British Author Quotes

A Frenchman named Chamfort, who should have known better, once said that chance was a nickname for Providence.

In the mind all things are written in pictures - there is no alphabetical combination of letters and words; all things are pictures and symbols.

Richard Jefferies

Our lives are like these things I make. Turn 'em, build 'em, bake 'em in fire. That's what you've been, son. Baked and fired. But a pot don't have the right to choose whether he be for water, wine, or just left empty. You have, son. You have.

I had thought that growing up's consolation was that you could escape from the arbitrariness of things, that somehow one acquired more control. Now you had two numbers until you were ninety-nine. And it wasn't true. Growing up was just more of the same but taller. What happened was all luck. There was no logic.

Janice Galloway

There is an argument for believing that the entire process of writing a piece of fiction is simply a thinly-controlled and highly-internalised nervous breakdown designed, with a bit of luck, to produce something worthwhile at the end.

What keeps the democracy alive at all but the hatred of excellence; the desire of the base to see no head higher than their own?

Perhaps, on the whole, embarrassment and perplexity are a kind of natural accompaniment to life and movement; and it is better to be driven out of your senses with thinking which of two things you ought to do than to do nothing whatever, and be utterly uninteresting to all the world.

Margaret Oliphant

I don't think there was any overall Reich policy to kill the Jews. If there was, they would have been killed and there would not be now so many millions of survivors. And believe me, I am glad for every survivor that there was.

I shall not say why and how I became, at the age of fifteen, the mistress of the Earl of Craven.

Harriette Wilson

Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once; a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow.

At some time in the future scientists, physicians, mediums and healers will have to work together to perfect the science of the whole.

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

The Door Without a Key is the Door of Dreams; it is the door by which the sensitive escape into insanity when life is too hard for them, and artists use it as a window in a watch-tower. Psychologists call it a psychological mechanism; magicians call it magic, and the man in the street calls it illusion or charlatanry according to taste. It does not matter to me what it is called, for it is effectual.

Red lights are like queues. They are for people who have time to waste.

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

Elizabeth Bartlett

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

True courage scorns to vent her prowess in a storm of words; and to the valiant action speaks alone.

Tobias Smollett

I can only suggest that, as we are practically without data, we should endeavor to obtain some.

R. Austin Freeman

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

Let it simply be said that we know more about the details of the hours immediately before and the actual death of Jesus, in and near Jerusalem, than we know about the death of any other one man in all the ancient world.

From age to age, Love's word rings forth, The truth is true and all is well, Unconquerable life prevails.

Thinking? You're not thinking. You're reasoning without reasons, and that's just another word for prejudice.

Anthony McGowan

I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.

War is only glorious when you buy it in the Daily Mail and enjoy it at the breakfast table. It goes splendidly with bacon and eggs. Real war is the final limit of damnable brutality, and that's all there is in it.

G. A. Studdert Kennedy

Then do you mean that I have got to go on catching these damned two-and-a-half pounders at this corner forever and ever? The keeper nodded. Hell! said Mr. Castwell. Yes, said his keeper.