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Quotes by British Authors
"Yearn for the opposite, to buck the trend, to be different."
"I wanted to be successful, not famous."
"In France, you can sell a lot, but nobody outside of France ever hears of it."
"I will sit down now but the time will come when you will hear me."
"In valley drift we meet commonly with the bones of quadrupeds which graze on plains bordering rivers."
"We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because "two" is "one and one." We forget that we still have to make a study of "and.""
"Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions."
"I used to say of Napoleon that his presence on the field made the difference of forty thousand men."
"My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance. I want to see growth in wood, time in stone, nature in a city, and I do not mean its parks but a deeper understanding that a city is nature too-the ground upon which it is built, the stone with which it is made."
"I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you."
"Have a dream in your head and a fire in your heart."
"Decide on what you think is right and stick to it."
"It is not empty rhetoric to talk of the Free World."
"What does that quote mean to you? Can you explain the concept behind it and not just repeat the pretty phrase to me?"
"Age may catch up with you, just never let it over take you."
"Swifts, on a fine morning in May, flying this way, that way, sailing around at a great hight, perfectly happily. Then, one leaps onto the back of another, grasps tightly and forgetting to fly they both sink down and down, in a great dying fall, fathom after fathom, until the female utters a loud, piercing cry of ecstasy."
"He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights.'White to play and mate in two moves.'Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates."
"All enchantments die; only cowards die with them."
"Those who say life is knocking them down and giving them a tough time are usually the first to beat themselves up. Be on your own side."
"The crusade against Communism was even more imaginary than the specter of Communism."
"Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. History has stopped. Nothing exists except in an endless present in which the Party is always right."
"Oh, you dear good father!" cried Mary, putting her hands round her father s neck, while he bent his head placidly, willing to be caressed. "I wonder if any other girl thinks her father the best man in the world.""Nonsense, child; you ll think your husband better.""Impossible," said Mary, relapsing into her usual tone, "husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order."
"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."
"I think life without Coronation Street would be unthinkable. It's part of all our lives."
"Pride helps us, and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts-not to hurt others."
"It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane."
"So I believe in the redeeming power of stories, I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in."
"Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?"
"Patience, the beggar's virtue, shall find no harbor here."
"The quest of the absolute leads into the four-dimensional world."
"In the shallow parts of many Swiss lakes, where there is a depth of no more than from 5 to 15 feet of water, ancient wooden piles are observed at the bottom sometimes worn down to the surface of the mud, sometimes projecting slightly above it."
"As a real person, he wouldn't last a minute, would he? But drama is about imperfection. And we've moved away from the aspirational hero. We got tired of it, it was dull. If I was House's friend, I would hate it. How he so resolutely refuses to be happy or take the kind-hearted road. But we don't always like morally good people, do we?"
"The feeling of not belonging, of not being entirely worthy, of being sometimes hostage to your own sensibilities. Those things speak to me very personally."
"The labour movement had the best opportunity in 50 years to transform not merely an industrial situation and win an important battle for workers in struggle, but an opportunity to change the government of the day."
"I would seriously question whether anybody is really foolish enough to really say what they mean. Sometimes I think that civilization as we know it would kind of break down if we all were completely honest."
"Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom."
"I don't need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me."
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