Quotes by British Authors - Page 551

The sexual mechanisms of the two genders are just not compatible, that’s the horrible truth of it. (...)This is a truth we dare not acknowledge these days - because sameness is our religion and heretics are no more welcome now than they ever were - but I’m going to acknowledge it, because I’ve always felt that humility before the facts is the only thing that keeps a rational man together. Be humble in the face of facts, and proud in the face of opinions, as George Bernard Shaw once said. He didn’t, actually. I just wanted to put some authority behind this observation of mine, because I know you’re not going to like it.
Hugh Laurie
By 1975 sexual feeling and marriage will have nothing to do with each other.
John Langdon-Davies
Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain--nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures.
Graham Greene
when she removed my hand from her chest for the one hundred thousandth time. Attack and defense, invasion and repulsion... it was as if breasts were little pieces of property that had been unlawfully annexed by the opposite sex - they were rightfully ours and we wanted them back.
Nick Hornby
Among men, sex sometimes results in intimacy; among women, intimacy sometimes results in sex.
Barbara Cartland
And there's no sex, hardly any love stuff at all, in Middle Earth, which always made me think, yes, the world would be better off without it.
Jo Walton
If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had only if they persevere.
P.D. James
Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology.' I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.
Graham Greene
If anything she was a shade too plump, but she knew the ninety-seven ways of making love that the Hindus are supposed to set much store by―though mind you, it is all nonsense, for the seventy-fourth position turns out to be the same as the seventy-third, but with your fingers crossed.
George MacDonald Fraser
She was going to go to her room,munch on chocolate,then collapse into bed.And if her upstairs neighbors decided to talk about who the daddy was or cry again about how much David was loved,she'd go up there and give them somthing to really bloody cry about.
Suzanne Wright
You know, I never imagined there were he-dryads. Not even in an oak tree."One of the giants grinned at him.Druellae snorted. "Stupid! Where do you think acorns come from?
Terry Pratchett
I needed to get familiar with sex, and it would be just as well to practise first with a boy I didn't care about too much. Then later on, if I was with someone special, I'd have more chance of doing everything right.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Read any women's magazine and you'll see the same complaint over and over again: men - those little boys ten or twenty or thirty years on - are hopeless in bed. They are not interested in "foreplay"; they have no desire to stimulate the erogenous zones of the opposite sex; they are selfish, greedy, clumsy, unsophisticated. These complaints, you can't help feeling, are ironic. Back then, all we wanted was foreplay, and girls weren't interested. They didn't want to be touched, caressed, stimulated, aroused; in fact, they used to thump us if we tried. It's not really very suprising, then, that we're not much good at all that. We spent two or three long and extremely formative years being told very forcibly not even to think about it. Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, foreplay changes from being something that boys want to do and girls don't, to something that women want and men can't be bothered with. (Or so they say. Me, I like foreplay - mostly because the times when all I wanted to do was touch are alarmingly fresh in my mind.) The perfect match, if you ask me, is between the Cosmo woman and the fourteen-year-old boy.
Nick Hornby
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex.
Julian Barnes
I never said I liked coffee better than sex. I said I'd had it more.
Kevin Sinnott
Now piercèd is her virgin zone;She feels the foe within it.She hears a broken amorous groan,The panting lover's fainting moan,Just in the happy minute.
John Wilmot
When I was young and had no senseIn far-off MandalayI lost my heart to a Burmese girlAs lovely as the day.Her skin was gold, her hair was jet,her teeth were ivory;I said, "For twenty silver pieces,Maiden, sleep with me."She looked at me, so pure, so sad,The loveliest thing alive,And in her lisping, virgin voice,Stood out for twenty-five.
George Orwell
Saturday 12 July 1823 [Halifax]Could not sleep last night. Dozing, hot & disturbed ... a violent longing for a female companion came over me. Never remember feeling it so painfully before ... It was absolute pain to me.
Anne Lister
The only thing for it is to use men for sex and never let any of them get so close they could hurt you.
Dorothy Koomson
My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.
W Somerset Maugham
Cuddling was for great aunts and teddy bears. Cuddling gave him cramp.
David Nicholls
They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but obliterating sensation, thrilling and swelling, and the sound of fabric on fabric and skin on fabric as their limbs slid across each other in this restless, sensuous wrestling. ... They moved closer, deeper and then, for seconds on end, everything stopped. Instead of an ecstatic frenzy, there was stillness. They were stilled not by the astonishing fact of arrival, but by an awed sense of return - they were face to face in the gloom, staring into what little they could see of each other's eyes, and now it was the impersonal that dropped away.
Ian McEwan
Death never mattered at those times - in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the wathchign her torch trail across to the opposite side of the common like the tail-light of a low car driving away.
Graham Greene
--the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man...
Thomas Hardy
Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.
H. Havelock Ellis
ya better come inside when you're ready tobut no chance if ya don't wanna danceyou like four letter words when you're ready tobut then you won't 'cos you know that you can
Def Leppard
Yes, I do believe in something. I believe in being warm-hearted. Ibelieve especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with awarm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the womentake it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It's all thiscold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.
D.H. Lawrence
All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.
Evelyn Waugh
It was like there was some parallel universe we all vanished off to where we had all this sex.
Kazuo Ishiguro
It is a terrible error to let any natural impulse, physical or mental, stagnate. Crush it out, if you will, and be done with it; or fulfil it, and get it out of the system; but do not allow it to remain there and putrefy. The suppression of the normal sex instinct, for example, is responsible for a thousand ills. In Puritan countries one inevitably finds a morbid preoccupation with sex coupled with every form of perversion and degeneracy.
Aleister Crowley
I staggered into a Manchester bar late one night on a tour and the waitress said "You look as if you need a Screaming Orgasm". At the time this was the last thing on my mind...
Terry Pratchett
Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
Philip Larkin
Sex without smiling is as sickly and as base as vodka and tonic without ice.
Stephen Fry
A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.
Anthony Burgess
Touched by her fingers, the two surviving chocolate people copulate desperately, losing themselves in a melting frenzy of lust, spending the last of their brief borrowed lives in a spasm of raspberry cream and fear.
Neil Gaiman
The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.
G.K. Chesterton
So you've just slept with him, given him your virginity, a man who doesn't love you. In fact, he has odd ideas about you, wants to make you some sort of kinky sex slave.
E.L. James
Sexually progressive cultures gave us literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust.
Alan Moore
She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.
Alexander McCall Smith
Gentlemen are gentlemen in bed. They make sure you're having a good time.""I'll make sure you're having a good time, and that you're okay with everything. I just won't be well mannered about it.
Samantha Young
Flirting is a woman’s trade, one must keep in practice.
Charlotte Brontë
He'd noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: it fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination - but at the end of the day they'd settle quite happily for egg and chips. If it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato.
Terry Pratchett
I couldn't possibly have sex with someone with such a slender grasp on grammar!
Russell Brand
Trying is something we do when we think we can’t do something. Even if your doing is not as perfect as you would like, decide to do it, and you will. -- Lady Nimrod of Buckmore in The Princelings and the Lost City
Jemima Pett
Take a walk outside - it will serve you far more than pacing around in your mind.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
To try is to invite uncertainty. Where confidence goes, success usually follows.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
When the positive revolution takes hold it will no longer be enough for politicians to gain points through attack or being negative. Politicians will be expected to be constructive.
Edward de Bono
Positive thinking,' he would say, 'is also very important.
Terry Pratchett
Even when you don't see old age coming, you can wave it goodbye
Benny Bellamacina
...once you have resolved to embrace the ideology of positive thinking, you will find a way to interpret virtually any eventuality as a justification for thinking positively. You need never spend time considering how your actions might go wrong.
Oliver Burkeman
Part of the problem with positive thinking, and many related approaches to happiness, is exactly this desire to reduce big questions to one-size-fits-all self-help tricks or ten point plans.
Oliver Burkeman
Who says you need to wait until you 'feel like' doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn't that you don't feel motivated; it's that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you're procrastinating on as passing weather, you'll realise that your reluctance about working isn't something that needs to be eradicated or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. You can note the procrastinatory feelings and act anyway.
Oliver Burkeman
Through positive thinking and related approaches, we seek the safety and solid ground of certainty, of knowing how the future will turn out, of a time in the future when we'll be ceaselessly happy and never have to fear negative emotions again. But in chasing all that, we close down the very faculties that permit the happiness we crave.
Oliver Burkeman
And here lies the essential between Stoicism and the modern-day 'cult of optimism.' For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word, 'happiness.' And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one's circumstances.
Oliver Burkeman
And here lies the essential difference between Stoicism and the modern-day 'cult of optimism.' For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word, 'happiness.' And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one's circumstances.
Oliver Burkeman
Be the great person you were always meant to be.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
The war we must must win is fought within.
Tom Payne
...to think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world." If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral you down into the ever-increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however,requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline - training - is about. So, train your mind to dwell on sweet perfumes...
James Clavell
It is not his body which makes a man strong, but his spirit. Nothing on the outside, but only that which comes from within.
Jocelyn Murray
My dear Mrs Casaubon," said Farebrother, smiling gently at her ardour, "character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.""Then it may be rescued and healed," said Dorothea.
George Eliot