British Author Quotes

Several large, artificial constructions are approaching us, ZORAC announced after a short pause. The designs are not familiar, but they are obviously the products of intelligence. Implications: we have been intercepted deliberately by a means unknown, for a purpose unknown, and transferred to a place unknown by a form of intelligence unknown. Apart from the unknowns, everything is obvious.

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

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.

Rooms are a fixed size, which can't be altered without pulling down walls and building new ones. They should be unchanging in shape and proportions. But sometimes they do change depending on who's in them.

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.

A man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket.

Everyone should find something they love doing. Then work isn't work. It's a part of themselves. Of who they are.

Paul J. McAuley

So some unlucky Engineer Does all the fit Materials compound, That are in Art or Nature found; Will glorious Fire-Works prepare.

then bite the tongue out by the root…
and chew, never swallow.
This is not sex, remember;
you are eating the sea.

Robin Robertson

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

The wise maketh every thing the means of advantage; and with the same countenance beholdeth he all the faces of fortune: he governeth the good, he conquereth the evil; he is unmov'd in all. Presume not in prosperity, neither despair thou in adversity.

I saw the radiant Queen of Night
Walking in brightness through the sky...

Charlotte Elliott

Since when was the stock market an accurate barometer of anything?

They went to the north, they went to the south, And into the west went they, Till they found a civil, civil engineer, And unto him did say: "Now tell to us, thou civil engineer, If this be fit to drink." And they showed him a cup of the town water, Which was as black as ink.

Robert Fuller Murray

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.

Ye generous maids, revenge your sex's wrong; Let not the mean destroyer e'er approach Your sacred charms. Now muster all your pride, Contempt and scorn, that, shot from Beauty's eye, Confounds the mighty impudent, and smites The front unknown to shame.

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.

The weightless mosquito touches
her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, how infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches.

Be careful how you talk about God. He's the only God we have. If you let him go he won't come back. He won't even look back over his shoulder. And then what will you do?