British Novelist Quotes

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.

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.

If we win the Welsh Heartland, then we win Wales; if we lose the Welsh Heartland, it is not Wales that we win.

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)

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

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

Of C. P. Snow

Nobody minded what you did in bed or what you said about God, a very civilized attitude in 1948.

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)

The witches are firm believers in reincarnation, and they say that 'once a witch always a witch.'

Gerald Gardner (Wiccan)

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

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

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.

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.

Dim loneliness came imperceivably into the fields and he turned back. The birds piped oddly; some wind was caressing the higher foliage, turning it all one way, the way home. Telegraph poles ahead looked like half-used pencils; the small cross on the steeple glittered with a sharp and shapely permanence.