British Author Quotes

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

Richard Llewellyn

To what new realms of marvel, say, Will conquering science war its way?

William Cox Bennett

It isn't important what you do, it is the attitude with which you proceed through the world that matters.

We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, We Poets of the proud old lineage Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest.

James Elroy Flecker

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

For most people, honesty is such an unusual departure from their standard modus operandi - such an abherration in their workaday mendacity - that they feel obliged to alert you when a moment of sincerity is coming on.

Believe that we too love freedom and desire it. To us it is more desirable than anything in the world. If you strike us down now, we shall rise again and renew the fight. You cannot conquer Ireland you cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom: if our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom then our children will win it with a better deed.

He turned then to Job, again using the King James's version. The translation from the Hebrew was narrower than the Greek but seemed more essential. It was the simple strong prose of men who believed and who were unafraid to name things.

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

Coleridge cried; "O God, how glorious it is to live!" Renan asks, "O God, when will it be worth while to live?" In Nature we echo the poet; in the world we echo the thinker.

Woods are to us anything but solitudes - they are populous and inexhaustible worlds, where creatures that mock the grasp but not the mind, a matchless phantasmagoria, flit before us; alternately make us merry with their pleasant follies, delight us with their romantic grandeur and beauty, and elevate our hearts with their sublime sentiments.

The past is for learning from and letting go. You can't revisit it. It vanishes.

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

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

I came to the place of my birth and cried: "The friends of my youth, where are they?"--and an echo answered, "Where are they?

Pity the sorrows of a poor old man,
Whose trembling limbs have borne him to your door,
Whose days are dwindled to the shortest span;
Oh give relief, and Heaven will bless your store.

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

Elizabeth Bartlett

What is seen must always be the outcome of much that is unseen.

I love the male body, it's better designed than the male mind.

The instinct to survive will never change, neither will the human body's amazing ability to endure.

Waiting and hoping is a hard thing to do when you've already been waiting and hoping for almost as long as you can bear it.

It normally happens that if you put two words together, or two syllables together, one of them will attract more weight, more emphasis, than the other. In other words, most so-called spondees can be read as either iambs or trochees.

This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can't get fresh fruit in the shops.

It was odd how one found oneself making trivial conversation on important occasions. Perhaps it was because one could not say what was really in one's mind.

Expression, child of soul! I fondly trace
Thy strong enchantment, when the poet's lyre,
The painter's pencil cathch thy sacred fire,
And beauty wakes for thee her touching grace

Helen Maria Williams