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Quotes by British Authors
"Marriage has a unique place because it speaks of an absolute faithfulness, a covenant between radically different persons, male and female; and so it echoes the absolute covenant of God with his chosen, a covenant between radically different partners."
"Take a pinch of snuff, doctor, and acknowledge that I have scored over you in your example."
"He that cannot forgive others, breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass if he would ever reach heaven; for everyone has need to be forgiven."
"They were keen for me still to play the piano, which I was going to, but 45 minutes of piano would be extremely boring. I like a bit of light and shade."
"To write simply is as difficult as to be good."
"Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed."
"The charm of variety there was not, nor the excitement of incident; but I liked peace so well, and sought stimulus so little, that when the latter came I almost felt it a disturbance, and rather still wished it had held aloof."
"They were totally supportive, always saw everything I did. One of the thrills of my life was when they went to the theater to see something that I wasn't in. It opened doors for them that otherwise would have been totally closed."
"She arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She nuzzles her cunt into my face like a filly at the gate. She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She's refilled each day with fresh tides of longing."
"No reflection was to be allowed now, not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet, so deadly sad, that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank, something like then world when the deluge was gone by."
"Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off - I'm talking 100km or 200km long - every 10 or 20 or 50 years."
"All choice of words is slang. It marks a class. "There is correct English: that is not slang. "I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets."
"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor."
"I never met your likeness. Jane: you please me, and you master me - you seem to submit, and I like the sense of pliancy you impart; and while I am twining the soft, silken skein round my finger, it sends a thrill up my arm to my heart. I am influenced - conquered; and the influence is sweeter than I can express; and the conquest I undergo has a witchery beyond any triumph _I_ can win."
"Swifts, on a fine morning in May, flying this way, that way, sailing around at a great hight, perfectly happily. Then, one leaps onto the back of another, grasps tightly and forgetting to fly they both sink down and down, in a great dying fall, fathom after fathom, until the female utters a loud, piercing cry of ecstasy."
"Expectation and disappointment are far from friends but they are close relations."
"We should be authentic: the 'real deal'. Neither a clone nor mimic be."
"God's thoughts of you are many, let not yours be few in return."
"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard."
"Just resolve to shine, constantly and steadily, like a warm lamp in the corner, and people will want to move towards you in order to feel happy, and to read things more clearly. You will be bright and constant in a world of dark and flux, and this will save you the anxiety of other, ultimately less satisfying things like 'being cool', 'being more successful than everyone else' and 'being very thin'."
"I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy."
"I need to be frightened of things. I hate it, but I must need it, because it's what I do."
"Pride helps us, and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts-not to hurt others."
"Self-harm appealed to my sadness but I didn't let it coax me."
"So I believe in the redeeming power of stories, I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in."
"Nature or nurture? A talent needs both."
"Nothing exists except through human consciousness."
"The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour."
"We're quite volatile as individuals, but that doesn't work exponentially when we are together. Relationships are about eating humble pie."
"I appeal to all Britishers to answer this call to arms for the defence of all the principles that we Englishmen have been the first to proclaim in the world."
"I would seriously question whether anybody is really foolish enough to really say what they mean. Sometimes I think that civilization as we know it would kind of break down if we all were completely honest."
"Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over."
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