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Quotes by English Authors
"It was all extremely symbolic; but then, if you choose to think so, nothing in this world is not symbolical."
"A doctor, a logician and a marine biologist had also just arrived, flown in at phenomenal expense from Maximegalon to try to reason with the lead singer who had locked himself in the bathroom with a bottle of pills and was refusing to come out till it could be proved conclusively to him that he wasn't a fish. The bass player was busy machine-gunning his bedroom and the drummer was nowhere on board.Frantic inquiries led to the discovery that he was standing on a beach on Santraginus V over a hundred light years away where, he claimed, he had been happy for over half an hour now and had found a small stone that would be his friend."
"Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same field, the results have been disastrous."
"The Genesis story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants."
"If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition."
"Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy."
"Twelve years on sets watching directors, I've taken a bit from everybody and rejected a lot."
"I'm surrounded by it. I have so many lovely people around me who are supportive, gentle, kind and considerate. I'm so grateful for every day that I'm on the planet and that continues to be so."
"And some scientists and other intellectuals are convinced-too eagerly in my view-that the question of God's existence belongs in the forever inaccessible PAP category. From this, as we shall see, they often make the illogical deduction that the hypothesis of God's existence, and the hypothesis of his non-existence, have exactly equal probability of being right."
"I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon."
"Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are."
"The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most."
"Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought."
"In trouble to be troubled, Is to have your trouble doubled."
"All action is for the sake of some end; and rules of action, it seems natural to suppose, must take their whole character and color from the end to which they are subservient."
"If Milosevic is to be tried, he has to be tried by a proper court, an impartial, properly constituted court which has international respect."
"If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?"
"Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy profession, and a large number of its practitioners spend many nights drowning their sorrows in Ouisghian Zodahs."
"I feel sorry for the '90s, because it was never able to be anything much more than the hangover to the party that was the '80s."
"For Children: You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It's quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a chicken. Like most things, of course, it isn't quite that simple. The fried egg isn't properly a fried egg until it's been put in a frying pan and fried. This is something you wouldn't do to a Friday, of course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, if you like, or on a cooker. It's all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while."
"The parish I live in is a very abrupt, uneven country, full of hills and woods, and therefore full of birds."
"Insanity is a gradual process - don't rush it."
"The Duke of Dunstable had one-way pockets. He would walk ten miles in the snow to chisel an orphan out of tuppence."
"Good so be would you if, duff plum of helping second A," said the Bursar. The table fell silent. "Did anyone understand that?" said Ridcully. The Bursar was not technically insane. He had passed through the rapids of insanity som time previously, and was now sculling around in some peaceful pool on the other side. He was quite often coherent, although not by normal human standards."
"I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful, with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground."
"Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!"
"The truth of the matter is, all of those guys on Star Trek: The Next Generation actually want to be me. These impersonations they do are just some way of trying to feel what it must be like to be me. And I understand that! Because it feels really good to be Patrick Stewart!"
"The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present."
"Everything that enlarges the sphere of human powers, that shows man he can do what he thought he could not do, is valuable."
"The best of us must sometimes eat our words."
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