British Author Quotes

J. K. Rowling

C. S. Lewis

A. A. Milne

William Ralph Inge

Harold Pinter

Salman Rushdie

Enid Blyton

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

Adrian Mitchell

When all is said and done, monotony may after all be the best condition for creation.

Lady Margaret Sackville

Five minutes! Zounds! I have been five minutes too late all my life-time!

Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are.

Christianity promises to make men free; it never promises to make them independent.

William Ralph Inge

Nothing now remains for us seven but to go back to Stable Hill, proclaim the truth, and take the adventure that Aslan sends us.

A great enormous thing, like — like nothing. A huge big — well, like a — I don't know — like an enormous big nothing.

Wouldst thou view the Lion's den? Search afar from haunts of men — Where the reed-encircled rill, Oozes from the rocky hill, By its verdure far descried 'Mid the desert brown and wide.

Welcome, brave Hero, to this course Retreat,
Thou who excell'st whatever Rome call'd great;
Great as thou art, yet others of thy Name
Shall thee transcend in martial Acts and Fame.
Two shall their Names from Africa receive,
As Asia did to thee thy Glories give.

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.

Twenty years is, after all, a long time. We are not the same people we were. Old friends, lovers, even family members: they are strangers who happen to wear a familiar face. We have no right to claim to know anyone after such a distance.

Most people, looking back at their childhood, see it as a misty country half-forgotten or only to be remembered through an evocative sound or scent, but some episodes of those short years remain clear and brightly coloured like a landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

D. E. Stevenson

Nice? It's the ONLY thing, said the Water Rat solemnly, as he leant forward for his stroke. Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing... he went on dreamily: messing about... in... boats; messing..

Kenneth Grahame

The whole of society in Washington is to some degree political. It is like no other capital city known to me, in that political thinking, the whole business, technical and personal, of politics, is not diluted by an equal interest in art, industry, amusement, anything you like. I don't meant that these are non-existent in Washington -- only that they are subdued to the ruling passion.

People's lives are often other than they seem to be on the surface. And sometimes, what's underneath and hidden is the best part of all, the part of real value.

The solar system is like a roulette gone mad, and the earth is the ball. It's been rolling for millions of years; what's going to happen if it stops? What hole will the ball plump into? Thirty-six - A pocketful of money for everybody - or zero? And the eternal banker sweeps up the stakes?

Yes, I tell you, it had a real savage splendour in the days when we found that no one couldn't sit on our faces any more because we'd loot to spend at last, and our world was to be our world, the one we wanted and not standing on the doorstep of somebody else's waiting for honey, perhaps.

You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not - life has been lived but it is still all going on, in the mind for better and for worse.

Penelope Lively

I have tried many times to express my feelings, but at each attempt, I find myself tongue-tied.

Things get passed around so easily on the Internet. Fact becomes fiction and fiction becomes fact.

I never like anyone till I've seen him at his worst.

The sun, we say, is the cause of heat, but the heat is the sun, hence on this window-ledge.

William Hale White

So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.

If only life were one long crisis, everyone would be perfect.

Angela Thirkell

I'm never happier than when I can write about draining swimming pools and abandoned hotels.