Quotes by British Authors - Page 499

When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.
Diane Setterfield
Gods? Don't let that impress you. Anyone can be a god if they have enough worshippers. You don't even have to have powers anymore. In my time I've seen theatre gods, gladiator gods, even storyteller gods - you people see gods everywhere. Gives you an excuse for not thinking for yourselves.God is just a word. Like Fury. like demon, Just words people use for things they don't understand. Reverse it and you get dog. It's just as appropriate.
Joanne Harris
And after that, and also for each word, there should be sentences that show the twists and turns of meanings—the way almost every word slips in its silvery, fishlike way, weaving this way and that, adding subtleties of nuance to itself, and then perhaps shedding them as public mood dictates.
Simon Winchester
I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it.Jean-Paul Sartre, Words
Carole Seymour-Jones
:Paintings are easy to see," he said after a moment. "Open, presented flat to the eye. Words are not easy. Words have to be discovered, deep in their pages, deciphered, translated, read. Words are symbols to be encoded, their letters trees in a forest, enmeshed, their tangled meanings never finally picked apart.
Catherine Fisher
When you draw, you copy the world don't you? You remake it on paper, but it isn't the same. It's yours. No one else could have created it just like that. When I make poems, I use the words we all use, but the order and the sound create a new power. This wood is someone's creation. We stumble through it's tendrils, as if we're crawling through the synapses of his mind.
Catherine Fisher
They said a lot of things to each other that night, but nothing that involved words.
Michael Grant
Talk is cheap when your words have no value.
Habeeb Akande
No critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. For English is a language that simply cannot be fixed, not can its use ever be absolutely laid down. It changes constantly; it grows with an almost exponential joy. It evolves eternally; its words alter their senses and their meanings subtly, slowly, or speedily according to fashion and need.
Simon Winchester
To say exactly what one means, even to one's own private satisfaction, is difficult. To say exactly what one means and to involve another person is harder still. Communication between you and me relies on assumptions, associations, commonalities and a kind of agreed shorthand, which no-one could precisely define but which everyone would admit exists. That is one reason why it is an effort to have a proper conversation in a foreign language. Even if I am quite fluent, even if I understand the dictionary definitions of words and phrases, I cannot rely on a shorthand with the other party, whose habit of mind is subtly different from my own. Nevertheless, all of us know of times when we have not been able to communicate in words a deep emotion and yet we know we have been understood. This can happen in the most foreign of foreign parts and it can happen in our own homes. It would seem that for most of us, most of the time, communication depends on more than words.
Jeanette Winterson
Talk is cheap when your words are of no value
Habeeb Akande
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me. Bones mend and become actually stronger in the very place they were broken and where they have knitted up; mental wounds can grind and ooze for decades and be re-opened by the quietest whisper.
Stephen Fry
As a result of these news stories, millions of people must have become aware of "niggardly," who otherwise would never have heard it, let alone thought to use it. If this is right, and the word has a new currency, it is probably not the currency I would wish for. The word's new lease of life is probably among manufacturers and retailers of sophomoric humor. I bet that even as I write, some adolescent boys, in the stairwell of some high school somewhere in America, are accusing each other of being niggardly, and sniggering at their own outrageous wit. I bet … Wait a minute. Sniggering? Oh, my God …
John Derbyshire
Words to intrigue, inspire, examine, question, praise; Words to help us appreciate our world, our selves, our games; Words to dance our true soul fires gracefully free.
Jay Woodman
Hungry for beautiful words, the fox comes rooting around in the hedge, almost too close to the fire. He reads my mind with one glance and is gone. All my poetry is now trotting around the bushes inside him, maybe some day to be partly eaten or left to rot. He understands being alive for as long as he can be, and does not worry about why, or what might happen afterwards.
Jay Woodman
She was only saying what I already knew in my heart, but hearing the words spoken made it seem all the more true, all the more terrifying.Words gave concepts power. Once they were released, there was no choice but to understand them, no matter how painful they might be.
Mike A. Lancaster
To say someone is a vision is to pay them a great compliment. If you say that they look a sight it is a grave insult.
Teresa Monachino
Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
Zadie Smith
Words borrowed of antiquity do lend a kind of majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes.
Ben Jonson
If words are to enter men's minds and bear fruit, they must be the right words shaped cunningly to pass men's defenses and explode silently and effectually within their minds.
J.B. Phillips
There is a weird power in a spoken word.
Joseph Conrad
Never use five words if you can get away with one, eh? I've known dead men talk more than you do.
Neil Gaiman
Fear not because your prayer is stammering, your words feeble, and your language poor. Jesus can understand you.
J.C. Ryle
That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape through the Saturnian discipline of lead, so filled the spaces of the loft that the air was all driven away. The lovers suffocated, but when the sacristan opened the tiny door the words tumbled him over in their desire to be free, and were seen flying across the city in the shape of doves.
Jeanette Winterson
To hunt words is to do no trespass.
Ivor Brown
Words have power, you understand? It is in the nature of our universe. Our library itself distorts time and space on quite a grand scale. Well, when the Post Office started accumulating letters, it was storing words. In fact, what was being created was what we call a 'gevaisa', a tomb of living words.
Terry Pratchett
We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate people of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes – our language is the language of everything we have read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.
Penelope Lively
I will write in words of fire.I will write them on your skin.I will write about desire.Write beginnings, write of sin.You’re the book I love the best,your skin only holds my truth, you will be a palimpsest lines of age rewriting youth. You will not burn upon the pyre. Or be buried on the shelf. You’re my letter to desire: And you’ll never read yourself. I will trace each word and comma As the final dusk descends, You’re my tale of dreams and drama, Let us find out how it ends.
Neil Gaiman
He taught me that language was rubbery, plastic. It wasn't, as I thought, something you just use, but something you can play with. Words were made up of little bits that could be shuffled, turned back to front, remixed. They could be tucked and folded into other words to produce unexpected things. It was like cookery, like alchemy. Language hid more than it revealed.
Mal Peet
A Dream Pirate attack is swift and ragged. Like awkward phantoms, the pirates often fly in lurches and jerks, and they usually destroy everything that gets in their way.
William Joyce
A word is used "correctly" when the average hearer will be affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not a literary, definition of "correctness". The literary definition would substitute, for the average hearer, a person of high education living a long time ago; the purpose of this definition is to make it difficult to speak or write correctly.
Bertrand Russell
Words are what you fight with but what you fight about is whether or not you’re afraid of them.
David Mitchell
Lovely phrases had lit candles in her mind, one after the other, till she felt intoxicated with the brightness.
Elizabeth Goudge
I dread the beginning of her new life more than words can tell, but I see some hope for her if she travels - none if she remains at home.
Wilkie Collins
... a man needs no camel to ride to hell, yea, nor horse, nor mule; a man may ride into hell on his tongue...
Terry Pratchett
Speech is the deadliest of revealers.' - Hercule Poirot, Cards on the Table
Agatha Christie
Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline.
Diane Setterfield
Words had become overnight just little coins, insignificant and unfreighted, to be exchanged for ribbons, buttons, for an apple or an egg.
Jo Baker
Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise.
Wilkie Collins
The explanation has been written already in the three words that were many enough, and plain enough, for my confession. I loved her.
Wilkie Collins
Remember to say what you mean, but don't say it meanly.
Elizabeth George
Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.
Aldous Huxley
A picture can say a thousand words, but a sentence can paint a thousand pictures...
J. Buchanan
He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.
Virginia Woolf
But you will never realize that an incident which filled but a degree in the circle of your thoughts covered the whole circumference of mine. No person can see exactly what and where another's horizon is.
Thomas Hardy
... Our language, tiger, our language: hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of legitimate new ideas... And yet, oh, and yet, we, all of us, spend all our days saying to each other the same things time after weary time: "I love you," "Don't go in there," "Get out," "You have no right to say that," "Stop it," "Why should I," "That hurt," "Help," "Marjorie is dead.
Stephen Fry
The word begone is a Russian doll. A small, single word, which contains so many others; and when all the smaller words inside line up, they look like a bridge: Be Beg Ego Go On One.
Craig Stone
He found himself in a room not unlike the shop. All books again, packed tight on shelves or laying in piles on every surface. It was a cozy room, for all that ; it smelled of warm, rich words and very deep thoughts.
Jenny Nimmo
The brain. Where words mean something. The heart. Where words feel something. When both work together. Kaboom.
Jill Telford
Sometimes words aren't needed.
Gavin Extence
DYER. No, I am not of your Mind, for the Dialogue was fitted up with too much Facility. Words must be pluckt from Obscurity and nourished with Care, improved with Art and corrected with Application. Labour and Time are the Instruments in the perfection of all Work.
Peter Ackroyd
Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free and all words, light and frothy, firm and sculpted as they may be, bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years. How they feel to us now tells us whole stories of our ancestors.
Stephen Fry
To animals they were just the weather, just part of everything. But humans arose and gave them names, just as people filled the starry sky with heroes and monsters, because this turned them into stories. And humans loved stories, because once you'd turned things into stories, you could change the stories.
Terry Pratchett
We must be careful with our words – we’re like superheroes and words are like our super powers. Super powers should always be used to help others…
Dianna Hardy
My head is a hive of words that won't settle.
Virginia Woolf
Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.
George Orwell
It pleases him how Spell is how the word is made but also, in the hands of the magician, how the world is changed. One letter separates Word from World, and that letter is like the number one, or an 'I', or a shaft of light between almost closed curtains. There is an old letter called a thorn, which jags and tears at the throat as it's uttered. Later he learns that Grammar and Glamour share the same deeper root, which is further magic, and there can be neither magic without that root, nor plant. He's lost in it like Chid in Child, or God reversed into Dog. Somewhere inside him is a colon. A sentence can last for life.
Charles Lambert
One of the difficulties of thinking clearly about anything is that it is almost impossible not to form our ideas in words which have some previous association for us; with the result that our thought is already shaped along certain lines before we have begun to follow it out. Again, a word may have various meanings, and our use of it in one sense may deceive our readers (or even ourselves) into supposing that we were using it in some other sense.
A.A. Milne
Well, it's really no use our talking in the way we have been doing if the words we use mean something different to each of us...and nothing.
Malcolm Bradbury
I love that word. Forever. I love that forever doesn't exist, but we have a word for it anyway, and use it all the time. It's beautiful and doomed.
Viv Albertine