Quotes by British Authors - Page 111

Tom's contemptuous conception of a girl included the attribute of being unfit to walk in dirty places.
George Eliot
He told me he was used to getting what he wanted.
Celia Conrad
...they were no more than steaks served up to portly politicians who controlled the personnel departments of the TV stations. (Showgirls in Italy)
Tobias Jones
This myth of meritocracy and equal opportunities encourages individualism over collective action, because when people believe this myth, they obviously see no need for protest movements around particular classes or identities, such as the Women's Movement or the Civil Rights workplace, education or in their personal lives, they are more likely to blame themselves, rather than sexism, racism, class oppression or homophobia; concepts which in current society are often seen as out of date. This type of blame even applies to experiences of actual violence or harassment with too many people believing that it is their fault if they are sexually harassed in the workplace or at school, abused by a partner or are a victim of sexual violence. Our society encourages this view, and in turn, that keeps people isolated and alone, rather than providing them the opportunity to get involved in collective struggles against such common experiences.
Finn Mackay
Men in particular,” he went on, stating the loathsome truth, “are given a fair amount of leeway in the public eye.
Lucy Parker
She was wise enough to hold her tongue. As this is the only instance known of a Woman's ever having done so, it was judged worthy to be recorded here.
Matthew Lewis
You may have learned from your mother or any other hunted woman. Smiling at devils is a useful learned thing. Swallowing discomfort down in spades. Holding it tight in your belly. Ageing on the inside only. Keeping it forever sexy.
Yrsa Daley-Ward
He certainly is very charming, but he makes me feel slightly ill at ease—almost as if I were a woman manquée, if there could be such a thing—you know, something lacking in me.""Oh, well, that's hardly his fault.""No," Dulcie agreed. "Mine, of course.
Barbara Pym
Women are silenced by both the invisibility and the acceptability of the problem.
Laura Bates
One of the cleverest and most insidious twists in the whole sorry tale is the way women are double bound by a gender-biased definition of professionalism and the threat of being labeled "whining.
Laura Bates
Sexism is often an invisible problem. This is partly because it's so frequently manifest in situations where the only witnesses present are victim and perpetrator.
Laura Bates
The incidents that go unwitnessed definitely help to keep sexism off the radar, and unacknowledged problem we don't discuss. But so too do the regular occurrences that hide in plain sight, within a society that has normalized sexism and allowed it to become so ingrained that we no longer notice or object to it. Sexism is a socially acceptable prejudice and everybody is getting in on the act.
Laura Bates
Our experiences of all forms of gender prejudice - from daily sexism to distressing harassment to sexual violence - are part of a continuum that impacts all of us, all the time, shaping ourselves, and our ideas about the world. To include stories of assault and rape within a project documenting everyday experiences of gender imbalance is simply to extend its boundaries to the most extreme manifestations of that prejudice. To see how great the damage can become when the minor, "unimportant" issues are allowed to pass without comment. To prove how the steady drip-drip-drip of sexism and sexualization and objectification is connected to the assumption of ownership and control over women's bodies, and how the background noise of harassment and disrespect connects to the assertion of power that is violence and rape.
Laura Bates
The more stories I heard, the more I tried to talk about the problem. And yet time and time again I found myself coming up against the same response: Sexism doesn't exist anymore. Women are equal now, more or less. You career girls these days have the best of all worlds - what more do you want? Think about the women in other countries dealing with real problems, people told me - you women in the West have no idea how lucky you are. You have "gilded lives"! You're making a fuss about nothing. You're overreacting. You're uptight, or frigid. You need to learn to take a joke, get a sense of humor, light up...You really need to learn to take a compliment.
Laura Bates
When we suggest victims can stop rape, we also (however unintentionally) imply that rape is an inevitable aspect of life rather than an action deliberately carried out by a perpetrator.
Laura Bates
As long as we as a society continue to belittle and dismiss women's accounts, disbelieve and question their stories, and blame them for their own assaults, we are playing right into the hands of those who silence victims by asking: "who would believe you anyways?".
Laura Bates
The very fact that it is necessary in the twenty-first century to explain why it's not okay to publicly debate whether or not women are "asking" for sexual assault is mind-boggling.
Laura Bates
This combination of ageism and sexism was also blatant in the Boston Herald's treatment of sixty-three-year-old Elizabeth Warren, whose 2012 Senate bid it sought to undermine by repeatedly dubbing her "Granny" in its pages, as if to imply that an older woman could not possibly be trusted with political responsibility.
Laura Bates
One day, in the very early months of the project, I read several entries in a single week from girls who had been subjected to leering and shouting from men in the street while walking home from school in their uniforms. Dismayed, I posted a question on Twitter: Surely, I asked, this couldn't be a common occurrence? By the end of the day, a deluge of hundreds of tweets had confirmed that the experience was not only common but almost ubiquitous.
Laura Bates
Girls are not only being denied access to scientific and adventurous toys, they're also presented with such a narrow range of options that domesticity and stereotypically "female" duties are shoved down their throats before they've even reached the age of five.
Laura Bates
Disbelief is the first great silencer.
Laura Bates
Inside the (Domestic) Sphere women did things which weren't too demanding like childcare, scrubbing the floor, washing the sheets and curtains, sewing on buttons, and coalmining.
Jacky Fleming
Anyone who calls you "little lady" has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to.
Neil Gaiman
You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women.
Neil Gaiman
Anyway, it's like with bikes,' said the first speaker authoritatively. 'I thought I was going to get this bike with seven gears and one of them razorblade saddles and purple paint and everything, and they gave me this light blue one. With a basket. A girl's bike.''Well. You're a girl,' said one of the others.'That's sexism, that is. Going around giving people girly presents just because they're a girl.
Terry Pratchett
The girls were expected to grow up to be somebody's wife. They were also expected to read and write, those being considered soft indoor jobs that were too fiddly for the boys.
Terry Pratchett
A womanly occupation means, practically, an occupation that a man disdains.
George Gissing
Guy welcomed my breasts warmly. He hugged them like long-lost friends and stared at them with the protectiveness of a mother lion, as if to make sure they didn't decide to get up on their own and leave the two of us alone together in his office. He waved them into a chair and asked if they would like anything to drink. On their behalf, I ordered Perrier.
Ally O'Brien
You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.
John Berger
A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.
Peter Shaffer
In the old days he had clutched life with such violence that the juice of it ran out between his fingers and was lost, but now he would touch it delicately, thankful for the good and accepting the ills with patience.
Elizabeth Goudge
Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dess? I though that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. "We must see all scars as beauty. OKay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on dying. A scar means, I survivied.
Chris Cleave
For a second, my hand touched yours, but that second is gone, and cannot be seen, heard or felt ever again. This second is gone, too, the moment in which I spoke by your side. It is dead. Let it die.
Claire North
For love, as she knew it now, was something without shame and without reserve, the possession of two people who had no barrier between them, and no pride; whatever happened to him would happen to her too, all feeling, all movement, all sensation of body and of mind.
Daphne du Maurier
Spiritual counselling is helping people find the deep root of stillness in themselves, which is also a connection to everything else.
Jay Woodman
Before passing through the gates of a town I've never visited, I take a minute to salute its saints - the dead and the living, the known and the hidden. Never in my life have I arrived at a new place without getting the blessing of its saints first. It makes no difference to me whether that place belongs to Muslims, Christians, or Jews. I believe that the saints are beyond such trivial nominal distinctions. A saint belongs to all humanity.
Elif Shafak
no life of faith can be lived privately. There must be an overflow into the lives of others.
G.K. Chesterton
Ye cannot live for yourselves; a thousand fibres connect you with your fellow-men, and along those fibres, as along sympathetic threads, run your actions as causes, and return to you as effects.
Henry Melvill
Free to move, speak, extemporize, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, an exploration there, but we are brought round full circle to face again the single immutable fact --
Tom Stoppard
Only connect!
E.M. Forster
The glow of the steetlamps sat heavy and thick above me. As I walked aimlessly, in the direction of downtown, I returned to my theories. That Mizuko and I shared the pictorial equivalent of DNA. That a sympathetic magic existed between us, no matter how far apart we were pulled. That we defied physical laws of time and space, waves, gravity, the rules laid down by physicists which governed our physical universe (earthquakes, tsunamis) and physical bodies. And yet somehow our connection had led to the opposite of intimacy. My search had led to its opposite. I had never felt so isolated and disconnected, even from myself.
Olivia Sudjic
Never stop loving yourself, for how can you truly love someone if you don't love yourself first. And never be afraid to love, for it is one of the most beautiful uglist things of this world.
Adrian Ross
When you read my texts, you saw a curt, miserable git. And you told me so. Maybe you're right. But you know what I saw when I read yours? - SamNo. And I don't want to know. - PoppyI saw a girl who races to help others but doesn't help herself. And right now you need to help yourself. No one should walk up the aisle feeling inferior or in a different league or trying to be something they're not. - Sam
Sophie Kinsella
If you have hung yourself out to dry, it means that you are still wet behind the ears.
Anthony T.Hincks
Be yourself!What harm can it do?
Anthony T.Hincks
Be yourself! Now that would be different!
Anthony T.Hincks
If you want to be unique.Just be yourself.
Anthony T.Hincks
You have to look at yourself objectively. Analyze yourself like an instrument. You have to be absolutely frank with yourself. Face your handicaps, don't try to hide them. Instead, develop something else.
Audrey Hepburn
Deeds of endurance, which seem ordinary in philosophy, are rare in conduct.
Thomas Hardy
The street is no longer measured by meters but by corpses ... Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those scorching howling bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure.
Max Hastings
I have broken where I should have bent; and have mused and brooded, when my spirit should have mixed with all God's great creation. The men who learn endurance, are they who call the whole world, brother. I have turned from the world, and I pay the penalty.
Charles Dickens
We have a calling: a need to be close to Nature, where she may cleanse our souls and wash away the stresses of yesterday. It is emotional recompense for the cost of living.
Fennel Hudson
Faster and faster they raced, but no one got hot or tired or out of breath.
C.S. Lewis
I guessed life was like that. You gained and you lost, and if you saved anything from the ruins, even if only a shred of self-respect, it was enough to take you through the next bit.
Dick Francis
Fly (poem from the book Blue Bridge)Delicate, / butterfly winged, / we vainly push against the sky, / each trying to find our place.Yes, we are going to die, / let's not beat about the bush. / Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, / maybe even years from now. Meanwhile, / we have someone who loves us, / someone to love. / Surely there is no need to hesitate.
Jay Woodman
Whatever he knows of his weaknesses, Private Mulvaney is wholly ignorant of his strength.
Rudyard Kipling
Surely she had endured enough for one evening without having to listen to intelligent conversation?
Stella Gibbons
Explorers like to pretend that they are a select breed of people with iron nerve and an ability to endure terrible hardship.
Tahir Shah
Here have I come to die,' he said, 'and where else could I ask to die but in your arms?
Roger Lancelyn Green
My parents had told me that I would not really die, not the real me: that nobody really died, when they died; that my kitten and the opal miner had just taken new bodies and would be back again, soon enough.
Neil Gaiman