top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by British Authors
"If you were out of a job and your kid needed diapers and your husband just left you, you would be so confused."
"Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind."
"Recounting the strange is like telling one's dreams: one can communicate the events of a dream, but not the emotional content, the way that a dream can colour one's entire day."
"No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married."
"Your smile is a gift of the gods."
"You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences."
"She looked at the girl in the mirror and the girl in the mirror looked back at her. I will be brave, thought Coraline. No, I am brave."
"One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact of what we call 'the thing itself'. But we call it wrongly. The thing itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea."
"A newspaper should be the maximum of information, and the minimum of comment."
"Every Christian would agree that a man's spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God."
"God waits only the separation of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward. Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over, and death is so certain an entrance to happiness -- to glory?"
"If in any divination the Tenth Card should be a Court Card, it shews that the subject of the divination falls ultimately into the hands of a person represented by that card, and its end depends mainly on him."
"If you can hear the birds singing, you're in the right place."
"I need Christ, not something that resembles Him."
"The quest of the absolute leads into the four-dimensional world."
"I've travelled around the UK a lot recently and have discovered that I really like trains. If you're in the quiet carriage, nobody can get hold of you and you can relax."
"I cannot, if I am in the field of glory, be kept out of sight: wherever there is anything to be done, there Providence is sure to direct my steps."
"It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities."
"A fool flatters himself, a wise man flatters the fool."
"I don't want to sound smug but I am reasonably satisfied with how it's gone. I think it's fine."
"Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."
"It's like trying to pin down a kangaroo on a trampoline."
"Any sane person would have left long ago. But I cannot. I have my sons."
"Performance is your reality. Forget everything else."
"All rock musicians are deaf... Or insensitive to mellow sounds."
"A person who steals bread during a famine is not treated as a thief."
"And therefore, for the sake of my mater, without any regard for my own, I hope all those that have a due regard for our constitution and for the rights and prerogatives of the crown, without which our constitution can not be preserved, will be against this motion."
"They act as if they supposed that to be very sanguine about the general improvement of mankind is a virtue that relieves them from taking trouble about any improvement in particular."
"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."
"Do not underestimate the determination of a quiet man."
"A whole new generation is looking at the videos, and going to the video shop and buying the re-release of the complete trilogy, which you can buy at a reasonable price."
"All we did in Alabama was have a read through with the script, but there was, 'No, well, it needs more. You've got to do this, Albert. You've got to do that, Jessica.' It didn't feel like that at all."
"The jet stream is a very strong force and pushing a balloon into it is like pushing up against a brick wall, but once we got into it, we found that, remarkably, the balloon went whatever speed the wind went."
"I didn't know what the hell Charlie Parker was playing... I just liked the way he played."
"A great movie evolves when everybody has the same vision in their heads."
"Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct."
"St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel."
"I don't understand, then, why, in the midst of all this, pregnant women - women trying to make rational decisions about their futures and, usually, that of their families, too - should be subject to more pressure about preserving life than, say, Vladimir Putin, the World Bank, or the Catholic Church."
"During the war years I worked on the development of radar and other radio systems for the R.A.F. and, though gaining much in engineering experience and in understanding people, rapidly forgot most of the physics I had learned."
bottom of page