British Author Quotes

Though he might be more humble, there is no police like Holmes.

'Tis hard we should be by the men despised,
Yet kept from knowing what would make us prized;
Debarred from knowledge, banished from the schools,
And with the utmost industry bred fools.

Lady Mary Chudleigh

Sometimes journeys begin long before their first step is taken

Tell England, ye who pass this monument,
We died for her, and here we rest content.

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.

The fool that eats till he is sick must fast till he is well.

George Walter Thornbury

Be careful how you talk about God. He's the only God we have. If you let him go he won't come back. He won't even look back over his shoulder. And then what will you do?

He had made one mistake in an otherwise flawless performance: he hadn't told me his name. Have you ever exchanged three words with an American without being told his name?

Kyril Bonfiglioli

And I wasn't a journalist any more than I was a trained nurse.

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

We, who have had tender, perfect mothers, would like to make it law that the other kind should always be called 'she-parents,' or 'female progenitors,' or any other descriptive title, but not profane the sacred name of mother!

Florence L. Barclay

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

I shall not say why and how I became, at the age of fifteen, the mistress of the Earl of Craven.

Harriette Wilson

But I didn't dare. That has always been my trouble. I've never dared enough.

Michael Morpurgo

Embla lies with each thing,
Ask looks and knows.
Understanding
without explanation
they depart and separate.

John Carder Bush

War is only glorious when you buy it in the Daily Mail and enjoy it at the breakfast table. It goes splendidly with bacon and eggs. Real war is the final limit of damnable brutality, and that's all there is in it.

G. A. Studdert Kennedy

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.

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.

Flee and your bad behavior will be fixed in people's minds. Return, seem in goo spirits, and everyone will doubt their own memory of events.

Believe that we too love freedom and desire it. To us it is more desirable than anything in the world. If you strike us down now, we shall rise again and renew the fight. You cannot conquer Ireland you cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom: if our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom then our children will win it with a better deed.

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

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.