British Novelist Quotes

J. K. Rowling

C. S. Lewis

William Makepeace Thackeray

Anne Brontë

Evelyn Waugh

Daphne du Maurier

John le Carré

Nothing now remains for us seven but to go back to Stable Hill, proclaim the truth, and take the adventure that Aslan sends us.

Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are.

Let's all pretend to be someone else, and then perhaps we'll find out who we are.

Fantasies are absolutely safe, as long as you never try to make them a reality.

Jane Green (author)

Maybe this is a characteristic of happy people. An ability to be entertained by the world.

The greatest act of love was to make a tape for someone. It was the only way we could share music and it was also a way of advertising yourself. Selection, order, the lettering you used for the track list, how much technical detail you went into, whether or not you added artwork or offered only artwork and no track list at all, these choices were as codified as a Victorian bouquet.

Lavinia Greenlaw

No, every person on this planet has darkness inside them. Buried so deep that only you know it's there when your world is coming to an end. Oh, but it's there. It's always there.

Alexander Gordon Smith

She had been the quiet, rather plain girl, with a surprisingly sharp tongue if she was put out, lovely eyes and pretty hair and a way of looking very directly at one. Now he had to admit that she had become more important to him than anyone else in the world. The idea of a future without her wasn't to be borne. She had by some mysterious metamorphosis become more beautiful than anyone else he had ever encountered.

Doesn't matter what language you speak or what clothes you wear. Some things don't change. Families. Friends. Lovers. They're the same in every city in every country in every continent of the world.

Annabel Pitcher

The union of the family lies in love; and love is the only reconciliation of authority and liberty.

Robert Hugh Benson

She touched his hand for the last time. "Oh, Karim, that we have already done. But always there was a problem between us. How can I explain? I wasn't me, and you weren't you. From the very beginning to the very end, we didn't see things. What we did—we made each other up."

Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem for the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

I'll tell you this, lad: A tattoo says more of a fellow looking at it than it can do of the man who's got it on his back.

Sarah Hall (writer)

When the loo paper gets thicker and the writing paper thinner, it's always a bad sign, at home.

English country life is more like Chekhov than The Archers or Thomas Hardy or even the Updike ethic with which it is sometimes compared.

For him the woods were a home and gave him the key Of knowledge, thirst for their treasures in herbs and flowers. The secrets held by the creatures nearer than we To earth he sought, and the link of their life with ours.

George Meredith

Oh, that in religion, as in everything else, man would judge his brother man by his own heart; and as dear, as precious as his peculiar creed may be to him, believe so it is with the faith of his brother!

I was already at an age when putting off anything was a bad idea.

The only really satisfactory confidante for your troubles is someone who enjoys them, and this inevitably cuts out anyone who actually loves you.

When you write something which comes off, it's a feeling like no other. It's like being visited by something outside yourself.

Elizabeth Jane Howard

A happy childhood is one of the best gifts that parents have it in their power to bestow.

Mary Cholmondeley

I have a work presently in the Press named 'Six Months in Hell' which you may one day read. I consider it will be worth perusing, bruising badly the morals of Britain and America, while Royalty, clergy, critics, society and bloodhounds of law must all incur its censure.

Amanda McKittrick Ros

At dawn, a railwaywoman
On a country platform whirls on the end of a chain
An irrelevant key, while a young guard makes to wipe
A crumb from her lapel; and see, she smiles
A permissory smile you take in from your corner seat:
A cameo of unrehearsed perfection.

They strip-searched me!" he burst out. "Me! Old enough to be their grandfather and they made me stand naked in the road, my things all unpacked in the mud!

Humans crave knowledge, and when that craving ends, we are no longer human.