Quotes by British Authors - Page 571

Why won’t you help me?
You have to able to manage on your own.
Diane Samuels
What I want is irrelevant. This is your life, Faith.
Diane Samuels
A town teeming with life. Full to overflowing. And every day, the good people counted their blessings. Every single one…
Diane Samuels
The inspector had interviewed boys before, boys from the poorest parts of town. He had the habit of not specifying "mam" or "dad" or even "parents." They were things he knew not every child possessed and so he was careful.
Sylvia Waugh
Do not throw me out. Please.
Diane Samuels
Don't even try making out I’m making this up. I’ve got proof. Evidence.
Diane Samuels
Remember that we always love and think of you. Always. Mother.
Diane Samuels
A terrible sadness threatened to overwhelm me as I wondered how two people capable of such love for each other had eventually felt so little for the child they had produced between them.
Toni Maguire
I thought upon the way in which we'd always shared each other's happiness, believing it would make the moment burn brighter and longer, but sadness can be shared too, perhaps sharing makes is burn briefer and less bright.
Tom Rob Smith
Mapleshade: "Your punishment is complete now, Crookedstar. You have lost everything." Crookedstar: "No, Mapleshade. You're wrong. I still have a clan that I love and am proud to lead. And now... ...now everything precious to me is here, in StarClan. My family is waiting here for me, when my ninth life has passed. It's you who have lost. You have no power over me anymore." Mapleshade: "I have destroyed you!" Crookedstar: "No, Mapleshade. I still have the cats that I loved. You have nothing and no one.
Erin Hunter
Since our yesterdays are gone and our tomorrows are never promised, TODAY I want to thank all my amazing friends and family for being in my life.
Steven Aitchison
I'm well aware that there is no job more important than that of raising a child, but the problem is that it isn't valued.
Paula Hawkins
Funny how you can forget that every family isn't like yours.
Patrick Ness
I would hear him screaming, I would watch him bleed, I would tear his flesh piece by piece before I would worry about Æthelflaed. This was family. This was revenge.
Bernard Cornwell
So long divided and so differently situated, the ties of blood were little more than nothing.
Jane Austen
Old Barley might be as old as thee hills, and might swear like a whole field of troopers, but there were redeeming youth and trust and hope enough in Chinks's Basin to fill it to overflowing.
Charles Dickens
They had learned that Sorhatani expected the same sort of instant obedience as her husband. She had grown up around men of power and had married into the great khan’s family at a very young age. She knew that men prefer to follow, that it takes an effort of will to lead. She had that will.
Conn Iggulden
Family life was and always will be the foundation of any civilization. Destroy the family and you destroy the country.
Erin Pizzey
My God. Johannes, are you saying that you’re accepting this task because I asked you?’ Cabal did not reply. Instead he found a loose thread on the eiderdown and fiddled distractedly with it. Horst sat on the side of the bed, embraced his brother around the shoulders with one arm, and rubbed the top of his head with the knuckles of the other. ‘Horst!’ snapped Cabal. ‘I am no longer eight years old!’ Horst kissed him on the top of the head. ‘You’ll always be my little brother, Johannes, even if you look older than me now.
Jonathan L. Howard
For my mum, to whom I'd turn in a heartbeat.
Non Pratt
To lose someone you love is the very worst thing in the world. It creates an invisible hole that you feel you are falling down and will never end. People you love make the world real and solid and when they suddenly go away forever, nothing feels solid any more.
Matt Haig
The clock had been Sylvie's, and her mother's before that. It had gone to Ursula on Sylvie's death and Ursula had left it to Teddy, and so it had zigzagged its way down the family tree......The clock was a good one, made by Frodsham and worth quite a bit, but Teddy knew if he gave it to Viola she would sell it or misplace it or break it and it seemed important to him that it stayed in the family. An heirloom. ('Lovely word,' Bertie said.) He liked to think that the little golden key that wound it, a key that would almost certainly be lost by Viola, would continue to be turned by the hand of someone who was part of the family, part of his blood. The red thread.
Kate Atkinson
It had been a wake-up call and now all she wanted was to keep her dad in sight and make sure he didn't eat too many Mars Bars or drink too much beer.
Vicky Pattison
It wasn't normal, it was quite far from normal, but they were hers and she loved everything about them.
Vicky Pattison
It's like he's my family, except better, because I've chosen him.
Patrick Ness
It's funny to think that Christmas — a time known for its joyful togetherness — can be the loneliest time of the year for some.
Giovanna Fletcher
Every family has in fact a sacred character belonging to it, which may indeed be forgotten or disdained; but the family is constituted, and ought therefore to be conducted, with the prospect of the rising generation following that which precedes it, not only to the grave, but to eternity"(Christopher Anderson). Every member of every household is an immortal creature; every one that leaves the circle by death, goes into an eternity of torment or bliss. And, since all the ordinances of God look to another world as their chief and ultimate reference, surely, surely, that institute which is the most powerful of all in the formation of character, must be considered as set up with a special intention to prepare the subjects of it for "glory, honour, immortality, and eternal life.
John Angell James
Geoffrey's own heart felt inconveniently large just then.
Thomas Hardy
They fuck you up, your mum and dad', and if you're planning on writing that's probably a good thing. But if you are planning on writing and they haven't fucked you up, well, you've got nothing to go on, so then they've fucked you up good and proper.
Alan Bennett
That's how birthdays were in our house. All hateful charades of pretty clothes, expensive presents, and ugly words . . .
Debbie Howells
...parents everywhere desire a better life for their children. It's a near constant: They understand the importance of education and crave it for their children, even as they are well aware of the sacrifice they will have to make.
John Wood
Look, my son, she is so beautiful, she has fair skin and green eyes and brown hair.''She's English?' I asked cheekily, holding the cheap photo print with trepidation. Which unfortunate victim had they found for me to marry in what backwater, unbeknownst that my heart was not for trading? Honour would quote Shakespeare to make a point; for me, it was always Rumi.'La hawla wala kuwwat... May God protect us from such misfortune... you think I have lost my senses that I would marry you to a white girl?' My mum used the word gori as an insult and yet when she talked about Billo she said 'Look how gori she is.'Oh, Mum, the irony.'Well, you seem pretty obsessed with green eyes and skin colour,' I mumbled.'She is gorgeous.' Mum went on ignoring me. 'Think how beautiful your children, my grandchildren, will be? They will have cats' eyes, just like Billo.'Honour has fair skin and green eyes too, and just think how beautiful your grandchildren will be if they're mixed race, I thought.I didn't say that to my mum, obviously.
Ruth Ahmed
You feel well, Ali? You have a very faraway look on your face, beta,' my dad said. 'Like you have left your heart behind.'He fixed me with eyes as liquid black as mine and for a moment I felt exposed, like he could see right through me. That irrational childhood thought that he could read my mind maybe.'What nonsense, his heart is here with his mother and his family. Tell him, Ali,' my mother said.'Begum, this generation of boys and girls, you know how they are.' My dad never said my mother's name; she was always Begum, the generic term for 'wife'.
Ruth Ahmed
Honour and I would have to create our world, live by our own rules. My family wasn't ready for her just yet. I didn't know if they ever would be.
Ruth Ahmed
She had not thought it would be so easy to slip into the old roles. Cambridge had changed her fundamentally and she thought she was immune. No one in her family, however, noticed the transformation in her, and she was not able to resist the power of their habitual expectations.
Ian McEwan
I had to be an adult, be a father without a son, so for one last moment I needed to be a son who needed his mother.
Ruth Ahmed
Men were often far different in their roles as fathers than they were as suitors, the memories of which kept them, out of necessity, both vigilant and violent, and even in tender moments, to their daughters.
James Anderson
We sit in the ruin, each reading a book, or three of us read out of four. Three different voices speak to us. We have taught the children to read again this week. Here, where there is no voice, apart from ours, they are desperate for any other. They will even sing to themselves, sometimes. The boy whistles. He makes his voice croak. He sings the same thing again, but breathing in. A bird echoes the first notes of Vivaldi.
Joanna Walsh
I'm looking at the ruins of my own existence and knowing, with a sickening certainty, that my old home and my old life have been truly destroyed.
K.C. Finn
There are so many of you, and you are still just the way I thought I'd grow up, with all that was enviably grown-up about you: the lace tops with modesty inserts, and the spangles as if for nights out, the stiff hair, the cardigans grown over with a fungus of secondary sexual characteristics--bristling with embroidery and drooping with labial frills.
Joanna Walsh
So I fight for a Father who I never loved, against a brother that I did. I defend an empire that never wanted me against an army that would have taken me in a heartbeat.
Chris Wraight
Family wasn't like that, not really. It was not something small and compact, a "nuclear family": it was a great big mess of people, all interlinked, cousins and aunts and relatives-by-marriage and otherwise--it was a network, like the Conversation or a human brain. It was what he had tried to escape, going into the Up and Out, but you cannot run away from family, it follows you, wherever you go.
Lavie Tidhar
A blood line is something you're born into. A Family is something you create.
Chris Wistaff
It's all a game. And if you don't want to play, maybe you shouldn't come to Hollywood.
Sophie Kinsella
Scientist say that music can change the speed of a heartbeat. They failed to add: so can a text message.
Holly Smale
Because that's the truth about people with obsessively organised plans: we're not trying to control everything in our lives. We're trying to block everything we can't.
Holly Smale
Parents are the last people on Earth who ought to have children.
Samuel Butler
Perhaps the greatest importance of the family, in these days of contraceptives, is that it preserves the habit of having children.
Bertrand Russell
When a child reaches adolescence, there is very apt to be a conflict between parents and child, since the latter considers himself to be by now quite capable of managing his own affairs, while the former are filled with parental solicitude, which is often a disguise for love of power. Parents consider, usually, that the various moral problems which arise in adolescence are peculiarly their province. The opinions they express, however, are so dogmatic that the young seldom confide in them, and usually go their own way in secret.
Bertrand Russell
It is not difficult for an unwise mother quite unintentionally to centre the heterosexual feelings of a young son upon herself, and it is true that, if this is done, the evil consequences pointed out by Freud will probably ensue. This is, however, much less likely to occur if the mother's sexual life is satisfying to her, for in that case she will not look to her child for a type of emotional satisfaction which ought to be sought only from adults. The parental impulse in its purity is an impulse to care for the young, not to demand affection from them, and if a woman is happy in her sexual life she will abstain spontaneously from all improper demands for emotional response from her child.
Bertrand Russell
...we're not eighteen anymore. We've lived. We've created things that last – things of joy, and things of burden.
Dianna Hardy
Perhaps we will not be great people, chosen by God, but just happy.
Philippa Gregory
We've had our ups and downs since then, but that's what families have, ups and downs.
Neil Gaiman
Dr. Xia was working as a salaried doctor attached to another man's medicine shop, which did not give him much chance to display his skill. But he worked had, and gradually his reputation began to grow. Soon he was invited to go on his first visit to a patient's home. When he came back that evening he was carrying a package wrapped in a cloth. He winked at my mother and his wife and asked them to guess what was inside the package. My mother's eyes was glued to the steaming bundle, and even before she could shout out "Steamed rolls!" she was already tearing the package open. As she was devouring the rolls, she looked up and met Dr. Xia's twinkling eyes. More than fifty years later she can still remember his look of happiness, and even today she says she can remember any food as delicious as those simple wheat rolls.
Jung Chang
One of the problems of the vacation is money, father.”“Oh, I shouldn’t worry about a thing like that at your age.”“You see, I’ve run rather short.”“Yes?” said my father without any sound of interest.“In fact I don’t quite know how I’m going to get through the next two months.”“Well, I’m the worst person to come to for advice. I’ve never been ‘short’ as you so painfully call it. And yet what else could you say? Hard up? Penurious? Distressed? Embarrassed? Stony-broke?” (Snuffle.) “On the rocks? In Queer Street? Let us say you are in Queer Street and leave it at that. Your grandfather once said to me, ‘Live within your means, but if you do get into difficulties, come to me. Don’t go to the Jews.
Evelyn Waugh
Those close to [Patricia Highsmith], particularly her family, often commented on how Highsmith's vision of reality was a warped one. In April 1947, she transcribed into her notebook what was, presumably, a real dialogue between herself and her mother, in which Mary accused her of not facing the world. Highsmith replied that she did indeed view the world 'sideways, but since the world faces reality sideways, sideways is the only way the world can be looked at in true perspective.' The problem, Highsmith said, was that her psychic optics were different to those around her, but if that was the case, her mother replied, then she should equip herself with a pair of new spectacles. Highsmith was not convinced. 'Then I need a new birth,' she concluded.
Andrew Wilson
--and yet, in my heart, I always knew we loved each other, a part of me understanding that the passion with which we hurt each other came from something strong enough to withstand the blows we inflicted. Looking back, I guess I always felt that we would have time to work things out eventually, not imagining what was to come; that we would one day have to cut all ties and never speak again.
Camilla Way
Her family... Love and involvement brought joy, but as well could become a hideously heavy millstone slung about one's neck. And the worst was that she felt useless because there was not a mortal thing she could do to help resolve their problems.
Rosamunde Pilcher
But when you choose your family, you get to choose how it is between you, too.
Patrick Ness
There are secrets in all families, you know.
Jane Austen