English Author Quotes

Only fools wait when their enemies are coming, to see if they may prove to be friends.

Philippa Gregory

Threadbare his songs seem now, to lettered ken: They were worn threadbare next the hearts of men.

So Orpheus did for his owne bride,
So I unto my selfe alone will sing,
The woods shall to me answer and my Eccho ring.

Somehow love gives even to a dull man the knowledge of his lover's heart.

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

A journalist who has to borrow a typewriter is bad news.

The difficult art I was attempting had, indeed a powerful fascination, before which the past faded, the future receded, and the whole of experience narrowed down to this stretch of glancing, glimmering water, and the fly I was trying to cast across it.

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

It is sweet to see how soon a spring becomes a rill, and a rill runs on into a rivulet, and a rivulet swells into a brook; and before one has time to say 'what are you at?' - before the first tree it ever spoke to is a dummy, or the first hill it ever ran down has turned blue, here we all have airs and graces, demands and assertions of a full grown river.

R. D. Blackmore

Maybe we all want to burn off across the horizon, into space, perhaps, to take off into some unknown territory and meet ourselves out there.

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.

A little common sense, goodwill, and a tiny dose of unselfishness could make this goodly earth into an earthly paradise.

Richard Aldington

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!

Things get shaped straight and thin for reasons of aerodynamics. Missiles and skyscrapers are shaped the way they are on the soundest principles of engineering, not as monuments to the dick. In fact, so is the dick. The dick is shaped like a dick because that is the most efficient shape for a dick to be. That's why it's dick shaped. I mean a dick shaped like a table would cause all sorts of practical spatial problems.

Most grown people are like icebergs, three-tenths showing, seven-tenths submerged - that is why a collision with one of them is unexpectedly hurtful...

We must go for a day in the country and when surrounded by the gay twittering of the birds and the smell of the cows I will lay my suit at her feet and he waved his arm wildly at the gay thought.

The world is full of people slandering their birthplaces, as if they really believe that small-town life is different elsewhere.

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

Words are the gateway to reality, the means by which we engage with the objective truth beyond ourselves.

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.

It takes strength to be proud of yourself and to accept yourself when you know that you have something out of the ordinary about you.

Abigail Tarttelin

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

Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,
And nought is everything and everything is nought.

And if thought and emotion can persist in this way so long after the brain that sent them forth has crumpled into dust, how vitally important it must be to control their very birth in the heart, and guard them with the keenest possible restraint.

Algernon Blackwood

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

Dick King-Smith