Quotes by British Authors - Page 801

There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
Bertrand Russell
Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.
Terry Pratchett
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Douglas Adams
I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
Jerome K. Jerome
Do you remember me telling you we are practicing non-verbal spells, Potter?""Yes," said Harry stiffly."Yes, sir.""There's no need to call me "sir" Professor."The words had escaped him before he knew what he was saying.
J.K. Rowling
He can run faster than Severus Snape confronted with shampoo.
J.K. Rowling
Mr. Moony presents his compliments to Professor Snape, and begs him to keep his abnormally large nose out of other people's business.Mr. Prongs agrees with Mr. Moony, and would like to add that Professor Snape is an ugly git.Mr. Padfoot would like to register his astonishment that an idiot like that ever became a professor.Mr. Wormtail bids Professor Snape good day, and advises him to wash his hair, the slimeball.
J.K. Rowling
Is it true that you shouted at Professor Umbridge?""Yes.""You called her a liar?""Yes.""You told her He Who Must Not Be Named is back?""Yes.""Have a biscuit, Potter.
J.K. Rowling
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
Terry Pratchett
Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Terry Pratchett
I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer
Douglas Adams
Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources
C.E.M. Joad
Have you ever noticed how ‘What the hell’ is always the right decision to make?
Terry Johnson
The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
Jane Austen
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
Douglas Adams
The story so far:In the beginning the Universe was created.This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Douglas Adams
cause when there's life there's still hope
Michael Morpurgo
[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.
C.S. Lewis
Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
Tom Stoppard
All of the great empires of the future will be empires of the mind.
Winston S. Churchill
Prayer is beyond any question the highest activity of the human soul. Man is at his greatest and highest when upon his knees he comes face to face with God.
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
You can tempt me, desert me, or cause me great pain; you can create a dark world that my cause me to fear; you can rule your world with blood and terror, that's true.But you can't win. And I know that. Weak as I am, with my imperfections and sins, even with all of my failing, I am stronger than you.I will soon have a body. And I have my agency now. I will increase in my faith and knowledge and power. I am not perfect, but I will be, and there's not a thing you can do! I will become like the Father if I follow the Son. You are powerless to stop me. You can threaten and tempt and whisper lies in my ear, but you can't stop me, Satan; I see that so clearly now! I can stop myslef, yes, but only if I follow you.And I reject you temptations. I reject your whispered lies. I reject you, Lucifer, and your entire plan. You have no power to control me. I am in control of myself. And try as you might, you won't control me on earth. We will defeat you in heaven, and we will deafeat you on earth. Here, or the earth, it doesn't matter; I am always stronger than you.
Chris Stewart
The world has enough women who know how to be smart. It needs women who are willing to be simple. The world has enough women who know how to be brilliant. It needs some who will be brave. The world has enough women who are popular. It needs more who are pure. We need women, and men, too, who would rather be morally right than socially correct.
Peter Marshall
If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.
Christopher Isherwood
There's always a choice,' said Torak, and walked backward off the cliff.
Michelle Paver
I have seen sights and travelled in countries you cannot imagine. I have been afraid and I have been in danger, and I have never for one moment thought that I would throw myself at at a man for his help.
Philippa Gregory
After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?
Russell Hoban
I don't think anyone, until their soul leaves their body, is past the point of no return
Tom Hiddleston
The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.
Joseph Conrad
We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely
C.S. Lewis
Cynicism is what passes for insight when courage is lacking.
Anita Roddick
I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.
Christopher Hitchens
Look in the mirror and say, 'There is none other like you and for that reason alone you are beautiful.
Miranda Hart
Be yourself. Don't worry about what other people are thinking of you.
Phil Lester
All shall be done, but it may be harder than you think.
C.S. Lewis
I don’t ever remember being afraid of “oldness”.There are things I miss about being younger - chiefly the ability to pull all-nighters and keep working and working well; and being smiled at by girls I didn’t know who thought I was cute; and I wish I had the eyesight I had even five years ago… but that stuff feels pretty trivial. I’m happier than I’ve been at any time in my life these days. I have a wonderful wife whom I adore, watched three amazing kids grow into two delightful adults and my favourite teenager, an astonishing number of grand life experiences, I’ve made art I’m proud of, I have real, true, glorious friends, and I’ve been able to do real good for things I care about, like freedom of speech, like libraries.Sometimes I’ll do something like An Evening With Neil and Amanda, or the 8 in 8 project, and completely surprise myself.I miss friends who have died, but then, I’m glad that time gave them to me, to befriend, even for a while, and that I was alive to know them. I knew Douglas Adams, and I knew Roger Zelazny, and I knew John M Ford, and I knew Diana Wynne Jones… do you know how lucky that makes me?Ah, I’m rabbiting on, and I sound a bit more Pollyannaish than I’m intending to sound: I know the downside of age and the downside of time, and I am sure that the view from age 51 is not the view from age 71.I wish the time hadn’t gone so fast, though. And sometimes I wish I’d enjoyed it more on the way, and worried about it less.
Neil Gaiman
It is wisdom to recognize necessity when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I shrug, trapped. I don’t want to lose him. In spite of all his demands, his need to control, his scary vices. I have never felt as alive as I do now. It’s a thrill to be sitting here beside him. He’s so unpredictable, sexy, smart, and funny. But hismoods… oh – and he wants to hurt me. He says he’ll think about my reservations, but it still scares me. I close my eyes. What can I say? Deep down I would just like more, more affection, more playful Christian, more… love.
E.L. James
It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this -- and much more than this is true -- why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us--why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him.Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.
Virginia Woolf
The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
Aldous Huxley
[Fireheart]mewed,"It's not my place to judge you." Greystripe looked up as Fireheart went on." Greystripe, whatever you decide to do, I will always be your friend.
Erin Hunter
And to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.
Jane Austen
Bunkum and tummyrot! You'll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he'd said 'What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?' He wouldn't even have started.
Roald Dahl
There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student.
Paul Graham
As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.
Stephen Fry
A sense of calm came over me. More and more often I found myself thinking, "This is where I belong. This is what I came into this world to do.
Jane Goodall
Too many people spend too much time trying to perfect something before they actually do it. Instead of waiting for perfection, run with what you go, and fix it along the way…
Paul Arden
It is necessary to hope... for hope itself is happiness.
Samuel Johnson
The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.
Martin Amis
Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.
T.H. White
follow your heart! (sppotedleafs motto)
Erin Hunter
The moral of the story is even though that seemed like the end of the world back then, right now I can look back on it and laugh. And if anyone is going through something similar right now just know it will get better.
Phil Lester
I ended my first book with the words 'no answer.' I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words.
C.S. Lewis
Nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas.
J.K. Rowling
For a long while I have believed – this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius Xerxes Cama’s belief in a fourth function of outsideness – that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers as belongers, perhaps; that, in sum, the phenomenon may be as “natural” a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated, throughout human history, by lack of opportunity. And not only by that: for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainly, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers’ seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or a movie theater, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveler, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.
Salman Rushdie
With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.
William Wordsworth
Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them but they are talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you. Now this man’s treatment [in Psalm 42] was this: instead of allowing this self to talk to him, he starts talking to himself. “Why art thou cast down, O my soul?” he asks. His soul had been depressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says, “Self, listen for moment, I will speak to you.
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Harry, despite your privileged insight into Voldemort’s world (which, incidentally, is a gift any Death Eater would kill to have), you have never been seduced by the Dark Arts, never, even for a second, shown the slightest desire to become one of Voldemort’s followers!”“Of course I haven’t!” said Harry indignantly. “He killed my mum and dad!”“You are protected, in short, by your ability to love!” said Dumbledore loudly.
J.K. Rowling
I will take the Ring", he said, "though I do not know the way.
J.R.R. Tolkien