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Quotes by English Authors
"But if you can create an honorable livelihood, where you take your skills and use them and you earn a living from it, it gives you a sense of freedom and allows you to balance your life the way you want."
"Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability."
"Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair."
"The comedians all finished their acts with a song. They would get a certain amount of money from the song publishers and would use that money to pay the writers. None of them paid very much for their comedy material, but it all added up."
"I don't know that the best way to approach it is to try and keep up. When you're doing that, you're setting yourself into a one-dimensional sort of race basically."
"The battalion, the whole battalion was affected by the two killed just within a week of being there, and I think that that pulled everybody up to make them realise that this was a very serious business."
"It is not the business of generals to shoot one another."
"For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria."
"I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself."
"In times of long established peace, when the tradition of generations has established the illusion of the profoundest human security, men's minds are not greatly distressed by grotesqueness and absurdity in their political forms. It is all part of the humour and the good-humour of life. When one believes that all the tigers in the jungle are dead, it is quite amusing to walk along the jungle paths in a dressing-gown with a fan instead of a gun."
"Spare me the whispering, crowded room, the friends who come and gape and go, the ceremonious air of gloom - all, which makes death a hideous show."
"It will be readily admitted, that a degree conferred by an university, ought to be a pledge to the public that he who holds it possesses a certain quantity of knowledge."
"One in the third film, I'm looking forward to meeting one of the Dementors."
"I have a habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am now leading a posthumous existence."
"Where might is mixed with wit, there is too good an accord in a government."
"My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vase for floral decoration."
"I know it's a film and all of that, and it's a Hollywood film, but it kind of feels like this sometimes, when you're in pain and it hurts, and you're desperate. Or you are about to cross some moral line and it's so seductive and you just do... and all that."
"The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relationships with my translators - I don't know whether that's a coincidence, or if there's something to be learned from it."
"We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding."
"Only in a novel are all things given full play."
"Correspondences are like small clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up."
"By increasing the size of the keyhole, today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door."
"To what a bad choice is many a worthy woman betrayed, by that false and inconsiderate notion, That a reformed rake makes the best husband!"
"Actually, I never liked Dylan's kind of music before; I always thought he sounded just like Yogi Bear."
"Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!"
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