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Quotes by English Authors
"The standing ovation threw me... to be held in such regard in a town so full of talent is quite something."
"Why do dachshunds wear their ears inside out?"
"A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world."
"The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead."
"We do not commonly see in a tax a diminution of freedom, and yet it clearly is one."
"It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us."
"Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism."
"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street."
"I try to imagine how we would live if we didn't know we were going to die. Would we live our lives differently? Less careful, maybe? Less scared? These are beautiful things to think about and build a song around."
"Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old."
"Sequels are very rarely a good idea, and in any case, the success of the book changed my relationship with the club in some ways."
"At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive."
"A man travels fastest who travels alone."
"Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought."
"Rickie had a young man's reticence. He generally spoke of "a friend, "a person I know, "a place I was at. When the book of life is opening, our readings are secret, and we are unwilling to give chapter and verse. Mr. Pembroke, who was half way through the volume, and had skipped or forgotten the earlier pages, could not understand Rickie's hesitation, nor why with such awkwardness he should pronounce the harmless dissyllable "Ansell."
"Logically enough, the office and the nunnery have been singularly popular in the imaginations of pornographers. We should not be surprised to learn that the erotic novels of the early modern period were overwhelmingly focused on debauchery and flagellation amongst clergy in vespers and chapels, just as contemporary Internet pornography is inordinately concerned with fellatios and sodomies performed by office workers against a backdrop of work stations and computer equipment."
"The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme."
"For the subtlest folly proceeds from the subtlest wisdom."
"It is the direction and not the magnitude which is to be taken into consideration."
"Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong - these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history."
"It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else."
"It went automatically to a heavy-weight mother with beetling eyebrows who looked as if she had just come from doing a spot of knitting at the foot of the guillotine."
"The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure."
"I don't want to hurt anybody or be offensive. But I don't want to not be me."
"You mustn't forget the circumstances I have been brought up in, the little education I have had."
"While money doesn't buy love, it puts you in a great bargaining position."
"Even though we know freedom as an idea we're not really as free as we think we are."
"So spake the enemy of mankind, enclosedIn serpent, inmate bad! and toward EveAddressed his way: not with indented wave,Prone on the ground, as since; but on his rear,Circular base of rising folds, that toweredFold above fold, a surging maze! his headCrested aloft, and carbuncle his eyes;With burnished neck of verdant gold, erectAmidst his circling spires, that on the grassFloated redundant: pleasing was his shapeAnd lovely; never since of serpent-kindLovelier."
"There's something about shadows because you make your own mind up about what's lurking in them."
"Alas! they had been friends in youth; but whispering tongues can poison truth."
"Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence."
"Philosophy is nothing but discretion."
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