Quotes by British Authors - Page 5

I'm my characters' galley slave.
Chloe Thurlow
Travel became distinguishable from pain and began to be regarded as an intellectual pleasur...These factors--the voluntariness of departure, the freedom implicit in the indeterminancies of mobility, the pleasure of travel free from necessity, the notion that travel signifies autonomy and is a means for demonstrating what one 'really' is independent of one context or set of defining associations--remain the characteristics of the modern conception of travel.Eric Leed
Robin Jarvis
There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to the catastrophe.
Horace Walpole
So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.
Virginia Woolf
Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.
Bernard Cornwell
People used to play with toys.Now the toys play with them.
Idries Shah
...for nothing is more boring than being forced to play.
Angela Carter
And I was a Child again, watching the bright World. But the Spell broke when at this Juncture some Gallants jumped from the Pitt onto the Stage and behaved as so many Merry-Andrews among the Actors, which reduced all to Confusion. I laugh'd with them also, for I like to make Merry among the Fallen and there is pleasure to be had in the Observation of the Deformity of Things. Thus when the Play resumed after the Disturbance, it was only to excite my Ridicule with its painted Fictions, wicked Hypocrisies and villainous Customs, all depicted with a little pert Jingle of Words and a rambling kind of Mirth to make the Insipidnesse and Sterility pass. There was no pleasure in seeing it, and nothing to burden the Memory after: like a voluntarie before a Lesson it was absolutely forgotten, nothing to be remembered or repeated.
Peter Ackroyd
Play invites participation.
Brian Goodwin
The goal is not simply to 'work hard, play hard.' The goal is to make our work and our play indistinguishable.
Simon Sinek
Did I live? The human world is like a vast musical instrument on which we play our individual part while simultaneously listening to the compositions of others in an effort to contribute to the whole. We don't chose whether to engage, only how to; we either harmonize or create dissonance. Our words, our deeds, our very presence create and leave impressions in the minds of others just as a writer makes impressions with their words. Who you are is an unfolding narrative. You came from nothing and will return there eventually. Instead of taking ourselves so seriously all the time, we can discover the playful irony of a story that has never been told in quite this way before. -- Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs
Stephen Batchelor
The bowler approached the wicket at a lope, a trot, and then a run. He suddenly exploded in a flurry of arms and legs, out of which flew a ball.
Douglas Adams
He suddenly exploded in a flurry of arms and legs, out of which flew a ball.
Douglas Adams
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?
Tom Stoppard
You will never become who you want to be if you keep blaming everyone else for who you are.
Habeeb Akande
Perhaps it was as well that she had been unconscious for four weeks. She had missed the aftermath, the SO-1 reports, the recriminations, Snood and Tamworth's funerals. She missed everything...except the blame. It was waiting for her when she awoke...
Jasper Fforde
. . . nobody in particular is to blame, that I can see, for the state in which things are . . .
Charlotte Brontë
Being the bearer of bad news is a terrible thing; sometimes you don't know if you'll have the words, the delicacy,the strength. You think of the person on the other side: how you're about to bring their world crashing down with a single phone call and deep inside them they'll hate you because their sorrow will just be searching for someone to blame. Then what do you say? That you're sorry? Sorry for what? They'll hate you even more because they'll know you're not sorry like they are. They'll know you haven't been destroyed like they have.
Emma Abdullah
The only person to blame for your situation is you.
Fennel Hudson
I reckon that blaming people fixes nothing. You're the only person who is going to sort you out. No-one else really can - or really cares, enough. That's what Nepalis know - better than anyone. That's our Western disease. Don't take responsibility. Take on a lawyer!
Jane Wilson-Howarth
Rights begin where love ends. Shall we argue over who is the most to blame?
Jeanette Winterson
The Auditors fluttered anxiously. And, as always happens in their species when something goes radically wrong and needs fixing instantly, they settled down to try to work how who was to blame.
Terry Pratchett
That drew a laugh from Jessamy, but he said, after a moment: “You had better flay me. It was my fault—all my fault!”“I was wondering how long it would be before you contrived to convince yourself that you were to blame,” said Alverstoke caustically. “I haven’t the slightest wish to know how you arrived at such an addlebrained conclusion, so don’t put yourself to the trouble of telling me!
Georgette Heyer
Rationally speaking, blaming one's behavior on alcohol or drugs is like blaming the ladder by which you descended into a pit, or the staircase that took you down to a cellar, for what you found there.
Graham Joyce
They came to the high stone shaft with the face of Sul; they descended to the terrace below. And here Caradog waited, leaning on his silver-tipped rod and eying the horizon, until the delicate slip of the new moon moved out from behind the shoulder of Mount Damyake, with the mysterious, shadowy ghost of the old moon cradle inside it, like an egg inside its egg cup."Now it is time," he
Joan Aiken
He blamed every fucker available excepting, of course, the one who was actually to blame, the one sitting in his saddle and getting colder, hungrier, and more lost with every unpleasant moment. ‘Shit!’ he roared at nothing.
Joe Abercrombie
Blame is something that is shared and denied in equal measures.
Patrick Ness
How different this world to the one about which I used to read, and in which I used to live! This is one peopled by demons, phantoms, vampires, ghouls, boggarts, and nixies. Names of things of which I knew nothing are now so familiar that the creatures themselves appear to have real existence. The Arabian Nights are not more fantastic than our gospels; and Lempriere would have found ours a more marvelous world to catalog than the classical mythical to which he devoted his learning. Ours is a world of luprachaun and clurichaune, deev and cloolie, and through the maze of mystery I have to thread my painful way, now learning how to distinguish oufe from pooka, and nis from pixy; study long screeds upon the doings of effreets and dwergers, or decipher the dwaul of delirious monks who have made homunculi from refuse. Waking or sleeping, the image of some uncouth form is always present to me. What would I not give for a volume by the once despised 'A. L. O. E' or prosy Emma Worboise? Talk of the troubles of Winifred Bertram or Jane Eyre, what are they to mine? Talented authoresses do not seem to know that however terrible it may be to have as a neighbour a mad woman in a tower, it is much worse to have to live in a kitchen with a crocodile. This elementary fact has escaped the notice of writers of fiction; the re-statement of it has induced me to reconsider my decision as to the most longed-for book; my choice now is the Swiss Family Robinson. In it I have no doubt I should find how to make even the crocodile useful, or how to kill it, which would be still better.("Mysterious Maisie")
Wirt Gerrare
Their bodies lay flatly on the rocks, and their eyes regarded him with evil interest: but it does not appear that Mr. Fison was afraid, or that he realized that he was in any danger. Possibly his confidence is to be ascribed to the limpness of their attitudes. But he was horrified, of course, and intensely excited and indignant at such revolting creatures preying upon human flesh. He thought they had chanced upon a drowned body. He shouted to them, with the idea of driving them off, and, finding they did not budge, cast about him, picked up a big rounded lump of rock, and flung it at one.And then, slowly uncoiling their tentacles, they all began moving towards him - creeping at first deliberately, and making a soft purring sound to each other.
H.G.Wells
He had found his monsters, and now was the time to leave them behind.
Tim Lebbon
She's in the club. The hopelessly-outnumbered-and-surrounded-by-monsters club.
M.R. Carey
Before you can kill the monster you have to say its name.
Terry Pratchett
I’m not sure we’re quite the monsters you want us to be.
Gavin G. Smith
Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.
Hilary Mantel
Monsters were one thing. She was used to monsters, she could deal with monsters. A noise in the darkness, with nothing attached to it, was another.
Paul Cornell
Monsters always make more trouble before they die.
Melinda Gebbie
A monster lies in wait in me,A stew of wounds and misery,But fiercer still in life and limb,The me that lies in wait in him.
Clive Barker
But then, maybe “I don’t believe in you” is the cruelest way to kill a monster.
Helen Oyeyemi
You worry that we're becoming monsters. Merlin, we already were monsters. You didn't make us any worse.
Alastair Reynolds
The strange thing arched its serpentine body to bring its head closer to the bear, all of its many eyes staring straight at him with alien curiosity. The thing looked at the bear. The bear looked at the thing."Oh well," said the bear. "Made a plan. Better stick to it, I suppose." And with that, mallet in paw, he leaped form the boat.
Dave Shelton
Leaves that rustled, twigs that scraped and rattled. But the thin shapes weren't falling, they were scurrying head first down the tree-trunks at a speed that seemed to leave time behind. Some of them had no shape they could have lived with, and some might never have had any skin. She saw their shriveled eyes glimmer eagerly and their toothless mouths gape with an identical infantile hunger. Their combined weight bowed the lowest branches while they extended arms like withered sticks to snatch the child. ("With The Angels")
Ramsey Campbell
Oh, monsters are scared," said Lettie. "That's why they're monsters.
Neil Gaiman
You’d better tell me what you know, toad,” said Tiffany. “Miss Tick isn’t here. I am.”“Another world is colliding with this one,” said the toad. “There. Happy now? That’s what Miss Tick thinks. But it’s happening faster than she expected. All the monsters are coming back.”“Why?”“There’s no one to stop them.”There was silence for a moment.“There’s me,” said Tiffany.
Terry Pratchett
The Plutocracy’s insatiable hunger for pixelated information is enough to put a bulimic Pac-Man to shame
Dean Cavanagh
A surfeit of information often hides an untruth,” he said, with annoying clarity.
Jasper Fforde
Warning:This data storage unit, or "book," has been designed to reprogram the human brain, allowing it to replicate the lost art that was once called reading. It is a simple adjustment and there will be no negative or harmful effects from this process.What you are doing: "Reading" ExplainedEach sheet is indelibly printed with information and the sheets are visually scanned from left to right, and from top to bottom.This scanned information is passed through the visual cortex directly into the brain, where it can then be accessed just like any other data.
Mike A. Lancaster
We know that children with autism like order, that they are often very visual and that they can be quite literal. They deserve beautiful resources and symbols that make sense. If a picture does not explain visually, it is pointless and the child will stop looking to the pictures for information.
Adele Devine
For a moment I think we were turned into information, and that in that instant we were linked to every other piece of information ever known; every thought ever thought, or at least ever captured by the light.
Alastair Reynolds
Nowhere in the world, Rud reflected, was journalism anything but a malignant and wanton power. Later on, as the Common-sense Movement grew, he had to think a lot about that. He had to spread a new system of ideas throughout the world, and journalism would neither instruct nor inform nor lend itself consistently to any sustained propaganda.
H.G.Wells
Careful evaluation of information that is portrayed as fact is critical.
Steven Redhead
people tell you so much more when they know you're just about to be dead . and then they talk around you, when you are.
Neil Gaiman
People today are in danger of drowning in information; but, because they have been taught that information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be. If they could handle information, they would not have to drown at all.
Idries Shah
I think Jay is in import and export business as his cards say, but he finally found that the second most valuable commodity today is information.""And?""The most valuable?""People with information," I suggested.
Len Deighton
Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.
Samuel Johnson
I never thought I'd hear myself say it, but safety first!
J.K. Rowling
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
Arthur Conan Doyle
She had expressed herself, as women will, in a smug broadside of pastel shades. Nothing clashed because nothing had the strength to clash; everything murmured of safety among the hues; all was refinement.
Mervyn Peake
I don't have to be safe to feel safe, I always feel safe at my core.
Jay Woodman
During my five years on Mauna Kea, workers routinely displayed the symptoms of Cerebral Hypoxia
Steven Magee
When Iran starts to regulate USA nuclear facilities, it will be a step in the right direction for the safety and security of 300 million people.
Steven Magee