British Novelist Quotes

What is freedom, in the end, but that no one cares any longer to try to restrain us?

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

Law is error, you see. It's an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.

Nobody minded what you did in bed or what you said about God, a very civilized attitude in 1948.

To be sympathetic without discrimination is so very debilitating.

Freedom came in strange forms and from unexpected directions.

I worry sometimes that we're apt to confuse forgiveness with forgetfulness. The potency of forgiveness comes precisely from the fact that it must be done while being goaded by an unhappy memory.

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

Because parents are transients in the maternity care system, there is little cumulative birth experience over successive generations of mothers. Women giving birth don't make the same mistakes as their mothers or grandmothers-they make new ones.

Elizabeth Noble

The Daily Worker has been renamed The Morning Star. I find nothing starry about it. A more informative new title would have been the Daily Striker.

Rayner Heppenstall

The Jewish religion has it completely right in maintaining you should think very carefully about what you eat.

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

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

Anne Douglas Sedgwick

To offer a man friendship when love is in his heart is like giving a loaf of bread to one who is dying of thirst.

Frank Frankfort Moore

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)

There had been a frozen mist here, and the trees were spun into feathers. Their fragile brilliance made me wonder why, into the spotlessness of Creation, God had seen fit to introduce soiling, twisting, rampaging, Man.

The ultimate purpose of Zen,' I remembered the roshi telling me, 'is not in the going away from the world but in the coming back. Zen is not just a matter of gaining enlightenment; it's a matter of acting in a world of love and compassion.

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

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

Elizabeth Inchbald

I cannot remember a time when I was not enraptured or tortured by words. Always there have been words which, sometimes for their sound alone, sometimes for their sound and sense, I would not use. From a loathing of their grossness or sickliness, their weight or want of weight. Their inexactitude, their feeling of acidity or insipidity. Their action, not only on the intelligence but on the nerves, was instant...

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.