English Novelist Quotes

Possessive parents rarely live long enough to see the fruits of their selfishness.

I send thee pansies while the year is young,
Yellow as sunshine, purple as the night;
Flowers of remembrance, ever fondly sung
By all the chiefest of the Sons of Light.

I can pass days
Stretch'd in the shade of those old cedar trees,
Watching the sunshine like a blessing fall,--
The breeze like music wandering o'er the boughs,
Each tree a natural harp,--each different leaf
A different note, blent in one vast thanksgiving.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

You are not in charge of the universe; you are in charge of yourself.

There is no merit in a special talent unless its exercise is of use to others.

The only situation which might justify panic is one in which panic is likely to help. Such a situation never arises. Though pretended panic may sometimes cause a useful diversion, real panic can never be anything other than a waste of energy.

I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me--a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn't dignified doesn't worry me.

I've learned over the years that everything is more or less the same amount of work, so you may as well set your sights high and try and do something really cool.

There is a passion of reverence, almost of pity, mingling with the love of an honest man for a pure girl, which makes it the most exquisite, perhaps, of all human sentiments.

In Europe, a product must be good, or it will not sell in competition with other products; with you, it is enough to say that it is good, often enough and sufficiently loudly. The keenest competition is not in the making of things but in the advertising of them!

There will always be people for and against you, and its pointless wasting time trying to win over some of the people who are against you. Spend time with people who are for you. Those realtionships are worth it.

Everyone seems to remember with great clarity what they were doing on November 22nd, 1963, at the precise moment they heard President Kennedy was dead.

Frederick Forsyth

A man will be generally very old and feeble before he forgets how much money he has in the funds.

Anthony Trollope

A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.

It wasn't so much all the sex that robbed me of my moral bearings, but all the narcotics. I must say, there's something about opium that goes very well with lesbianism.

The trouble with Ian [Fleming] is that he gets off with women because he can't get on with them.

Rosamond Lehmann

Ainsley walked round him, shivering and rubbing his nose. The nose felt that it was running, or felt that it didn't feel it was running when it was

What has patriotism come to be but greed and false pride, when the only way it can show itself is by shedding blood to gain gold? More economic advantage, more territory, more power.

Sylvia Thompson

People always grumbled. If things went well they wanted them to go better. Give them comfort and they wanted luxuries.

Eleanor Hibbert

Kindnesses have wings and roots... wings that never droop, and roots that never die.

Mary Louisa Molesworth

Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.

To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it's ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.

Look on the grave where thou must sleep Thy last, and strongest foe; It is endurance not to weep, If that repose seem woe.

To be haunted is to glimpse a truth that might best be hidden.

There's no way out of this, it's stark: live or die. Every given moment a bubble that bursts. Step on, from one to the next, ever onwards, a rainbow of stepping stones, each bursting softly as your foot touches and passes on. Till one step finds only empty air. Till that step, live.