English Author Quotes

Everything that I write is a kind of battle won—or lost—against silence and incoherence.

Look at everything upside down.Take absolutely nothing for granted.

Recently a young journalist came to interview me about what I was doing the day war broke out. During the course of the interview I recounted the deaths of my only brother, my husband's only brother, a brother in law and my four best friends. "So," she said, did the war affect you in any way?

Deborah Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire

Though like the wanderer,
The sun gone down,
Darkness be over me,
My rest a stone;
Yet in my dreams I'd be
Nearer, my God, to Thee.

Sarah Fuller Flower Adams

Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand.

Bits of jokes, bits of statistics, bits of foolery.

Any fool can be fussy and rid himself of energy all over the place, but a man has to have something in him before he can settle down to do nothing.

J. B. Priestley

E'er time and place were, time and place were not, When Primitive Nothing something straight begot, Then all proceeded from the great united — What.

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester

There is more evil in a drop of sin than in a sea of affliction.

The first slap-jack given me for dinner was a cake of flour, partially fried in a pan of fat bacon. I nibbled about the brown edges and threw it, unbaked, against a barn door, where it stuck for days.

Al the povere peple tho pescoddes fetten; Benes and baken apples thei broghte in hir lappe, Chibolles and chervelles and ripe chiries manye, And profrede Piers this present to plese with Hunger.

William Langland

'Qui procul hinc', the legend's writ,—
The frontier-grave is far away—
'Qui ante diem periit:
Sed miles, sed pro patria.'

Mastery in poetry consists largely in the instinct for not ruining or smothering or tinkering with moments of vision.

Thou that swing'st upon the waving haire Of some well-filled Oaten Beard, Drunke ev'ry night with a Delicious teare, Dropt thee from Heav'n, where now th'art! The joys of Earth and Ayre are thine intire, That with thy feet and wings dost hop and flye; And when thy Poppy workes, thou dost retire To thy carv'd Acorn-bed to lye.

Richard Lovelace

From marrying in haste, and repenting at leisure;
Not liking the person, yet liking his treasure:
Libera nos.

Elizabeth Thomas

Never ride your horse more than five-and-thirty miles a day, always taking more care of him than of yourself; which is right and reasonable, seeing as how the horse is the best animal of the two.

Mobile phones... they're not for communicating, they're for broadcasting. Broadcasting The Show Of Me.

The sea makes no promises and breaks none.

Lillian Beckwith

O how beautiful is morning!
How the sunbeams strike the daisies
And the kingcups fill the meadow
Like a golden-shielded army
Marching to the uplands fair.

Fair summer droops, droop men and beasts therefore: So fair a summer look for never more. All good things vanish, less than in a day, Peace, plenty, pleasure, suddenly decay. Go not yet away, bright soul of the sad year; The earth is hell when thou leav'st to appear.

Many a man has risen to eminence under the powerful reaction of his mind in fierce counter-agency to the scorn of the unworthy, daily evoked by his personal defects, who with a handsome person would have sunk into the luxury of a careless life under the tranquillizing smiles of continual admiration.

Thomas De Quincey

And the elephant sings deep in the forest-maze
About a star of deathless and painless peace
But no astronomer can find where it is.

The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,
One is nearer God's Heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on Earth.

Dorothy Frances Gurney

For parents to restrain the inclinations of their children in marriage is an usurped power.

Look in, and see Christ's chosen saint In triumph wear his Christ-like chain; No fear lest he should swerve or faint; "His life is Christ, his death is gain.