Quotes by British Authors - Page 805

Darling, when things go wrong in life, you lift your chin, put on a ravishing smile, mix yourself a little cocktail...
Sophie Kinsella
You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you can change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you're dead, it's gone. Over. You've made what you've made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished.
Neil Gaiman
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.
George Orwell
Oh, what a tangled web we weave...when first we practice to deceive.
Walter Scott
In friendship...we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years' difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another...the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting--any of these chances might have kept us apart. 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, "Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another." The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.
C.S. Lewis
I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now...Come further up, come further in!
C.S. Lewis
In the end, you have to choose whether or not to trust someone.
Sophie Kinsella
If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.
Roald Dahl
Nothing is permanent in this wicked world, not even our troubles.
Charlie Chaplin
Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.
Winston S. Churchill
I heard a definition once: Happiness is health and a short memory! I wish I'd invented it, because it is very true.
Audrey Hepburn
Whatever comes," she said, "cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.
Neil Gaiman
Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.
John Wesley
The universe is big, its vast and complicated, and ridiculous. And sometimes, very rarely, impossible things just happen and we call them miracles. And that's the theory. Nine hundred years, never seen one yet, but this would do me.
Steven Moffat
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
Ernst F. Schumacher
And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
C.S. Lewis
I'd rather be a rising ape than a falling angel.
Terry Pratchett
For myself I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use to be anything else.
Winston S. Churchill
For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.
J.R.R. Tolkien
What are you going to do with your life?" In one way or another it seemed that people had been asking her this forever; teachers, her parents, friends at three in the morning, but the question had never seemed this pressing and still she was no nearer an answer... "Live each day as if it's your last', that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn't practical. Better by far to be good and courageous and bold and to make difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance.
David Nicholls
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
Richard Dawkins
We meet no ordinary people in our lives.
C.S. Lewis
Dumbledore will only leave from Hogwarts when there are none loyal to him!
J.K. Rowling
Travel far enough, you meet yourself.
David Mitchell
There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.
G.K. Chesterton
I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
T.S Eliot
God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.
C.S. Lewis
You'll never find a rainbow if you're looking down
Charlie Chaplin
Everybody is special. Everybody. Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. Everybody. Everybody has their story to tell.
Alan Moore
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
E.M. Forster
The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.
Audrey Hepburn
To love and win is the best thing.To love and lose, the next best.
William Makepeace Thackeray
She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon. You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood. She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here.
Neil Gaiman
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
George Eliot
There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
Kazuo Ishiguro
It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew - and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents - that there was all the difference in the world.
J.K. Rowling
Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery.
J.K. Rowling
There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.
J.K. Rowling
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.
Stephen Hawking
Is 'fat' really the worst thing a human being can be? Is 'fat' worse than 'vindictive', 'jealous', 'shallow', 'vain', 'boring' or 'cruel'? Not to me.
J.K. Rowling
The thing about growing up with Fred and George," said Ginny thoughtfully, "is that you sort of start thinking anything's possible if you've got enough nerve.
J.K. Rowling
People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.
A.A. Milne
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.
William Blake
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
Agatha Christie
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
George Orwell
When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
C.S. Lewis
You can't stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.
A.A. Milne
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell
Nothing is impossible, the word itself says 'I'm possible'!
Audrey Hepburn
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
Neil Gaiman
You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
C.S. Lewis
To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.
J.K. Rowling
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
George Eliot
It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.
Lewis Carroll
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
Winston S. Churchill
The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
Virginia Woolf
Life is like an escalator. You see, it carries you on regardless. And you might as well enjoy the view and seize every opportunity while you're passing. Otherwise, it'll be too late.
Sophie Kinsella
When you're locked up in here for life, you learn to welcome the little freedoms.
Alexander Gordon Smith