Quotes by British Authors - Page 501

Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in some extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is seen as evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally un****ed-up personality
Douglas Adams
He didn't speak much but the little he said kept me busy.
Peter Akinti
And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband.
Virginia Woolf
...his words - the gift of expression, the bewildering, the iluminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.
Joseph Conrad
When silence greets you, listen for those powerful words lost within the void of reason...
Virginia Alison
I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they're supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons.
Jeanette Winterson
Every evening I sat on the music-stool and wrote down my day, and it was as if I, Anna, were nailing Anna to the page. Every day I shaped Anna, said: Today I got up at seven, cooked breakfast for Janet, sent her to school, etc. etc., and felt as if I had saved that day from chaos. Yet now I read those entries and feel nothing. I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing. Words mean nothing. They have become, when I think, not the form into which experience is shaped, but a series of meaningless sounds, like nursery talk, and away to one side of experience. Or like the sound track of a film that has slipped its connection with the film. When I am thinking I have only to write a phrase like ‘I walked down the street’, or take a phrase from a newspaper, ‘economic measures which lead to the full use of …’ and immediately the words dissolve, and my minds starts spawning images which have nothing to do with the words, so that every word I see or hear seems like a small raft bobbing about on an enormous sea of images. So I can’t write any longer. Or only when I write fast, without looking back at what I have written. For if I look back, then the words swim and have no sense and I am conscious only of me, Anna, as a pulse in a great darkness, and the words that I, Anna, write down are nothing, or like the secretions of a caterpillar that are forced out in ribbons to harden in the air.
Doris Lessing
The words come at my call but who calls whom?
Jeanette Winterson
She was convinced a word existed, a noun, that meant the loss of feelings for someone who was formerly loved—a word for the act of falling out of love. I said I couldn't think of it. It wasn't in the dictionary either, not the one she wanted.
Olivia Sudjic
Mizuko loved reading the dictionary. She liked it when there were multiple meanings for words and when opposite meanings could be contained.
Olivia Sudjic
_____________________" I'm lost for words.
Anthony T.Hincks
When we were leaving London, Dad spent about an hour trying to push his wardrobe through the bedroom door. He turned it on its side. He tried it upside down. He tilted it one way and then the other but it just would not fit. Words like "Mum" and "Affair" and "Dad" and "Drinking" were just like that wardrobe--too big to get out. No matter what I did, I couldn't fit them through the space between my teeth.
Annabel Pitcher
By claiming that our words are too hard to understand, the media perpetuates the idea that WE are too hard to understand, and suggests that there’s no point in trying.
C. N. Lester
Everything you mean to me,I can't put into words,because when you're as perfect as you,no amount of words will do.
Anthony T.Hincks
We never stop loving,No matter what we say,because we say just empty words,to keep our hurt away.
Anthony T.Hincks
whispers are often thunderous
Richard Smyth
A word in earnest is as good as a speech
Charles Dickens
Have you noticed how vocabularies fluctuate in order to cope with our need to justify ourselves?
J.G. Ballard
In the words he’s free, on the page he can be anything. A hero.
Lavie Tidhar
She wished such words unsaid with all her heart
Jane Austen
Except that love - that mysterious, vast, all-encompassing power - could not possibly be contained in a single word.
Mary Balogh
Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.
Aldous Huxley
Somewhere embedded in every ordinary book are the five or six words for which really all the rest will be written.
G.K. Chesterton
If I had my life over again[, ] I'd have thought more about words. And thought about them earlier.
Enid Bagnold
Words are only words
Jude Morgan
I collect words--they are sweets in the mouth of sound.
Sally Gardner
[W]e talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannise over them too; we are fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to wait upon us on great occasions; we think it looks important, and sounds well. As we are not particular about the meaning of our liveries on state occassions, if they be but fine and numerous enough, so, the meaning or necessity of our words is a secondary consideration, if there be but a great parade of them. And as individuals get into trouble by making too great a show of liveries, or as slaves when they are too numerous rise against their masters, so I think I could mention a nation that has got into many great difficulties, and will get into many greater, from maintaining too large a retinue of words.
Charles Dickens
Jess couldn't stop spitting out words, because they were words like blades to hurt, and if she swallowed them, she'd be scraped hollow.
Helen Oyeyemi
I am often described to my irritation as a 'contrarian' and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on that occasion I lived up to the title by ridiculing the word in my introduction to the book's first chapter.) It is actually a pity that our culture doesn't have a good vernacular word for an oppositionist or even for someone who tries to do his own thinking: the word 'dissident' can't be self-conferred because it is really a title of honor that has to be won or earned, while terms like 'gadfly' or 'maverick' are somehow trivial and condescending as well as over-full of self-regard. And I've lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like 'Against the Stream,' 'Against the Current,' 'Minority of One,' 'Breaking Ranks' and so forth—all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg's withering remark about 'the herd of independent minds.' Even when I was quite young I disliked being called a 'rebel': it seemed to make the patronizing suggestion that 'questioning authority' was part of a 'phase' through which I would naturally go. On the contrary, I was a relatively well-behaved and well-mannered boy, and chose my battles with some deliberation rather than just thinking with my hormones.
Christopher Hitchens
Mrs. Bittarcy rustled ominously, holding her peace meanwhile. She feared long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many syllables.("The Man Whom The Trees Loved")
Algernon Blackwood
Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.
Samuel Johnson
Words are like spices. Too many is worse than too few.
Joan Aiken
And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the sixteenth century, when novelty blew through English like a spring breeze. Some twelve thousand words, a phenomenal number, entered the language between 1500 and 1650, about half of them still in use today, and old words were employed in ways not tried before. Nouns became verbs and adverbs; adverbs became adjectives. Expressions that could not have grammatically existed before - such as 'breathing one's last' and 'backing a horse', both coined by Shakespeare - were suddenly popping up everywhere.
Bill Bryson
One should therefore not rely on mere words, but everywhere search for the intention behind them. (121)
Edward Conze
I like to use simple words, but in a complicated way.
Carol Ann Duffy
Words', he said, 'is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life. So you must simply try to be patient and stop squibbling. As I am telling you before, I know exactly what words I am wanting to say, but somehow or other they is always getting squiff-squiddled around.
Roald Dahl
This is one of the disadvantages of wine, it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.
Samuel Johnson
Say something worth the words.
Tracy Chevalier
There are some words that once spoken will split the world in two. There would be the life before you breathed them and then the altered life after they'd been said. They take a long time to find, words like that. They make you hesitate. Choose with care. Hold on to them unspoken for as long as you can just so your world will stay intact.
Andrea Levy
Words are cheap. The biggest thing you can say is 'elephant'.
Charlie Chaplin
Words are like Leaves; and where they most abound,Much Fruit of Sense beneath is rarely found.
Alexander Pope
In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.
Kate Atkinson
When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.
Hilary Mantel
Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
A.S. Byatt
Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.
David Almond
Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
A.S. Byatt
Tears are the noble language of eyes, and when true love of words is destitute. The eye by tears speak, while the tongue is mute.
Robert Herrick
Words are everything. Words give wings even to those who have been stamped upon, broken beyond all hope of repair.
Samantha Shannon
WORDS IN THE HEART CANNOT BE TAKEN.
Terry Pratchett
What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.
Aldous Huxley
Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.
Wilkie Collins
Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me.
C.S. Lewis
When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.
Virginia Woolf
But words are things, and a small drop of ink,Falling, like dew, upon a thought producesThat which makes thousands, perhaps millions think.
George Gordon Byron
Sweet words are like honey, a little may refresh, but too much gluts the stomach.
Anne Bradstreet
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Rudyard Kipling
For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice.
T.S Eliot
In the language of the day it is customary to describe a certain sort of book as “escapist” literature. As I understand it, the adjective implies, a little condescendingly, that the life therein depicted cannot be identified with the real life which the critic knows so well in W.C.1: and may even have the disastrous effect on the reader of taking him happily for a few hours out of his own real life in N.W.8. Why this should be a matter for regret I do not know; nor why realism in a novel is so much admired when realism in a picture is condemned as mere photography; nor, I might add, why drink and fornication should seem to bring the realist closer to real life than, say, golf and gardening.
A.A. Milne
The Booker thing was a catalyst for me in a bizarre way. It’s perceived as an accolade to be published as a ‘literary’ writer, but, actually, it’s pompous and it’s fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself. I’d always read omnivorously and often thought much literary fiction is read by young men and women in their 20s, as substitutes for experience.
Neil Cross
Poirot, watching him, felt suddenly a doubt--an uncomfortable twinge. Was there, here, something that he had missed? Some richness of the spirit? Sadness crept over him. Yes, he should have become acquainted with the classics. Long ago. Now, alas, it was too late....
Agatha Christie