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Quotes by English Authors
"Since childhood she had walked the Devon rivers with her father looking for flowers and the nests of birds, passing some rocks and trees as old friends, seeing a Spirit everywhere, gentle in thought to all her eyes beheld."
"I plot the first 5 or 6 chapters quite minutely, and also the end. So I know where I am going but not how I'm going to get there, which gives characters the chance to develop organically, as happens in real life as you get to know a person."
"Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever."
"Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way."
"I believe you can frighten people without showing their heads caved-in."
"Every one knows, that the mind will not be kept from contemplating what it loves in the midst of crowds and business. Hence come those frequent absences, so observable in conversation; for whilst the body is confined to present company, the mind is flown to that which it delights in."
"Go with your fate, but not beyond. Beyond leads to dark places."
"Those from whose pocket the salary is drawn, and by whose appointment the officer was made, have always a right to discuss the merits of their officers, and their modes of exercising the duties they are paid to perform."
"Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,""to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow."
"Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read."
"The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them."
"Smoking calms me down. It's enjoyable. I don't want politicians deciding what is exciting in my life."
"When I had dark hair I definitely felt that I was more anonymous."
"Measures of self-government and a school council, especially for such young children, were a great innovation."
"They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence, their experiments did not always succeed."
"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."
"I am not ashamed to say that I am the son of a washerwoman."
"Humanity's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there."
"When I became a Christian my confidence grew."
"The Span of Life is too short to be trifled away in unconcerning and unprofitable Matters."
"I did not know at first that it would be a series; I discovered after the first novel that I had more to say about it, so I did another. And another, and then the readers demanded yet more."
"When you live by the sea, there are definite seasons when you can see the weather coming and going, which lends itself to photography."
"One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass."
"My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest."
"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried."
"I never felt so close to a guitar as that silver one with mirrors that I used on stage all the time."
"He wasn't sure he liked everything that was happening, but a lot of it was "cultural," apparently, and you couldn't object to that, so he didn't. "Cultural" sort of solved problems by explaining that they weren't really there."
"Oh yes, much, because music is just something that comes to you. You don't question it."
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