Quotes by British Authors - Page 500

Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.
Virginia Woolf
She thought of all the words that went unspoken in the world, throughout time: what happened to them, where did they go? What would happen if they were all spoken? How different would the world be then?
Livi Michael
Where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?
Charlotte Brontë
Wagamama. Text messaging aficionados might like to note that this is one of the most satisfying words you can possibly type.
Danny Wallace
There is something talismanic about familiar words.
Marcel Theroux
Integrity is a life where your beliefs and intentions are aligned with your words and actions.
Stephen Lovegrove
A witch relied too much on words ever to go back on them.
Terry Pratchett
Words are clothes that thoughts wear
Samuel Butler
Not everything needs to be said. The silences, the words that aren’t spoken, lead us to the questions we should be asking.
David Powning
There is no surer or more illuminating way of reading a man's character, and perhaps a little of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he prefers to use certain words.
Owen Barfield
We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us to grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. Nevertheless there they are; we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the best and not the worst of them.
Samuel Butler
My words will be my legacy, etched in heartfelt honesty upon the pages of time.
Callum McLaughlin
Joy lurks in every mundane thing, just waiting to be found. Love is impervious to reason. And words are wonderful.
Anna Lyndsey
I have a sort of . . . thing, I suppose, for certain words. They spark inside me, somehow, turning me to touchpaper, but I don't know what they are until someone says them.
Alexis Hall
Any punishment is an insult to the crime
Nathan Filer
Sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never hurt. Lies. Words hurt. The words we remember. Well, the hurt feeling the words caused stays with us forever.
Jill Telford
Rouge of my heart, intertwined with double-hued destiny,Thread of my thoughts, constant and rubicund legacy,Filament of my future, endeared unto my expectation,Cord of my emotion, seared with eternal elation.
Jasper Fforde
Lord Vetinari in a meeting: “what people said was what they wanted him to hear. He paid a lot of attention to the spaces outside the words, though. That’s where the things were that they hoped he didn’t know and didn’t want him to find out.
Terry Pratchett
…the way people understood things had a lot to do with the way people were, how they had been shaped, what the wanted; tricks of rhetoric would not shift them.
Ian McEwan
For myself, I favored the abstract. I collected not just obsolete terms and words, but ideas.
Jasper Fforde
Another one of your quippy japes?
Jasper Fforde
Some things should never be said. Not out loud in clear, simple words. You talk around them. You leave gaps and blanks. You use other words and talk in curves and arcs for the worst things because you need to keep them like mist. Words are dangerous. Like a spell, if you name the mist, call out all of the words that describe it sharp and clear, you turn it solid, into something that no one should ever hold in their hands. Better that it stays like water, slipping between your fingers.
Alexia Casale
The sky was like ebony and the only illumination was the harsh white light of the central streetlamp, which cast shadows so hard it seemed you might cut yourself on them.
Jasper Fforde
…although her mouth uttered fond words, her eyes spoke only venom.
Jasper Fforde
She had large, questioning eyes that seemed to draw me in and a sense of quiet outrage that simmered just beneath the surface. More than anything, within her features, there was a streak of wild quirkiness that made her dazzlingly attractive.
Jasper Fforde
Why write? Life is a cage of empty words.
Miriam Elia
Words were only an approximation of meaning. The meaning escaped between the words, dissolved, disappeared, like fog fading away between iron bars.
Charlotte Lamb
No comment" is a comment so I never really understood.
Lily O'Brien
One suffers in silence so long as one has the strength and when that strength fails one speaks without measuring one's words much.
Charlotte Brontë
She said, 'It is filled with all the words for how I want you.
Sarah Waters
For she was the only one, of all of them, to have spared me a pleasant word; and suddenly I longed for time to pass, not for its own sake, but as it would take me back to her.
Sarah Waters
All in all, I'd heard people do a lot of things with words. I'd heard them not say what they meant and I'd seen them not do what they said, but I'd never met a person who could speak so simply and still convey so much.
Rachel Joyce
Take it for words. O woman’s poor revenge,Which dwells but in the tongue!
John Webster
To often we speak just to hear the sound of our own voice, when we should speak only when the words are sweeter than silence.
Steven Aitchison
Intentionally, or unintentionally, Kat had spoken with her eyes; tenderly and lovingly conveying a message to Freya that her tongue wouldn't let her speak. It was glaringly obvious they both felt it. The words were not important. The pauses, gazes, and drawn out breaths were what mattered.
Kiki Archer
The two words expressed volumes.
Agatha Christie
Writing's much more romantic when its pen and ink and paper. It's... More timeless. and worthwhile. Think about it. There are so many words gushing out into the universe these days. All digitally. All in Comic Sans or Times New Roman. Silly Websites. Stupid news stories digitally uploaded to a 24-hour channel. Where's all this writing going? Who's keeping a note of it all? Who's in charge of deciding what's worthwhile and what isn't? But back then... Back then, if someone wanted to write something they had to buy paper. Buy it! And ink. And a pen. And they couldn't waste too many sheets cos it was expensive. So when people wrote, they wrote because it was worthwhile... not just because they had some half-baked idea and they wanted to pointlessly prove their existence by sharing it on some bloody social networking site.
Holly Bourne
But words are water in Amsterdam, they flood your ears and set the rot, and the church's east corner is crowded.
Jessie Burton
I wish, he thinks, spoken words could be captured and kept in a locket.
David Mitchell
The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like talking thunder; like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken; like the men singing the Corn Song, beautiful, beautiful, so that you cried.
Aldous Huxley
Writing is life – it’s where my heart leads me each day, and how I understand the world we live in.
Phen Weston
Today words curve around my vision,Stumbling from my parched coreTo soak again those strands of silence.
Phen Weston
The truth of a myth, your Honor, is not its words but its patterns.
David Mitchell
I am surprised to see how much I have written; with stories even a page can take me hours, but the truth seems to flow out as fast as I can get it down. But words are very inadequate – anyway, my words are.
Dodie Smith
Yes, and words are not deeds, Solanka allowed, moving off fretfully. Though words can become deeds. If said in the right place and at the right time, they can move mountains and change the world. Also, uh-huh, not knowing what you're doing - separating deeds from the words that define them - was apparently becoming an acceptable excuse. To say "I didn't mean it" was to erase meaning from your misdeeds, at least in the opinion of the Beloved ALis of the world. Could that be so? Obviously, no. No, it simply could not. Many people would say that even a genuine act of repentance could not atone for a crime, much less this unexplained blankness - an infinitely lesser excuse, a mere assertion of ignorance that wouldn't even register on any scale of regret.
Salman Rushdie
Who cares what a writer looks like as long as their words are beautiful?
Holly Bourne
It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case is always the wrong size to fit in the template called language.
Jeanette Winterson
Words fly like stones into clouds and accelerate....
Jay Woodman
And they held on tight to that beautiful silent moment before words transported them to the realm of the ordinary, to the realm of the inarticulate and mundane.
Sarah Winman
I did not want to appear before the world as pathetic, deprssed, and psychologically ill. So I erected a barrier of words and wit around myself, so that nobody could see how needy I really was.
Karen Armstrong
The word 'Terror' is so generally and universally used in connection with everyday trivial matters that it is apt to fail to convey, when intended to do so, its real meaning.
Jim Corbett
Mr. Treadstone believed that there was always an apposite word. The English language, after all, was the richest in the world. If you couldn’t find the apposite word, if you found your language slipping into the mire of vagueness and obscurity, this meant that you needed to work on your vocabulary. Because the apposite word certainly existed – and it was very eager to make your acquaintance.
Gavin Extence
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can also hurt me. Stones and sticks break only skin, while words are ghosts that haunt me. Slant and curved the word-swords fall, it pierces and sticks inside me. Bats and bricks may ache through bones, but words can mortify me. Pain from words has left its' scar, on mind and hear that's tender. Cuts and bruises have not healed, it's words that I remember.
Ruby Redfort
Her thoughts are full of other things just now; and people have such different ways of showing feeling: some by silence, some by words.
Elizabeth Gaskell
The most important questions are the ones we can't hope to answer with words. Words are like toys : they amuse and educate us for a time, but when we come to manhood, we should give them up.'Sunmer shakes his head.' The words are all we have,' he says.' If we give them up, we are no better than the beasts.'Otto smiles at Sunmer's wrong headedness.' Then you must find out the explanations on your own, if that is what you truly think.
Ian McGuire
And the people who would burn the words, the people who would take the books from the shelves, the firemen and the ignorant, the ones afraid of tales and words and dreams and Hallowe'en and people who have tattooed themselves with stories and Boys! You Can Grow Mushrooms in Your Cellar! and as long as your words which are people which are days which are my life, as long as your words survive, then you lived and you mattered and you changed the world and I cannot remember your name.I learned your books. Burned them into my mind. In case the firemen come to town.
Neil Gaiman
In the right context you can make words do all kinds of things.
China Miéville
If words are to enter men's hearts 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
Normally, words are sentfrom the brain towards the mouth, and somewhere along the line you take a moment to checkthem, see that they are actually the ones you ordered and that they’re nicely wrapped, beforeyou bundle them on their way towards your palate and out into the fresh air.But when you’re caught up in the flow of things, the checking part of your mind can falldown on the job.
Hugh Laurie
When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.
Lewis Carroll