Quotes by British Authors - Page 542

I’m glad to be eating the bread of freedom even if it does taste like sponge buttered with greasy salt.
Diane Samuels
I don't want to sew.How else will the buttons get onto the coat?
Diane Samuels
We all die one day, but jewels never fade or perish. Through our children we live. That’s how we cheat death.
Diane Samuels
To some, having children may seem as conducive to travelling as having your feet set in concrete.
Jane Wilson-Howarth
All of us were once children, but only some of us remember that
Steven Aitchison
We were young, she continued, while she had a bad heart. Did we not want to earn our tips, she asked us and, cowed, we refrained from introducing the subject again.Her bad heart, I noticed, did not force her to abstain from smoking, or from eating large portions of puddings. Every time I heard her opening how she could not carry anything heavy, I thought sourly "except yourself".
Toni Maguire
No, but still it is very unpleasant to live with such unimpressible, incomprehensible creatures. You cannot love them; and if you could, your love would be utterly thrown away: they could neither return it, nor value, nor understand it.
Anne Brontë
Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,––to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow.
Charles Dickens
I finally made friends with my father when I entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am certain I had been a disappointment to him. He did not ask for a child with a book of its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done: swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy, but that was not what he had wound up with.
Neil Gaiman
Children, as I have said, use back ways and hidden paths, while adults take roads and official paths
Neil Gaiman
Oh no-"she began.It shocked her to be right. Parent's were right, not children. Children could say anything, Arriety knew and enjoy saying it- knowing always they were safe and wrong.
Mary Norton
The various forms of electromagnetic radiation were extensively proven harmful to human health decades ago. The air is electrified, the ground is electrified, the water is electrified, your metal mattress is electrified, your metal under wired bra is electrified, your children are electrified, and you are electrified. Unfortunately, we are in the electromagnetic radiation epidemic.
Steven Magee
It may be possible that Leukemia in children is linked to the location of the fuse board and the electrical meter on the home.
Steven Magee
I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies...
Neil Gaiman
Writing for children is an art in itself, and a most interesting one.
Enid Blyton
How silly men were! Their part in procreation was so unimportant; it was the woman who carried the child through long months of uneasiness and bore it with pain, and yet a man because of his momentary connection made such preposterous claims. Why should that make any difference to him in his feelings towards the child?
W Somerset Maugham
Children should never have baths,’ my grandmother said. ‘It's a dangerous habit.’‘I agree, Grandmamma.
Roald Dahl
In most stories she knows, children have a mother and a father, like Iphigenia had Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, and Helen had Leda and Zeus. Sometimes they have teachers too, but not always, and they never seem to have sergeants.
M.R. Carey
Teachers should not fear going off plan if a better learning opportunity presents itself. Plans are plans, but children are living, breathing, creative people, who deserve to have their questions answered and original ideas explored.
Adele Devine
Oh, the pain of it, thought Lee, thinking about his children, oh! the exquisite pain of unrequited love. The only authentic wound, the sweet curse they inflict on you, the revenge of heterosexuality.
Angela Carter
I might be asked, ‘Do you equally reject the approach which begins with the question “What do modern children need?” — in other words, with the moral or didactic approach?’ I think the answer is Yes. Not because I don’t like stories to have a moral: certainly not because I think children dislike a moral. Rather because I feel sure that the question ‘What do modern children need?’ will not lead you to a good moral. If we ask that question we are assuming too superior an attitude. It would be better to ask ‘What moral do I need?’ for I think we can be sure that what does not concern us deeply will not deeply interest our readers, whatever their age. But it is better not to ask the question at all. Let the pictures tell you their own moral. For the moral inherent in them will rise from whatever spiritual roots you have succeeded in striking during the whole course of your life. But if they don’t show you any moral, don’t put one in.
C.S. Lewis
If I have done anything, even a little, to help small children enjoy honest, simple pleasures, I have done a bit of good.
Beatrix Potter
Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.
Charles Lamb
There are things in this world that the children hear, but whose sounds oscillate below an adult's sense of pitch.
Edmund de Waal
USA schools know that computer electromagnetic interference (EMI) emissions, WiFi and campus cell towers are radiation poisoning the children and the government is determined to keep on doing it.
Steven Magee
Children should be able to live a life free from electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure and radio frequency (RF) radiation pollution and it is time that we all took a stand against this.
Steven Magee
Instead of turning away from them (war conditions) in instinctive horror, as people seem to expect, the child may turn towards them with primitive excitement. The real danger is not that the child, caught up all innocently in the whirlpool of war, will be shocked into illness. The danger lies in the fact that the destruction ranging in the outer world may meet the very real aggressiveness ranging in the inside of the child
Anna Freud
Sock Monsters Pay-It-Forward to offer hospitalized children a chance to smile, if only for a while!
Dalene Davies
They're like children, really. Only children are far more logical which makes it difficult sometimes with them. But these people are illogical, they want to be reassured by your telling them what they want to believe. Then they're quite happy again for a bit.
Agatha Christie
There are many who say ‘I believe this,’ but would they hold true to those beliefs if their children were threatened? No. But Genghis would. If you told him you would kill his children, he would tell you to go ahead, but realize that the cost would be infinite, that he would tear down cities and nations and the price would never be paid. He did not lie and his enemies knew it. His word was iron.
Conn Iggulden
What we bloodlessy call 'place' is to young children a wild compound of dream, spell and substance: place is somewhere they are always 'in', never 'on'.
Robert Macfarlane
The most influential of all educational factor is the conversation in a child's home.
William Temple
Political indoctrination was geared towards producing activists. The propaganda image of the ideal child was a precocious political orator mouthing agitprop. Communism could not be taught from books, educational thinkers maintained. It had to be instilled through the whole life of the school, which was in turn to be connected to the broader world of politics through extra-curricular activities, such as celebrating Soviet holidays, joining public marches, reading newspapers and organizing school debates and trials. The idea was to initiate the children into the practices, cults and rituals of the Soviet system so that they would grow up to become loyal and active Communists.
Orlando Figes
Most moderately active children – as long as they have full stomachs – cope well with exotic experiences, but parents should get fit for their trip. Young children will expect their parents to be All Powerful so they would be wise to prepare properly and arrive with toned quads or they might not keep up on the slopes.
Jane Wilson-Howarth
More children suffer from interference than from noninterference.
Agatha Christie
Child's evidence is always the best evidence there is. I'd rely on it every time. No good in court, of course. Children can't stand being asked direct questions. They mumble or else look idiotic and say they don't know. They're at their best when they're showing off.
Agatha Christie
...in those days children were rather out of fashion.
Anthony Powell
A child has an ingrained fancy for coal, not for the gross materialistic reason that it builds up fires by which we cook and are warmed, but for the infinitely nobler and more abstract reason that it blacks his fingers.
G.K. Chesterton
A small child being dragged to bed peered curiously at me as it passed, then waved. We waved back, not being entirely sure how else to respond to small creatures like that.
Kate Griffin
Down vith children! Do them in!Boil their bones and fry their skin!Bish them, sqvish them, bash them, mash them!Brrreak them, shake them, slash them, smash them!Offer chocs vith magic powder!Say “Eat up!” then say it louder.Crrram them full of sticky eats,Send them home still guzzling sveets.And in the morning little foolsGo marching off to separate schools.A girl feels sick and goes all pale.She yells, “Hey look! I've grrrown a tail!”A boy who's standing next to herScreams, “Help! I think I'm grrrowing fur!” Another shouts, “Vee look like frrreaks!There's viskers growing on our cheeks!”A boy who vos extremely tallCries out, “Vot's wrong? I'm grrrowing small!”Four tiny legs begin to sprrroutFrom everybody rrround about.And all at vunce, all in a trrrice,There are no children! Only MICE!
Roald Dahl
However, what I do believe to genuinely sacred - and, indeed, more useful to the earth as a whole - is trying to ensure that there are as few unbalanced, destructive people as possible. By whatever rationale you use, ending a pregnancy 12 weeks into gestation is incalculably more moral than bringing an unwanted child into this world. It's those unhappy, unwanted children, who then grew into angry adults, who have caused the great majority of humankind's miseries. They are the ones who make states feel feral; streets dangerous; relationships violent.
Caitlin Moran
Every woman who chooses - joyfully, thoughtfully, calmly, of their own free will and desire - not to have a child does womankind a massive favour in the long term. We need more women who are allowed to prove their worth as people; rather than being assessed merely for their potential to create new people. After all, half those new people we go on to create are also women - presumably themselves to be judged, in their futures, for not making new people. And so it will go on and on...
Caitlin Moran
A child develops best when, like a young plant, he is left undisturbed in the same soil. Too much travel, too much variety of impressions, are not good for the young, and cause them as they grow up to become incapable of enduring fruitful monotony.
Bertrand Russell
No, she thought, putting together some of the pictures he had cut out - a refrigerator, a mowing machine, a gentleman in evening dress - children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed.
Virginia Woolf
The emergence of Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity is where Autism was back in the 1970's and very few children had the condition. Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity must not be allowed to explode into the new epidemic that Autism has become.
Steven Magee
High powered radio frequency (RF) transmitters really need to be reclassified as an industrial application and banned out of residential communities that have developing babies and children.
Steven Magee
Women's magazines sadly remark that children can have a disruptive effect on the conjugal relationship, that the young wife's involvement with her children and her exhaustion can interfere with her husband's claims on her. What a notion- a family that is threatened by its children! Contraception has increased the egotism of the couple: planned children have a pattern to fit into; at least unplanned children had some of the advantages of contingency. First and foremost they were whether their parents liked it or not. In the limited nuclear family the parents are the principals and children are theirs to manipulate in a newly purposive way. The generation gap is being intensified in these families where children must not inconvenience their parents, where they are disposed of in special living quarters at special times of day, their own rooms and so forth. Anything less than this is squalor. Mother must not have more children than she can control: control means full attention for much of the day, then isolation.
Germaine Greer
English children have lost their innocence, for their first lessons have been in the exploitation of their adult slave. A sterilized parent is a eunuch in his children's haremm. to be sure, I recognize that efficient contraception is necessary for sexual pleasure, and that sexual pleasure is necessary, but contraception for economic reasons is another matter. 'We can only afford two children' is a squalid argument, but more acceptable in our society than 'we don't like children'. A sterilized parent is forever bound to those children he has, more than ever immobile and predictable, and those children are more securely bound to him. 'We can only afford two children' really means, 'We only like clean, well-discipline middle-class children who grow up to be professionals', for children manage to use up all the capital that is made available for that purpose, whatever proportion it may be of the family's whole income, just as housework expands to fill the time available. The sterilized parent is the ultimate domestic animal.
Germaine Greer
If women could regard childbearing not as a duty or an inescapable destiny but as a privilege to be worked for, the ay a man might work for the right to have a family, children might grow up without the burden of gratitude for the gift of life which they never asked for.
Germaine Greer
We could see that our mothers blackmailed us with self-sacrifice, even if we did not know whether or not they might have been great opera stars or toasts of the town if they had not borne us. In our intractable moments we pointed out that we had not asked to be born, or even to go to an expensive school. We knew that they must have had motives of their own for what they did with us and to us. The notion of our parents' self-sacrifice filled us not with gratitude but with confusion and guilt. We wanted them to be happy yet they were sad and deprived and it was our fault.
Germaine Greer
Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic...
J.K. Rowling
Both men and women who have children as a rule regulate their lives largely with reference to them, and children cause perfectly ordinary men and women to act unselfishly in certain ways, of which perhaps life insurance is the most definite and measurable.
Bertrand Russell
The recipe for each child is just for that child, even if it is the same mother and father.
Alexander McCall Smith
Good BonesLife is short, though I keep this from my children.Life is short, and I’ve shortened minein a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,a thousand deliciously ill-advised waysI’ll keep from my children. The world is at leastfifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservativeestimate, though I keep this from my children.For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,sunk in a lake. Life is short and the worldis at least half terrible, and for every kindstranger, there is one who would break you,though I keep this from my children. I am tryingto sell them the world. Any decent realtor,walking you through a real shithole, chirps onabout good bones: This place could be beautiful,right? You could make this place beautiful.
Maggie Smith
The affection of parents makes infants feel safe in this dangerous world, and gives them boldness in experimentation and in exploration of their environments.
Bertrand Russell
The heterosexual emotions of young children can find a natural, wholesome and innocent outlet with other children; in this form they are a part of play, and like all play, they afford a preparation for adult activities.
Bertrand Russell
Love she had found, had a strange way of multiplying. Doubling, trebling itself, so that, as each child arrived, there was always more than enough to go around.
Rosamunde Pilcher
She had loved them all, her children. Loved each one the best, but for different reasons.
Rosamunde Pilcher
The general public of the wireless western nations are very tolerant to the radiation poisoning of the next generation of children by their corporate controlled governments.
Steven Magee
I regard taking healthy sea level adapted children to the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea as a form of child abuse.
Steven Magee