British Author Quotes

My mother bids me bind my hair
With bands of rosy hue,
Tie up my sleeves with ribbons rare,
And lace my bodice blue.

We bar girls don't cheat on wives, we are just the rope that cheating husbands hang themselves with.

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.

Should we miss but a tree where we used to be playing,
Or find the wood cut where we sauntered a-Maying,—
If the yew-seat's away, or the ivy's a-wanting,
We hate the fine lawn and the new-fashioned planting.
Each thing called improvement seems blackened with crimes,
If it tears up one record of blissful old times.

Susanna Blamire

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.

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.

Nobody hopped into a wardrobe to find Narnia; they hopped in, thinking it was just a wardrobe. They didn't climb up the Faraway Tree, knowing it was a Faraway Tree; they thought it was just a really big tree. Harry Potter thought he was a normal boy; Mary Poppins was supposed to be a regular nanny. It's the first and only rule. Magic comes when you're not looking for it

The heart is like an instrument whose strings Steal magic music from Life's mystic frets.

Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm.

I know heaps of quotations, so I can always make quite a fair show of knowledge.

People should always mind their own business. More trouble is caused in this world by interference than any other single thing.

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

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

Then we shall rise
And view ourselves with clearer eyes
In that calm region where no night
Can hide us from each other's sight.

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.

And this was your Cradle? Why, surely, my Jenny,
Such cozy dimensions go clearly to show
You were an exceedingly small pickaninny,
Some nineteen or twenty short summers ago.

Frederick Locker-Lampson

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.

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

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

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.

It is not, in fact, cookery books that we need half so much as cooks really trained to a knowledge of their duties.

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)

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

Love is a wonderful thing, my dear, but it leaves you wide open for blackmail.