British Author Quotes

Glorious is the Voice of Man, and sweet is the music of the harp.

Richard Llewellyn

To what new realms of marvel, say, Will conquering science war its way?

William Cox Bennett

It isn't important what you do, it is the attitude with which you proceed through the world that matters.

It normally happens that if you put two words together, or two syllables together, one of them will attract more weight, more emphasis, than the other. In other words, most so-called spondees can be read as either iambs or trochees.

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

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.

He gets at the substance of a book directly; he tears out the heart of it.

Of Samuel Johnson

He turned then to Job, again using the King James's version. The translation from the Hebrew was narrower than the Greek but seemed more essential. It was the simple strong prose of men who believed and who were unafraid to name things.

They will come, not to paint the bay and the sea and the boots and the moors, but the warmth of the sun and the colour of the wind. A whole new concept. Such stimulation. Such vitality.

Rosamunde Pilcher

Coleridge cried; "O God, how glorious it is to live!" Renan asks, "O God, when will it be worth while to live?" In Nature we echo the poet; in the world we echo the thinker.

then bite the tongue out by the root…
and chew, never swallow.
This is not sex, remember;
you are eating the sea.

Robin Robertson

The past is for learning from and letting go. You can't revisit it. It vanishes.

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

We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun or feel the rain
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly and spent
Their lives for us loved, too, the sun and rain?

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

Do people who wave at trains Wave at the driver, or at the train itself? Or, do people who wave at trains Wave at the passengers? Those hurtling strangers, The unidentifiable flying faces?

He that feareth is a slave, were he never so rich, were he never so powerful. But he that is without fear is king of all the world.

Eric Rücker Eddison

I've given up reading the papers. Since the world's so obviously bent on killing itself, I decided months ago to sit back and let it.

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

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

The instinct to survive will never change, neither will the human body's amazing ability to endure.

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.

The weightless mosquito touches
her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, how infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches.

This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can't get fresh fruit in the shops.

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.

Pity the sorrows of a poor old man,
Whose trembling limbs have borne him to your door,
Whose days are dwindled to the shortest span;
Oh give relief, and Heaven will bless your store.