British Novelist Quotes

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

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

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

Elizabeth Gaskell

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.

It is universally allowed that, though nothing can be more interesting in itself than the conversation of two lovers, yet nothing can be more insipid in detail - just as the heavenly fragrance of the rose becomes vapid and sickly under all the attempts made to retain and embody its exquisite odor.

Susan Edmonstone Ferrier

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

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

Of C. P. Snow

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

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

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

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.

Being alone in our present society raises an important question about identity and well-being.

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

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.

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

To define a man: he must be a creature who makes me feel that I am a woman.

We only have one life to live, and must go on with it to the end, that if we feel it is meaningless, then we ourselves must give it meaning.

It is the rank and file - the average woman - for whom the world has opened up so astonishingly.

Mary Augusta Ward

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

My idea of marriage, as of every other partnership,... is that each member shall contribute to it his or her personality, unrepressed and uncoerced. Thus, and only thus, we obtain the most complex synthesis possible, which may well surpass in beauty, as it surely does in interest and human value, the separate elements of such an association.

Phyllis Bentley

The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that.

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.

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

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

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