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Quotes by English Authors
"Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow."
"I wanted to look at the upper-middle-class scene since the war, and in particular my generation's part in it. We had spent our early years as privileged members of a privileged class. How were we faring in the Age of the Common Man? How ought we to be faring?"
"I know as a manager you have to abide by the chairman's decisions. But his decisions were this team, that team, this player, that player. The chairman is a control freak."
"When you use music to worship you are not attempting to entertain."
"Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?"
"You are always new, The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest."
"Heavy misfortunes have befallen us, but let us only cling closer to what remains, and transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet live. Our circle will be small, but bound close by the ties of affection and mutual misfortune. And when time shall have softened your despair, new and dear objects of care will be born to replace those of whom we have been so cruelly deprived."
"What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is unremembered and our infancy remembered but in fragments. We live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being. Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance of ourselves, and this is much."
"I like to play with someone who can cover a lot of ground and someone with whom you can discuss the language at a reasonable level; otherwise it gets a bit frustrating."
"I made a rule for myself that the only television things I would do would be my own stories."
"Since good the more Communicated more abundant grows."
"I found that I could make people laugh doing people like Shirley Bassey. Fortunately it worked."
"Had his brain been constructed of silk, he would have been hard put to it to find sufficient material to make a canary a pair of cami-knickers."
"In the nineteenth century, many Anglican theologians, both evangelical and catholic, embraced positively the proposal of evolution."
"Imagine that every man's mind is an island, surrounded by ocean. Each seems isolated, yet in reality all are linked by the bedrock from which they spring. If the ocean were to vanish, that would be the end of the islands. They would all be part of one continent, but the individuality would have gone."
"Celebrities meet a lot of people and we just can't maintain them all in our fuddled brains."
"The 6th of August in the morning we saw an opening in the land and we ran into it, and anchored in 7 and a half fathom water, 2 miles from the shore, clean sand."
"It's sometimes easier to defend a one goal lead than a two goal lead."
"The menu is not the meal."
"It is easy to answer the ultimate questions - it saves you bothering with the immediate ones."
"It'll be no use their putting their heads down and saying, 'Come up again, dear!' I shall only look up and say, 'Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up -- if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else' -- but, oh, dear!"
"Well, I must do't. Away, my disposition, and possess me Some harlot's spirit! My throat of war be turn'd, Which quier'd with my drum, into a pipe Small as an eunuch, or the virgin voice That babies lull asleep! The smiles of knaves Tent in my cheeks, and schoolboys' tears take up The glasses of my sight! A beggar's tongue Make motion through my lips, and my arm'd knees, Who bow'd but in my stirrup, bend like his That hath receiv'd an alms! I will not do't, Lest I surcease to honor mine own truth, And by my body's action teach my mind A most inherent baseness."
"I have found by experience that they who have spent all their lives in cities improve their talents but impair their virtues and strengthen their minds but weaken their morals."
"So much barbarism, however, still remains in the transactions of most civilized nations, that almost all independent countries choose to assert their nationality by having, to their inconvenience and that of their neighbors, a peculiar currency of their own."
"But I like all the books. You've got to read them all to get the complete Harry Potter experience."
"Our state cannot be severed, we are one,One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself."
"Even a criminal has the right to a new life, but they made sure I did not have that. They just didn't stop calling me a prostitute for ever and ever and ever and ever."
"Come and trip it as ye go On the light fantastic toe."
"My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don't get right."
"Perhaps we too seldom reflect how much the life of Nature is one with the life of man, how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the difference between them."
"Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman. Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to be entirely in her grasp for a while, she had handled the distaff, the spindle, and the shears at her own free will, few in the world would have noticed the change of government. There would have been the same inequality of lot, the same heaping up of favors here, of contumely there, the same generosity before justice, the same perpetual dilemmas, the same captious alteration of caresses and blows that we endure now."
"Experience shows that success is due less to ability than to zeal."
"She did not understand the beauty he found in her, through touch upon her living secret body, almost the ecstasy of beauty. For passion alone is awake to it. And when passion is dead, or absent, then the magnificent throb of beauty is incomprehensible and even a little despicable; warm, live beauty of contact, so much deeper than the beauty of vision."
"The Methodists love your big sinners, as proper subjects to work upon."
"There is not in the universe a more ridiculous, nor a more contemptible animal, than a proud clergyman."
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