British Novelist Quotes

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.

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.

Most men, if you just tell them what to do in a businesslike fashion, will follow directions without thinking about it. One proceeds on the assumption that they'll do as they're told, and they do.

Lynne Reid Banks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Well, I didn't need them. I didn't need anyone. I was Lola Rose. I just wished I looked more like my idea of Lola Rose.

Jacqueline Wilson

The dust comes secretly day after day,
Lies on my ledge and dulls my shining things.
But O this dust that I shall drive away
Is flowers and Kings,
Is Solomon's temple, poets, Nineveh.

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

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