Quotes by British Authors - Page 555

Why harrow oneself by looking on the worst side?... Because it is sometimes necessary.
Agatha Christie
Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
Alan W. Watts
Myth could be as sustaining as reality - sometimes even more so.
Alexander McCall Smith
There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.
Arthur C. Clarke
It is ourselves we encounter whenever we invent fictions.
Frank Kermode
So you're going to have to ask yourselves on simple question: Which one of us is speaking now?
Jasper Fforde
In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse - a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred - about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.
Julian Barnes
The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b. who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.
John Derbyshire
Our relation, all round, exists--it's a reality, and a very good one; we're mixed up, so to speak, and it's too late to change it. We must live IN it and with it
Henry James
The entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous. They shouldn't have cared so much that they were losing blind taste tests with old Coke, and we shouldn't at all be surprised that Pepsi's dominance in blind taste tests never translated to much in the real world. Why not? Because in the real world, no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind.
Malcolm Gladwell
The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it with the world as they think about it and talk about it and describe it. For on the one hand there is the real world and on the other there is a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds. These are very very useful symbols, all civilization depends on them, but like all good things they have their disadvantages, and the principle disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth.
Alan W. Watts
Mostly you are what they think you are.
Neil Gaiman
It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality
Virginia Woolf
You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
Graham Greene
Two people can illustrate crudity to you.The first is the crude man, whom you see perceiving the diamond as a stone.The other is the refined man, who makes clear to you the crudity of the first one.
Idries Shah
Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration.
Jasper Fforde
I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.
George Orwell
I still can't believe it . . . him comin' here everyday, nobody realizin'. Still, that's life: lotta stuff happens under the waterline.
Alan Moore
The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revulsions. It is the finite divorced from the Eternal. It is multiplicity in isolation from its non-dual Ground. It is time apprehended as one damned thing after another. It is a system of verbal categories taking the place of the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars which constitute reality. It is a notion labelled 'God'. It is the Universe equated with the words of our utilitarian vocabulary.
Aldous Huxley
Appearance, not reality, is what the clever dog grasps at in these clever days. We spurn the dull-brown solid earth; we build our lives and homes in the fair-seeming rainbow-land of shadow and chimera.
Jerome K. Jerome
What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176)
Stephen Batchelor
Or -- and this she knew was a far more accurate way of looking at it -- the book was true and reality was lying.
Terry Pratchett
I'm really very sorry for you all, but it's an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.
W.S. Gilbert
Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected.
Alfred North Whitehead
My personal theory is that he has a very firm grasp upon reality, it's simply not a reality the rest of us have ever met before.
Terry Pratchett
Acquaint yourself with your own ignorance.
Isaac Watts
It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should.
Alain de Botton
Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which is not there.
E.H. Gombrich
People talk about escapism as if it's a bad thing... Once you've escaped, once you come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You come back to it with skills, weapons, knowledge you didn't have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality.
Neil Gaiman
In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.
Aleister Crowley
Odysseus draped the towel over his shoulders and stretched his back. "You remember practicing with wooden swords? All the moves, the blocks, the counters, getting your footwork right, learning how to be in balance always?""Of course you were a hard master.""And you recall the first time you went into a real fight, with blood being shed and the fear of death in the air?""I do""The moves are the same, but the difference is wider than the Great Green. Love is like that, Helikaon. You can spend time with a whore and laugh and know great pleasure. But when love strikes--- ah, the difference is awesome. You will find more joy in the touch of a hand or the sight of a smile than you could ever experience in a hundred nights of passion with anyone else. The sky will be more blue, the sun more bright. Ah, I am missing my Penelope tonight
David Gemmell
It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.
Alan W. Watts
In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.
Scarlett Thomas
A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until--"My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience... "Look, look!" recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.
Tom Stoppard
I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.
Diane Setterfield
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
Salman Rushdie
It's lies. It's all lies. Some of them are just prettier than others, that's all. People see what they think is there.
Terry Pratchett
You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it...fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in the flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens.
John Fowles
The fool's crime is the crime that is found out and the wise man's crime is the crime that is not found out.
Wilkie Collins
A lover finds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank; he wishes to catch a glimpse of her fair face without waking her. He steals softly over the grass, careful to make no sound; he pauses -- fancying she has stirred: he withdraws: not for worlds would he be seen. All is still: he again advances: he bends above her; a light veil rests on her features: he lifts it, bends lower; now his eyes anticipate the vision of beauty -- warm, and blooming, and lovely, in rest. How hurried was their first glance! But how they fix! How he starts! How he suddenly and vehemently clasps in both arms the form he dared not, a moment since, touch with his finger! How he calls aloud a name, and drops his burden, and gazes on it wildly! He thus grasps and cries, and gazes, because he no longer fears to waken by any sound he can utter -- by any movement he can make. He thought his love slept sweetly: he finds she is stone dead.I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house: I saw a blackened ruin.
Charlotte Brontë
Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?
Jeanette Winterson
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.
George Orwell
Look at him now, poor fellow. That's what a dose of reality does for you...Never touch the stuff myself, you understand. Find it gets in the way of the hallucinations.
Alan Moore
Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.
Alan Moore
When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.
Margery Williams Bianco
As sure as water's wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end.
Neil Gaiman
It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
Virginia Woolf
...reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays....
Aldous Huxley
It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.
Anthony Burgess
You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.
Neil Gaiman
We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.
C.S. Lewis
The more real you get the more unreal the world gets.
John Lennon
The thing about real life is, when you do something stupid, it normally costs you. In books the heroes can make as many mistakes as they like. It doesn't matter what they do, because everything works out in the end. They'll beat the bad guys and put things right and everything ends up cool.In real life, vacuum cleaners kill spiders. If you cross a busy road without looking, you get whacked by a car. If you fall from a tree, you break some bones. Real life's nasty. It's cruel. It doesn't care about heroes and happy endings and the way things should be. In real life, bad things happen. People die. Fights are lost. Evil often wins. I just wanted to make that clear before I begun.
Darren Shan
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
T.S Eliot
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
John Lennon
Nothing ever becomes real 'til it is experienced.
John Keats
Reality is frequently inaccurate.
Douglas Adams
There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened.
Douglas Adams
She will not die today. I won't let her.
Erin Hunter
Passion is like the lightening, it is beautiful and it links the earth to heaven, but it blinds.
H. Rider Haggard