British Novelist Quotes

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

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

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!

America was the worst place in the world in which to fail, fall sick, get old or die, because then your problems had crystallised into the unforgivable sin. Failure.

At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - relief or despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking - 'wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant!

Gareth Roberts (writer)

If you give a man a fish, he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish, you do him a good turn.

Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie

I didn't have time to lose it. I didn't have time to lie down in the corner shop and scream and beat the floor until my hands bled. I didn't have time to miss Jack. Stroma kept on chattering away and getting excited over novelty spaghetti shapes and finding the joy in every little thing, and it occurred to me even then that she was probably looking after me, too.

Jenny Valentine

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

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

Elizabeth Gaskell

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

The games that white folk play on blacks are straightforward enough and well documented; the games that black folk play on whites are equally obvious. But the games that black folk play on one another! Well, that's something else again.

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.

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

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

Jane Green (author)

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

Oh, love. Love is best of all. There is no such total element, not even pain. Who has ever loved, knows this. I need not say more.

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)

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.

There were also the razor marks on her wrists and forearms, half a dozen per arm, not very deep, not very convincing really, just a lame, hapless attempt at hurting herself. There hadn't even been that much blood and nobody at the hospital had been at all surprised. These scars, for some reason, he didn't mind. Maybe they even appealed to him. They showed that she was weak and in need of him.

Geoff Nicholson

You can even get used to having a hole in your life where someone used to live. A hole where you thought they'd live for always, except that one day they just step sideways, without looking back or saying good-bye, and vanish forever.

Lies are easy to believe in but the truth sounds false.

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

Mary Cholmondeley

Money trials are not the hardest, and somehow or other, they are always overcome.

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

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