British Novelist Quotes

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 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

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.

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

To be sympathetic without discrimination is so very debilitating.

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)

Give me the comma of imperfect striving, thus to find zest in the immediate living. Ever the reaching but never the gaining, ever the climbing but never the attaining of the mountain top.

Hyphens, like cats, are capable of arousing tenderness or shudders.

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

The union of the family lies in love; and love is the only reconciliation of authority and liberty.

Robert Hugh Benson

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

London is a city of clubs and private houses. You have to be a member.

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)

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

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

Elizabeth Inchbald

She touched his hand for the last time. "Oh, Karim, that we have already done. But always there was a problem between us. How can I explain? I wasn't me, and you weren't you. From the very beginning to the very end, we didn't see things. What we did—we made each other up."

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

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.

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

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.

When engaged in safe occupations, and living in healthy countries, men are much more apt to be frugal, than in unhealthy, or hazardous occupations, and in climates pernicious to human life. Sailors and soldiers are prodigals.... War and pestilence have always waste and luxury, among the other evils that follow in their train.