British Novelist Quotes

Is it for you to forgive me? Is it for me to forgive you? Is it for God to forgive us all, and for what? Where there's no judging on one side or the other, there's no forgiveness wanted.

E. Arnot Robertson

But what was a body? Dust, dung, urine, itches. It was the light within which was important, and it was not significant if that light endured after death, or if the soul was blinded eternally in the endless night of the suspired flesh.

Taylor Caldwell

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

All the soppy talk about the inner child has not laid to rest deep fantasies about the inner ogre.

To be sympathetic without discrimination is so very debilitating.

If we win the Welsh Heartland, then we win Wales; if we lose the Welsh Heartland, it is not Wales that we win.

One doesn't love any of the things of Summer as much as one does the things of Spring.

Anne Douglas Sedgwick

Farewell to Thee! But not farewell To all my fondest thoughts of Thee; Within my heart they still shall dwell And they shall cheer and comfort me.

There is always a pleasure in unravelling a mystery, in catching at the gossamer clue which will guide to certainty.

Elizabeth Gaskell

I assure you my professions never go beyond my intentions...

Elizabeth Inchbald

We approached our new microwave oven with the trepidation of two people returning to a reactor station after a leak.

There's an argument for saying that brave men deserve what they get, but it's a serious business forcing cowards to stand in harm's way.

I mucked about with his hair. His shoes
were where he left them. His shoes are where he
left them.

As Romeo and Juliet found to their cost, marriage is never just about two people falling in love, it is about families.

Dim loneliness came imperceivably into the fields and he turned back. The birds piped oddly; some wind was caressing the higher foliage, turning it all one way, the way home. Telegraph poles ahead looked like half-used pencils; the small cross on the steeple glittered with a sharp and shapely permanence.

You won't regret the men you never killed, but you will regret the women you passed up.

Bernard Cornwell

There is one class of mind that loves to lean on rules and definitions, and another that discards them as far as possible. A faddist will generally ask for a definition of faddism, and one who is not a faddist will be impatient of being asked to give one.

Samuel Butler (novelist)

I give you my solemn vow to be your faithful partner in sickness and in health, to stand by your side in good times and in bad, to share your joy as well as your sorrow... I promise to love you unconditionally, to support you in your goals and dreams, to honor and respect you, to laugh with you and cry with you, to share my hopes and dreams with you, and bring you solace in times of need... And to cherish you for as long as we both shall live.

A man who so much resembled a Baked Alaska—sweet, warm and gungy on the outside, hard and cold within.

Of C. P. Snow

Guests stay where you've put them, and carry on doing whatever you suggested they do, until you suggest they stop and do something else. If you leave them drinking a cup of tea and looking through your holiday slides, they're supposed to sit tight till you ask them to come and string beans in your kitchen.

A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all.

Give me the comma of imperfect striving, thus to find zest in the immediate living. Ever the reaching but never the gaining, ever the climbing but never the attaining of the mountain top.

This skin, this hair, all this outside stuff. It isn't me. It's just my package. It's like the wrapper around the sweet; it isn't the sweet itself. What we really are is all inside the package. All our feelings. All our good moods and bad moods. All our ideas, our cleverness, our love, that's what a person really is. It's called a spirit.

Colin Cotterill

I suppose as long as novels last, and authors aim at interesting their public, there must always be in the story a virtuous and gallant hero; a wicked monster, his opposite; and a pretty girl, who finds a champion. Bravery and virtue conquer beauty; and vice, after seeming to triumph through a certain number of pages, is sure to be discomfited in the last volume, when justice overtakes him, and honest folks come by their own.

William Makepeace Thackeray

Sometimes human nature can leave you looking just a little shamefaced.