English Novelist Quotes

Humans cannot fly, but they can get the flying feeling. All they need to do is go out at night into a wild storm where the thunder roars like applause and the lightning throws itself in daggers of light at your bare feet and you suddenly find you are not afraid.

Skullion had little use for contraceptives at the best of times. Unnatural, he called them, and placed them in the lower social category of things along with elastic-sided boots and made-up bow-ties. Not the sort of attire for a gentleman.

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

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

But while our parting was mutually acceptable and even expedient, still it was painful. And I would like to think it hurt both of us, for I certainly felt it: a wrenching inside, like some small but improbably necessary organ was no longer in there, that it was missing, torn or fallen out. And at the time I'd thought that was the end of it; what was missing was gone forever

But truth, that dangerous commodity, has a way of sticking...

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

Oh why was I born for this time? Before one is thirty to know more dead than living people.

Lady Cynthia Asquith

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.

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.

Sometimes I feel that I am destined always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs. That God has made me the victim of some cosmic practical joke, by assigning me little more than a walk-on part in my own life. Or sometimes I feel that my role is simply to be a spectator to other people's stories, and always to wander away at the most important moment, drifiting into the kitchen to make a cup of tea just as the denouement unfolds.

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.

For true happiness, sane enjoyment, you must look to the country, not town. Only you want one true heart beside you with which to enjoy it!

Ellen Buckingham Mathews

Her own excited feelings had magnified it in length, and breadth, and height — had made a molehill into a mountain...

Ellen Wood (author)

A circus here, a circus there; here today, gone tomorrow. Big Brother watching you. Fear eats the soul.

But it is hard, whatever you have endured, to give up on love. Hard to stop thinking of it as a home you might one day find again. More than hard

Andrew Miller (novelist)

A writer's work may be a coded autobiography, but only a very close friend could decipher it.

People only know what you tell them.And it was true.People gave out their whole life stories to anyone and everyone without a second's thought.Stand at a bus stop, sit in a strange pub, get banged up, and someone would always give you their life story.It was as if they were trying to prove they existed

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

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

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

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

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!

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