Quotes by British Authors - Page 557

Democracy is more vindictive than cabinets, the wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.
Winston S. Churchill
Kat stood immobile and watched with pain, a kiss of passion, a kiss of desire; a kiss that could never be hers.
Kiki Archer
The man up there raged aloud in two languages, and with a sincerity in his fury that almost convinced me I had, in some way, sinned against the harmony of the universe
Joseph Conrad
What I am interested in, what I write and care about, exists in the slow lane, somewhere between hand-ploughed fields and a pint of real ale.
Fennel Hudson
What I Have Lived ForThree passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved. Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
Bertrand Russell
Suicide is a confession of failure. And like divorce, it is shrouded in excuses and rationalizations spun endlessly to disguise the simple fact that all one's energy, passion, appetite and ambition have been aborted.
Al Álvarez
Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O'Shea. And if it doesn't destroy it dies. It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one's life, that one's brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, that one's expended all one's tenderness, poured out all the riches of one's soul on a poor drab, a fool, a peg on which on hung one's dreams, who wasn't worth a stick of chewing gum.
W Somerset Maugham
I know very little about darkness, Mr Bowden, except that we cannot stop its coming.
Anna Freeman
I could not tell anymore how much of the screaming came from my own mouth. I was borne up on the swell of it, I was the sound. We were all howling together, the poor and the quality, the boxing girl and the beast inside my breast. If she was a madwoman, then we were all of us with her, and I had never felt such savage elation, nor known that it existed.
Anna Freeman
Men and women find all sorts of ways to be together, all sorts of ways. Yours was high and dangerous. Most of us stay on the lower paths.
Josephine Hart
Heart language is logic set on fire.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
A vigorous temper is not altogether an evil. Men who are as easy as an old shoe are generally of as lttle worth .
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
So black is my heart for it is buried in the fiery chasm of untameable passion. It beats in the dark recesses of unquenchable thirst for love and desire from which there is no return...
Virginia Alison
Yeah! "I love you" is subject to the law of diminishing returns; like one or two other critical weekly elements of a relationship, it loses a bit of thrilling value every time you get it out.'... That's what happens with "I love you", that same phrase that you once shouted Hollywood or Heathcliff-like in the lashing raining, now- now you are saying it dumbly at the end of every phone conversation, a follow-on from," I'll be back for dinner." Once it came out spontaneous rush, it forced itself out; now it's reflex.
David Baddiel
Books are my passion," James told her, "I cannot imagine passing a day without reading.
Sophie Barnes
Passion is not such an emotion as a destiny.
Jeanette Winterson
Falling in love, finding your passion, are attempts to locate, to picture, to represent what you unconsciously feel frustrated about, and by.
Adam Phillips
The mental agony I have suffered, during the last two days, wrings from me the avowal to you of a passion which, as you well know, is not one of yesterday, nor one I have lightly formed. On Rose, sweet, gentle girl! my heart is set, as firmly as ever heart of man was set on woman. I have no thought, no view, no hope in life, beyond her; and if you oppose me in this great stake, you take my peace and happiness in your hands, and cast them to the wind. Mother, think better of this, and of me, and do not disregard the happiness of which you seem to think so little.
Charles Dickens
One passion leads to another. It's passion that makes the wheels of life turn, passion for work, passion for pleasure, passion for passion.
Chloe Thurlow
He spoke as if the answer were a matter of indifference to him. But it was not so. For all his pain, he longed to see the author of it. Although he hated Margaret at times, when he thought of that gentle familiar attitude and all the attendant circumstances, he had a restless desire to renew her picture in his mind--a longing for the very atmosphere she breathed. He was in the Charybdis of passion, and must perforce circle and circle ever nearer round the fatal centre.
Elizabeth Gaskell
Woman cannot survive on droplets, she requires waves to regularly crash over her shores as the moon gives way to the sun...
Virginia Alison
To be sure, there's a warm passion behind what you say. But if you give in to that passion, friends, you're doing what I always warned you agin: you're a placing the satisfaction of your own feelings above the work you have to do... Don't you worry that John Faa's heart is too soft to strike a blow when the time comes. And the time will come under judgement. Not under passion.
Philip Pullman
There are kisses and kisses, I am told, and this must have been quite the other sort from Millie's resonant signals of regard.
H.G.Wells
He walks the soft grass, wet with fresh rain, jeans slung low on his hips and shirt hanging open, still dripping from the fevered maelstrom that set fire to the night sky. Fury in his step and passion furrowing his brow...He is my perfect storm...
Virginia Alison
The sea has its moods. Sometimes it is melancholic and morose, other times fierce and feisty. But always passionate. Even when calm, one can sense the depth of the sea’s passion
Jocelyn Murray
Yet I must tell you, that all these graces which are expressed by passions of sorrow, fear, joy, hope, love, are not so certainly to be tried by the passion that is in them, as by the will that is either contained in them, or supposed in them; not as acts of the sensitive, but of the rational appetite (358).
Richard Baxter
To know your ruling passion, examine your castles in the air.
Richard Whately
The hope is always here, always alive, but only your fierce caring can fan it into a fire to warm the world.
Susan Cooper
Do no drown me with mediocrity, give me passion, desire, make me inhale breaths of lust and love in the dark hours that tingle down my spine...
Virginia Alison
...But I do like the idea of household gods--shall we get some? A set of little statues and bring the boys up to believe in them?""I hope they believe in something," said Elspeth. 'Imagaine believing in nothing at all--not even in love, or justice, or any of the things that can make people passionate.""Such as a country?"Elspeth thought about this. "I suppose there are lots of people who believe in Scotland. Or the European Union, for that matter. Their belief anables them to ... well, to talk about the future with enthusiasm. They don't like things as they are and they are convinced that things will be much improved once they are otherwise.""Well, why not?" asked Matthew."I didn't say there was any reason why not. I'm just commenting on that sort of belief. The trouble is that it might make discussion difficult. If somebody believes to strongly in one particular solution to the world's problems, then it may obscure the nuances. That's all I was saying." Elspeth paused. "They may not see that there are others who have a different view. You can love things in a whole lot of different ways, can't you?
Alexander McCall Smith
Ask yourself, if they getting married, would you be upset if you weren't invited? If the answer is no, then that's an easy name to cross off your list.
Anna Bell
From the flames she rises, a bold, resplendent warrior ready to bring the world to its knees and cast away those who do not revere their Goddess. Enrapturing all those whom she favours there is no escaping her beguiling sensuality. Enfolding him to her breast, she enslaves his tumescence within her warm embrace and he is lost, within her passion, for eternity...
Virginia Alison
If I wish to kiss you, I will. No priest, no father, and no god will stop me.
Jayne Castel
And I saw her as a sad thirtieth child of Valentine that fell, not as Lucifer rebelling against God, but because she too passionately wanted to be united with him! All things in excess become sin.
Lawrence Durrell
There is no correct way to write a novel, or rather, there is only one, and that one way is to make it interesting. That is very easily said, but how do you make your writing interesting?The answer to the question is, that you write interestingly only about the things that genuinely interest you. This is an infallible rule.
Ted Hughes
The difference between a fairly interesting writer and a fascinating writer is that the fascinating writer has a better nose for what genuinely excites him, he is hotter on the trail, he has a better instinct for what is truly alive in him. The worse writer may seem to be more sensible in many ways, but he is less sensible in this vital matter: he cannot distinguish what is full of life from what is only half full or empty of it. And so his writing is less alive, and as a writer he is less alive, and in writing, as in everything else, nothing matters but life.
Ted Hughes
This was genius at close quarters, and genius had that something above normal in it that was a great strain upon the ordinary mind and feeling. All five were different from each other, yet each had that curious quality of burning intensity, the single-mindedness of purpose that made such a terrifying impression. She did not know whether it were a quality of brain or rather a quality of outlook, of intensity. But each of them, she thought, was in his or her way a passionate idealist.
Agatha Christie
What would your young students say, who have come so far to hear you and prefer your severe lectures to ease of a worldly life, if they should discover you secretly a slave to your passions and a victim of those weaknesses from which your rules secured them?
Emily Williams
We are all a slave to our passions
Emily Williams
There are few overnight successes and many up-all-night successes.
Kevin Ashton
A woman may get to love by degrees—the best fire does not flare up the soonest.
George Eliot
Working hard for something we do not care about is called stress, working hard for something we love is called passion.
Simon Sinek
The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts.
Henry Moore
and the castle in which she dwelt was a prison to her; and sometimes sudden fits of gusty passion would overtake her, for weariness grew to hate, and hate to wrath,"The Serpent's Head
Lady Dilke
He became so gloomy that she asked him, at last, if he was worried about anything. He assured her, instantly, that he was the happiest man in the world. And he was. At times he was almost bewildered by his own bliss in being there, with Tony, so terribly dear, beside him; really his own for the rest of his life. It was not her fault if the insatiable sorrows of an unequal love tormented him, the hungry demand for more, for a fuller return, for a feeling which it was not in her nature to give. As she leaned forward, absorbed in the passions staged beneath her, he felt suddenly that their box contained just himself and a wraith, a ghost; as if the real Antonia, whom he loved, was an imagined woman living only in his sad fancy.
Margaret Kennedy
Keep your passions burning brightly.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
And there’s also ‘To him that hath shall be given.’ After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.
C.S. Lewis
Every man who is acutely alive is acutely wrestling his own soul.
D.H. Lawrence
Nothing can be more slightly defined than the line of demarcation between sanity and insanity ... Make the definition too narrow, it becomes meaningless; make it too wide, and the whole human race becomes involved in the dragnet. In strictness we are all mad when we give way to passion, to prejudice, to vice, to vanity; but if all the passionate, prejudiced and vain people were to be locked up as lunatics, who is to keep the key to the as
Kate Summerscale
I do not say that I could never be persuaded to sacrifice my reputation to passion- only that it would take a great deal.
Jude Morgan
I resist my temptations in order to feel i am free.
Mike Gayle
How can you claim to have a passionate interest in something, and then make no effort to properly understand it?
Simon Cheshire
It is a fact that the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest conflicts of the world are carried on in every individual breast capable of feeling and passion. [An anarchist]
Joseph Conrad
Passion is of the nature of seed, and finds nourishment within, tending to a predominance which determines all currents towards itself, and makes the whole life its tributary.
George Eliot
A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.
Thomas Hardy
The bed we loved in was a spinning world of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seaswhere we would dive for pearls. My lover’s wordswere shooting stars which fell to earth as kisseson these lips; my body now a softer rhymeto his, now echo, assonance; his toucha verb dancing in the centre of a noun.Some nights, I dreamed he’d written me, the beda page beneath his writer’s hands. Romanceand drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -I hold him in the casket of my widow’s headas he held me upon that next bes
Carol Ann Duffy
Oh, mention it! If I storm, you have the art of weeping.""Mr. Rochester, I must leave you.""For how long, Jane? For a few minutes, while you smooth your hair — which is somewhat dishevelled; and bathe your face — which looks feverish?""I must leave Adele and Thornfield. I must part with you for my whole life: I must begin a new existence among strange faces and strange scenes.""Of course: I told you you should. I pass over the madness about parting from me. You mean you must become a part of me. As to the new existence, it is all right: you shall yet be my wife: I am not married. You shall be Mrs. Rochester — both virtually and nominally. I shall keep only to you so long as you and I live. You shall go to a place I have in the south of France: a whitewashed villa on the shores of the Mediterranean. There you shall live a happy, and guarded, and most innocent life. Never fear that I wish to lure you into error — to make you my mistress. Why did you shake your head? Jane, you must be reasonable, or in truth I shall again become frantic."His voice and hand quivered: his large nostrils dilated; his eye blazed: still I dared to speak."Sir, your wife is living: that is a fact acknowledged this morning by yourself. If I lived with you as you desire, I should then be your mistress: to say otherwise is sophistical — is false.""Jane, I am not a gentle-tempered man — you forget that: I am not long-enduring; I am not cool and dispassionate. Out of pity to me and yourself, put your finger on my pulse, feel how it throbs, and — beware!"He bared his wrist, and offered it to me: the blood was forsaking his cheek and lips, they were growing livid; I was distressed on all hands. To agitate him thus deeply, by a resistance he so abhorred, was cruel: to yield was out of the question. I did what human beings do instinctively when they are driven to utter extremity — looked for aid to one higher than man: the words "God help me!" burst involuntarily from my lips."I am a fool!" cried Mr. Rochester suddenly. "I keep telling her I am not married, and do not explain to her why. I forget she knows nothing of the character of that woman, or of the circumstances attending my infernal union with her. Oh, I am certain Jane will agree with me in opinion, when she knows all that I know! Just put your hand in mine, Janet — that I may have the evidence of touch as well as sight, to prove you are near me — and I will in a few words show you the real state of the case. Can you listen to me?""Yes, sir; for hours if you will.
Charlotte Brontë
A display of indifference to all the actions and passions of mankind was not supposed to be such a distinguished quality at that time, I think, as I have observed it to be considered since. I have known it very fashionable indeed. I have seen it displayed with such success, that I have encountered some fine ladies and gentlemen who might as well have been born caterpillars.
Charles Dickens
No. Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there's no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It's the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It's the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It's the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days.
Jeanette Winterson
With horror he saw that her hair was already afire as the tarred stake burned about her head. He held her agonized gaze with his fierce black eyes. "I'll love you forever, and beyond," he vowed as he raised both arms and plunged his sword into her heart.~Marcus Magnus
Virginia Henley