British Author Quotes

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

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.

Spring is come home with her world-wandering feet, And all things are made young with your desires.

Francis Thompson

There are only these: sparkling eyes, smudged lipstick, fading starlight, the crunching of feet on gravel, laughter, and a slow walk home.

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

For most people, honesty is such an unusual departure from their standard modus operandi - such an abherration in their workaday mendacity - that they feel obliged to alert you when a moment of sincerity is coming on.

Oh dear,' said Eddie. 'We'd better hurry. Tinto, call me a cab.' All right,' said Tinto. 'You're a cab.

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

Young people who need a love potion very seldom have five thousand dollars. If they had they would not need a love potion.

John Collier (fiction writer)

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

Reason is necessarily the language of moral, political, and scientific argument: not because reason is holy or on some elevated plane, but because it isn't; because it is accessible to all humans; because, as well as working, it can be seen to work.

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

Paul Stewart (writer)

If the electrician who comes to mend my fuse blows it instead, so I should stop having electricity? I should cut off my light? Socialism is my light, can you understand that?

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

It's not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone with them.

Isabel Colegate

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

William Chamberlayne

I'd rather live precariously in my own office than comfortably in somebody else's.

You emerge from tragedy equipped against lies. After the musical, you're anybody's fool

The within is ceaselessly becoming the without. From the state of a man's heart doth proceed the conditions of his life; his thoughts blossom into deeds, and his deeds bear the fruitage of character and destiny.

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

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

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

As I go musing through this mournful land
Soothed by the pine-tree's solemn harmony,
Thy well-loved image comes and walks by me.
I seem to hold thee by the gentle hand
And talk of things I dimly understand,
That thy dear spirit set to mine may be
As to an intricate lock the simple key.

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

Angela Thirkell

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

Richard Flecknoe