Quotes by British Authors - Page 615

But by that time Lady Harman had acquired the habit of reading and the habit of thinking over what she read, and from that it is an easy step to thinking over oneself and the circumstances of one's own life. The one thing trains for the other.
H.G.Wells
A library — a place full of books! Imagine!" Ivy couldn't imagine a place closer to heaven. Think of all the books you could read!
Gemma Jackson
Having had this kind of binge reading relationship with online content for 15 years we're starting to think 'Hang on, we only have finite time and there is infinite content'.
Seb Emina
But one day he said to me:‘I’ve got it now. It’s reading isn’t it?’‘I’m sorry?’‘You read a lot, don’t you? That’s where it all comes from. Reading. Yeah, reading.’The next time I saw him he had a Herman Hesse novel in his hands. I never saw him again without a book somewhere on his person. When I heard, some years later, that he had got into Cambridge I thought to myself, I know how that happened. He decided one day to read.
Stephen Fry
She liked to watch her father as he read, and to listen to the smoothly rolling tones; she felt no curiosity about what the words meant. It was only Shakespeare and she was used to him.
Stella Gibbons
She sat in a corner warm with sunlight, a copy of Home Notes open unread upon her knee, and watched the green meadows flying past while the business men in the carriage talked about news in the papers— awful, as usual— their golf, their gardeners, and the detective stories they were reading.
Stella Gibbons
Every book is a journey, a map into the complexities of the human mind and soul.
Elif Shafak
In reading we have to allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested, not stated; lapsing and flowing into each other like reeds on the bed of a river
Virginia Woolf
She just wanted - had always wanted - a good book to read. Being chased by hellhounds and blowing things up were comparatively unimportant parts of the job. Getting the books - now, that was what *really* mattered to her.
Genevieve Cogman
At the age of 46 I was starting to see the appearance of rainbow halos and starbursts around bright nighttime lights, problems reading small print, focusing issues with my eyes, and image recognition issues. I had been exposed to bright high powered 20 watt scattered sodium LASER light a decade earlier in very high altitude astronomy.
Steven Magee
To tidy up takes time, and she wants all her time for wolfing books...
Stella Gibbons
I was a reader before I was a writer, and when I started putting together my first collection of short stories, Fairytales For Lost Children, I drew on my rich history as a reader to try and create my voice. I wanted this voice to reflect my Somali background, my Kenyan upbringing and my London home. This voice would be a mashup of all the elements that formed my youth; the sticky-sweet Jamaican patois, the Kenyan street slang, my Somali and Italian linguistic tics, my love of jazz poetics and nineties hip-hop slanguistics. This language would form the bed on which my narratives of love, loss, identity and hope would rest.
Diriye Osman
A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one's age group. It comes from reading books above one.
J.R.R. Tolkien
So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read in school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
Jeanette Winterson
Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them.
Anthony Powell
No harm in listening. Alexei's a child, not a wizard. We don't lose control of our brains by listening.
Katherine Rundell
When you read," the man whispered, "you discover who you really are. You find traces of yourself, little pieces you didn't know were there.
Malcom McNeill
Books may not judge you, but people do.
Natasha Farrant
I know someone who has never been able to read _The Cuckoo Clock_ since leaving her girlhood home, because it had to be read sitting halfway up the stairs, where the light through a stained-glass landing window fell on it, staining the pages red and blue and green.
Rosemary Sutcliff
Libraries are about Freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.
Neil Gaiman
When you read,' the man whispered, 'you discover who you really are. You find traces of yourself, little pieces you didn't know were there.
Malcolm McNeill
But why," he said with animation, "do the English not read their own great literature?"Victor laughed triumphantly, and said, "Because at school they are made to hate it.
Olaf Stapledon
Reading is important. It’s not primarily escapism (though it can be, and there’s nothing wrong with some of that in good measure) and it’s not primarily a way of passing the time. Reading is important to the good life because it stokes the furnaces of our intellect, allows us to expand our understanding of the universe, both inner and outer, for practical gain and simple pleasure. It can induce awe, inspire respect, excite, piss off, and intrigue. These are things that make life worth living.
Robert Wringham
With a book he was regardless of time...
Jane Austen
The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop.
C.S. Lewis
Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people’s imagination.
Henry James
It’s very silly,” she said, “but I go on with it in spite of myself. I’m afraid I’m too easily pleased; no novel is so silly I can’t read it.
Henry James
We would like to go and see the field that Millet…shows us in his Springtime, we would like Claude Monet to take us to Giverny, on the banks of the Seine, to that bend of the river which he hardly lets us distinguish through the morning mist. Yet in actual fact, it was the mere chance of a connection or family relation that give…Millet or Monet occasion to pass or to stay nearby, and to choose to paint that road, that garden, that field, that bend in the river, rather than some other. What makes them appear other and more beautiful than the rest of the world is that they carry on them, like some elusive reflection, the impression they afforded to a genius, and which we might see wandering just as singularly and despotically across the submissive, indifferent face of all the landscapes he may have painted.’It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.To forget this may sadden us unduly. When we feel interest to be so dependent on the exact locations where certain great artists found it, a thousand landscapes and areas of experience will be deprived of possible interest, for Monet only looked at a few stretches of the earth, and Proust’s novel, though long, could not comprise more than a fraction of human experience. Rather than learn the general lesson of art’s attentiveness, we might seek instead the mere objects of its gaze, and would then be unable to do justice to parts of the world which artists had not considered. As a Proustian idolater, we would have little time for desserts which Proust never tasted, for dresses he never described, nuances of love he didn’t cover and cities he didn’t visit, suffering instead from an awareness of a gap between our existence and the realm of artistic truth and interest.The moral? There is no great homage we could pay Proust than to end up passing the same verdict on him as he passed on Ruskin, namely, that for all its qualities, his work must eventually also prove silly, maniacal, constraining, false and ridiculous to those who spend too long on it.‘To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.
Alain de Botton
I am the girl who spends hours huddled in a corner of a library, trying to find what you love the most about Marlowe, just so I can write you a poem worthy of Shakespeare. I've made books my lovers, hours my enemies and you the only story.
Nikita Gill
We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading.
C.S. Lewis
Unlike music, excessive reading has been shown to be dangerous for the female mind. It was taught in our earliest lectures: the male cells are essentially katabolic: active energetic; and female cells are anabolic: there to conserve energy and support life. While a little light reading is fine, breakdown follows when woman goes against her nature.
Anna Hope
Did I really read every single book in the school? My mother maintains I did. Maybe I just told the teachers I had and they all believed me. Maybe this is where the lying about books really began. Where were the checks and balances? I blame the authorities.
Andy Miller
...a library is not just a reference service: it is also a place for the vulnerable. From the elderly gentleman whose only remaining human interaction is with library staff, to the isolated young mother who relishes the support and friendship that grows from a Baby Rhyme Time session, to a slow moving 30-something woman collecting her CDs, libraries are a haven in a world where community services are being ground down to nothing. I've always known libraries are vital, but now I understand that their worth cannot be measured in books alone.
Angela Clarke
Book after book, I get hooked, every time the writer talks to me like a friend.
Marc Bolan
Books are a portable kind of time travel. We go back as well as forward when we read them. When we come back into the now, after being immersed in worlds previously unknown to us, we find ourselves, transformed. Touched by their magic, nothing we ever perceived beforehand remains quite the same.
Suzy Davies
She measured time in pages. Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on the size of the type, and when you think of time in this way there isn’t time for anything else.
Zadie Smith
I wanted books and made no distinction between good books or bad, only between the ones I loved, the ones that spoke to my soul, and the ones I merely liked. I did not care how a story was written. There were no bad stories: every story was new and glorious.
Neil Gaiman
I am supposed to be an utter fool and the more I read the more of a fool they think me.
Robert Graves
It seems that one ought to read in two ways: 1) because of a particular and personal interest, which makes the thing one's own, regardless of what other people think of the book 2) to a certain extent, because it is something one 'ought to have read' but one must be quite clear this why one is reading.
T.S Eliot
How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow. There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time...
Neil Gaiman
He sat down on a grassy bank and looked at the city that surrounded him, and thought, one day he would have to go home. And one day he would have to make a home to go back to. He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough. He pulled out his book.
Neil Gaiman
Reading time is precious. Don't waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously put you off the activity altogether.
Lionel Shriver
You know what it's like to *lose* yourself in a story. We have brother and sister *souls*.
Mike Carey
Do you know I get such a passion for reading sometimes its like the other passion -writing- only the wrong side of the carpet.
Virginia Woolf
Reading is awesome. Just escaping into someone else's life, into another world. In books, everything is possible.
Nick Lake
You can tell a lot about a person's priorities in life by reading their will.
Steven Magee
I look upon fine phrases as a lover. - John Keats
Beatrice K. Otto
I like how books let you into another world, but how it's secret. Like, when you read, the world you see is different from the one someone else sees when they read the same words. It's just yours.
Clare Fisher
You must know that feeling when it's raining outside and the heating's on and you lose yourself, utterly, in a book. You read and you read and you feel the pages slipping through your fingers until suddenly there are fewer in your right hand than there are in your left and you want to slow down but you still hurtle on towards a conclusion you can hardly bear to discover.
Anthony Horowitz
Quiet,� she hissed at me, her voice shockingly aggressive for such a small person. “Otherwise, I’ll shut you up myself.
Adele Rose
I was just thinking that it would be nice if, for once in a while, life made things easier,� I told him, feeling annoyed. “Why does life have to throw impossible tasks at us all the time for crying out loud?� At hearing my debate, Luna huffed.“Because life’s a bitch,� she growled under her breath, sulking. “That’s why.
Adele Rose
Clearly, this was another thing I needed to add to the: ‘repetitive cycle of things that were constantly happening in my life’ list, which currently contained fainting and my ability to find trouble.
Adele Rose
Of course they were eaten,� he retorted, his eyes flashing in cold humour. “Trolls generally aren’t exactly renowned for being vegetarians.
Adele Rose
It’s tough, but if you want to survive, sometimes you have to do the seemingly impossible.
Adele Rose
Well…it’s whether you want to face certain death by taking a risk on the other route or almost certain death by scaling the walls?� she replied. “Therefore, for me, considering our options, it’s a no brainer.
Adele Rose
Man I’m hot,� I exclaimed, fanning myself. The combination of climbing out of the cave and the sun meant that I was perspiring like crazy. “Why thank you,� retorted Blaine, smirking. “I’m pleased that my presence causes that kind of reaction.
Adele Rose
From Tudor to eighteenth-century England, there are many instances of women writers with no place or room of their own. The life-story of the play-wright Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland (1585-1639) gives us a dramatic and, lately, much-studied example. In the hagiographical 'The Lady Falkland: Her Life', written by one of her daughters, we hear how the prodigious Elizabethlearnt to read very soon and loved it much... Without a teacher, whilst she was a child, she learnt French, Spanish, Italian [and] Latin... She having neither brother nor sister, nor other companion of her age, spent her whole time in reading; to which she gave herself so much that she frequently read all night; so as her mother was fain to forbid her servants to let her have candles, which command they turned to their own profit, and let themselves be hired by her to let her have them, selling them to her at half a crown apiece, so was she bent to reading; and she not having money so free, was to owe it them, and in this fashion was she in debt a hundred pound afore she was twelve year old.
Hermione Lee
Reading exposes is to the experiences and minds of others, makes us challenge our own provinciality, deepens and widens who we are and what we can become.
Rick Gekoski
If you will read and listen, you will admit a multiplicity of voices and points of view, consider them with some humility, allow them gracious entrance however strident or discordant some of them may sound, then you will grow and change, and each of these voices will become a constituent part of who you become, an atom of growing being. It is literature and only literature than can do this.
Rick Gekoski
...begged them as we read our literary texts, only to listen. To wrench open - it takes an effort of will - the portcullis to their teenage hearts for just a couple of hours once a week, to humbly admit another, and better - a Yeats or Shakespeare, a Crazy Jane or Hamlet - and to welcome them, to allow for those tiny spots of time some vibration in the jelly of being, that makes, once it has settled, a subtle new mould... Otherwise, I would observe tartly...you are merely going to become a product of your family, the few friends you might make and the few lovers you may garner...nothing more than a function of your upbringing - a type. Whereas, if you will only read, and listen, you will admit a multiplicity of voices and points of view, consider them with some humility, allow them gracious entrance however strident or discordant some of them may sound, then you will grow and change, and each of these voices will become a constituent part of who you become, an atom of growing being. It is literature and only literature than can do this.
Rick Gekoski