Quotes by British Authors - Page 5

When the north wind blew across the tar ponds, voices were carried away.
Jonathan Campbell
You may say, But wasn't this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.
Julian Barnes
She was crude, but loyal. He began to understand her even better than before. A pity she was so old; it was too late to try to make a human being of her.
Elias Canetti
The world won't get more or less terrible if we're indoors somewhere with a mug of hot chocolate.
Kamila Shamsie
You are no longer human, with all those depths and highs and nuances of emotion that define you as a person.There is no feeling any more, because to feel any emotion would also be to beckon the overwhelming blackness from you. My mind has now locked all this down. And without any control of this self-defence mechanism my subconscious has operated. I do not feel any more.
Jake Wood
I looked at the piles of plates and cups, and kettles, and bottles and jars, and pies and stoves, and cakes, and tomatoes, &c., and felt that the thing would soon become exciting. It did. They started with breaking a cup. That was the first thing they did. They did that just to show you what they COULD do, and to get you interested.
Jerome K. Jerome
It did not last: the Devil howling 'Ho, Let Einstein be,' restored the status quo.
John Collings Squire
I am his Highness' dog at Kew;Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
Alexander Pope
I think a strong claim can be made that the process of scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art. This is best seen in the theoretical aspects of Physical Science. The mathematical theorist builds up on certain assumptions and according to well understood logical rules, step by step, a stately edifice, while his imaginative power brings out clearly the hidden relations between its parts. A well constructed theory is in some respects undoubtedly an artistic production. A fine example is the famous Kinetic Theory of Maxwell. ... The theory of relativity by Einstein, quite apart from any question of its validity, cannot but be regarded as a magnificent work of art.
Ernest Rutherford
Earlier fundamental work of Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Whorf, etc., as well as my own attempt to use this earlier thinking as an epistemological base for psychiatric theory, led to a series of generalizations: That human verbal communication can operate and always does operate at many contrasting levels of abstraction. These range in two directions from the seemingly simple denotative level (“The cat is on the mat”). One range or set of these more abstract levels includes those explicit or implicit messages where the subject of discourse is the language. We will call these metalinguistic (for example, “The verbal sound ‘cat’ stands for any member of such and such class of objects”, or “The word, ‘cat’ has no fur and cannot scratch”). The other set of levels of abstraction we will call metacommunicative (e.g., “My telling you where to find the cat was friendly”, or “This is play”). In these, the subject of discourse is the relationship between the speakers. It will be noted that the vast majority of both metalinguistic and metacommunicative messages remain implicit; and also that, especially in the psychiatric interview, there occurs a further class of implicit messages about how metacommunicative messages of friendship and hostility are to be interpreted.
Gregory Bateson
The youth of Idaho falls should be encouraged to take drugs in order to cope up with the fact that there is plutonium in their drinking water.
Bill Bryson
She ran from the shame, slammed his door behind her and ran, away from the pain and the moment when he had been so close to her mouth he could have kissed her, the thought that made her feel like her heart would burst.
Laure Eve
Water shrinks wool, urgency shrinks time.Shrinkage may be an advantage or the reverse, according to expectation.
Idries Shah
The thought of being whoever I want is a terrifying thing, because I have only ever been who everyone has wanted me to be.
Dianna Hardy
How did the Prince Charming of my childhood turn out to be such a crushing disappointment? Maybe he wasn't Prince Charming in the first place.
Paige Toon
I was sixteen, and I honestly believed I was due a love story.
Sara Barnard
...A vision from a universe where the Equal Rights Amendment--with its redefinition of personhood--is rejected by the house of deputies: A universe where to die is to become property and to be created outwith a gift of parental DNA is to be doomed to slavery.
Charles Stross
Animal welfarism is a blatant lie. Anyone who truly cares for the welfare of another, would never dream of exploiting them. For just as when slavery is deeply set into the psyche of a nation, those crying for slave welfare and not abolitionism, argue in favour of slavery and exploitation, and thus push eventual abolitionism further into the future.
Mango Wodzak
Industrial liquid gas containers were left open and venting gas into the indoor environment in high altitude astronomy. On reflection, I realized that I routinely observed mental and physical effects that match those of a low oxygen environment in staff that I supervised.
Steven Magee
Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at the time, that he may wonder at them; so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed ages that fled.
Charles Mackay
Whereas Nature does not admit of more than three dimensions ... it may justly seem very improper to talk of a solid ... drawn into a fourth, fifth, sixth, or further dimension.
John Wallis
Saving and pinching to get married, you're losing the best time of your life.
Muriel Spark
Zed and Sky had stayed behind and were chatting with Will, Sky sitting on Zed's knee as if nothing was going to get them apart again in a hurry. Victor and Uriel were playing cards at the kitchen table. Trace looked cute in an apron, chopping vegetables with a surgeon's precision.
Joss Stirling
The more alien that you make your environment, the more likely it is that you will be sick.
Steven Magee
Because there is no challenge, there is no reason to work hard. And with no reason to work hard, we all have become lazy. Lazy people are like cancer. They spread. Before you know it, the entire country is destroyed.
Tahir Shah
Endurance over-goaded, stretched the hand of fraternity to sedition.
Charlotte Brontë
To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces.
Arthur Conan Doyle
An image flashed across her mind of two rams flinging their heads against each other on a rocky mountainside. What did the girl rams do? Faint with pleasure? Clap their cloven hooves? Lean against some nearby boulders, with little tubs of mountain grass, discussing the battle?
Edward St. Aubyn
You'll be back! If you're not, then I'll come and find you. Now, do as I say and go have some fun. I want those eyes to have light in them next time I see you." He turned me around, smacked my arse and sent me on my way.
Lesley Jones
Meanwhile, we have carved out a place for ourselves among the dead; the glittering pinnacles of commerce rise along the skyline, their foundations sunk in a charnel house; and the lost lie forgotten below us as, overhead, we persaude ourselves that we are immortal and carry on the business of life.
Catharine Arnold
It's not unreal to me yet, though it might get that way soon. It still feels very real. And not even horrible -- the dead are just the dead. I am convinced that the living people they once were would have been proud of their protective bodies hoodwinking their murderers to save someone else. [..] But it's not civilized. There is something indecent about it -- really foully indecent. The civilized Rose-person in me, who still seems to exist beneath the layers of filth, knows this. [..] I have become so indifferent about the dead.
Elizabeth Wein
Pluto is dead, I know as I observed the Terminator that was sent to kill it
Steven Magee
Drake’s dead,” Astrid said. “Dead people don’t come back. Let’s not be ridiculous.”Howard made a derisive snort. “Okay. That’s as far as I go with you on this, Sammy boy.” He made a hand-washing gesture.Astrid slammed her palm on the table, surprising even herself. “Somebody better tell me what all these back-and-forth looks are about.”“Brittney,” Howard said, spitting the name out like it was poison. “She came back. Sam had her and stuck her with Brianna, and told me not to talk about it.”“Brittney?” Astrid said, confused.Howard said, “Yeah. You know, like dead-girl Brittney? Way dead? Dead a long time and buried a long time and suddenly she’s sitting in my house chatting? That Brittney.”“I’m still not…”“Well, Astrid,” Howard said, “I guess we just found the limits of your big old genius brain. Point is that someone who was very seriously dead is suddenly not so dead anymore.”“But…,” Astrid started. “But Drake…”“As dead as Brittney,” Howard said. “Which might be a slight problem, since Brittney isn’t exactly dead herself.
Michael Grant
Stay in your boats,” Dahra said. “We’re still going to need food. Throw your fish onto the dock. I’ll get Albert to send someone here to collect it. Then go back out, row up the coast a little ways, and camp out.”“Camp out?” Quinn echoed.“Yes!”“You’re serious.”“No, it’s my idea of a joke, Quinn,” Dahra snapped. “Pookie just coughed up a lung and fell over dead. You understand what I’m saying? I mean he coughed his actual lungs out of his mouth.
Michael Grant
Hunter’s dead,” Taylor said without preamble. “It was these . . . these things. They came crawling up out of him and were eating him, oh God, I mean, it was like . . . I mean he was crying and Dekka prayed with him and he tried to fry his own brain just like he did with Harry only I guess it didn’t work, I guess he couldn’t do it, so Sam . . .” She swallowed. “Anyone have some water?”“What about Sam?” Astrid demanded.“He did it for him. Sam. I mean, he . . . Hunter was, you know . . . so Sam.” She pantomimed raising her hands, like Sam, like he would do when using his power.Astrid closed her eyes and crossed herself.“Rest in peace,” Edilio said and crossed himself as well.“Sam burned the boy?” Howard asked. Then, bitterly sarcastic said, “Yeah, you all pray to Jesus. Because Jesus is really providing a lot of help here. Sounds to me like Sam was the one doing what had to be done.
Michael Grant
Nothing says you're more sexy than when you wear clothes.
Anthony T.Hincks
There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhsof human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even registertheir names, why was that. When the government finally built camps it only allowed for six thousand families to remain in the state, dispersing theothers around the country where they would be invisible and impotent, why was that. The camps at Purkhoo, Muthi, Mishriwallah, Nagrota were builton the banks and beds of nullahas, dry seasonal waterways, and when the water came the camps were flooded, why was that. The ministers of thegovernment made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internalmigrants whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that. The tents provided for the refugees to live in were often uninspected andleaking and the monsoon rains came through, why was that. When the one-room tenements called ORTs were built to replace the tents they tooleaked profusely, why was that. There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensarieslacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe fivethousand deaths because of intense heat and humidity because of snake bites and gastroenteritis and dengue fever and stress diabetes andkidney ailments and tuberculosis and psychoneurosis and there was not a single health survey conducted by the government why was that and thepandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and the insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, todream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that whywas that why was that why was that why was that.
Salman Rushdie
Cookbooks, it should be stressed, do not belong in the kitchen at all. We keep them there for the sake of appearances; occasionally, we smear their pages together with vibrant green glazes or crimson compotes, in order to delude ourselves, and any passing browsers, that we are practicing cooks; but in all honesty, a cookbook is something you read in the living room, or in the bathroom, or in bed.
Anthony Lane
Idolatry involves putting the things we love in the place of God or seeing God as a means of getting the things that we want, and that's the second great struggle of our lives.
Colin S. Smith
Parvati positively beamed. Harry could tell that she was feeling guilty for having laughed at Hermione in Transfiguration. He looked around and saw that Hermione was beaming back, if possible even more brightly. Girls were very strange sometimes.
J.K. Rowling
I suddenly felt the way Cinderella might have felt if she hadn’t had that convenient midnight curfew: my feet were hurting, my hair was slipping free from its pins, and my makeup was getting all smudged from sweat. I was unbelievably tired, undeniably depressed, and I just wanted charming.
J.M. Richards
A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation?
China Miéville
Dreams so often become nightmares. Family can so easily become foes. And people are always more stupid than you give them credit for.
Mike A. Lancaster
Love and honor. They are the two great things, and now they’re dimmed and blighted. Today, love is just sex and sentimentality. Love is really a recognition of truth, a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that is compatible with — that makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other. That’s what love is. It’s a recognition of singularity… And love is giving and giving and giving … not looking for any return. Until you do that, you can’t love.
Robert Graves
It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones who win in the lifelong race.
Robert W. Service
That is our Shield Ring, our last stronghold; not the barrier fells and the totter-moss between, but something in the hearts of men.
Rosemary Sutcliff
Once in a very blue moon, John Tallow imagined his younger self standing down the timeline of his present life, bare toes curling in teenage beach sand, looking ahead to today and watching his future life collapse in on itself like a dying star. His future life becoming small and dark and dense, its gravity apparently grim and inescapable.Once in a very blue moon, John Tallow spent some cash on a bottle of vodka and drank it at home within an hour.
Warren Ellis
Has Orc shown up here?” But neither Caine nor Diana answered. Both were staring at Drake, who sauntered toward them, all his cockiness restored, no longer the ragged scarecrow who had wept when he saw the melted stump of his hand lying on the tile floor. “Drake,” Caine said. “We thought you were dead.”“I’m back,” Drake said. “And better than ever.”The red tentacle unwrapped itself from around his waist, like a python releasing its victim.“Like it, Diana?” Drake asked.The arm, that impossible bloodred snake, coiled above Drake’s head, swirled, writhed. And then, so fast that the human eye could barely register the movement, it snapped like a bullwhip.The sound was a loud crack. A mini–sonic boom.Diana cried out in pain. Stunned, she stared at the cut in her blouse and the trickle of red from her shoulder.“Sorry,” Drake said with no attempt at sincerity. “I’m still working on my aim.”“Drake,” Caine said and, despite the blood, despite Diana’s wound, he grinned. “Welcome back.”“I brought some help,” Drake said. He extended his left hand, and Caine shook it awkwardly with his right. “So. When do we go take down Sam Temple?
Michael Grant
Have you seen Sam?” Mary asked.“What do you want with Sam?”“I can’t take care of all those littles with just John to help me.”Howard shrugged. “Who asked you to?”That was too much. Mary was tall and strong. Howard, though a boy, was smaller. Mary took two steps toward him, pushing her face right into his. “Listen, you little worm. If I don’t take care of those kids, they’ll die. Do you understand that? There are babies in there who need to be fed and need to be changed, and I seem to be the only one who realizes it. And there are probably more little kids still in their homes, all alone, not knowing what’s happening, not knowing how to feed themselves, scared to death.”Howard took a step back, tentatively lifted the bat, then let it fall. “What am I supposed to do?” he whined.“You? Nothing. Where’s Sam?”“He took off.”“What do you mean, he took off?”“I mean him and Quinn and Astrid took off.”Mary blinked, feeling stupid and slow. “Who’s in charge?”“You think just because Sam likes to play the big hero every couple years that makes him the guy in charge?”Mary had been on the bus two years ago when the driver, Mr. Colombo, had had his heart attack. She’d had her head in a book, not paying attention, but she had looked up when she felt the bus swerve. By the time she had focused, Sam was guiding the bus onto the shoulder of the road.In the two years that followed, Sam had been so quiet and so modest and so not involved in the social life of the school that Mary had sort of forgotten that moment of heroism. Most people had.And yet she hadn’t even been surprised when it was Sam who had stepped up during the fire. And she had somehow assumed that if anyone was going to be in charge, it would be Sam. She found herself angry with him for not being here now: she needed help.“Go get Orc,” Mary said.“I don’t tell Orc what to do, bitch.”“Excuse me?” she snapped. “What did you just call me?”Howard gulped. “Didn’t mean nothing, Mary.”“Where is Orc?”“I think he’s sleeping.”“Wake him up. I need some help. I can’t stay awake any longer. I need at least two kids who have experience babysitting. And then I need diapers and bottles and nipples and Cheerios and lots of milk.”“Why am I going to do all that?”Mary didn’t have an answer. “I don’t know, Howard,” she said. “Maybe because you’re really not a complete jerk? Maybe you’re really a decent human being?”That earned her a skeptical look and a derisive snort.“Look, kids will do what Orc says,” Mary said. “They’re scared of him. All I’m asking is for Orc to act like Orc.”Howard thought this over. Mary could almost see the wheels spinning in his head.“Forget it,” she said. “I’ll talk to Sam when he gets back.”“Yeah, he’s the big hero, isn’t he?” Howard said, dripping sarcasm. “But hey, where is he? You see him around? I don’t see him around.”“Are you going to help or not? I have to get back.”“All right. I’ll get your stuff, Mary. But you better remember who helped you. You’re working for Orc and me.”“I’m taking care of little kids,” Mary said. “If I’m working for anyone, it’s for them.”“Like I say, you remember who was there when you needed them.” Howard turned on his heel and swaggered away.
Michael Grant
In good truth he had started in London with some vague idea that as his life in it would not be of long continuance, the pace at which he elected to travel would be of little consequence; but the years since his first entry into the Metropolis were now piled one on top of another, his youth was behind him, his chances of longevity, spite of the way he had striven to injure his constitution, quite as good as ever. He had come to that period of existence, to that narrow strip of tableland, whence the ascent of youth and the descent of age are equally discernible - when, simply because he has lived for so many years, it strikes a man as possible he may have to live for just as many more, with the ability for hard work gone, with the boon companions scattered, with the capacity for enjoying convivial meetings a mere memory, with small means perhaps, with no bright hopes, with the pomp and the circumstance and the fairy carriages, and the glamour which youth flings over earthly objects, faded away like the pageant of yesterday, while the dreary ceremony of living has to be gone through today and tomorrow and the morrow after, as though the gay cavalcade and the martial music, and the glittering helmets and the prancing steeds were still accompanying the wayfarer to his journey's end. Ah! my friends, there comes a moment when we must all leave the coach with its four bright bays, its pleasant outside freight, its cheery company, its guard who blows the horn so merrily through villages and along lonely country roads. Long before we reach that final stage, where the black business claims us for its own speecial property, we have to bid goodbye to all easy, thoughtless journeying and betake ourselves, with what zest we may, to traversing the common of reality. There is no royal road across it that ever I heard of. From the king on his throne to the laborer who vaguely imagines what manner of being a king is, we have all to tramp across that desert at one period of our lives, at all events; and that period is usually when, as I have said, a man starts to find the hopes, and the strength, and the buoyancy of youth left behind, while years and years of life lie stretching out before him. The coach he has travelled by drops him here. There is no appeal, there is no help; therefore, let him take off his hat and wish the new passengers good speed without either envy or repining. Behld, he has had his turn, and let whosoever will, mount on the box-seat of life again, and tip the coachman and handle the ribbons - he shall take that journey no more, no more for ever. ("The Banshee's Warning")
Charlotte Riddell
Stray voltage/current/frequency is the most serious form of exposure. Electrocution kills very few people per year. Stray voltage/current/frequency exposure is suspected to be making people sick in the millions!
Steven Magee
Alcoholism is above all a disease of denial.
David Stafford
I have never heard of an electromagnetically hypersensitive person recovering from the condition using shielding and Faraday cages, they just seem to become social lepers due to their increasing reactivity to the city environment and addicts to their shielded environment.
Steven Magee
But there are some born to do penance by nature. Maybe they lift the load for some of us who take it quite comfortably that we're humankind, and not angels.
Ellis Peters
[T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.
Christopher Hitchens
Learning how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them. Harder, maybe. There'd be a sight more frogs in this world if I didn't know how not to turn people into them. And big pink balloons, too.
Terry Pratchett
Even gods decay. Like, in 1890 somebody sold off thousands of mummified Ancient Egyptian sacred cats - _for fertilizer_. Get the point? Constancy isn't.
Jonathan Gash
With Cats, some say, one rule is true:Don’t speak till you are spoken to.Myself, I do not hold with that —I say, you should ad-dress a Cat.But always keep in mind that heResents familiarity.I bow, and taking off my hat,Ad-dress him in this form: O Cat!But if he is the Cat next door,Whom I have often met before(He comes to see me in my flat)I greet him with an oopsa Cat!I think I've heard them call him James —But we've not got so far as names.
T.S Eliot
[M]an is not permitted without censure to follow his own thoughts in the search of truth, when they lead him ever so little out of the common road.
John Locke
Oh, this time I was doing the gossiping. You should really dismiss me for disloyalty, not to mention the disrespect I'm showing right now by talking to you like this.
Jayne Bauling