Quotes by British Authors - Page 802

On Wednesday, when the sky is blue,and I have nothing else to do,I sometimes wonder if it's true That who is what and what is who." - Winnie-the-Pooh
A.A. Milne
To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.
Audrey Hepburn
But as the years went on, I realised that what I really want to be, all told, is a human. Just a productive, honest, courteously treated human.
Caitlin Moran
Because sometimes there are problems bigger than this week’s end of the world and sometimes you just have to find the extraordinary in your ordinary life.
Patrick Ness
Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have "essential" and "long overdue" meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg.
J.K. Rowling
Exuberance is beauty.
William Blake
Criticism - however valid or intellectually engaging - tends to get in the way of a writer who has anything personal to say. A tightrope walker may require practice, but if he starts a theory of equilibrium he will lose grace (and probably fall off).
J.R.R. Tolkien
Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear
Joseph Conrad
Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity
T.S Eliot
Hope springs forever.
J.K. Rowling
Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.
Virginia Woolf
Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still are.
David Mitchell
And...I think that's what life is all about, actually,about children and flowers.
Audrey Hepburn
Don't count your owls before they are delivered.
J.K. Rowling
Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.
Bertrand Russell
Only one life, ’twill soon be past,Only what’s done for Christ will last.
C.T. Studd
My sun sets to rise again.
Robert Browning
She could hear, some way off, her brothers calling to each other in the woods behind the house. She hoped desperately that their game wouldn't bring them any closer, that they wouldn't scare the birds away. Somehow she knew that you didn't get many moments like this in your life: moments when you knew, without any doubt, that you were alive, when you felt the air in your lungs and the wet grass beneath your feet and the cotton on your skin; moments when you were completely in the present, when neither the past nor the future mattered. She tried to slow her breathing, hoping somehow to make this moment last forever.
Neil Gaiman
Have to? Of course you have to! But only because of you, Harry, won't rest until Voldemort is finished! Think now, for once, if you have never heard of the prophecy! What would you do?
J.K. Rowling
Buy a pup and your money will buyLove unflinching that cannot lie.
Rudyard Kipling
If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.
Kazuo Ishiguro
God, send me anywhere, only go with me. Lay any burden on me, only sustain me. And sever any tie in my heart except the tie that binds my heart to Yours.
David Livingstone
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
John Lubbock
I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.
W.H. Auden
So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.
Neil Gaiman
Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
C.S. Lewis
And a beautiful world we live in, when it is possible, and when many other such things are possible, and not only possible, but done-- done, see you!-- under that sky there, every day.
Charles Dickens
Grace isn't a little prayer you chant before receiving a meal. It's a way to live.
Jacqueline Winspear
Evil exists in us all, Torak. Some fight it. Some feed it. That's how it's always been.
Michelle Paver
That's chess!" snapped Ron. "You've got to make some sacrifices!
J.K. Rowling
Love, being in love, isn’t a constant thing. It doesn’t always flow at the same strength. It’s not always like a river in flood. It’s more like the sea. It has tides, it ebbs and flows. The thing is, when love is real, whether it’s ebbing or flowing, it’s always there, it never goes away. And that’s the only proof you can have that it is real, and not just a crush or an infatuation or a passing fancy
Aidan Chambers
The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self--all your wishes and precautions--to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call "ourselves," to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be "good.
C.S. Lewis
If you can't be honest with your friends and colleagues and loved ones, then what is life all about?
Sophie Kinsella
I realized then that even though I was a tiny speck in an infinite cosmos, a blip on the timeline of eternity, I was not without purpose.
R.J. Anderson
For the future, the motto is, "No days unalert.
Robert Greene
We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
G.K. Chesterton
To read is to empower,To empower is to write,To write is to influence,To influence is to change,To change is to live".
Jane Evershed
A man can't soar too high, when he flies with his own wings.
William Blake
If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonders.
Andrew Harvey
Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!
Henry Scott Holland
You are a human with one life and its up to you to make it the best life you can.
Dan Howell
Loyalty and obedience to wisdom and justice are fine; but it is still finer to defy arbitrary power, unjustly and cruelly used--not on behalf of ourselves, but on behalf of others more helpless.
Elizabeth Gaskell
Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.
Benjamin Disraeli
You told me once of the plants that lie dormant through the drought, that wait, half-dead, deep in the earth. The plants that wait for the rain. You said they'd wait for years, if they had to; that they'd almost kill themselves before they grew again. But as soon as those first drops of water fall, those plants begin to stretch and spread their roots. They travel up through the soil and sand to reach the surface. There's a chance for them again.
Lucy Christopher
You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.
C.S. Lewis
We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.
T.S Eliot
The word 'listen' contains the same letters as the word 'silent'.
Alfred Brendel
Here lies one whose name was writ on water.
John Keats
It used to be about trying to do something. Now it's about trying to be someone.
Margaret Thatcher
Nobody gets praised for the right reasons.
Diana Wynne Jones
I am an optimist... I choose to be. There is a lot of darkness in our world, there is a lot of pain and you can choose to see that or you can choose to see the joy. If you try to respond positively to the world, you will spend your time better.
Tom Hiddleston
Onward and Upward! To Narnia and the North!
C.S. Lewis
Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure
Virginia Woolf
Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.
Neil Gaiman
In the end, everything is a gag.
Charlie Chaplin
The universe is big. It's vast and complicated and ridiculous. And sometimes—very rarely—impossible things just happen and we call them miracles.
Steven Moffat
Dance like you're stamping on a human face forever, love like you've been in a serious car crash that minced the front of your brain, stab like no one can arrest you, and live like there's no such thing as God.
Warren Ellis
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which,if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
C.S. Lewis
As for what it's against - the story is against those who pervert and misuse religion, or any other kind of doctrine with a holy book and a priesthood and an apparatus of power that wields unchallengeable authority, in order to dominate and suppress human freedoms.
Philip Pullman
We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
Alan Turing