British Novelist Quotes

People's lives are often other than they seem to be on the surface. And sometimes, what's underneath and hidden is the best part of all, the part of real value.

Belonging is a contested state. Home is a place riddled with vexing questions.

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.

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.

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

Science fiction is essentially a kind of fiction in which people learn more about how to live in the real world, visiting imaginary worlds unlike our own, in order to investigate by way of pleasurable thought-experiments how things might be done differently.

Brian Stableford

This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can't get fresh fruit in the shops.

He that feareth is a slave, were he never so rich, were he never so powerful. But he that is without fear is king of all the world.

Eric Rücker Eddison

Twenty years is, after all, a long time. We are not the same people we were. Old friends, lovers, even family members: they are strangers who happen to wear a familiar face. We have no right to claim to know anyone after such a distance.

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.

It is strange that people train themselves so carefully to go to waste so prematurely

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.

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

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

Robert Hugh Benson

Several large, artificial constructions are approaching us, ZORAC announced after a short pause. The designs are not familiar, but they are obviously the products of intelligence. Implications: we have been intercepted deliberately by a means unknown, for a purpose unknown, and transferred to a place unknown by a form of intelligence unknown. Apart from the unknowns, everything is obvious.

Words are the birds that break cover and show your enemy where you're hiding.

Mike Carey (writer)

Most people, looking back at their childhood, see it as a misty country half-forgotten or only to be remembered through an evocative sound or scent, but some episodes of those short years remain clear and brightly coloured like a landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

D. E. Stevenson

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

The brilliant escape, the funny line to cap it, despite the lack of timing. And the girl was still dead. The last act had not materialised. The world, and himself, remained so far from what they should be: so imperfect.

My love for my father has never been touched or approached by any other love. I hold him in my heart of hearts as a man apart from all other men, as one apart from all other beings.

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

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

You have no idea, sir, how difficult it is to be the victim of benevolence.

Jane Aiken Hodge

I'd rather be in trouble for having done something than for not having done anything.

So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.