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Quotes by British Authors

"You can never fully put your finger on the reason why you're suddenly, inexplicably compelled to explore one life as opposed to another."

"One can spend too much of one's life locked in stuffy rooms seeking out obscure truths, searching, researching, until one is too old to enjoy life."


"We carry within us the wonders we seek without us."


"I never wanted to do political satire because it seems too surface to me."


"You can't reason yourself back into cheerfulness any more than you can reason yourself into an extra six inches in height."

"I was moved beyond words. The train ride over the mountains from lake Titticaca to Cusco reminded me of Africa where I grew up; and 4 days walking on the Inca Trail, then more in the jungle, just magnificent - time, space, and splendour. Our planet is superb!"

"Do just once what others say you can't do, and you will never pay attention to their limitations again."

"She is up there with the best of them. I can only talk about my experience, but it was genuinely special."

"I was timid and frightened as a child. Yours truly did not shin up mountains or do any other kind of adventurous stuff."

"Being under pressure is great, if it's all in the right place."

"As with all my work, whether it's a leaf on a rock or ice on a rock, I'm trying to get beneath the surface appearance of things. Working the surface of a stone is an attempt to understand the internal energy of the stone."

"We believe we've got the skill base and the techniques to supply the chips that really enable the end manufacturers to develop exciting, innovative products themselves."

"Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world, I said, "but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be-it isn't a mirror, it's an aspiration."

"The most successful people I know are also the most reliable."

"We often forget that the Author of our faith must be the Preserver of it also. The lamp which was burning in the temple was never allowed to go out, but it had to be daily replenished with fresh oil; in like manner, our faith can only live by being sustained with the oil of grace."

"Tale-bearing emits a threefold poison; for it injures the teller, the hearer, and the person concerning whom the tale is told."

"A major difficulty is that the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx is partly a product of the answers that we already have given to the riddle in its various forms."

"The Heart & Mind when in unison is the most powerful creative state for bringing your desires alive within your reality."


"Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?"

"I found that a bit unfair. However, I did feel quite liberated when I left. I'm very grateful to the show - it revived a flagging career, but I'm glad to be away from it now."

"We want a system that will improve consistency and steadiness in the quality of government."

"This was a townscape raised in the teeth of cold winds from the east; a city of winding cobbled streets and haughty pillars; a city of dark nights and candlelight, and intellect."

"He could tell her that dogs used to look like cats and vice versa without a lick of proof and it would change the way she regarded the animals."

"We learn to restrain ourselves as we get older. We keep apart when we have quarrelled, express ourselves in well-bred phrases, and in this way preserve a dignified alienation, showing much firmness on one side, and swallowing much grief on the other. We no longer approximate in our behaviour to the mere impulsiveness of the lower animals, but conduct ourselves in every respect like members of a highly civilised society."

"It seems as you'll never know the rights of it; but that doesn't hinder there being a rights, Master Marner, for all it's dark to you and me.''No,' said Silas, 'no; that doesn't hinder. Since the time the child was sent to me and I've come to love her as myself, I've had light enough to trusten by; and now she says she'll never leave me, I think I shall trusten until I die."


"It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends."

"And sometimes, when you fall, you fly."

"There is always a need to understand that others don't think the way that you do."

"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard."

"Why do they blame me for all their little failings? They use my name as if I spent my entire days sitting on their shoulders, forcing them to commit acts they would otherwise find repulsive. 'The devil made me do it.' I have never made one of them do anything. Never. They live their own tiny lives. I do not live their lives for them."

"There's little growth and progression without learning and reflection."

"What happens to you here is forever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves."

"It is impossible says our distressed mind; try it, whispers admonishing us, the dream."


"To sit and contemplate - to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are."

"Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises."
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