British Author Quotes

Because he says he can't stand you and you act like you can't stand him, and whenever a man and a woman behave like that toward each other, it usually means something's going on.

Still-born Silence! thou that art
Floodgate of the deeper heart.

Richard Flecknoe

Cats, no less liquid than their shadows,
Offer no angles to the wind.
They slip, diminished, neat, through loopholes
Less than themselves.

A. S. J. Tessimond

They need only adapt to the circumstances that old Lydian tradition which says that games of chance were invented during great famine. Men permitted themselves to eat only every second day, and tried to forget their hunger by playing at draughts and dice.

Everything passes. Joy. Pain. The moment of triumph; the sigh of despair. Nothing lasts forever - not even this.

Paul Stewart (writer)

The spiritual element, the really important part of religion, has no concern with Time and Space, temporary mundane laws, or conduct.

Richard Le Gallienne

A prowde hert in a beggers brest,
A fowle visage with gay temples of atyre,
Horrible othes with an holy prist,
A justice of juges to selle and lete to hyre,
A knave to comande and have an empire,
To yeve a jugement of that never was wrought,
To preche of pees and sette eche man on fyre,
It may wele ryme but it accordith nought.

It's different when the person you love dies. There's an awful finality to death. But it is final. The end. And there's the funeral, family gatherings, grieving, all of those necessary rituals. And they help, believe me. When the object of your love just disappears, there's no way to deal with the grief and pain.

Barbara Taylor Bradford

Like beauteous flowers which vainly waste their scent
Of odours in unhaunted deserts.

William Chamberlayne

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.

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

If the garden of Eden really exists it does so moment by moment, fragmented and tough, cropping up like a fan of buddleia high up in the gutter of a deserted warehouse, or in a heap of frozen cabbages becoming luminous in the reflected light of roadside snow.

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.

Modern humanity's sense of alienation lies in the fact that we have cut ourselves adrift from both the natural world and from the roots of our past.

Philip Carr-Gomm

Bombastes: So have I heard on Afric's burning shore A hungry lion give a grievous roar; The grievous roar echoed along the shore.
Artaxaminous: So have I heard on Afric's burning shore Another lion give a grievous roar; And the first lion thought the last a bore.

William Barnes Rhodes

I feel like I'm eighty years old. I'm tired of life and my mind wants to die.

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.

What is the life of a man more than the life of a lamb, or any guiltless animal?

Love is about needing someone, about feeling as if the day isn't quite right if they're not there. Its about knowing that, no matter how bad a day you've had, the moment you see them again or hear their voice, the world is back in its place.

At least half of my life's many mistakes can be safely put down to impetuosity: the other half derive from inertia.

O yowthe allas why wilt thow nat enclyne,
And un-to reuled reform bowe thee?
Syn resoun is the verray streighte lyne
Þat ledith folk un-to felicitee.

What is seen must always be the outcome of much that is unseen.

Generally speaking, the best people nowadays go into journalism, the second best into business, the rubbish into politics and the shits into law

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
And some are treasured for their markings –
They cause the eyes to melt
Or the body to shriek without pain.

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