Quotes by British Authors - Page 5

Here, are the stiffening hills, here, the rich cargoCongealed in the dark arteries,Old veinsThat hold Glamorgan's blood.The midnight miner in the secret seams,Limb, life, and
Mervyn Peake
When Eve upon the first of MenThe apple press’d with specious cant,Oh! what a thousand pities thenThat Adam was not adamant!
Thomas Hood
There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
Arthur Conan Doyle
If you blend in, you don't stand out.
Anthony T.Hincks
You don't want captains in the army who know too much or think too much.
Robert Graves
Some mathematics problems look simple, and you try them for a year or so, and then you try them for a hundred years, and it turns out that they're extremely hard to solve. There's no reason why these problems shouldn't be easy, and yet they turn out to be extremely intricate. [Fermat's] Last Theorem is the most beautiful example of this.
Andrew John Wiles
Really, it is unfair to say that English spelling is not an accurate rendering of speech. It is – it's only that it renders the speech of the 16th century.
Guy Deutscher
The sadness began later, in waves as crushing as the contractions had been,
Ruth Ahmed
I am what the water gave me, / a smoke-ring in a jar, / the braided rope / my ladder-to-the-light, / my shivering bird heart / caught
Pascale Petit
Any noseMay ravage with impunity a rose.
Robert Browning
You cannot have too many aconites. They cost, as I said before, about fifty shillings a thousand. A thousand will make a brave splash of colour, which lasts a month. If you can afford ten thousand, you are mad not to buy them. There are so many exciting places you can put them. . . in the hollow of a felled tree, by the border of a pond, in a circle round a statue, or immediately under your window, so that you can press your nose against the glass, when it is too cold to go out, and stare at them, and remember that spring is on its way.
Beverley Nichols
Gnats drifted on the same warm summer breeze that saw colorful paper lanterns swaying on their strings. Lily of the valley filled jam jars at each table, but sweet peas had won out in the battle to fragrance the evening air.
Anouska Knight
Yorkshire had none of the color I'd known in Cape Town- the vivid pinks and purples of the freesias and arum lilies in the flower sellers' baskets. Yorkshire had none of the fragrant floral perfume, or the tang of salt in the air from the ocean.
Hazel Gaynor
Better a crust of black bread than a mountain of paper confections, Better a daisy in earth than a dahlia cut and gathered,Better a cowslip with root than a prize carnation without it
Arthur Hugh Clough
Suddenly Damask found herself staring down at the flowers through a dazzle of tears. The words sounded so innocent and so disarming - she remembered that she hadn't wanted to come through the beautiful woods at all; and there was no danger, nothing wrong except the wickedness of her own heart. She looked at Danny's big, brown, work-scarred hands gently gathering the flowers and her love for him was a physical pain. Oh, how she loved him; how she wished that he would ask her to marry him!"Norah Lofts
Norah Lofts
Our analyses of the FDA data showed relatively little difference between the effects of antidepressants and the effects of placebos. Indeed, the effects were so small that they did not qualify as clinically significant. The drug companies knew how small the effect of their medications were compared to placebos, and so did the FDA and other regulatory agencies. The companies found various ways to make the data seem more favorable to their products, and the FDA helped them keep their negative data secret. In fact, in some instances, the FDA urged the companies to keep negative data hidden, even when the companies wanted to reveal them. My colleagues and I hadn't really discovered anything new. We had merely revealed their 'dirty little secret'.
Irving Kirsch
Whenever a homeless person speaks to me in the USA, I always assume that I am speaking to a police officer and play along with the suspected charade.
Steven Magee
Am I just a mosaic of myself, held in the shape of a whole person?
Emma Newman
MaturityA stationary sense . . . as, I suppose,I shall have, till my single body grows        Inaccurate, tired;Then I shall start to feel the backward pullTake over, sickening and masterful —         Some say, de
Philip Larkin
When I am in the vibration of prosperity and abundance I am cosmically connected to my world and the Universe.
Debbie A. Anderson
Well, aren't you just saying it's better to be neurotic, sensitive, and miserable than unimaginative, adjusted and content? Is it really better?
Malcolm Bradbury
We die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.
Mark Lawrence
Just for a moment, amid all the bad stuff, this was a happy place again.
Caroline Green
The astounding natural beauty of the USA is offset by its extremely poor social security system that is clearly apparent when driving around the country.
Steven Magee
... the irregularities of the motion of Uranus...in order to find out whether they may be attributed to the action of an undiscovered planet beyond it.[John Couch Adams on how he began to discover Neptune.]
John Couch Adams
A few years after working on Mauna Kea, I discovered that I had radiation sickness
Steven Magee
Tuning must come first. Each recital begins with a careful tightening of the pegs on the cross-bar, twisting them in their socket of red threads as each string is plucked and tested. He uses his thumb for this, softer and subtler than the plectrum, his head bent to the vibrating string and his lips slightly open, breathing quickly, as over the body of a lover.
Ann Wroe
The new disease of our age is being OK doing everything at exactly the same time.
Nigel Cumberland
When she spoke, Tom held his breath, so eagerly he listened; when she sang, he sat like one entranced. She touched his organ, and from that bright epoch even it, the old companion of his happiest hours, incapable as he had thought of elevation, began a new and deified existence.
Charles Dickens
For all his determination to keep her at arm's length, they had literally leaned on each other. He could remember exactly what it felt like to have his arm around her waist as they had meandered towards Hazlitt's Hotel. She was tall enough to hold easily. He had never fancied very small
Robert Galbraith
Sometimes I scare myself with how quickly I can come up with lies.
Anna Bell
How often have I noticed or, indeed, listened to him? We talk, but do I actually listen, or is our conversation mainly a question of my waiting for him to stop and for it to be my turn to say something? For how many of us is that what conversation means - the setting up of our lines?
Alexander McCall Smith
Notoriety wasn't as good as fame, but was heaps better than obscurity.
Neil Gaiman
It's the people who seem weak who are always suprisingly strong, and the ones who seem strong who are unexpectledly weak.
Lisa Jewell
Ashe was typical of that strata of mankind which conducts its human relationships according to a principle of challenge and response. Where there was softness, he would advance; where he found resistance, retreat. Having himself no particular opinions or tastes he relied upon whatever conformed with those of his companion. He was as ready to drink tea at Fortnum's as beer at the Prospect of Whitby; he would listen to military music in St. James's Park or jazz in Compton Street cellar; his voice would tremble with sympathy when he spoke of Sharpeville, or with indignation at the growth of Britain's colored population. To Leamas this observably passive role was repellent; it brought out the bully in him, so that he would lead the other gently into a position where he was committed, and then himself withdraw, so that Ashe was constantly scampering back from some cul-de-sac into which Leamas had enticed him.
John le Carré
I have noticed more than once in life that a taste for the ineffably twee can go hand-in-hand with a distinctly uncharitable outlook on the world, I once shared an office with a woman who had covered the wall space behind her desk with pictures of fluffy kitties; she was the most bigoted, spiteful champion of the death penalty with whom it has ever been my misfortune to share a kettle.A love of all things saccharine often seems present where there is a lack of real warmth or charity.
J.K. Rowling
You desire the end but close your eyes to the means. You want the garden to be beautiful, provided that the smell of manure is kept well away from your fastidious nose.
P.D. James
Yes, it was a "beautiful" sermon, tugging the emotions and conjuring up pictures of greatness and peace. But were they talking about the decent peppery ordinary old man he knew, or had the subject strayed to the story of some saint of the past? Or were there perhaps two men being buried under the same name? One perhaps had shown himself to Ross, while the other had been reserved for the view of men like William-Alfred. Ross tried to remember Charles before he was ill, Charles with his love of cockfighting and his hearty appetite, with his perpetual flatulence and passion for gin, with his occasional generosities and meannesses and faults and virtues, like most men. There was some mistake somewhere. Oh well, this was a special occasion...But Charles himself would surely have been amused. Or would he have shed a tear with the rest for the manner of man who had passed away?
Winston Graham
...some student asked if he [Larry Summers] didn’t have essentially the same relationship with Bob Rubin. Wasn’t Summer’s opposition to capital controls just a sop to Wall Street banks, which wanted to recoup their risky investments regardless of how doing so affected the country in which they had invested? “Summers just lost it,” said one audience member, a business school student. “he looked at the person and said, “you don’t know what you’re talking about and how dare you ask this question of the president of Harvard?
Richard Bradley
Before our "company" set off, at a wink from the officer, Plumpie stood up and proposed a search. I could see that some of the others thought she was wasting our time, but our company commander cheerfully seconded her proposal. He suggested we search him first. A boy was called to do this, and found a big bunch of keys on him. Our commander acted as though he had been genuinely careless, and gave Plumpie a victorious smile. The rest of us searched each other. This roundabout way of doing things reflected a Maoist practice: things had to look as though they were the wish of the people, rather than commands from above. Hypocrisy and playacting were taken for granted.
Jung Chang
My hopes were all dead --- struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive. I looked at my love: that feeling which had been my master's --- which he had created; it shivered in my heart, like a suffering child in a cold cradle; sickness and anguish had seized it; it could not seek Mr Rochester's arms --- it could not derive warmth from his breast. Oh, never more could it turn to him; for faith was blighted -- confidence destroyed!
Charlotte Brontë
What’s up, Sam?”“What birthday?” he panted.“What?”“What birthday, Anna?”It took a while for her to absorb his fear. It took a while for the reason for his fear to dawn on her.“Fifteen,” Anna said in a whisper.“What’s the matter?” Emma asked, sensing her twin’s mood. “It doesn’t mean anything.”“It doesn’t,” Anna whispered.“You’re probably right,” Sam said.“Oh, my God,” Anna said. “Are we going to disappear?”“When were you born?” Sam asked. “What time of day?”The twins exchanged scared looks. “We don’t know.”“You know what, no one has blinked out since that first day, so it’s probably—”Emma disappeared.Anna screamed.The other older kids took notice, the littles, too.“Oh, my God!” Anna cried. “Emma. Emma. Oh, God!”She grabbed Sam’s hands and he held her tight.The prees, some of them, caught the fear. Mother Mary came over. “What’s going on? You’re scaring the kids. Where’s Emma?”Anna just kept saying, “Oh, my God,” and calling her sister’s name.“Where’s Emma?” Mary demanded again. “What’s going on?”Sam didn’t want to explain. Anna was hurting him with the pressure of her fingers digging into the backs of his hands. Anna’s eyes were huge, staring holes in him.“How far apart were you born?” Sam asked.Anna just stared in blank horror.Sam lowered his voice to an urgent whisper. “How far apart were you born, Anna?”“Six minutes,” she whispered.“Hold my hands, Sam,” she said.“Don’t let me go, Sam,” she said.“I won’t, Anna, I won’t let you go,” Sam said.“What’s going to happen, Sam?”“I don’t know, Anna.”“Will we go to where our mom and dad are?”“I don’t know, Anna."“Am I going to die?”“No, Anna. You’re not going to die.”“Don’t let go of me, Sam.”Mary was there now, a baby on her hip. John was there. The prees, some of them, watched with serious, worried looks on their faces.“I don’t want to die,” Anna repeated. “I…I don’t know what it’s like.”“It’s okay, Anna.”Anna smiled. “That was a nice date. When we went out.”“It was.”For a split second it was like Anna blurred. Too fast to be real. She blurred, and Sam could almost swear that she had smiled at him.And his fingers squeezed on nothing.For a terribly long time no one moved or said anything.The littles didn’t cry out. The older kids just stared.Sam’s fingertips still remembered the feel of Anna’s hands. He stared at the place where her face had been. He could still see her pleading eyes.Unable to stop himself, he reached a hand into the space she had occupied. Reaching for a face that was no longer there.Someone sobbed.Someone cried out, other voices then, the prees started crying.Sam felt sick. When his teacher had disappeared he hadn’t been expecting it. This time he had seen it coming, like a monster in a slow-motion nightmare. This time he had seen it coming, like standing rooted on the railroad tracks, unable to jump aside.
Michael Grant
I began to cry but maintained my shouting through it, like a wind through sheets of rain.
Olivia Sudjic
One group of riders doped, the others alongside them racing clean. You can work out for yourselves which group was fastest.
David Millar
Whereas fanatic is usually a pejorative word, a Fan is someone who has roots somewhere.
Simon Kuper
If you ask a conservative for a statement of his political convictions, he may well say that he has none, and that the greatest heresy of modernity is precisely to see politics as a matter of convictions as though one could recuperate, at the level of political purpose, the consoling certainty which once was granted by religious faith. In another sense, however, conservatism does rest in a system of belief, and is opposed as much to the theory as to the practice of socialist and liberal politics.
Roger Scruton
Question: Which Mediterranean government shares all of Ronald Reagan's views on international terrorism, the present danger of Soviet advance, the hypocrisy of the United Nations, the unreliability of Europe, the perfidy of the Third World and the need for nuclear defense policy? Question: Which Mediterranean government is Ronald Reagan trying, with the help of George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, to replace with a government led by a party which professes socialism and which contains extreme leftists?If you answered 'the government of Israel' to both of the above, you know more about political and international irony than the President does.
Christopher Hitchens
Stop fretting and eat your Madeira Cake..
Diane Samuels
It seems shelving is an art, like everything else. I decide to do it exceptionally well.
Deborah Meyler
Ocular infidelity is unfortunately rampant in this so called "artist's world.
Muse
The measures themselves are easily distorted to suit reporting purposes.
John Seddon
This fits in with what I saw in staff in astronomical facilities and was reporting to the management team: 10-14% Oxygen: Emotional upset, abnormal fatigue, disturbed respiration.
Steven Magee
Walking a short way back along the embankment, almost to where the cross stood, Smiley took another look at the bridge, as if to establish whether anything had changed, but clearly it had not, and though the wind appeared a little stronger, the snow was still swirling in all directions.
John le Carré
In the middle, the river was a deep green, scattered with rocks poking their noses up for a breath. The water charged around them, creating eddies and whirlpools. Closer to the bank, the current dragged lengths of weed along with it so it seemed that long-haired women swam just under the surface, never coming up for air.
Claire Fuller
The dangerous charm of GPC was that everything in the world could be called up; if you didn't look out, a couple of sessions might turn you from a serious enquirer into a mere gape-mouthed browser.
Julian Barnes
If you're insulting people on the internet, you must be ugly on the inside.
Phil Lester
To her [Florence Nightingale] chiefly I owed the awakening to the fact that sanitation is the supreme goal of medicine its foundation and its crown.
Elizabeth Blackwell
This original version of Coca-Cola contained a small amount of coca extract and therefore a trace of cocaine. (It was eliminated early in the twentieth century, though other extracts derived from coca leaves remain part of the drink to this day.) Its creation was not the accidental concoction of an amateur experimenting in his garden, but the deliberate and painstaking culmination of months of work by an experienced maker of quack remedies.
Tom Standage
No matter who you were in sixteenth-century Europe, you could be sure of two things: you would be lucky to reach fifty years of age, and you could expect a life of discomfort and pain. Old age tires the body by thirty-five, Erasmus lamented, but half the population did not live beyond the age of twenty. There were doctors and there was medicine, but there does not seem to have been a great deal of healing. Anyone who could afford to seek a doctor's aid did so eagerly, but the doctor was as likely to maim or kill as to cure. His potions were usually noxious and sometimes fatal—but they could not have been as terrible and traumatic as the contemporary surgical methods. The surgeon and the Inquisitor differed only in their motivation: otherwise, their batteries of knives, saws, and tongs for slicing, piercing, burning, and amputating were barely distinguishable. Without any anesthetic other than strong liquor, an operation was as bad as the torments of hell.
Philip Ball
Short story collections are the literary equivalent of canapés, tapas and mezze in the world of gastronomy: Delightful assortments of tasty morsels to whet the reader's appetite.
Alex Morritt