British Author Quotes

Strew your gladness on earth's bed,
So be merry, so be dead.

Charles Hamilton Sorley

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

Harriette Wilson

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

Anthony McGowan

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

Modern humanity's sense of alienation lies in the fact that we have cut ourselves adrift from both the natural world and from the roots of our past.

Philip Carr-Gomm

One of the most important lessons she'd recently learned was that looking strong and confident was sometimes all the people required of you.

Stuart Hill (author)

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

There are some words that once spoken will split the world in two. There would be the life before you breathed them and then the altered life after they'd been said. They take a long time to find, words like that. They make you hesitate. Choose with care. Hold on to them unspoken for as long as you can just so your world will stay intact.

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.

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

R. Austin Freeman

But I didn't dare. That has always been my trouble. I've never dared enough.

Michael Morpurgo

When we are conscious of the least comparative merit in ourselves, we should take as much care to conceal the value we set upon it, as if it were a real defect; to be elated or vain upon it is showing your money before people in want.

If miracles be incredible, Christianity is false. If Christ wrought no miracles, then the Gospels are untrustworthy.

Frederic William Farrar

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

Gavin Pretor-Pinney

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.

The press and politicians. A delicate relationship. Too close, and danger ensues. Too far apart and democracy itself cannot function without the essential exchange of information. Creative leaks, a discreet lunch, interchange in the Lobby, the art of the unattributable telephone call, late at night.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

John Drinkwater

Some day your head won't find my lap so easily. Trust is a habit you'll soon break.

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.

Did I, my lines intend for public view,How many censures, would their faults pursue,Some would, because such words they do affect,Cry they're insipid, empty, uncorrect.And many, have attained, dull and untaught,The name of wit, only by finding fault.True judges, might condemn their want of wit,And all might say, they're by a woman writ.

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea

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?

We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun or feel the rain
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly and spent
Their lives for us loved, too, the sun and rain?

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

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.

The tranquil current of domestic happiness affords no materials for narrative.

Among the poor, the approach of dissolution is usually regarded with a quiet and natural composure, which it is consolatory to contemplate, and which is as far removed from the dead palsy of unbelief as it is from the delirious raptures of fanaticism. Theirs is a true, unhesitating faith, and they are willing to lay down the burden of e weary life, in the sure and certain hope of a blessed immortality.