British Author Quotes

J. K. Rowling

C. S. Lewis

A. A. Milne

William Ralph Inge

Harold Pinter

Salman Rushdie

Enid Blyton

Nothing now remains for us seven but to go back to Stable Hill, proclaim the truth, and take the adventure that Aslan sends us.

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

Adrian Mitchell

When all is said and done, monotony may after all be the best condition for creation.

Lady Margaret Sackville

Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are.

Christianity promises to make men free; it never promises to make them independent.

William Ralph Inge

Five minutes! Zounds! I have been five minutes too late all my life-time!

A great enormous thing, like — like nothing. A huge big — well, like a — I don't know — like an enormous big nothing.

True courage scorns to vent her prowess in a storm of words; and to the valiant action speaks alone.

Tobias Smollett

Our lives are like these things I make. Turn 'em, build 'em, bake 'em in fire. That's what you've been, son. Baked and fired. But a pot don't have the right to choose whether he be for water, wine, or just left empty. You have, son. You have.

I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.

Because I longed to comprehend the infinite I drew a line between the known and unknown.

Elizabeth Bartlett

Red lights are like queues. They are for people who have time to waste.

Railways and the Church have their critics, but both are the best ways of getting a man to his ultimate destination.

I shall not say why and how I became, at the age of fifteen, the mistress of the Earl of Craven.

Harriette Wilson

Wouldst thou view the Lion's den? Search afar from haunts of men — Where the reed-encircled rill, Oozes from the rocky hill, By its verdure far descried 'Mid the desert brown and wide.

The trouble was, she could not see the justice of her state. She was not old: she was a girl hidden behind a mask. Now that she had realized she was no longer young, she did not know how she should behave. She had become a stranger in her own life.

From age to age, Love's word rings forth, The truth is true and all is well, Unconquerable life prevails.

I had thought that growing up's consolation was that you could escape from the arbitrariness of things, that somehow one acquired more control. Now you had two numbers until you were ninety-nine. And it wasn't true. Growing up was just more of the same but taller. What happened was all luck. There was no logic.

Janice Galloway

I can find no room in my cosmos for a deity save as a waste product of human weakness, the excrement of the imagination.

There's all sorts of things I was always meaning to get around to - learning to play the flute, calculating the square root of nought, going mad - but I just didn't have the time.

He gets at the substance of a book directly; he tears out the heart of it.

Of Samuel Johnson

In the mind all things are written in pictures - there is no alphabetical combination of letters and words; all things are pictures and symbols.

Richard Jefferies

The first few glasses of beer were a revelation; they flushed my veins with happiness; they washed away all cares and shyness and worries. I remember thinking to myself, If I could have two pints of beer every afternoon, life would be a great happiness.

George Mackay Brown

A Frenchman named Chamfort, who should have known better, once said that chance was a nickname for Providence.

Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once; a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow.