Quotes by British Authors - Page 30

Before the house-maid had lit the fire the next day, or the sun gained any power over the cold, gloomy morning in January, Marianne, only half dressed, was kneeling against one of the window-seats for the sake of all the little light she could command from it, and writing as fast as a continual flow of tears would permit her.
Jane Austen
But that's the thing about all of this," he says gently but urgently, "we survive. After each known down, each earth shattering blow, we get up again. Even though we walk through hell, and it feels like all we do is walk through hell, we do eventually make it to the otherside. Scarred. Mostly broken. But we survive. And then we start to rebuild ourselves. We're never the same, but we do rebuild ourselves. Because something like this is just another way in which we change. We all have to change.
Dorothy Koomson
But Dobby shouted, "You shall not harm Harry Potter! ... He got up, face livid, and pulled out his wand, but Dobby raised a long, threatening finger. "You shall go now," he said fiercely, pointing down at Mr. Malfoy. "You shall not touch Harry Potter. You shall go now.
J.K. Rowling
Every villain is a hero in his own mind.
Tom Hiddleston
Sophia shrieked and fainted on the ground – I screamed and instantly ran mad. We remained thus mutually deprived of our senses, some minutes, and on regaining them were deprived of them again. For an Hour and a Quarter did we continue in this unfortunate situation – Sophia fainting every moment and I running mad as often. At length a groan from the hapless Edward (who alone retained any share of life) restored us to ourselves.
Jane Austen
He would be able to suffer what his son had suffered. He would be able to suffer and his suffering would for an instance displace his grief.
Simon Lelic
There is nothing more painful than the untimely death of someone young and dear to the heart. The harrowing grief surges from a bottomless well of sorrow, drowning the mourner in a torrent of agonizing pain; an exquisite pain that continues to afflict the mourner with heartache and loneliness long after the deceased is buried and gone.
Jocelyn Murray
Only parents and torturers and the janitors of holocausts are asked to stand the sound of so much human grief.
Martin Amis
In the chain of events, it is arbitrary to be sentimental about the passing of any one link.
Johnny Rich
No journey out of grief was straightforward. There would be good days and bad days.
Jojo Moyes
We are bidden to 'put on Christ', to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.
C.S. Lewis
Like Mom, Zoe thought–like Mom used to. And that’s where they differed, for Zoe wrote quiet poetry suffused with twilight and questions. It’s not even good poetry, she thought. I don’t have talent, it’s her. I should be the one ill; she has so much to offer, so much life. “You’re a dark one,” her mother said sometimes with amused wonder. “You’re a mystery.
Annette Curtis Klause
It is not triumph which defines a man, but tragedy. Triumph always brings out the best in men, but tragedy shows us what we are made of.
Jocelyn Murray
The beauties of the North seemed to be intensified by the loss we had experienced there, and they drew us back to them.
David Almond
Loss of cell phone reception inside of a building generally indicates that the following two issues may be present: 1. High electromagnetic interference (EMI) environment from dirty electricity that is being generated by electronic products. 2. Shielding and Faraday cage effects from metalwork in the building.
Steven Magee
Life becomes involuntary repetitive when you suffer from short term memory loss.
Steven Magee
You see, because [Norfolk is] stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it's not on the way to anywhere. People going north and south, they bypass it altogether. For that reason, it's a peaceful corner of England, rather nice. But it's also something of a lost corner.'Someone claimed after the lesson that Miss Emily had said Norfolk was England's 'lost corner' because that was were all the lost property found in the country ended up.Ruth said one evening, looking out at the sunset, that 'when we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, and we were free to travel the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Let's forgive someone for Valentines day, it's a great way to show love, and forgive yourself too for the hurt you held onto.
Jay Woodman
God forgives us, as—when—we forgive them who injure us—and ourselves. These last weeks I think I have understood what many times in the past I thought I knew—but we never know—we never reach the end of understanding—the understanding of God—the mystery of his love...
Lucy Beckett
Having no need to judge, control, react, so forgiveness does not even arise.
Jay Woodman
The Queen (Victoria) wrote generously to her mother, 'I quite understand your feelings on the occasion of Sir John Conroy's death. . . I will not speak of the past and the many sufferings he entailed on us by creating divisions between you and me which could never have existed otherwise, they are buried with him.. For his poor wife and children I am truly sorry." Thanking the Queen for her letter the Duchess of Kent wrote 'Yes, Sir John Conroy's death was a most painful shock. I shall not try and excuse the many errors that unfortunate man committed, but it would be very unjust if I allowed all the blame to be thrown on him. I am in justice bound to accuse myself. . . I erred in believing blindly, in acting with out refection. . . I allowed myself unintentionally to be led led to hurt you, my dearest child, for whom I would have given at every moment my life! Refection came always too late, but not the deserved punishment! My sufferings were great, very great. God be praised that those terrible times are gone by and that only death can separate me from you My beloved Victoria.
Cecil Woodham-Smith
O, sir,' murmured Sheila, still on her knees, 'please forgive me.''Forgive you! 0, la, la, la!' cunningly cried the droll, and strutting like an actor. 'Forgiveness is easy, is it not? O, yes, it is nothing. You are a young woman full of pride. O. yes! - but that is nothing. And full of penitence, and that is nothing, too. Pride is nothing, penitence nothing, forgiveness nothing, but even a bargain in farthings must be paid to be made, and I am a plain business man. What costs nothing brings no balm, and you would not like that, you would not like that, now would you?' (“The Bogey Man”)
A.E. Coppard
On the canvas of life,Every sweep of the brush matters,Counts for something…
Scott Hastie
I am sad, like the hot dust on the streetsAnd the music of fresh fallen leavesCaught in a sliding summer breeze.
Scott Hastie
The gilded spiralOf longings within.Our very own cathedralThat points persistently to heaven.
Scott Hastie
For myself, I favored the abstract. I collected not just obsolete terms and words, but ideas.
Jasper Fforde
She said, 'It is filled with all the words for how I want you.
Sarah Waters
We never stop loving,No matter what we say,because we say just empty words,to keep our hurt away.
Anthony T.Hincks
Jess couldn't stop spitting out words, because they were words like blades to hurt, and if she swallowed them, she'd be scraped hollow.
Helen Oyeyemi
Mrs. Bittarcy rustled ominously, holding her peace meanwhile. She feared long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many syllables.("The Man Whom The Trees Loved")
Algernon Blackwood
The parrot had a range of phrases. His own name ('Niko, Niko'), the name of his original owner and now 'Stavros'. Occasionally he would also say 'Panagia mou', which could be an expression of piety but also a gentle expletive, depending on how it was said. With the parrot it was hard to tell. It did not sound pious.
Victoria Hislop
It's a truth universally acknowledged...
Jane Austen
She had thought of literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) as something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightning; something errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold, literature was an elderly gentleman in a grey suit talking about duchesses…Orlando then came to the conclusion (opening half-a-dozen books)…that it would be impolitic in the extreme to wrap a ten-pound note round the sugar tongs when Miss Christina Rossetti came to tea…next (here were half-a-dozen invitations to celebrate centenaries by dining) that literature since it all these dinners must be growing very corpulent; next (she was invited to a score of lectures on the Influence of this upon that; the Classical revival; the Romantic survival, and other titles of the same engaging kind) that literature since it listened to all these lectures must be growing very dry; next (here she attended a reception given by a peeress) that literature since it wore all those fur tippets must be growing very respectable; next (here she visited Carlyle’s sound-proof room at Chelsea) that genius since it needed all this coddling must be growing very delicate…
Virginia Woolf
I will find you another long-forgotten Queen Mab poem in no time. Depend on it. I refuse to let Cody or anyone else know more about English Literature than me. So calm yourself, Elfish, and let an expert take over.
Martin Millar
In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfill their mysterious purpose.
G.K. Chesterton
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, and of the heart.
Salman Rushdie
Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committ
Christopher Hitchens
Publishers are businesses and I don’t blame them for that. If they didn’t make money by publishing books, there wouldn’t be any books.
Johnny Rich
Are we not acceptable, moon? Are we not lovely sitting together here, I in my satin; he in black and white?
Virginia Woolf
Logically, this kind of atheism did not prove that there was no God.... On the contrary, Southwell was typical in placing the onus probandi on those who affirmed the existence of God and Holyoake regarded himself as an atheist only in his inability to believe what the churches would have him believe. They were content to show that the Christian concept of the supernatural was meaningless, that the arguments in its favor were illogical, and that the mysteries of the universe, insofar as they were explicable, could be accounted for in material terms.
Edward Royle
The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof.
Ashley Montagu
If, as I have reason to believe, I have disintegrated the nucleus of the atom, this is of greater significance than th
Ernest Rutherford
Believe in the potential of obtaining or achieving a desire.
Steven Redhead
Generate the belief in what you wish to achieve.
Steven Redhead
Civilization is always threatened from below, by patterns of belief and emotion that may once have been useful to our ancestors, but that are useful no longer.
Roger Scruton
I do not believe in God. It seems to me that theists of all kinds have very largely failed to make their concept of a deity intelligible; and to the extent that they have made it intelligible, they have given us no reason to think that anything answers to it.
A.J. Ayer
For as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it’s true or not.
Neil Gaiman
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widely spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
Bertrand Russell
The future begins today.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Q: When is the perfect time? A: Who can say, but probably somewhere between haste and delay - and it's usually most wise to start today.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
There are two schools of thought about the resilience of time. The first is that time is highly volatile, with every small event altering the possible outcome of the earth's future. The other view is that time is rigid, and no matter how hard you try, it will always spring back toward a determined present. Myself, I do not worry about such trivialities. I simply sell ties to anyone who wants to buy one...
Jasper Fforde
Soothsayers are like that. They see many futures but never their own.
Jasper Fforde
A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like our Earth.
Christopher Wren
Each age selects its own geniuses from the past to suit its own needs. It's always been that way.
Seb Kirby
The most obvious and the most distinctive features of the History of Civilisation, during the last fifty years, is the wonderful increase of industrial production by the application of machinery, the improvement of old technical processes and the invention of new ones, accompanied by an even more remarkable development of old and new means of locomotion and intercommunication. By this rapid and vast multiplication of the commodities and conveniences of existence, the general standard of comfort has been raised, the ravages of pestilence and famine have been checked, and the natural obstacles, which time and space offer to mutual intercourse, have been reduced in a manner, and to an extent, unknown to former ages. The diminution or removal of local ignorance and prejudice, the creation of common interests among the most widely separated peoples, and the strengthening of the forces of the organisation of the commonwealth against those of political or social anarchy, thus effected, have exerted an influence on the present and future fortunes of mankind the full significance of which may be divined, but cannot, as yet, be estimated at its full value.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Learn from the past, log the lessons from the past, butleave the past!
Elizabeth George
All life is preoccupied with death. Death is the only certain future. Yet in the face of reason, everyone holds out hope for the highly improbable.
Johnny Rich
The science done by the young Einstein will continue as long as our civilization, but for civilization to survive, we'll need the wisdom of the old Einstein -- humane, global and farseeing. And whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate into the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth, far beyond the Earth
Martin J. Rees
MotherHushed and sacred silencefills the dawning skyI ponder in this momentof our journey which is nigh...
Muse
I grew up in an era that was a golden age of the blockbuster, when something we might call a family film could have universal appeal. That's something I want to see again. In terms of the tone of the film, it looks at where we are as a people and has a universality about human experience.
Christopher J. Nolan