English Author Quotes

Like an ambassador that beds a queen
With the nice caution of a sword between.

Epitaph:

Went the day well? we died and never knew;
But well or ill, England, we died for you.

John Maxwell Edmonds

The first men that our Saviour dear
Did choose to wait upon him here,
Blest fishers were; and fish the last
Food was, that he on earth did taste:
I therefore strive to follow those
Whom he to follow him hath chose.

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

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

There is a word in Old English which belongs wholly to that civilization - "dustsceawung," meaning contemplation of dust. It is a true image of the Anglo-Saxon mind, or at least an echo of that consciousness which considered transcience and loss to be part of the human estate; it was a world in which life was uncertain and the principal diety was fate or destiny or "wyrd."

Immense as Whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful calm trouble the Ocean till it boyl...

William Davenant

Astronomy is certainly an alluring science; set an astronomer before a telescope, and an overwhelming attraction draws his soul away through the tube up into heaven, and leaves his body without mundane interests.

Sabine Baring-Gould

Stories never really end. They can go on and on and on. It's just that sometimes, at a certain point, one stops telling them.

Mary Norton (author)

Her beauty, passive in despair, Through sand and seaweed shone, The fairest jelly-fish I e'er Had set mine eyes upon. It would have made a stone abuse The callousness of fate, This creature of prismatic hues, Stranded and desolate!

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

Elizabeth Thomas

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

Then he looked by him, and was ware of a damsel that came riding as fast as her horse might gallop upon a fair palfrey. And when she espied that Sir Lanceor was slain, then she made sorrow out of measure, and said, O Balin ! two bodies hast thou slain and one heart, and two hearts in one body, and two souls thou hast lost.

Is it not easy to conceive the World in your Mind? To think the Heavens fair? The Sun Glorious? The Earth fruitful? The Air Pleasant? The Sea Profitable? And the Giver bountiful? Yet these are the things which it is difficult to retain. For could we always be sensible of their use and value, we should be always delighted with their wealth and glory.

Thomas Traherne

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.

Whoso maintains that I am humbled now
(Who wait the Awful Day) is still a liar;
I hope to meet my Maker brow to brow
And find my own the higher.

Frances Cornford

There's nothing wrong with sexual feelings in themselves, so long as they are straightforward and not sneaking or sly. The right sort of sex stimulus is invaluable to human daily life. Without it the world grows grey.

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.

He that upon a true principle lives, without any disquiet of thought, may be said to be happy.

Roger L'Estrange

A quack is as fit for a pimp as a midwife for a bawd: they are still but in their way, both helpers of nature.

William Wycherley

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

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.

A beautiful envelope for mortality, presenting a glittering and polished exterior, the appearance of which gives no certain indication of the real value of what is contained therein.

Clara Lucas Balfour

But thou mayst grant this humble prayer,
Forget me not! forget me not!

A little of what you like does you good. But you can have too much of a good thing.

Dick King-Smith