British Author Quotes

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?

For us creatures of a day the mountains stand fast.

Douglas Freshfield

The tranquil current of domestic happiness affords no materials for narrative.

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

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

Strange to the world, he wore a bashful look, The fields his study, nature was his book.

Robert Bloomfield

There are some words that once spoken will split the world in two. There would be the life before you breathed them and then the altered life after they'd been said. They take a long time to find, words like that. They make you hesitate. Choose with care. Hold on to them unspoken for as long as you can just so your world will stay intact.

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

Not a single other creature in all the history of the world has been just as ourselves. Not another will be like us.

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

R. Austin Freeman

Expression, child of soul! I fondly trace
Thy strong enchantment, when the poet's lyre,
The painter's pencil cathch thy sacred fire,
And beauty wakes for thee her touching grace

Helen Maria Williams

How sad that we can now go up in aeroplanes and see that there are no gods upon the clouds.

Gavin Pretor-Pinney

Doctors don't know a thing. These diseases that people [who travel there] get in India, they're not physical, they're purely psychic. We only get them because we try to resist India — because we shut ourselves up in our little Western egos and don't want to give ourselves.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Strew your gladness on earth's bed,
So be merry, so be dead.

Charles Hamilton Sorley

Adventure must be held in delicate fingers. It should be handled, not embraced. It should be sipped, not swallowed at a gulp.

Music comes from an icicle as it melts, to live again as spring water.

Henry Williamson

It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas.

Christopher Fowler

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

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

Anthony McGowan

Last night I had rinsed out my sari strip and briefs in the sea. I walked down naked to where they hung in the branches of the silvery leafed tree beside the creek. Underneath the lazy sensuality of a luxurious stretch from toes to nose I felt the strong unequivocal demand of my blood. I hugged myself for a moment watching the grey light yield to dawn through half-closed eyes.

I saw the radiant Queen of Night
Walking in brightness through the sky...

Charlotte Elliott

Everyone should find something they love doing. Then work isn't work. It's a part of themselves. Of who they are.

Paul J. McAuley

You have no idea, sir, how difficult it is to be the victim of benevolence.

Jane Aiken Hodge

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

John Drinkwater

I'd rather be in trouble for having done something than for not having done anything.