British Novelist Quotes

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.

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

I give you my solemn vow to be your faithful partner in sickness and in health, to stand by your side in good times and in bad, to share your joy as well as your sorrow... I promise to love you unconditionally, to support you in your goals and dreams, to honor and respect you, to laugh with you and cry with you, to share my hopes and dreams with you, and bring you solace in times of need... And to cherish you for as long as we both shall live.

At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - relief or despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking - 'wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant!

Gareth Roberts (writer)

They strip-searched me!" he burst out. "Me! Old enough to be their grandfather and they made me stand naked in the road, my things all unpacked in the mud!

Tell England, ye who pass this monument,
We died for her, and here we rest content.

Sometimes journeys begin long before their first step is taken

O, to bring back the great Homeric time, The simple manners and the deed sublime: When the wise Wanderer, often foiled by Fate, Through the long furrow drave the ploughshare straight.

Mortimer Collins

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

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

Elizabeth Inchbald

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

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

English country life is more like Chekhov than The Archers or Thomas Hardy or even the Updike ethic with which it is sometimes compared.

The tranquil current of domestic happiness affords no materials for narrative.

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

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

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

Gerald Gardner (Wiccan)

One doesn't love any of the things of Summer as much as one does the things of Spring.

Anne Douglas Sedgwick

I worry sometimes that we're apt to confuse forgiveness with forgetfulness. The potency of forgiveness comes precisely from the fact that it must be done while being goaded by an unhappy memory.

I didn't have time to lose it. I didn't have time to lie down in the corner shop and scream and beat the floor until my hands bled. I didn't have time to miss Jack. Stroma kept on chattering away and getting excited over novelty spaghetti shapes and finding the joy in every little thing, and it occurred to me even then that she was probably looking after me, too.

Jenny Valentine

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

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.

And I wasn't a journalist any more than I was a trained nurse.

Flee and your bad behavior will be fixed in people's minds. Return, seem in goo spirits, and everyone will doubt their own memory of events.

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.