Quotes by British Authors - Page 670

From the top of the bus she could see the vast bowl of London spreading out to the horizon: splendid shops with mannequins in the window, interesting people and already a much bigger world.
Julia Gregson
Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other - good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on.
Mary Balogh
What a strange creature is a laughing fool,As if a man were created to no useBut only to show his teeth.
John Webster
Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.
Julian Barnes
Well, very long ago, on the spot where the Wild Wood waves now, before ever it had planted itself and grown up to what it now is, there was a city - a city of people, you know. Here, where we are standing, they lived, and walked, and talked, and slept, and carried on their business. Here they stabled their horses and feasted, from here they rode out to fight or drove out to trade. They were a powerful people, and rich, and great builders. They built to last, for they thought their city would last for ever.
Kenneth Grahame
The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.
Alan Hollinghurst
It is the function of creative people to perceive relations between thoughts, or things, or forms of expressions that seem utterly different, and to be able to Connect the seemingly Unconnected".
William Plomer
Machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate: only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers, don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty! You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure! Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world . . .
Charlie Chaplin
But one never does form a just idea of anybody beforehand. One takes up a notion and runs away with it.
Jane Austen
Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves.
Terry Pratchett
One of the the things she most liked about the city -apart from all its obvious attractions, the theatre, the galleries, the exhilarating walks by the river- was that so few people ever asked you personal questions.
Julia Gregson
I wanted to explain that trusting is harder than being trusted.
Simon Van Booy
During the last six months the little girl Harriet, without her noticing it, had disappeared and a new Harriet had taken her place. A Harriet who looked much the same outside, but was more of a person inside.
Noel Streatfeild
SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.
Philip Larkin
Economists often talk about the 80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the “work” will be done by 20 percent of the participants. In most societies, 20 percent of criminals commit 80 percent of crimes. Twenty percent of motorists cause 80 percent of all accidents. Twenty percent of beer drinkers drink 80 percent of all beer. When it comes to epidemics, though, this disproportionality becomes even more extreme: a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work.
Malcolm Gladwell
Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not. There were five billion people down there. What was going to happen soon would make barbarism look like a picnic - hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants.
Neil Gaiman
Who are these people sharing the street with me? What is going on in their worlds, inside their heads? Are they in love? If so, is it the kind that Mum and Dad have? Based on having things in common, like raspberry picking and a love of dogs, and Shakespeare, and long country walks? Or is it the knock-you-out, eat-you-up, set-you-on-fire kind of love that I have longed for-and avoided-all my life?
Alison Larkin
They served to remind Cabal - should a reminder ever be necessary - why his social skills were so poor: people were loathsome and not worth the practise.
Jonathan L. Howard
History isn't like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always - eventually - manages to spring back into its old familar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.
Terry Pratchett
Progress is made by the improvement of people, not the improvement of machines.
Adrian Tchaikovsky
The day we find the perfect church, it becomes imperfect the moment we join it.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
John Fowles
People only know what you tell them.And it was true.People gave out their whole life stories to anyone and everyone without a second's thought.Stand at a bus stop,sit in a strange pub,get banged up,and someone would always give you their life story.It was as if they were trying to prove they existed
Martina Cole
The only people who can change the world are people who want to. And not everybody does.
Hugh MacLeod
Oh! you are a great deal too apt, you know, to like people in general. You never see fault in any body. All the world are good and agreeable in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of a human being in my life.""I would wish not to be hasty in censuring any one; but I always speak what I think.
Jane Austen
I've realised now that the reality of children is you have to be in the right place with the right person.
Benedict Cumberbatch
He had found many years ago before that if you kept very quiet people filled in the silences themselves,offering more information than they had originally intended to give.
Martina Cole
There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them.
Nick Hornby
In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his hip, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a railroad. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford.
Elizabeth Gaskell
People are predictable. That's what makes them easy to kill.
Shaun Jeffrey
Polly felt questing eyes boring into her. She was embarrassed, of course. But not for the obvious reason. It was for the other one, the little lesson that life sometimes rams home with a stick: you are not the only one watching the world. Other people are people; while you watch them they watch you, and they think about you while you think about them. The world isn’t just about you.
Terry Pratchett
The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
Lionel Shriver
Only people who're positive enough to have friends have enemies. When you're as glum and morose as he was, people just give up and go away.
Ellis Peters
If you stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you.
Cory Doctorow
Oh how I hate people!
Mervyn Peake
Oh. I see. People don't want to see what can't possibly exist.
Terry Pratchett
But I discovered that people like me -- they do, you know, if you like them -- and then it was all right.
Diana Wynne Jones
I think people make their own faces, as they grow.
Enid Blyton
Twolegs are mousebrain
Erin Hunter
If you expect the worse, you're only denying someone a chance to be better
Sangu Mandanna
And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.
Philip Pullman
I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone.
Ford Madox Ford
I don't see what's so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin' upset cos' they act like people", said Adam severely. "Anyway, if you stopped tellin' people it's all sorted out after they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive.
Terry Pratchett
As long as you hate, there will be people to hate.
George Harrison
It is no use trying to sum people up.
Virginia Woolf
Don't trust people who tell you other people's secrets.
Dan Howell
People are so fucking dumb. Nobody reads anymore, nobody goes out and looks and explores the society and culture they were brought up in. People have attention spans of five seconds and as much depth as a glass of water.
David Bowie
I like seeing people when they can't see me.
Dodie Smith
I find people confusing.
Mark Haddon
Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
Salman Rushdie
And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.
Terry Pratchett
Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.
Neil Gaiman
The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.
Terry Pratchett
People are too complicated to have simple labels.
Philip Pullman
It is good people who make good places.
Anna Sewell
Why change? Everyone has his own style. When you have found it, you should stick to it.
Audrey Hepburn
You are who you are when nobody's watching.
Stephen Fry
Combinations of people, who should have nothing to say to each other. Yet, with hearts that do not recognize it.
Tracy Rees
I wish I was friends with things," he said at last, "but I'm not. I never had anything to be friends with, and I can't bear people.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
I know what it's like not to have friends. People need friends. Life's not much fun without them.
Michelle Harrison