Quotes by British Authors - Page 634

Perhaps the various burnings of the Alexandria Library were necessary, like those Australian Forest Fires without which the new seeds cannot burst their shells and make a young, healthy forest.
William Golding
We shall change all that...because it is possible to change the world, if one is determined enough, and if one sees with sufficient clarity just what has to be changed.
Alexander McCall Smith
My life will be what I make it," he told her. "That is true for all of us all the time. We cannot know what the future will bring or how the events of the future will make us feel. We cannot even plan and feel any certainty that our most carefully contrived plans will be put into effect. Could I have predicted what happened to me in the Peninsula? Could you have predicted what happened to you in Cornwall? But those things happened to us nevertheless. And they changed our plans and our dreams so radically that we both might have been excused for giving up, for never planning or dreaming again, for never living again. That too is a choice we all have to make.
Mary Balogh
Things are embarrassing, best to avoid them. But since your death I prefer a naturalist style of conversation. Let's strip it down to what matters. Let's have emotions and beliefs on show without the modest covering of small talk.
Rosamund Lupton
For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.
Jeanette Winterson
The boundaries of this world are forever shifting – from day to night, joy to sorrow, love to hate, and from life itself to death; and who can say at what moment we may suddenly cross over the border, from one state of existence to another, like heat applied to some flammable substance? I have been given my own ever-changing margins, across which I move, continually and hungrily, like a migrating animal. Now civilized, now untamed; now responsive to decency and human concern, now viciously attuned to the darkest of desires.
Michael Cox
We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day.We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep,Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow,The path of its departure still is free.Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;Nought may endure but Mutability!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.
Harold Wilson
Small things start us in new ways of thinking
V.S. Naipaul
The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rose water; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.
Hilary Mantel
All I know is that I've wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I'd get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don't want it anymore, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow's sky. That's what I want now, and I think it's what you should want too. But it will be too late soon. We'll become too set to change. If we don't take our chance now, another may never come for either of us.
Kazuo Ishiguro
For once, it seems there’s nothing to worry about…… for the time
Nick Abadzis
In History, stagnant waters, whether they be stagnant waters of custom or those of despotism, harbour no life; life is dependent on the ripples created by a few eccentric individuals. In homage to that life and vitality, the community has to brave certain perils and must countenance a measure of heresy. One must live dangerously if one wants to live at all.
Herbert Read
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.
Graham Greene
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.
Aldous Huxley
The fact is that five years ago I was, as near as possible, a different person to what I am tonight. I, as I am now, didn't exist at all. Will the same thing happen in the next five years? I hope so.
Siegfried Sassoon
Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit. 'Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost.
Neil Gaiman
Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)
Jeanette Winterson
You tried to change didn’t you? Closed your mouth more, tried to be softer, prettier, less volatile, less awake... You can’t make homes out of human beings. Someone should have already told you that.
Warsan Shire
People say we can't do anything about the way the world is; they say it's set in stone. I say it looks like stone, but it's mostly paint and cardboard.
Katherine Rundell
Then he asked if I didn’t like things changing. And I said I wouldn’t mind things changing if I became an astronaut, for example, which is one of the biggest changes you can imagine, apart from becoming a girl or dying.
Mark Haddon
Children being children, however, the grotesque Hopping Pot had taken hold of their imaginations. The solution was to jettison the pro-Muggle moral but keep the warty cauldron, so by the middle of the sixteenth century a different version of the tale was in wide circulation among wizarding families. In the revised story, the Hopping Pot protects an innocent wizard from his torch-bearing, pitchfork-toting neighbours by chasing them away from the wizard's cottage, catching them and swallowing them whole.
J.K. Rowling
If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?
W Somerset Maugham
Fret not where the road will take you. Instead concentrate on the first step. That's the hardest part and that's what you are responsible for. Once you take that step let everything do what it naturally does and the rest will follow. Do not go with the flow. Be the flow.
Elif Shafak
If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.
Anita Roddick
Change has to come for life to struggle forward.
Helen Hollick
If time and space, as sages say,Are things which cannot be,The sun which does not feel decayNo greater is than we.So why, Love, should we ever prayTo live a century?The butterfly that lives a dayHas lived eternity.
T.S Eliot
A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.
Neil Gaiman
New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises 'Why then are you not taking part in them?
H.G.Wells
That just the way it is. Some things will never change. That's just the way it is. But don't you believe them.
Malorie Blackman
It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers.
H.G.Wells
We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because they are what help us grow. With out them we grow weak like the Eloi in comfort and security. We need to constantly be challenging ourselves in order to strengthen our character and increase our intelligence.
H.G.Wells
You should never make fun of something that a person can't change about themselves.
Phil Lester
You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Neil Gaiman
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
Aldous Huxley
Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.
Terry Pratchett
For the khan, we will take their cities, their women, and their lands. This is the great raid, the farthest strike in the history of the nation of Genghis. We will not be stopped.
Conn Iggulden
Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
I don't have a lot of patience for stories in which women are rescued by men.
Neil Gaiman
It is quite certain that the skirt means female dignity, not female submission; it can be proved by the simplest of all tests. No ruler would deliberately dress up in the recognized fetters of a slave; no judge would would appear covered with broad arrows. But when men wish to be safely impressive, as judges, priests or kings, they do wear skirts, the long, trailing robes of female dignity. The whole world is under petticoat government; for even men wear petticoats when they wish to govern.
G.K. Chesterton
He would never understand women, he thought. They were life’s great mystery.
Conn Iggulden
She had one of those husky voices that sounded as if she were permanently coming down with a cold. Men seemed to find that sexy in a woman, which Jackson thought was odd because it made women sound less like women and more like men. Maybe it was a gay thing.
Kate Atkinson
But men are funny about their wars, they act as if they own them, and perhaps they do, for I don't think women ever start them.
Pippa Goldschmidt
My brave husband came back from fighting the Turks and brought me a robe of silk and a necklace of human teeth. He sat up at night by his hearth telling tales of battle. Apparently the Turks are ten times more ferocious and fearless than the Scots. 'Perhaps we should invite them here to drive the Scots back,' I suggested, and he laughed, but he didn't kiss me. That's when I learned the truth about scars. A man with a battle scar is a veteran, a hero, given an honoured place at the fire. Small boys gaze up fascinated, dreaming of winning such badges of courage. Maids caress his thighs with their buttocks as they bend over to mull his ale. Women cluck and cosset, and if in time other men grow a little weary of that tale of honour, then they call for his cup to be filled again and again until he is fuddled and dozes quietly in the warmth of the embers. But a scarred woman is not encouraged to tell her story. Boys jeer and mothers cross themselves. Pregnant women will not come close for fear that if they look upon such a sight, the infant in their belly will be marked. You've heard of the tales of Beauty and the Beast no doubt. How a fair maid falls in love with a monster and sees the beauty of his soul beneath the hideous visage. But you've never heard the tale of the handsome man falling for the monstrous woman and finding joy in her love, because it doesn't happen, not even in fairytales. The truth is that the scarred woman's husband buys her a good thick veil and enquires about nunneries for the good of her health. He spends his days with his falcons and his nights instructing pageboys in their duties. For if nothing else, the wars taught him how to be a diligent master to such pretty lads.
Karen Maitland
his wife might, I verily believe, be the very happiest woman the sun shines on
Charlotte Brontë
This rose is not so fragrant as a summer flower, but it has stood through hardships none of them could bear: the cold rain of winter has sufficed to nourish it, and its faint sun to warm it; the bleak winds have not blanched it, or broken its stem, and the keen frost has not blighted it. Look, Gilbert, it is still fresh and blooming as a flower can be, with the cold snow even now on its petals.
Anne Brontë
The whole damn thing started when they gave women the vote.
Gavin Lyall
He disapproved, he didn't believe in girls drinking, he was full of the conventions of a generation older than himself. Of course one drank oneself, one fornicated, but one didn't lie with a friend's sister, and 'decent' girls were never squiffy.
Graham Greene
Jane, will you marry me?""Yes sir.""A poor blind man, whom you will have to lead about by the hand?""Yes, sir.""A crippled man, twenty years older older than you, whom you will have to wait on?""Yes, sir.""Truly, Jane?""Most truly, sir.
Charlotte Brontë
#ToTheGirls2016 Value yourself, your voice, your body, your opinions, your dreams, your pride, your ego. You have a RIGHT to take up space.
Abigail Tarttelin
The objective of stereotypes is not to reflect or represent a reality but to function as a disguise, or mystification, of objective social relations.
Hazel V. Carby
Husbands are always angry, that's their nature.And the nature of us women,is not to pay a blind bit of notice.
M.C. Beaton
I think every woman in our culture is a feminist. They may refuse to articulate it, but if you were to take any woman back forty years and say, 'Is this a world you want to live in?' they would say, 'No.
Helen Mirren
Every woman is a mad ugly bad old witch somewhere in her heart.
Philippa Gregory
His staff had shaken hands with her as though a woman was merely another kind of man. Fools! The seeds of Eve were in this radiant creature. The lullabyes of half a million years throbbed in her throat. Had they no sense of wonder, no reverence, no pride?
Mervyn Peake
Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they'll marry anybody.
Anthony Powell
We need a temporary cessation in people having any opinions about any women, ever. I propose a, say, five-year moratorium on having opinions about women, in order to let one generation of girls get from one side of puberty to the other without growing up in a climate where women are constantly being scolded, chivvied, harassed, or subjected to thunderous opinion columns concluding that, yet again, some woman in the public eye has overreached herself and should wind her neck in.
Caitlin Moran
With boys there was a fundamental assumption that they had a right to be there — not always, but more often than not. With girls, 'Why her?' came up so quickly.
Helen Oyeyemi
It is obvious to you that the struggle will be an unequal one, but I shall make it - I shall make it as long as I have an ounce of strength left in me, or any life left in me.
Emmeline Pankhurst
Then the truth is this: a good man can only aspire to be worthy of a good woman. She'll always be out of his league in ways he'll never understand. But he'll appreciate what he doesn't understand—if he's smart.
James Anderson