Quotes by British Authors - Page 672

The sad fact is, there are 7.220.400.641 people on the planet, but right now I haven't got a single one to talk to.
Holly Smale
Why do you always rescue me?" — "Every Cinderella needs a fairy godmother. But sometimes your fairy godmother needs you right back.
Holly Smale
And this way, l'll leave everything behind before it gets the chance to do the same to me.
Holly Smale
Friends don't leave friends behind to wash dishes for yetis!
Philip Reeve
Family. Friendship. Loyalty. These things have been my guiding stars, my light in these dark times.
John Gwynne
Here’s my usual party strategy: find the liquor, find the food, find the space where two walls meet. Alienate enough people around you to have some breathing room. Find the attractive people—this shouldn’t take long; they’ll be the ones getting everything they want in life. Once you’ve found them, stare hungrily at them all evening, and interpret every alarmed flicker of eye contact from them as a new stage in your relationship.
Isaac Oliver
I felt tears pricking inside my eyelids. Maybe I came first with Oliver
Jacqueline Wilson
I felt tears pricking inside my eyelids. Maybe I came first With Oliver.
Jacqueline Wilson
Friendship is a weird sort of thing when you think about it.
Rachael Lucas
The more she was absolutely in need of external friendship, the more disposed was she to reject it, and to declare to herself that she was prepared to stand alone in the world.
Anthony Trollope
Sometimes, Anselm – and especially with the most important parts of our lives – we cannot share who we are. We can give the facts, as information, to a stranger; but with a friend we want to give that little bit more, something that changes the facts into flesh and spirit . . . and at certain times we can’t do it. Because ultimately we can’t give away our depths: they lie beyond our grasp. It is when we most want to do so that we realize how immense we are . . . more vast and mysterious than the night sky; and alone.
William Brodrick
I must be able to say, 'Percival, a ridiculous name'. At the same time let me tell you, men and women, hurrying to the tube station, you would have had to respect him. You would have had to form up and follow behind him. How strange to oar one's way through crowds seeing life through hollow eyes, burning eyes.
Virginia Woolf
But for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of Ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, 'Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,' can truly say to every group of Christian friends, 'You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.' The friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others...At this feast it is He who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. it is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.
C.S. Lewis
Maybe friendship was loving someone even when you didn't always understand them.
Sarah Morgan
Friends can create our most cherished memories.
Fennel Hudson
We pick our friends not only because they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are.
Alain de Botton
We laughed over our difference then spent years bonding over things that made us the same.
Nikesh Shukla
As to our going on together as we were going, in a sort of friendly way, the people round us would have made it unable to continue. Their views of the relations of man and woman are limited, as is proved by their expelling me from the school. Their philosophy only recognizes relations based on animal desire. The wide field of strong attachment where desire plays, at least, only a secondary part, is ignored by them—the part of—who is it?—Venus Urania.
Thomas Hardy
You say 'love' too easily, Kepler.""No, not rally - please don't call me that. The idea that love has to be a blazing romantic thing of monogamous stability is innately ludicrous. You loved your parents, perhaps, because they were the warmth you could flee to. You loved your first childhood crush with a passion that made your lips tingle, your flesh grow light in their presence. You loved your wife with the steadiness of an ocean against the shore; your lover with the blaze of a shooting star, your best friend with the confidence of a mountain. Love is a many-splendorous thing, as the old song says....
Claire North
You know I'm not a man with whom you can have inconsequential conversations. I cannot split myself into two, one your friend and the other the king's servant.
Hilary Mantel
That's the problem with lying. You can never remember what you've said.
Jane Green
Forever feels a long time when you're eighteen. When you're away from home for the first time in your life, when you forge instant friendships that are so strong they are destined, surely, to be with you until the bitter end.
Jane Green
I am not a people pleaser. I am not a person who says things because she thinks it will make the other person happy, nor am I a person who offers things she cannot deliver because I want the other person to like me.
Jane Green
You must work to live, not live to work.
Jane Green
I should send my bees ashore for you, upon my sacred honour.
Patrick O'Brian
Well, I will wear the bees, like Damon and Pythagoras – ho, a mere sixty thousand bees in the cabin don't signify, much.
Patrick O'Brian
There is no gift like friendship. Remember this - when you become a young man. For your fate will turn on the first true friend you make.
Rudyard Kipling
To anyone who will take the trouble to become attached to her she will immediately give a devoted, generous, imaginative and completely uncapricious attention, which is still a calculated avoidance of self-surrender. This is no doubt another reason why she never went into films; her private life must be an almost full-time activity. This has the sad result too that her existence is one long act of disloyalty; and when I knew her she was constantly involved in secrecy and lying in order to conceal from each of her friends the fact that she was so closely bound to all the others.
Iris Murdoch
If you want to talk about it with someone, then I`m happy to listen, or try and help, but you should only tell me if you want to.
Jane Green
I've decided that I'm not going to try to squeeze myself into a friendship that hurts me any more. I'm going to let her go and just be friends with people who make me feel good about my self.
Zoe Sugg
It's never too early to give your best friend some moral support
Zoe Sugg
2NOTES“You broke your other appointment, didn’t you?”“I did not! I told you on the phone—these people canceled at the last minute—”“Oh, Geo dear, come off it! You know, I sometimes think, about you, whenever you do something really sweet, you’re ashamed of it afterwords! You knew jolly well how badly I needed you tonight, so you broke that appointment. I could tell you were fibbing, the minute you opened your mouth! You and I can’t pull the wool over each other’s eyes. I found that out, long ago. Haven’t you—after all these years?”“I certainly should have,” he agrees, smiling and thinking what an absurd and universally accepted bit of nonsense it is that your best friends must necessarily be the ones who best understand you.
Christopher Isherwood
In a word, in adversity she was the best of comforters, in good fortune the most troublesome of friends...
William Makepeace Thackeray
See" Kayla links her arm through mine, leaving Blake to jostle and race the other guys. "I tell them I can handle my own stuff, but it's like a mark of pride or something. I'm surprised Blake doesn't just hoist me over his shoulder and try to carry me, too!"I laugh, starting to relax. "Is it bad I can actually picture that?
Abby McDonald
Those who cannot conceive of Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.
C.S. Lewis
He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood.
E.M. Forster
No man, ever indulged more freely or happily in that playful facetiousness which gratifies all without wounding any.
William Wilberforce
I felt Holmes's hand steal into mine and give me a reassuring shake.- Watson
Arthur Conan Doyle
I preach that odd defiant melancholy that sees the dreadful loneliness of the human soul and the pitiful disaster of human life as ever redeemable and redeemed by compassion, friendship and love.
John Derbyshire
The bonds of friendship dwindle with age, Oliver. But a little blackmail lasts forever.
Stephen Hunt
She had been trying hourly to ensure that this new friendship remained such, to be certain that it would not slip out of the careful grasp of her fingers and into the darker champers of her heart.
Shamim Sarif
The bards sing of love, they celebrate slaughter, they extol kings and flatter queens, but were I a poet I would write in praise of friendship.
Bernard Cornwell
I think it's swell that there are people you don't have to worry about when you don't see them for a long time, you don't have to wonder what they do, how they're getting along with themselves. You just know that they're all right, and probably doing something they like.
Helen Oyeyemi
There came an awful day when I picked up the phone and knew at once, as one does with some old friends even before they speak, that it was Edward. He sounded as if he were calling from the bottom of a well. I still thank my stars that I didn't say what I nearly said, because the good professor's phone pals were used to cheering or teasing him out of bouts of pessimism and insecurity when he would sometimes say ridiculous things like: 'I hope you don't mind being disturbed by some mere wog and upstart.' The remedy for this was not to indulge it but to reply with bracing and satirical stuff which would soon get the gurgling laugh back into his throat. But I'm glad I didn't say, 'What, Edward, splashing about again in the waters of self-pity?' because this time he was calling to tell me that he had contracted a rare strain of leukemia. Not at all untypically, he used the occasion to remind me that it was very important always to make and keep regular appointments with one’s physician.
Christopher Hitchens
What is particularly striking about his reconstruction and criticisms of the traditional account of friendship is that he finds it deficient not only by the light of his own Christian viewpoint; he also finds friendship deficient when judged from the perspective of its own self-proclaimed ethical foundations. Thus, Kierkegaard concludes that the reciprocity involved in friendship actually betrays its essential selfishness.
Graham Smith
And here was the moment. The end of it all, for civilization was merely another name for friendship, and friendship was coming to an end.
Iain Pears
And what will they do to you when you have told them this story?' Esca said very simply, 'They will kill me.' 'I am sorry, but I do not think much of that plan.' Marcus said.
Rosemary Sutcliff
Who has not remarked the readiness with which the closest of friends and honestest of men suspect and accuse each other of cheating when they fall out on money matters? Everybody does it. Everybody is right, I suppose, and the world is a rogue.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Pam wasn't what Gloria would have called a friend, just someone she had known for so long that she had given up trying to get rid of her.
Kate Atkinson
You feel, I suppose, that, in losing Isabella, you lose half yourself: you feel a void in your heart which nothing else can occupy.  Society is becoming irksome; and as for the amusements in which you were wont to share at Bath, the very idea of which without her is abhorrent.  You would not, for instance, now go to a ball for the world.  You feel that you have no longer any friend to whom you can speak with unreserve; on whose regard you can place dependence; or whose counsel, in any difficult, you could rely on.
Jane Austen
Elizabeth could never address her without feeling that all the comfort of intimacy was over, and, though determined not to slacken as a correspondent, it was for the sake of what had been, rather than what was.
Jane Austen
An hour's conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy.
Charles Williams
I should explain — in view of my last letter, you may find it slightly surprising — that Daphne and I are now bosom friends. That is to say, she seems to think we are; and I do not feel that I know her well enough to dispute it.
Sarah Caudwell
Michael Powell knows what I am going to say even before I say it — maybe even before I have thought it – and that is very rare. You are lucky if you meet someone like that once in your life.
Emeric Pressburger
In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets... Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, "Here comes one who will augment our loves." For in this love "to divide is not to take away.
C.S. Lewis
How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.
A.A. Milne
Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends - comrades - do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed...
C.S. Lewis
Jess thought for a moment. 'You know those films where people fight up the top of the Empire State Building or up a mountain or whatever? And there's always that bit when the baddie slips off and the hero tries to save him, but, like, the sleeve of this jacket tears off and goes over and you hear him all the way down. Aaaaaaaaagh. That's what I want to do.' 'You want to watch me plunge to my doom.' 'I'd like to know that I've made the effort. I want to show people the torn sleeve.
Nick Hornby
No, Geo—underneath all that, Nan really loves me. It’s just she wants me to see things her way. You know, she’s two years older; that meant a lot when we were children. I’ve always thought of her as being sort of like a road—I mean, she leads somewhere. With her, I’ll never lose my way.
Christopher Isherwood
The King once said to me, 'Harold, you stand above all other men.' I said, 'No, Sire. I want nothing more than to stand shoulder to shoulder with my men. I am nothing without them.
Elizabeth Alder