Quotes by British Authors - Page 677

The thing about the Lexington International Bank ladder was that it was very long, and climbing it was very exhausting, and so Andrew Brown didn't have a lot of time to think about whether he really wanted to get to the top of it—and besides, since so many other people were climbing too, the view from the top must be worth it.So he kept going. He worked hard. He put his heart and mind and soul into it. There was an opening for a position half a rung higher than he already was. With a promotion, he might get two hours a week of a secretary's time. He'd go to more important meetings, with more senior people, and have the opportunity to impress them, and if he did he might be promoted again and then... well, of course eventually he'd be running the whole office. It's important to have a dream: otherwise you might notice where you really are.
Naomi Alderman
Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.
John le Carré
My help had been needed and claimed; I had given it: I was pleased to have done something: trivial, transitory though the deed was, it was yet an active thing, and I was weary of an existence all passive.
Charlotte Brontë
Thus, you see, he arrived at the same end, via supposed duty, that he was previously pledged to via interest. I fancy a good number of us, when any line of action will promote our own interest, can make ourselves believe that reasons exist which compel us to it as a duty.
Elizabeth Gaskell
It’s not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something.
Winston S. Churchill
. . . in no instance has a system in regard to religion been ever established, but for the purpose, as well as with the effect of its being made an instrument of intimidation, corruption, and delusion, for the support of depredation and oppression in the hands of governments.
Jeremy Bentham
A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood.
Joanne Harris
There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.
Charles Dickens
Find the thing you want to do most intensely, make sure that’s it, and do it with all your might. If you live, well and good. If you die, well and good. Your purpose is done
H.G.Wells
Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.
Julian Barnes
Cat: Where are you going?Alice: Which way should I go?Cat: That depends on where you are going.Alice: I don’t know.Cat: Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.
Lewis Carroll
The thing is--fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.
William Golding
Am I doomed? Flashing darkness is pretty much the same as flashing light really. Fear isn’t at all the same as courage but after a certain point perhaps being afraid of everything is the same as being afraid of nothing.
Russell Hoban
Mum was determinate to crush my spirit and put a stop to my behavior once and for all and she beat me up so violently, so often, that I finally understood I must never question her or so much as look at her directly again.
Joe Peters
When you're little you believe whatever your mother tells you, so I assumed it must be true, that I must be inferior to the others in some way.
Joe Peters
I stood in bars, clothed but naked, looking from their eyes to my feet and back again. Still there was the longing to contend with: the heavy, bloody, chemical urge to consume another body and spit out its bones in a new child. How do you make a stranger so intimate when they could so easily destroy you?
Nadifa Mohamed
Then the dwarves forgot their joy and their confident boasts of a moment before and cowered down in fright. Smaug was still to be reckoned with. It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.
J.R.R. Tolkien
She got up and he saw the skin of her thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape––anywhere––for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.
Graham Greene
Being one’s true and honest self can often be dangerous; and poetry should always be a place where, if only between the pages, that danger and energy and fear and excitement and love can fizz and spark without ever threatening to burn something down.
Andrew McMillan
Sir Edward Grey echoed this: More than one true thing may be said about the causes of the war, but the statement that comprises most truth is that militarism and the armaments inseparable from it made war inevitable. Armaments were intended to produce a sense of security in each nation – that was the justification put forward in defence of them. What they really did was to produce fear in everybody.
Jonathan Glover
Or do you like being frightened?”Hugh, though generally intelligent, is dense in certain ways; this is one of them.“Why, of course, I like being frightened,” I said. “I want to be made to creep and creep and creep. Fear is the most absorbing and luxurious of emotions. One forgets all else if one is afraid.
E.F. Benson
Stalin’s Russia was a trap, in which even those running the system were caught. The leaders were trapped by fear of Stalin and even he was trapped by his fear of their desire to be rid of him. Everything he had to eat or drink had to be tasted by one of his colleagues first. Beria’s behavior at his death showed that his fear was only partly paranoia.
Jonathan Glover
If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a newborn child, then that will be at least a small intellectual advance. In time, perhaps, we may even learn to toddle.
Salman Rushdie
But fear and fascination are yokefellows, oxen out of step but pulling in the same direction...
Winston Graham
And she answered: 'All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.''What do you fear, lady?' he asked.'A cage,' she said.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The smell of home was indistinguishable from the smell of leaving home: each inhalation a mix of familiarity and fear.
Camilla Gibb
Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly.
Alain de Botton
Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives. There is a deep-seated fear, in most people, of the cold world and the possible cruelty of the herd; there is a longing for affection, which is often concealed by roughness, boorishness or a bullying manner in men, and by nagging and scolding in women. Passionate mutual love while it lasts puts an end to this feeling; it breaks down the hard walls of the ego, producing a new being composed of two in one.
Bertrand Russell
We know no fear. It was cut from our souls at birth. We can feel it only as an absence, as an empty shadow cast by the light of annihilation. In the face of a future of atrocity I stand mute, numb to the only feeling that would make me human. But I remember what fear was: its cold pulse in my veins; its echo in my ears. I remember fear, and remember that I was once human. I look towards what must come to pass and I wish that I could meet it as my ancestors did, with fear. The future deserves that, it deserves fear.
John French
After another long silence, bit by bit, realisation dawned upon Edmund and he became even paler than Hecate herself which was, in itself, a fantastic achievement. Adele Rose, Awakening.
Adele Rose
Jeese, I thought, fear choking me. I was being targeted by a ‘tangoed’ psychopath!
Adele Rose
Jacob studied the iron graveyard, where every vehicle was its own gravestone. He drove slowly through, as if he was afraid to wake the dead. That was not it though. The general made it clear that they should fear the living.
Dean F. Wilson
Sometimes in life you've got to Ctrl, Alt, Delete and let go.
Marilyn Devonish
My basic political principle: If something, whether right- or left-wing, is driven by love and solidarity, it is right; if it is driven by hate and fear it is wrong. Simple as that.
Neel Burton
It was necessary to be afraid in order to have courage.
Sarah Perry
As my heart begins to return to normal, I look down at -- and feel such an intense rush of love and relief it takes my breath away. "I will never let you put of my sight again," I promise --
Camilla Way
Fear is leaden. Courage is golden. Let go of the weight of the world, and you will fly.
Dean F. Wilson
You don’t know anything about me.”“No, I know not everything about you. But I sense enough to know you have mistaken obsession with drive, guilt with injustice. I know you want to escape what you are, cabbage fairy,” he said, reaching for his hood and gloves and tucking them into the waistband of his trousers. “Your desires are no different from my own, I simply have the courage to face them.
F.D. Lee
Storms are relentless and unforgiving. You know it's there, you feel it surrounding you, threatening to consume you should you dare to look, dare to behold the captivating wonder...Yet, fear grips. For although you know that it could swallow you whole and rip you to shreds, if you do not, eventually, the storm will dissipate, leaving you trembling and empty...We storms know this...
Virginia Alison
Her fear was infectious, and though I was too young to truly know terror, I felt it in my heart and trembled.
Darren Shan
[Patricia Highsmith] was overwhelmed by sensory stimulation - there were too many people and too much noise and she just could not handle the supermarket. She continually jumped, afraid that someone might recognise or touch her. She could not make the simplest of decisions - which type of bread did she want, or what kind of salami? I tried to do the shopping as quickly as possible, but at the check-out she started to panic. She took out her wallet, knocked off her glasses, dropped the money on the floor, stuff was going all over the place.
Andrew Wilson
After reading Burgum, [Patricia Highsmith] wrote in her cahier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, 'a young man whose authority is art and therefore himself,' who when he murders, 'feels no guilt or even fear when he thinks of legal retribution'. The more she read of Kafka the more she felt afraid as she came to realise, 'I am so similar to him.
Andrew Wilson
A life lived in fear is a life half lived.
Carrie Hope Fletcher
The tragedy of power like mine is that there is no way down. There can only be extinction. Dust to dust rags to rags fear to fear.
V.S. Naipaul
There is no reprieve when you have a broken mind; cease-fires are rare. Even on good days, you know everything could change on a dime. Fear is your constant shadow
Barbara Claypole White
Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram now and then; for she had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly...Her triumph was tempered by circumspection, she had still that field-mouse fear of the coulter of destiny despite fair promise, which is common among the thoughtful who have suffered early from poverty and oppression.
Thomas Hardy
I fear I am beyond your comprehension. - Gandalf the White
J.R.R. Tolkien
Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation bywhich a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate. - Screwtape
C.S. Lewis
In my work with hundreds of women over the past few years a theme has emerged: women’s desperate, unquenchable desire to step into their power, countered by the fear of what will happen if they do. The longing to express the riches inside them, wrestling with the deep terror of being burned by the judgement, hatred or rejection of strangers or loved ones if they do. This fear of being burned is an oddly female one. It is a fear which keeps us small and scared… but seemingly safe. From the outside this can seem like an overreaction. Both the need, and the fear. But women, it seems, have an innate knowing of what it means to burn… and be burned. They know the dangers in their bones. And it makes them wary.
Lucy H. Pearce
Creativity takes courage. Not just once, but consistently. Without courage we cannot be creative. Without feeling fear at some point we will not reach our creative potential. From first putting paint on paper through to selling our work on a worldwide stage there is plenty to be scared of. But this is where creativity lives – on the edge of our comfort zones.
Lucy H. Pearce
We dare not talk of the darkness for fear it will infect us.We dare not talk of the fire, for fear it will destroy us.And so we live in the half-light, Like our mothers before us.Come to the fire, Feel it warm your skin.Come to the fire,Feel it burn in your belly,Shine out through your eyes.Come dance in the fire, Let it fuel your prayers.
Lucy H. Pearce
About time,” Brianna said.“Hey, sorry, we were kind of busy,” Quinn snapped. “And I didn’t exactly realize I was on a schedule.”“I don’t like what I have to do here,” Brianna said. She handed Quinn the note.He read it. Read it again.“Is this some kind of joke?” he demanded.“Albert’s dead,” Brianna said. “Murdered.”“What?”“He’s dead. Sam and Dekka are off in the wilderness somewhere. Edilio’s got the flu, he might die, a lot of kids have. A lot. And there are these, these monsters, these kind of bugs . . . no one knows what to call them . . . heading toward town.” Her face contorted in a mix of rage and sorrow and fear. She blurted, “And I can’t stop them!”Quinn stared at her. Then back at the note.He felt his contented little universe tilt and go sliding away.There were just two words on the paper: “Get Caine.
Michael Grant
If we really believe what we say we believe- if we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a "wandering to find home", why should we not look forward to the arrival. There are, aren't there, only three things we can do about death: to desire it, to fear it, or to ignore it. The third alternative, which is the one the modern world calls "healthy" is surely the most uneasy and precarious of all.
C.S. Lewis
You will not say how you are haunted by the faces of the men you killed, how in their last gasp of life they sought your pity and you had none. You will not speak of the boys who died screaming for their mothers while you twisted a blade in their guts and snarled your scorn into their ears. You will not confess that you wake in the night, covered in sweat, heart hammering, shrinking from the memories. You will not talk of that, because that is the horror, and the horror is held in the heart’s hoard, a secret, and to admit it is to admit fear, and we are warriors.We do not fear. We strut. We go to battle like heroes. We stink of shit.
Bernard Cornwell
Don't try to fight depression and fear with violent physical or mental exercise. But don't give into them either. Just think. Oh, here they are again, and look past them, as if you were looking over someone's shoulder at something beyond. Fix your mind on what's be
Marcia Willett
When we’re apart, I can think of nothing but you—of being with you again—and I . . . I’m sorry if I hurt you before. I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear about my feelings, if I wasn’t strong enough to fight for the chance to be with you. I’m going to do that now. I promise. Because I simply cannot imagine choosing a life without you in it.
Sophie Barnes
When we’re apart, I can think of nothingbut you—ofbeing with you again—andI . . . I’m sorry if I hurt you before. I’m sorryif I wasn’t clear about my feelings, if I wasn’tstrong enough to fight for the chance to bewith you. I’m going to do that now. I promise.Because I simply cannot imagine choosing alife without you in it.
Sophie Barnes
It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought - that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc - should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.
George Orwell
Always remember this, Henri. Men trade for profit. They are driven by greed. But debt is about fear, and fear is stronger than greed. The true power, the weapon that defeats all others, is debt. Fools search for gold. The wise man studies debt. That is the key to all business.
Edward Rutherfurd
I told you from the beginning—as soon as I could—I told you I was afraid of myself." There was a piteous pleading in the low murmur in which Deronda turned his ear only. Her face afflicted him too much. "I felt a hatred in me that was always working like an evil spirit—contriving things. Everything I could do to free myself came into my mind; and it got worse—all things got worse. That is why I asked you to come to me in town. I thought then I would tell you the worst about myself. I tried. But I could not tell everything.
George Eliot