top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by English Authors
"How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians."
"I think there's an element where people get very comfortable in their ghetto. Which is fair enough."
"If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry."
"'Tis well enough for a servant to be bred at an University. But the education is a little too pedantic for a gentleman."
"Acceptance is the truest kinship with humanity."
"I felt emotions of gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me. Half surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away by them, and forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy."
"The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings."
"The amount of sophistication varies according to the quality of the medium, and to the state of the same medium at different times; it must be attributed in the best cases physiologically to the medium, intellectually to the control."
"And she answered: 'All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.''What do you fear, lady?' he asked.'A cage,' she said."
"I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world."
"Don't you believe people when they tell you that people sought for a sign, and believed in miracles because they were ignorant. They did it because they were wise, filthily, vilely wise-too wise to eat or sleep or put on their boots with patience."
"I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas."
"Having a persona people recognize, it's the thing that probably gets you paid the most - but it's also the thing that virtually every actor in the world doesn't want. 'Cause, like, no one would believe me if I wanted to play something ultra-realistic, like a gangster or something."
"An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one."
"A man has generally the good or ill qualities, which he attributes to mankind."
"A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with 'Got To Get You Off My Mind', but then realised that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straight away, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs, and ... oh there are loads of rules."
"I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist."
"You know, one had as good be out of the world, as out of the fashion."
"One of the great benefits of organised religion is that you can be forgiven your sins, which must be a wonderful thing. I mean, I carry my sins around with me, there's nobody there to forgive them."
"To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter."
"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another."
"I was in the band as a boy and was taught music and learned to compose."
"I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free."
"All my pupils are the creme de la creme. Give me a girl of an impressionable age, and she is mine for life."
"Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends."
"Unlike other peoples the United States found their origin in a deliberate act of corporate self-assertion, and ever since the Revolution every little American has been taught to associate himself personally with this creative act."
"And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability."
"It faintly irritated him that Zaphod had to impose some ludicrous fantasy on to the scene to make it work for him. All this Margrathea nonsense seemed juvenile. Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
"I wouldn't want to criticise someone like Charlotte Church because she has done fantastically well, but personally I've always cared about the long term."
"Until this movie I have played a boxer, a cowboy, a knight, a prince, an elf and a pirate. I am so glad to have done all of that already, and am ready for this phase of my career."
"It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it."
"I know My God commands, whose power no power resists."
"Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes already scattered; as a broken link, a biological dead end, an eternal withdrawal from reality, a once complex object that now dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a l like a fallen speck of soot on a blank sheet of paper."
"For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote."
bottom of page