British Novelist Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

I have a work presently in the Press named 'Six Months in Hell' which you may one day read. I consider it will be worth perusing, bruising badly the morals of Britain and America, while Royalty, clergy, critics, society and bloodhounds of law must all incur its censure.

Amanda McKittrick Ros

The ultimate purpose of Zen,' I remembered the roshi telling me, 'is not in the going away from the world but in the coming back. Zen is not just a matter of gaining enlightenment; it's a matter of acting in a world of love and compassion.

If sexual experiences were theoretically minimal, social expectations were on the contrary great. Once there was a Drag Hunt Ball just outside Oxford, to which I had unaccountably failed to be asked. I asked God to so something about it, and God recklessly killed poor King George VI, as a result of which the Hunt Ball was cancelled.

Freedom came in strange forms and from unexpected directions.

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.

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

Gerald Gardner (Wiccan)

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.

To offer a man friendship when love is in his heart is like giving a loaf of bread to one who is dying of thirst.

Frank Frankfort Moore

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

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

Of C. P. Snow

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

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.