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Quotes by British Authors
"Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go."
"There's a shortage of perfects breasts in this world. It would be a pity to damage yours."
"Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe. If you believe, clap your hands!"
"Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy."
"I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul."
"I don't know to what extent someone can BECOME an artist - you either are or you aren't - and if you are you'll HAVE to make your way to some kind of sickly light, no matter how terrible the soil you were seeded in your nature will out somehow."
"The cultivation of sensibility on purely personal lines may, in fact, be the very worst training for a world where only the corporate and the cooperative will matter."
"I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost - it's there and then it's gone."
"Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted."
"Our technological infrastructure alienates us from each other. No need to form a workplace community, everybody there will be out in a year or two, and so will you, looking for a better place."
"In the sequence where I am burned at the stake, everything was so casual and hazardous that the bottom of my dress caught fire, and the grips became hysterical as they tried to pull me off the stake."
"And, of course, supernatural elements just make a story more interesting."
"We are afraid that Heaven is a bribe, and that if we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that the mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives. A man's love for a woman is not mercenary because he wants to marry her, nor his love for poetry mercenary because he wants to read it, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk. Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object."
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
"The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child's home."
"My children are not royal; they just happen to have the Queen for their aunt."
"They handled it very badly. It was disappointing and very humiliating. John York was very rude. He never consulted with me over what he said to the press."
"Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space."
"In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA."
"Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia."
"Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities - because it is the quality which guarantees all others."
"I was utilized because I have a certain face that works well in cinema, and I'm used to making myself look as good as possible."
"The Lord's mercy often rides to the door of our hearts on the black horse of affliction. Jesus uses the whole range of our experiences to wean us from earth and woo us to Heaven."
"You know too well the forces which compose their army to dread their superior numbers."
"Christianity does NOT replace the technical. When he tells you to feed the hungry and doesn't give you lessons in cookery. If you want to learn THAT, you must go to a cook rather than a Christian."
"Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it."
"Time alone helps us to remember who we are."
"As preachers of the gospel of Jesus, do not expect worldly honors: these Jesus Christ neither took to himself, nor gave to his disciples."
"Yearn for the opposite, to buck the trend, to be different."
"Dreams do come true, if we only wish hard enough, You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it."
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