Quotes by British Authors - Page 6

Karl Wiggins

I delve into the mysterious and counterintuitive world of helmets and high-visibility gear later in the book. But it's worth immediately noting this: while they're not inherently bad, they're less a safety device for cycling than a symptom of a road network where no cyclist can truly feel safe.

Peter Walker

The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.

George Orwell

In strict medical terms marijuana is far safer than many foods we commonly consume. For example, eating 10 raw potatoes can result in a toxic response. By comparison, it is physically impossible to eat enough marijuana to induce death. Marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. By any measure of rational analysis marijuana can be safely used within the supervised routine of medical care.[DEA Administrative Law Judge - 1988]

Francis Young

I can't be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of gloom and eucalyptus.

Gerald Durrell

Mother do you think they'll drop the bomb? Mother do you think they'll like this song? Mother do you think they'll try to break my balls?Mother should I build the wall?Mother should I run for president?Mother should I trust the government?Mother will they put me in the firing line?Mother am I really dying?Hush now baby, baby, dont you cry.Mother's gonna make all your nightmares come true.Mother's gonna put all her fears into you.Mother's gonna keep you right here under her wing.She wont let you fly, but she might let you sing.Mama will keep baby cozy and warm.Ooooh baby ooooh baby oooooh baby,Of course mama'll help to build the wall.Mother do you think she's good enough -- to me?Mother do you think she's dangerous -- to me?Mother will she tear your little boy apart?Mother will she break my heart?Hush now baby, baby dont you cry.Mama's gonna check out all your girlfriends for you.Mama wont let anyone dirty get through.Mama's gonna wait up until you get in.Mama will always find out where you've been.Mama's gonna keep baby healthy and clean.Ooooh baby oooh baby oooh baby,You'll always be baby to me.Mother, did it need to be so high?

Roger Waters

He was a compact, clearcut man, with precise features, a lot of very soft black hair, and thoughtful dark brown eyes. He had a look of wariness, which could change when he felt relaxed or happy, which was not often in these difficult days, into a smile of amused friendliness and pleasure which aroused feelings of warmth, and something more, in many women.

A.S. Byatt

Once he got bitten, and they all wept bitterly, expecting to see a spectacular death-agony; but he just went off into the bush and probably ate something, for he came back in a few days quite cock-a-hoop and as ready to eat snakes as ever.

Richard Hughes

You'd love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts.

China Miéville

There’s a big default notion that “spare,” or “precise” prose is somehow better. I keep insisting to them that while such prose is completely legitimate, it’s in no way intrinsically more accurate, more relevant, or better than lush prose. That adjective “precise,” for example, needs unpicking. If a “minimalist” writer describes a table, and a metaphor-ridden adjective-heavy weird fictioneer describes a table, they are very different, but the former is in absolutely no way closer to the material reality than the latter. Both of them are radically different from that reality. They’re just words. A table is a big wooden thing with my tea on it.

China Miéville

He lifted his arm that had been resting on her shoulders and gazed at the words she had written on his hand. He had been branded as cattle are branded to show whom they belong to. The cold mountain air stung his lips. She was driving too fast on this road that had once been a forest. Early humans had lived in it. They studied fire and the movement of the sun. They read the clouds and the moon and tried to understand the human mind His father had tried to melt him into a Polish forest when he was five years old. He knew he must leave no trace or trail of his existence because he must never find his way home. That was what his father had told him. You cannot come home. This was not something possible to know but he had to know it all the same

Deborah Levy

By degrees, the bitterness at my heart diffused itself to the circumference of the circle in which my life went its cheerless mechanical round.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Flora took pleasure in the delicacy of her approach and studied the ways of the smallest, sweetest blooms she could find, tiny pimpernels and forget-me-nots hiding in the pockets of the fields. The energy of the sun on her body and the joy of foraging filled her soul. She flew the fields and gathered until the light began to fade and she heard the sound of her forager sisters' wings turning for home. Then she joined them.

Laline Paull

It is generally the trustful and optimistic people who can afford to retreat. The loveless and faithless ones are compelled by their pessimism to attack.

T.H. White

It's easier to surrender to confinement.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Sometimes it is no great shame to give in, even to despair, provided that it is just for a little while. Sometimes a little surrender is good for the soul.

Alexia Casale

The proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator—to enact intellectually, volitionally, and emotionally, that relationship which is given in the mere fact of its being a creature. When it does so, it is good and happy.

C.S. Lewis

The poor wretch, she had given up so much and could yet smile at her trouble. He himself had never surrendered to anything in life - that was what life demanded of you - surrender. For reward it gave you love, this swarthy, skin-deep love that exacted remorseless penalties.

A.E. Coppard

Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender.

Sebastian Faulks

I'm a laugh tart. I make no secret of that fact.

Hugh Grant

Xav sprinkled olive oil on his lettuce. 'Lola was very particular that it all had to fit properly.' 'Lola?' squeaked Diamond. I wanted to warn her not to rise to the bait Xav was dangling in front of her but it was too late. Xav added some Parmesan and pepper. 'Suspicious, Diamond? You should be. This is a bachelor party I'm organizing, not a school outing, and it is going to tick all of Trace's boxes. Lola is either a very efficient water sports instructor or an exotic dancing girl; I'll leave it your imagination.' I rolled my eyes at Diamond. 'Myabe she's both. I mean the guys will really go for that, I guess. Don't worry,Di, Luigi and his crew will not disappoint us girls.' Luigi was in fact Contessa Nicoletta's little bespectacled chef with whom I had been consulting about the menu for Friday, but the Benedicts weren't to know that. 'He has promised to provide something suitably spicy for our tastes.

Joss Stirling

I instantly like people who laugh at my jokes. It's a weakness of mine.

Matthew Norman

Some men laugh easily. It makes them winning dinner companions.

Joe Abercrombie

We seem to live in a world where you have to walk around grinning like a loon. I can’t understand all the fuss about Mona Lisa painting, everyone wondering why she’s not smiling, if she’s depressed or heartbroken. No, she was just normal!Emotions are always extreme these days: you either have to be crying with laughter or crying in pain. No wonder water levels are rising. It’s not global warming, it’s all the tears from crying.

Karl Pilkington

Suddenly I had to laugh. It was like realising you definitely need to projectile vomit when you thought you had it under control in some imprisoning form of public space.

Olivia Sudjic

Time if abused is always sure to have the last laugh.

Steven Redhead

Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years it was a splendid laugh!

Charles Dickens

Moshe was an Israeli with an ear-slitting laugh. He used it in the same way as a madman uses a gun, spraying it around with bewildering randomness.

Alex Garland

The clown may be the source of mirth, but - who shall make the clown laugh?

Angela Carter

The best way to treat obstacles is to use them as stepping-stones. Laugh at them, tread on them, and let them lead you to something better.

Enid Blyton

It's important to learn to laugh at ourselves, don't take life too seriously.

Geri Halliwell

Drive-Thru McDonalds was more expensive than I thought...once you've hired the car...

Tim Key

I never stopped joking around long enough to realize you weren't laughing anymore.

Alexandra Potter

They didn't know why these things were funny. Sometimes you laugh because you've got no more room for crying. Sometimes you laugh because table manners on a beach are funny. And sometimes you laugh because you're alive, when you really shouldn't be.

Terry Pratchett

My pain may be the reason for somebody's laugh.But my laugh must never be the reason for somebody's pain.

Charlie Chaplin

You don’t have to speak at all—I know what you’d say…- Laura

Wilkie Collins

My word is iron," Kublai said to the guards, as Meng Guang was led away. "Your people will come to know this, in time.

Conn Iggulden

A rumbling volcano is like a pimple.You know that they're both going to explode,but you just don't know when.

Anthony T.Hincks

We should know who they are," I said, "before we kill them. That's just being polite.

Bernard Cornwell

I don't think that you know who we are, but we know who you are!

Anthony T.Hincks

Spermicide' sort of rhymes with 'pesticide', yet you wouldn't put a load of DDT in you know where to kill you know what, now would you?

Anthony T.Hincks

But there was nothing. No village or town as far as her eyes could strain. Nowhere for her saviours to come from and take her to; just fields and trees and the weeping arc of the river Greave all the way to the horizon. Just like in the books, Greaveburn was all there was; building and building until streets were foundations, roofs were floors, constantly climbing away from itself. now that Abrasia saw it, her dream of escape crumbled completely like an ancient map in her fingers. The horizon was the world's edge and there was nothing beyond it but mist and falling.Greaveburn stood alone on this little circle of earth, the river running around and into itself like a snake eating its tail. And Abrasia was doomed to watch the sun and stars trade places for all eternity.

Craig Hallam

When you want to change anything it is best to simply be the change. Nothing will influence your thinking and your feelings as much as your body becoming the new you.It is simple really, we are accustomed to having our minds or our emotions tell our body how to behave. Sayings like: "I expect it will be a disaster," result in slumping body language. Feelings anxiety cause our body to tense up. But you can work your system the other way around and use your body to influence your thoughts and your feelings.Try this: sit or stand up straight and put a big smile on your face - now, how do you feel?

David Ferrers M Nlp

Every inch of space was used. As the road narrowed, signs receded upwards and changed to the vertical. Businesses simply soared from ground level and hung out vaster, more fascinatingly illuminated shingles than competitors. We were still in a traffic tangle, but now the road curved. Shops crowded the pavements and became homelier. Vegetables, spices, grocery produce in boxes or hanging from shop lintels, meats adangle - as always, my ultimate ghastliness - and here and there among the crowds the alarming spectacle of an armed Sikh, shotgun aslant, casually sitting at a bank entrance. And markets everywhere. To the right, cramped streets sloped down to the harbor. To the left, as we meandered along the tramlines through sudden dense markets of hawkers' barrows, the streets turned abruptly into flights of steps careering upwards into a bluish mist of domestic smoke, clouds of washing on poles, and climbing. Hong Kong had the knack of building where others wouldn't dare.

Jonathan Gash

He was dropped under a streetlamp, the only person left on the bus. A patch of mauled light. Gritty pavement, scarred with a million cigarette burns. Weeds and spit and oil. Place like this, the only glitter was the knife just before it sank in. Place like this, there wasn't any gold.

Rupert Thomson

Vasco bought a bottle of vodka to celebrate and they drank it in the old sailors' graveyard in Mangrove South. This was where the funeral business had first put down its roots. Over the wall, between two warehouses, Jed could just make out the Witch's Fingers, four long talons of sand that lay in the mouth of the river. Rumour had it that, on stormy nights a century ago, they used to reach out, gouge holes in passing ships, and drag them down. Hundreds of wrecks lay buried in that glistening silt. The city's black heart had beaten strongly even then. There was one funeral director, supposedly, who used to put lamps out on the Fingers and lure ships to their doom.

Rupert Thomson

Three years in London had not changed Richard, although it had changed the way he perceived the city. Richard had originally imagined London as a gray city, even a black city, from pictures he had seen, and he was surprised to find it filled with color. It was a city of red brick and white stone, red buses and large black taxis, bright red mailboxes and green grassy parks and cemeteries.It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names - Crouch End, Chalk Farm, Earl's Court, Marble Arch - and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, dirty, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or, more recently, motorized, and the need of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every color and manner and kind.

Neil Gaiman

So now I lye by Day and toss or rave by Night, since the ratling and perpetual Hum of the Town deny me rest: just as Madness and Phrensy are the vapours which rise from the lower Faculties, so the Chaos of the Streets reaches up even to the very Closet here and I am whirl'd about by cries of Knives to Grind and Here are your Mouse-Traps. I was last night about to enter the Shaddowe of Rest when a Watch-man, half-drunken, thumps at the Door with his Past Three-a-clock and his Rainy Wet Morning. And when at length I slipp'd into Sleep I had no sooner forgot my present Distemper than I was plunged into a worse: I dreamd my self to be lying in a small place under ground, like unto a Grave, and my Body was all broken while others sung. And there was a Face that did so terrifie me that I had like to have expired in my Dream. Well, I will say no more.

Peter Ackroyd

There’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork, greatest of Discworld c

Terry Pratchett

We all tend to think of ourselves as the last unsinning inhabitants of whatever place we live in. We don't usually recognize ourselves as participants in its destruction.

David Owen

We get so used to the gregarious nature of our towns and villages that we forget how crowded our existence has become.

Fennel Hudson

Well, maybe it started that way. As a dream, but doesn’t everything. Those buildings. These lights. This whole city. Somebody had to dream about it first. And maybe that is what I did. I dreamed about coming here, but then I did it.

Roald Dahl

this was an environment built, not for man, but for man's absence.

J.G. Ballard

Without knowing it, he had constructed a gigantic vertical zoo, its hundreds of cages stacked above each other. All the events of the past few months made sense if one realised that these brilliant and exotic creatures had learned to open the doors.

J.G. Ballard

the ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis.

J.G. Ballard

Where do you go if you don’t belong anywhere? If I wanted to run away then why come to the city? Because this is the place to hide. This is the place to be invisible. Anyone can be no one here, and I am someone that wants to be no one.

Steven Wilson

But this city is a world of its own, a country within a country. People are used to taking the old and making it news; and used, too, to taking the new and making it old. Every glass of water from its taps, it is said, has passed six times through the kidneys of another, and every scrap of its land has been trodden on, fought over, dug up and broken down for centuries.

Amanda Craig

Streets that follow like a tedious argumentOf insidious intentTo lead you to an overwhelming question...

T.S Eliot

We think our fathers fools so wise we grow Our wiser sons no doubt will think us so.

Alexander Pope

Youth! youth! how buoyant are thy hopes they turn Like marigolds toward the sunny side.

Jean Ingelow

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