British Novelist Quotes

In the Age of Kali the meek and helpless will be preyed upon without mercy, and there will be a surplus of AK-47s.

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

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

Mary Cholmondeley

The greatest act of love was to make a tape for someone. It was the only way we could share music and it was also a way of advertising yourself. Selection, order, the lettering you used for the track list, how much technical detail you went into, whether or not you added artwork or offered only artwork and no track list at all, these choices were as codified as a Victorian bouquet.

Lavinia Greenlaw

If you tell someone a secret, and ask them to keep it secret, you are asking them to display a discretion you are unable to display yourself.

Jill Paton Walsh

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

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

Jane Green (author)

How little do they know human nature, who think they can say no to passion, so far shalt thou go, and no farther!

I've given up reading the papers. Since the world's so obviously bent on killing itself, I decided months ago to sit back and let it.

He turned then to Job, again using the King James's version. The translation from the Hebrew was narrower than the Greek but seemed more essential. It was the simple strong prose of men who believed and who were unafraid to name things.

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

Sometimes you remember your life in photographs that were never taken.

There are some words that once spoken will split the world in two. There would be the life before you breathed them and then the altered life after they'd been said. They take a long time to find, words like that. They make you hesitate. Choose with care. Hold on to them unspoken for as long as you can just so your world will stay intact.

One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fiber of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardily.

I'll tell you this, lad: A tattoo says more of a fellow looking at it than it can do of the man who's got it on his back.

Sarah Hall (writer)

When a clandestine couple kisses, it is much more likely that sex will immediately follow. This is because there is much more risk. Once you have kissed secretly, it is very difficult not to have sex. It would be impolite not to have sex. You have to show that you are serious about each other.

Unhappy people do the oddest, most terrible things, just trying to keep despair at bay. All you have to do is accept them...go around them...take evasive action.

Geraldine McCaughrean

Maybe this is a characteristic of happy people. An ability to be entertained by the world.

Everyone should find something they love doing. Then work isn't work. It's a part of themselves. Of who they are.

Paul J. McAuley

Humans crave knowledge, and when that craving ends, we are no longer human.

It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas.

Christopher Fowler

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

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

He had made one mistake in an otherwise flawless performance: he hadn't told me his name. Have you ever exchanged three words with an American without being told his name?

Kyril Bonfiglioli

Though he might be more humble, there is no police like Holmes.