Quotes by British Authors - Page 558

It isn't very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as much as it makes life possible. A poor substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps, but real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness.
Lionel Shriver
Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided likemercury then gathered up only at the last moment.
Jeanette Winterson
Passion out of passion's obstacles.
Jeanette Winterson
chaos of thought and passion, all confus'd.
Alexander Pope
Well, He had known what love was-a sharp pang, a fierce experience, in the midst of whose flames he was struggling! but, through that furnace he would fight his way out into the serenity of middle age,-all the richer and more human for having known this great passion.
Elizabeth Gaskell
You do not win a war by dying for your country. You win a war by making sure that some poor bastard dies for his.
Mal Peet
He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her.
W Somerset Maugham
You have a dress with a décolletage to emphasise your breasts. I suppose the cleavage is the proper focus but what I wanted to do was to fasten my index finger and thumb at the bolts of your collar bone, push out, spreading the web of my hand until it caught against your throat. You asked me if I wanted to strangle you. No, I wanted to fit you, not just in the obvious ways but in so many indentations.
Jeanette Winterson
The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love's nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love's fire. So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all.
Jeanette Winterson
Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps, but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.
Jeanette Winterson
Working hard for something we don't care about is called stress: Working hard for something we love is called passion.
Simon Sinek
Infatuation. First Love. Lust. My passion can be explained away. But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals.
Jeanette Winterson
Accounts are not quite settled between us," said she, with a passion that equaled my own. "I can love, and I can hate. You had your choice. You chose to spurn the first; now you must test the other.
Arthur Conan Doyle
I, while the gods laugh, the world's vortex am;Maelström of passions in that hidden seaWhose waves of all-time lap the coasts of me;And in small compass the dark waters
Mervyn Peake
Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you've lost forever. There is only now.
Jeanette Winterson
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--Not in lone splendour hung aloft the nightAnd watching, with eternal lids apart,Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,The moving waters at their priestlike taskOf pure ablution round earth's human shores,Or gazing on the new soft-fallen maskOf snow upon the mountains and the moors--No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,And so live ever--or else swoon to death. Glanzvoller Stern! wär ich so stet wie du,Nicht hing ich nachts in einsam stolzer Pracht!SchautŽ nicht mit ewigem Blick beiseite zu,Einsiedler der Natur, auf hoher WachtBeim Priesterwerk der Reinigung, das die See,Die wogende, vollbringt am Meeresstrand;Noch starrt ich auf die Maske, die der SchneeSanft fallend frisch um Berg und Moore band.Nein, doch unwandelbar und unentwegtMöchtŽ ruhn ich an der Liebsten weicher Brust,Zu fühlen, wie es wogend dort sich regt,Zu wachen ewig in unruhiger Lust,Zu lauschen auf des Atems sanftes Wehen -So ewig leben - sonst im Tod vergehen!
John Keats
Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?
Graham Greene
Oh I believe in loving cats and dogs and children and parents – sometimes – but I don’t believe in romantic love. Of course, there’s the momentary rush of hormones and chemicals that encourages us to mate, but it’s biology – it’s no more inherently mystical than the nicotine in that cigarette you’re smoking
Amy Jenkins
The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but on the mastery of his passions.
Alfred Tennyson
I loved you madly; in the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of the night, girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and Hells of visions into which I rushed, carrying your image in my arms, I loved you madly.
Charles Dickens
She arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She nuzzles her cunt into my face like a filly at the gate. She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She's refilled each day with fresh tides of longing.
Jeanette Winterson
It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.
George Eliot
Love is not a hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed; but, flower or weed, whose scent and colour are always, wild!
John Galsworthy
Light yourself on fire with passion and people will come from miles to watch you burn.
John Wesley
Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body.
Jeanette Winterson
We fucked a flame into being.
D.H. Lawrence
My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.
Thomas Hardy
Quick-loving hearts ... may quickly loathe.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.
Aldous Huxley
What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone.
Alexander Pope
I was never afraid of anything in the world except the dentist.
Taylor Caldwell
May He give usall the courage that we needto go the way He shepherds us.That when He callswe may go unfrightened. If He bids us come to Himacross the waters,that unfrightened we may go. And if He bids us climb a hill,may we not notice that it is a hill,mindful only ofthe happiness of His company. He made us for Himself,that we should travel with Himand see Him at the lastin His unveiled beautyin the abiding city whereHe is lightand happinessand endless home.
Bede Jarrett
If there is to be any hope for the world, indeed if you really want to find satisfaction and happiness in your life, you must regard the return you will receive as a secondary consideration, if a consideration at all ……seek money first and you will ruin your land, or betray your profession…
Sir James Darling
Wars are all fought by men who either believe they are right or who have no other choice. How they fight defines who they are when the blood stops flowing.
Lucas Bale
But then life is never neat, it is made up of doors and trapdoors. You move down baroque corridors, and even when you think you know which door to open, you still need to have the courage to choose.
J.M. Ledgard
To do something you're afraid of, especially for the sake of somebody else, is the very definition of courage.
Michelle Harrison
He supposed he was one of those unfortunates born with a great capacity for suffering.... He opened his eyes a moment and they were dark with fear, for only one race was run as yet and there might be many others.... Then his newborn courage came back to him and he accepted his suffering as the price he must pay for the gift of creation that was his. And suffering, he had discovered, could be the gateway to renewal, than which no more glorious experience can be man's on earth.
Elizabeth Goudge
I have extremely little courage myself, much less than you; but I have found that whenever, after a long struggle, I have screwed my courage up to do something I always felt much freer & happy after it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I feel as if I could be any thing or every thing, as if I could rant and storm, or sigh, or cut capers in any tragedy or comedy in the English language.
Jane Austen
His importance to the century just past, and therefore his status as a figure in history as well as in literature, derives from the extraordinary salience of the subjects he ‘took on,’ and stayed with, and never abandoned. As a consequence, we commonly use the term ‘Orwellian’ in one of two ways. To describe a state of affairs as ‘Orwellian’ is to imply crushing tyranny and fear and conformism. To describe a piece of writing as ‘Orwellian’ is to recognize that human resistance to these terrors is unquenchable. Not bad for one short lifetime.
Christopher Hitchens
To hold the courage to let another witness our tears, while refuting fears invitation to shield face, is to grant the most privileged of all loving intimacies to them.
Ged Thompson Liverpool Poet
It’s braver to stay. It takes courage to stay. I am sure I speak for all the single people here when I say that I don’t want to ever lack that courage. I don’t want to lose my best friend and my true love, just because I wanted tostay in control and not take a risk. Even if they walked away, even ifthey ran to the other side of the world, even if I thought that I didn't have a chance in hell, I still want to know that I did everything I couldto make it happen.
Gemma Burgess
It was strange how fear had gone,now that we knew the worst and had a fighting man by our side.
John Buchan
When a man comes out of great danger, he is apt to be a little deaf to the call of duty.
John Buchan
One of the first lessons life teaches us is that on these occasions of back-chat between the delicately-natured, a man should retire into the offing, curl up in a ball, and imitate the prudent tactics of the opossum, which, when danger is in the air, pretends to be dead, frequently going to the length of hanging out crêpe and instructing its friends to gather round and say what a pity it all is.
P.G. Wodehouse
I thought I would die without you, in reality I was reborn...
Seja Majeed
Even the Sun gets tired of rising, but he does it out of love for the Earth...
Seja Majeed
Live for what you love, and die for what you're unwilling to live without...
Seja Majeed
We search for happiness across every landscape, if only we knew that the seed in which it first grows, is planted within ourselves...
Seja Majeed
It would be nice if the story ended differently - if he had burst into tears and professed his love for me; if he had said the same three words back and hugged me; if he had given it thought and then asked if we could try a relationship. But you know what? I said those three words to a boy who didn’t love me back, at least not in that way. He casually dropped a “love you” later on, and in a platonic ‘you have impacted my life’ way, he was telling the truth. But I knew. He had given it thought, and we were not on the same page. I built up all this courage to say “I love you” for the very first time, and I said those words to a person that couldn’t reciprocate them. But guess what? I don’t regret any of it.
Stephen Lovegrove
The irony is, nothing is more frightening than being frightened.
Neel Burton
Boldly they rode and well,Into the jaws of Death,Into the mouth of hell.
Alfred Tennyson
And an even worse example, I think, than the cheapening of the word CHARITY is the new newspaper cheapening of the word COURAGE.Any man living in complete luxury and security who chooses to write a play or a novel which causes a flutter and exchange of compliments in Chelsea and Chiswick and a faint thrill in Streatham and Surbiton, is described as "daring," though nobody on earth knows what danger it is that he dares. I speak, of course, of terrestrial dangers; or the only sort of dangers he believes in. To be extravagantly flattered by everybody he considers enlightened, and rather feebly rebuked by everybody he considers dated and dead, does not seem so appalling a peril that a man should be stared at as a heroic warrior and militant martyr because he has had the strength to endure it.
G.K. Chesterton
He that feareth is a slave, were he never so rich, were he never so powerful. But he that is without fear is king of all the world. Though hast my sword. Strike. Death shall be a sweet rest to me. Thraldom, not death, should terrify me.
E.R. Eddison
For the sake of all the others who are like you, but less strong and less gifted perhaps, many of them, it's up to you to have the courage to make good.
Radclyffe Hall
By strengthening our compassion, we give fuel to our courage and determination.
Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone
Gratitude...here at home our faith dwindlespolitical division causes tensions to kindle -we should never forgetwho stands at the door -who shields us with armorand shall forever more...
Muse
At Times I Am A Flower...at times I am a flower ~singularly defined ...
Muse
Honor LostAmbulant sunshine piercedthe soot covered glass ~the feeble man wandered byin this ritual morning pass ...
Muse
They thought he was scared all the time because he was a coward. The truth was, only he could see the world clearly enough to know how truly scary it was.
Simon R. Green