English Author Quotes

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

Philippa Gregory

This life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant.

The loves that meet in Paradise shall cast out fear, And Paradise hath room for you and me and all.

Christina Rossetti

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

Light was first
Through the Lord's word Named day:
Beauteous, bright creation!

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

The poet is always concerned with achieving a balance between the inner and the outer world; it is his business to hold in a single thought reality and justice.

Michael Roberts

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.

Tell me the old, old story
Of unseen things above,
Of Jesus and his glory,
Of Jesus and his love.

Katherine Hankey

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.

Epitaph:

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

John Maxwell Edmonds

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.

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

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