Quotes by British Authors - Page 572

She was wonderful; no mother could have been more wonderful. But ever after, she demanded that I should not forget it, nor cease to be grateful, nor hold an opinion different from her own, nor even, as I grew older, feel the need for any companionship but hers.
Rosemary Sutcliff
Uncle Acton spent the whole of his working life in India, for the simple reason that he gave up work very young.
Rosemary Sutcliff
My mother was the perfect Spartan mother. I have always been able to imagine her telling her sons to return from battle 'with their shields, or on them'. She did actually try it on my father at the start of the Second World War. He didn't take it kindly, and confided to me ruefully that he thought she rather fancied herself a Hero's Widow.
Rosemary Sutcliff
Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply.
Jane Austen
Adoption is outside. You act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn't belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you. It is impossible to believe anyone loves you for yourself.I never believed that my parents loved me. I tried to love them but it didn't work. It has taken me a long time to learn how to love - both the giving and the receiving. I have written about love obsessively, forensically, and I know/knew it as the highest value.I loved God of course, in the early days, and God loved me. That was something. And I loved animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you? I had no idea. I thought that love was loss. Why is the measure of love loss?
Jeanette Winterson
Chance looked up at him, her dark grey eyes out. 'I knew you were gonna be like this.''How'd you know?' Reaper said, reaching out and putting his arm around her shoulders.'I am my father's daughter, ain't I?' said Chance.Reaper smiled. 'You sure as hell you are.
Sean Black
I can see us there still," he said, "for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten. Yet there is no particular story attached to them," he said, "despite their place in the story I have just told you. That time spent swimming in the pool beneath the waterfall belongs nowhere: it is part of no sequence of events, it is only itself, in a way that nothing our life before as a family was ever itself, because it was always leading to the next thing and the next, was always contributing to our story of who we were.
Rachel Cusk
She explains that often the people who mean the most to us have to be left behind because they cannot follow us along our destined path.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Mollycoddling was the mother's duty; the father's lay elsewhere. As a consequence, his four older children feared and respected him, as they had been taught to do, and the love the professed to feel, had they been asked and had they answered truthfully or even had access to the truth, was of a duty-bound, obligatory kind too, a love issuing from commandment and tradition and the notion of family, not one from the tides of the heart or the unbridled, inexplicable pull of feelings. If painted, that love would take the form of a polite and manicured wash of pleasant colours, not the hurl-and-splatter of impastoed reds.
Neel Mukherjee
When people show you who they are, believe them.
Jane Green
Shock doesn't hit all at once. I have learned.
Jane Green
People show you who they are, not by what they say, but by what they do.
Jane Green
She would talk to him in the car, ask him something, then turn on the radio and find her question answered by the lyrics of a song; pick up a book and turn to a random page, to find the words that were exactly what she needed to hear. There is no such thing as coincidence, she would think, blowing a kiss of thanks to the heavens.
Jane Green
There is something magical about young love, when you still think that the world is your oyster and you have your whole life ahead of you.
Jane Green
Bad things always happen in three.
Jane Green
You discover something so awful, so life-changing, the only way you can cope is to jump straight into denial.
Jane Green
It is a characteristic of human beings that if they haven’t got a family of their own, they will invent one.
Angela Carter
Sometimes you just need the comforts of home, the familiarity of your own family bed and only the pampering a mother can do.
Emily Williams
Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded, madly holding a lump of London clay, some grass, some white tubers, a dandelion, a fat worm passing the world through itself.
Zadie Smith
I loved them too and while you might lay a greater claim to them, I defy you to miss your wife any more than I’ll miss my best friend or your child, who was every inch a son to me.
Fiona McIntosh
Family. The greatest loyalty after God.
Sarah Dunant
Oh, I loathe weddings. I loathe sitting down and participating in inane conversations with proud parents and smug couples who all look like they might secretly hate each other.
Saleem Haddad
Once upon a time, before the boys were killed and when there were more horses than cars, before the male servants disappeared and they made do, at Upleigh and at Beechwood, with just a cook and a maid, the Sheringhams had owned not just four horses in their own stable, but what might be called a 'real horse', a racehorse, a thoroughbred. Its name was Fandango. It was stabled near Newbury. It had never won a damn thing. But is was the family's indulgence, their hope for fame and glory on the racecourses of southern England. The deal was that Pa and Ma - otherwise known in his strange language as 'the shower' - owned the head and body and he and Dick and Freddy had a leg each.'What about the fourth leg?''Oh the fourth leg. That was always the question.
Graham Swift
It was a bad idea to play chicken with someone who'd known you your whole life. Nobody came out a winner.
Alwyn Hamilton
Everybody has a story. It’s like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can’t say you haven’t got them. Same goes for stories.
Diane Setterfield
What makes a family is neither the absence of tragedy nor the ability to hide from misfortune, but the courage to overcome it and, from that broken past, write a new beginning.
Steve Pemberton
It wasn't that you could take them for granted, as such - heaven knows, nothing can be taken for granted in this life - it was simply that you would know, almost unthinkingly, that they'd be there if you needed them, no matter how bad things got.
Gail Honeyman
I'm responsible. I chose to put myself in a situation where I'm responsible, wanting to look after her, a small, dependent, vulnerable creature. It's innate and I don't even have to think about it. It's like breathing -- for some people.
Gail Honeyman
There are orphanages," he exclaimed to himself, "for children who have lost their parents--oh! why, why, why, are there no harbours of refuge for grown men who have not yet lost them?
Samuel Butler
Two people who know they do not understand each other, breeding children whom they do not understand and who will never understand them.
T.S Eliot
You can Cut Back or you can Make More Money
Sophie Kinsella
People change. Life changes. It's the way of the world. Maybe it's meant to be.
Sophie Kinsella
The other person always has a point, Listen to each other, and you'll hear it.
Sophie Kinsella
Some things are private. I mean, we're grown-ups now. You don't share everything.
Sophie Kinsella
It's just, there's something compelling about very beautiful people. Especially strong-jawed men with stubble and intense eyes. You fall under their spell and believe anything they say.
Sophie Kinsella
Buy calmly and with meaning.
Sophie Kinsella
People move on. Friendship end.
Sophie Kinsella
Where the parents are not 'good enough' the rest of the programme for life may be distorted and later stages in the archetypal sequence may fail to be realized. Thus, the boy whose father was inadequate or absent may fail to actualize his masculine potential sufficiently to establish the social or vocational role his talents equip him for, or he may be unable to sustain a relationship with a member of the opposite sex long enough for him to become an adequate husband or father himself.
Anthony Stevens
Sometimes John had recorded new compositions, or lines from his new poems. Sometimes he'd just record a busy night in The Green Man. Sometimes sheep, seals, skylarks, the wind turbine. If Liam were home there would be some Liam. The summer fair. The Fastnet Race. I would unfold my map of Clear Island. Those tapes prised the lid off homesickness and rattled out the contents, but always at the bottom was solace.
David Mitchell
Let's just go in and enjoy ourselves,' Yvonne had said after a long moment when the Hitchens family had silently reviewed the menu—actually of the prices not the courses—outside a restaurant on our first and only visit to Paris. I knew at once that the odds against enjoyment had shortened (or is it lengthened? I never remember).
Christopher Hitchens
[Phoebe Broome] 'Well,' she said at last. 'You've now met my father. At his worst.'[Lord Vladimir] 'Being myself widely considered my family's most difficult member, I would not presume to comment.''That is... gentlemanly of you.
Alison Sinclair
Family is what works.
Ian McDonald
Gran follows recipes by looking at picture—to the eye, delicious; to the tongue, boiled socks. Makes you wanna cry really.
Simon Cheshire
Sometimes I think it is my fate to live in the wreckage and confusion of crumbling houses.
Abdulrazak Gurnah
She did not think that those who were late, or the ancestors themselves, would wish punishment upon us, no matter what our transgressions. It was far more likely that there would be love, falling like rain from above, changing the hearts of the wicked; transforming them
Alexander McCall Smith
He sat staring before him, seeing nothing but a long line of Mortimers, inexhaustable and prolific to the end of time.
Edith Pargeter
She treated Vanessa and me as if we were visiting budgerigars that needed to be fed and then put somewhere dark for the night.
Alexandra Fuller
There was once a king, and he had a queen; and he was the manliest of his gender, and she was the loveliest of hers. They had nineteen children, and were always having more.
Charles Dickens
What manner of mind considers this holy estate [pregnancy] which women are privileged by the Almighty to attain as a slur upon the social conscience?
Grantly Dick-Read
At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don't see how your gestures already mirror his; you don't see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don't hear his whisper in your blood.
Salman Rushdie
In Africa, there is a birthrate trap: a higher standard of living will lead to smaller families but smaller families will not lead to a higher standard of living.
Christopher Hitchens
You'd think (losing his job and degree for having made false claims as a researcher) would be a lesson to him," said Miss Hillyard. "It didn't pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour for the women and children we hear so much about -- but in the end it left him worse of."But that," said Peter, "was only because he committed the extra sin of being found out.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Families are wonderful institution," he said. "I value mine more than I can possibly say. But each of us has an individual life to live, our own path to tread, our own destiny to forge. You can imagine, if you will, how my family wished to shelter and protect me and do my living for me so that I would never again know fear or pain or abandonment. Eventually I had to step clear of them-or I might have fallen into the temptation of allowing them to do just that.
Mary Balogh
Without fail, he always signed off on these letters with love and he always included Whiskey and Bess in the list of individuals sending this love my way. At the time it made me laugh, it made me embarrassed, but as soon as I softened, as soon as I matured back into his son, I came to appreciate what he was saying -- an endearing and magnanimous reminder of how family will always be the sum of its individual members, be they human or animal.
Nick Trout
The place of horror turns out to be no more than a green scoop, sometimes shadowed, sometimes shining with the bilberries and grass within it, as if a mouth had opened from which streamed a beam of light. So my uncle Robert's death, which had looked from a distance to be an all-consuming tragedy was, close-up, the story of a man finding release from his pain and how his brother had showed such defiant love. The past was a grave, a trap - and yet, also neither of these. Just light, coming and going.At the wolf pit you imagine you will stare into a hole littered with bones, but what draws you to that place is not what you take from it. The wolf pit seems a delicate illusion. You walk towards it; there is nothing, just a curve of the moor; then it is a soft green light, and then it is nothing again.
Will Cohu
...And talking of the dear family party which would then be restored, of their mutual pursuits and cheerful society, as the only happiness worth a wish.
Jane Austen
Make a wish," said Indigo.Rose made a wish and then asked, "Why?""That's what I always do. Wish on the moving ones.""Does it matter how fast they move?""I don't think so.""Can you wish on airplanes, too?""Oh, yes.
Hilary McKay
For Saffron," it said in shaky old writing on the damaged base, and on the other side, "Saffy's angel."Saffron, picking up the broken fragments one by one, said it didn't matter. She hugged Rose and Indigo and Caddy and Sarah, and said again and again that it didn't matter, it didn't matter at all.
Hilary McKay
Mothers are inscrutable beings to their sons, always. ("The Higgler")
A.E. Coppard
Blood is thicker than water, I know, but it's unnatural stuff to drink so much of. (“The Wife Of Ted Wickham”)
A.E. Coppard