President Obama...I speak from experience.
Steven Magee
It has been my experience that law enforcement reports are littered with fabrications, inaccuracies, omissions, fraud, fantasies and willful blindness.
Steven Magee
NASA has decades of experience in studying the effects of Sick Building Syndrome (SBS) and their experiments show that continuous habitation of an alien environment in Space results in sickness in less than a year in astronauts and a similar environment on Earth produces ill health in humans in just two years.
Steven Magee
Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions . . . by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.
Malcolm Gladwell
Things it helps me to rememberWhen in a bad mood, keep quiet or still.Baggy jumpers don’t suit you.When you’re tired you get doubtful.Difficulties come in spurts.Listen to the echo of your own voice. Avoid be strident.All aeroplanes go through clouds during their journeys. So do people during theirs.Often greater clarity comes out of confusion. You have to be puzzled before you find a solution.PMS often brings on a crisis of confidence.Ordinariness is restful.If someone is explosive in front of you, be silent. If you feel explosive, be silent.
Aidan Chambers
Up the still, glistening beaches,Up the creeks we will hie,Over banks of bright seaweedThe ebb-tide leaves dry.We will gaze, from the sand-hills,At the white, sleeping town;At the church on the hill-side—And then come back down.Singing: "There dwells a loved one,But cruel is she!She left lonely for everThe kings of the sea.(from poem 'The Forsaken Merman')
Matthew Arnold
Cradle of SolitudeFor we know not why our tribulationsare given as suchour fragile formscreated from the dust...
Muse
Ode to the Chamber...linger here amidst the chamberin which we embrace our lovetalk to me of sonnetsand call me turtledove...
Muse
Do You Believe...on this road of lifeon this dayI take younow husband and wife...
Muse
Do You BelieveDo you believethat I have loved yousince the dawn of time?Do you believethat we were destinedto be intertwined?...
Muse
...flames moved towards himand dropped within-singed and marred his tender skin ...(the frightful plight tale)
Muse
The time has come," the walrus said, "to talk of many things: Of shoes and ships - and sealing wax - of cabbages and kings
Lewis Carroll
We are limited only by our unwillingness to take action.
Steven Redhead
You do what you are
Glynn Burridge
It is incumbent upon us to do what we can, even if we cannot do much.
David Smail
... A few centuries earlier... humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons, we have largely altered that... Man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false," but as "academic" or "practical," "outworn" or "contemporary," "conventional" or "ruthless." Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous - that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.
C.S. Lewis
Oh, the others will talk and plan and make oaths and promises, but there are precious few fuckers who will do.
Ian McGuire
As the sun rules the day and the moon governs the night, so too, we are connected by: the air that we breathe, light that we see and the darkness that follows. Life is too short to waste it on disagreements. Surely, we can all agree to disagree. So let us find a common ground, form a union and spread joy, happiness and freedom around the world for the benefit of you, me and the future generations to come.
Raymond Beresford Hamilton
Fear sees, even when eyes are closed.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
The eternal sea of politics is best left to politicians.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Asleep you can experience many hours whilst only a few waking moments have passed. This is why dreams are an ideal platform for training.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Verily, a man without fear is either dead or happy to die.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this [atomic] energy in a form which could be employed, the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dream of scientific fiction, but the remotest possibility must always be considered that the energy once liberated will be completely uncontrollable and by its intense violence detonate all neighbouring substances. In this event, the whole of the hydrogen on earth might be transformed at once and the success of the experiment published at large to the universe as a new star.
Francis William Aston
Just like the cosmonauts and their pee plants, all we have is each other.
Arthur C. Clarke
Space, as you can see, is a complete void, nothing but clear air, without solid objects or the illumination of light. On some of our photographs of space, however, studied close to, even without a magnifying glass or an enlargement lens, you will notice, in the remote background, stars, some solitary, others in shimmering clusters. And in the next set of photographs you will see the alien machine we encountered that sat stubbornly stationary in the way of our unselfgoverned path.
Philip Dodd
Sometimes, during the lonely hours on the control deck, Bowman would listen to this radiation. He would turn up the gain until the room filled with a crackling, hissing roar; out of this background, at irregular intervals, emerged brief whistles and peeps like the cries of demented birds. It was an eerie sound, for it had nothing to do with Man; it was as lonely and meaningless as the murmur of waves on a beach, or the distant crash of thunder beyond the horizon.
Arthur C. Clarke
I am in short, a witch of the quantumverse.
Philip Palmer
Everyone has got their own ideas and they push them and say to hell with everyone else. That's the history of the human race. It got us on top, only now it is pushing us off. The thing is that people will put up with any kind of discomfort, and dying babies, and old age at thirty as long as it has always been that way. Try to get them to change and they fight you, even while they're dying, saying it was good enough for grandpa so it's good enough for me. Bango, dead.
Harry Harrison
Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into the room, and the wall closed up again.
E.M. Forster
Science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun.
Brian W. Aldiss
Anyone can see that an ass laden with books remains a donkey. A human being laden with the undigested results of a tussle with thoughts and books, however, still passes for wise.
Idries Shah
Recognising our own mistakes helps us to empathise non-judgementally with others and helps enable us to understand their issues.
Jay Woodman
Thus the feeling I sometimes have - which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have - that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, the total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, too easily.
Oliver Sacks
Not by discussions nor by argument, but by lifting up Christ shall we draw men unto Him.
James Hudson Taylor
Asked in 1919 whether it was true that only three people in the world understood the theory of general relativity, [Eddington] allegedly replied: 'Who's the third?
Arthur Stanley Eddington
If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.
Herbert Spencer
The ability to discern truth comes from learning, growing, and understanding the Bible.
Elizabeth George
Dark Energy is poorly understood and it is clear that we are currently moving into exploring thecomplete electromagnetic spectrum that also includes the study of atmospheric pressure waves,atmospheric voltage effects on the cellular system, and the biological effects of the various forms ofatmospheric radiation transmission.
Steven Magee
If you want to understand the causes of aggression, study police officers
Steven Magee
Electricity should not be banned, it just needs much better government regulation and understanding by the medical profession of the full range of toxicity that it presents to the human.
Steven Magee
Whatsume'er the failings on his part, Remember reader he were that good in his hart.
Charles Dickens
I love the story of a thing. I love a thing for what it means a thousand times more than for what it's worth.
Elizabeth Wein
From the first, Istanbul had given him the impression of a town where, with the night, horror creeps out of the stones. It seemed to him a town the centuries had so drenched in blood and violence that, when daylight went out, the ghosts of its dead were its only population.
Ian Fleming
His indirect way of approaching a character or an action, striving to realize it by surrounding rather than invading it, is ideally suited to the indefinite and suggestive presentation of a ghost story.(introduction to "Sir Edmund Orme" by Henry James)
Herbert A. Wise
I don’t know. How can you know? I…I’m a monster. When I’m hungry, I might do anything.""Oh no, of course I couldn’t possibly understand you." Violet’s shadowed face seemed to be wearing a grim and serious smile. "I know, you woke up one day and found out that you couldn’t be the person you remembered being, the little girl everybody expected you to be. You just weren’t her any more, and there was nothing you could do about it. So your family decided you were a monster and turned on you." Violet sighed, staring out into the darkness."Believe me, I do understand that. And let me tell you - from one monster to another - that just because somebody tells you you’re a monster, it doesn’t mean you are."just now you told me what you did because you want me to stop you from eating Pen. If you were a real monster, you wouldn’t have done that, would you?" Trista’s eyes stung, and she wiped strands of cobweb away with her sleeve."Idiot," added Violet, for good measure.
Frances Hardinge
Know your number. If you don’t know it you might forget who you are.
Diane Samuels
Ha!’ cackled the fiend, ‘I expect you’d like revenge on that husband of yours. Murder shouldn’t go unpunished, and no creature enjoys delivering chastisement as much as I. What about giving him a taste of his own medicine? If you’d be so kind as to lend me your body, I’ll set him dancing to my tune.’The wife’s spectre grimaced and nodded, at which the wicked Likho stripped off the nightgown, then the dead woman’s pliant skin, peeling back the flaccid folds. These it left in a slack heap. It gobbled her flesh and sucked the bones clean. These it hid behind the stove, before inserting itself inside the empty, wrinkled carcass, taking the former position of the corpse. Its fat tongue swiped the last juices from around its lips.When the husband returned home, all was as it had been; there was not a speck of blood to be seen, although the strangest smell of rotten eggs lingered
Emmanuelle de Maupassant
I saw the massive stone altar first begin to glow like a ruby; then it was a heart of liquid gold like a solid single-crystal chrysoprase: the gold intensified into ice-cold emerald and passed into the dark sapphire of an arctic sky; this again withdrew into a violet so deep that the visual purple of the eye itself seemed absorbed in that depth, that abyss of color in which sight was being drowned. And as this intensification of vibrancy seemed to sweep across the visible spectrum up to those ranges where energy absorbs all mass and that which can pierce the most solid is itself fine beyond all substance, so it seemed with hearing. That abyss of sound which I had been thinking of as only depth, it, too, seemed to rise or, rather, I suppose I was carried up on some rising wave which explored the deep of the height.As the light drew toward the invisible, I experienced a sound so acute that I can only remember feeling to myself that this was the note emitted when the visible universe returns to the unmanifest—this was the consummatum est of creation. I knew that an aperture was opening in the solid manifold. The things of sense were passing with the music of their own transmutation, out of sight. Veil after veil was evaporating under the blaze of the final Radiance. Suddenly I knew terror as never before. The only words which will go near to recreating in me some hint of that actual mode are those which feebly point toward the periphery of panic by saying that all things men dread are made actually friendly by this ultimate awfulness. Every human horror, every evil that the physical body may suffer, seemed, beside this that loomed before me, friendly, homely, safe. The rage of a leaping tiger would have been a warm embrace. The hell of a forest wrapped in a hurricane of fire, the subzero desolation of the antarctic blizzard, would have been only the familiar motions of a simple well-known world. Yes, even the worst, most cunning and cruel evil would only be the normal reassuring behavior of a well-understood, much-sympathized-with child. Against This, the ultimate Absolute, how friendly became anything less, anything relative.
Gerald Heard
Dorothea: "What the fuck are you?"Nix: "A man who wanted to be a God...then changed his mind.
Clive Barker