British Author Quotes

Glorious is the Voice of Man, and sweet is the music of the harp.

Richard Llewellyn

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

When a clandestine couple kisses, it is much more likely that sex will immediately follow. This is because there is much more risk. Once you have kissed secretly, it is very difficult not to have sex. It would be impolite not to have sex. You have to show that you are serious about each other.

I thought of the infinitely many points that can divide the space between two human hearts.

I can only suggest that, as we are practically without data, we should endeavor to obtain some.

R. Austin Freeman

How little do they know human nature, who think they can say no to passion, so far shalt thou go, and no farther!

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.

At some time in the future scientists, physicians, mediums and healers will have to work together to perfect the science of the whole.

That he loved her was his life's greatest grace—that she loved him was a burden and mystery beyond compare.

The Door Without a Key is the Door of Dreams; it is the door by which the sensitive escape into insanity when life is too hard for them, and artists use it as a window in a watch-tower. Psychologists call it a psychological mechanism; magicians call it magic, and the man in the street calls it illusion or charlatanry according to taste. It does not matter to me what it is called, for it is effectual.

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

An hypothesis is only a habit - a habit of looking through a glass of one peculiar colour, which imparts its hue to all around it.

Frederick Marryat

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

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

Tobias Smollett

Perhaps, on the whole, embarrassment and perplexity are a kind of natural accompaniment to life and movement; and it is better to be driven out of your senses with thinking which of two things you ought to do than to do nothing whatever, and be utterly uninteresting to all the world.

Margaret Oliphant

How sad that we can now go up in aeroplanes and see that there are no gods upon the clouds.

Gavin Pretor-Pinney

We all long for someone with whom we are able to share our peculiar burdens of being alive.

What keeps the democracy alive at all but the hatred of excellence; the desire of the base to see no head higher than their own?

Let it simply be said that we know more about the details of the hours immediately before and the actual death of Jesus, in and near Jerusalem, than we know about the death of any other one man in all the ancient world.

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

Thinking? You're not thinking. You're reasoning without reasons, and that's just another word for prejudice.

Anthony McGowan

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

There is an argument for believing that the entire process of writing a piece of fiction is simply a thinly-controlled and highly-internalised nervous breakdown designed, with a bit of luck, to produce something worthwhile at the end.

Then do you mean that I have got to go on catching these damned two-and-a-half pounders at this corner forever and ever? The keeper nodded. Hell! said Mr. Castwell. Yes, said his keeper.

Visiting any shop for the first time is exciting. There's always that buzz as you push open the door; that hope; that belief - that this is going to be the shop of all shops, which will bring you everything you ever wanted, at magically low prices.

Sophie Kinsella