Quotes by British Authors - Page 715

When you become aggressive in arguments, you force the other person to become defensive which means they’ll either get ready to fight you or ready to flee from you.
Sam Owen
We have to allow ourselves to feel it in order to heal it.
Sam Owen
Within our emotions lie answers, truths and instructions.
Sam Owen
Feeling your way to knowledge rather than thinking your way, often results in better learning.
Sam Owen
Anger usually only serves us, and even then, only very fleetingly.
Sam Owen
Correctly identifying a negative emotion takes the brain out of fight-or-flight mode and into problem-solving mode, out of tension, anger and confusion and into ease, calm and clarity.
Sam Owen
Our emotions affect the atmosphere around us, and other people, because emotions influence the electromagnetic field our heart emits.
Sam Owen
When people seem angry, sometimes they are simply upset and hurting. Asking the right questions helps them to work through it.
Sam Owen
Sometimes the anger directed at another is actually anger toward the self.
Sam Owen
Fear of confronting emotions is like fear of reading road signs.
Sam Owen
Introspection and observation of others are vital for the ongoing good health of our own psyche; watch, learn and tweak as required.
Sam Owen
Be you, be true to your word, don't sell yourself short and don't waste your life worrying.
Sam Owen
She had never been able to tolerate dishonesty, which she thought threatened the very heart of relationships between people. If you could not count on other people to mean what they said, or to do what they said they would do, then life could become utterly unpredictable. The fact that we could trust one another made it possible to undertake the simple tasks of life.
Alexander McCall Smith
When you walk around feeling quietly upset, frustrated, angry or some other negative emotion, people around you will detect it to some degree or another, even if only subconsciously.
Sam Owen
Whatever you focus your mind on, you will consciously and subconsciously work towards.
Sam Owen
Sometimes being overwhelmed by emotions can leave you speechless but even then it is important to identify the correct emotion.
Sam Owen
Your eyes will contradict your words if your words contradict your thoughts and feelings.
Sam Owen
Jealousy is when their reflection in the mirror that is your progress, is attacked rather than appreciated, begrudged rather than understood.
Sam Owen
Our emotions are encoded in the heart signals we emit. Use the energy you feel to know how they are feeling.
Sam Owen
And what of this young woman beside him, whom he had loved devotedly for four years and still did love? She had given him more than Elizabeth ever could: months of unflawed relationship, unquestioning trust (which he was now betraying in thought) . Oh nonsense! What man did not at some time or another glance elsewhere? And who could complain if it remained at a glance? (Chance was a fine thing).
Winston Graham
Boundaries keep people out mine served only to keep me in.
Anita Brookner
Assumptions close doors. Intrigue opens them.
Sam Owen
Saul is as different from Simon Wakefield as it's possible to get, I find myself thinking. And Edward Monkford is utterly different from both of them. It seems incredible that Emma could have had relationships with all three men. Where Simon's eager to please, but also touchy and insecure, and Edward's calm and super-confident, Saul is pushy and brash and loud. He also has a habit of saying 'Yeah?' aggressively at the end of his sentences, as if trying to force me to agree with him.
J.P. Delaney
And when I realized you had secrets too, I was glad. I thought we could be honest with each other. That we could finally rid ourselves of all the clutter from our past. Not our possessions, but the stuff we carry around inside our heads. Because that's what I've realized, living in One Folgate Street. You can make your surroundings as polished and empty as you like. But it doesn't really matter if you're still messed up inside. And that's all anyone's looking for really, isn't it? Someone to take care of the mess inside our heads?
J.P. Delaney
You stop talking about things when you’ve worked them out. You’re no longer an observer but a participant. You’re too busy for this bullshit.
Caitlin Moran
I'm only fifteen. I'm not sure I ever want to get married. I'm neither messing around while waiting nor looking for some "real thing". What I want is much more complicated. I want somebody to talk about books, who would be my friend, and why couldn't we have sex as well if we wanted to? (And used contraception.) I'm not looking for romance. Lord Peter and Harriet would seem a pretty good model to me. I wonder if Wim has read Sayers?
Jo Walton
Or perhaps it's the wickedness in him that she can't resist. There are such women.
Madeleine Brent
Everyone endeavours to eliminate through the other individual his own weaknesses, defects, and deviations from the type, lest they be perpetuated or even grow into complete abnormalities in the child which will be produced.
Alain de Botton
we would not reliably assent to reproduce unless we first had lost our minds.
Alain de Botton
Ah, Chantal... Now I think I know how it feels to fly on a trapeze.
Madeleine Brent
All women are lifelong members of the Secret Service...So, if you must lie, better make sure you cover your tracks because there is no such thing as a 'dumb blonde'...
Virginia Alison
She was the kind of person who never gave you enough time to miss her.
Zadie Smith
I just don't have a tremendously strong belief that relationships can work. I'm really quite convinced that they don't. And if they do, it's really quite terribly brief and sporadic.
Morrissey
We became six people at a table in Hampton Court. We rose and walked together down the avenue. In the thin, the unreal twilight, fitfully like the echo of voices laughing down some alley, geniality returned to me and flesh. Against the gateway, against some cedar tree I saw blaze bright, Neville, Jinny, Rhoda, Louis, Susan and myself, our life, our identity. Still King William seemed an unreal monarch and his crown mere tinsel. But we – against the brick, against the branches, we six, out of how many million millions, for one moment out of what measureless abundance of past time and time to come, burnt there triumphant. The moment was all; the moment was enough.
Virginia Woolf
Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God -- a being capable of understanding. Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bam-boozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers.
Graham Greene
Or maybe it was already too late; you only get one first love. She was mine, but I had not been hers. She was only going to look for some echo of it, and if I had made the right noises, that echo might have been me for a while.
Olivia Sudjic
The ambivalent strategy involves clinging to the care-giver, often with excessive submissiveness, or adopting a role-reversal in which the care-giver is cared for rather than vice versa. Here feelings of anger at the rejection are most conspicuously subjected to defensive exclusion. Although these strategies have the function of maintaining attachment in the face of difficulties, a price has to be paid. The attachment patterns so established are clearly restricted and, if repeated in all relationships, will be maladaptive.
Jeremy Holmes
A person's attachment status is a fundamental determinant of their relationships, and this is reflected in the way they feel about themselves and others. Neurotic patterns can be seen as originating here because, where core attachments are problematic, they will have a powerful influence on the way someone sees the world and their behaviour. Where there is a secure core state, a person feels good about themselves and their capacity to be effective and pursue their projects. Where the core state is insecure, defensive strategies come into play.
Jeremy Holmes
He looked at me thoughtfully, and smiled slowly, his green eyes warm. He smelled of the outdoors, he was so tall and broad shouldered and so ... male ... in this house of women he was shockingly different. All I could think of was how much I wanted to kiss him. I was clearly losing my mind.
Abbi Waxman
A man is biologically incapable of giving ‘the look’.
Fennel Hudson
The modern world is filled with failed relationships.
Steven Magee
One relationship didn't work out, but that doesn't mean relationships never work out. One single experience isn't representative of all of them.
Sarah Morgan
No relationship is perfect. No matter how much love there is, there's a strong chance you're going to hit rocky times at some point. Life is unpredictable. It can throw out the unexpected and the challenging. Coping with that requires trust and honesty.
Sarah Morgan
We are in the era of dysfunctional relationships.
Steven Magee
The fact was, it was safer to stay uninvolved. He was perfectly fine with emotions, so long as they belonged to other people. Oh, he tried relationships after Peg's death, for a while he really tried, but he couldn't bear to get closed ... [it was easier] to disconnect from that part of life and turn his back on love altogether.Easier to find what he needed in music.
Rachel Joyce
He smiled as he imagined the composite Jamie/Isabel, who would play the bassoon, read philosophy, interfere in other people's affairs rather too much, drive a green Swedish car and make legendary potatoes Dauphinoise.
Alexander McCall Smith
You stayed because you’d invested so much time in your relationship that it would be a waste to walk away.
A.L. Michael
Often I wished for someone to share my mind with; but their hearts were in little things, they would have thought me a dreamer, and I had to plan alone.
Mary Renault
When they got to their hotel she went straight up to bed, but he paused to get a drink. There was, in the vestibule, a flower stall and he bought a handful of roses, stiffly wired into a bouquet, before proceeding to the oppressive gorgeousness of their bridal suite. The lift was lined with looking glass, so that as he shot upwards he got an endlessly duplicated version of himself, stout and nervous, a light cloak flung over his shoulder and flowers in his hand: an infinitely long row of gentlemen carrying offerings to an unforgiving past.
Margaret Kennedy
But love...it's only an illusion. A story one makes up in one's mind about another person. And one knows all the time it isn't true. Of course one knows why one's always taking care not to destroy the illusion.
Virginia Woolf
He was as incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving the pain he caused others.
Graham Greene
When the sun grew too hot we went into the wood where waves of Bluebells dashed around the foot of the Oak in front of us... I never knew before, the delight of offering oneself up; I even longed for some self sacrifice, to have to give up something for her sake. It intoxicated me to think I was making another happy...
W.N.P. Barbellion
He's a sweet man whose crime was that he didn't love me quite enough, and because this wasn't much of a crime I had to make up some bigger ones.
Nick Hornby
Cyphel knew exactly how he felt about her as well — it was there in her expression whenever they spoke that beguiling combination of amusement and haughtiness that she carried off so well. It was a look that expressed disdain at Campion’s guarded advances but also a kind of measured probationary respect as well. It was a look that said You dare to think that I will find you as interesting as you obviously find me Well perhaps in that very act of daring you become interesting to me if only fleetingly.
Alastair Reynolds
[M]an is not an island, he is more like a spaghetti junction.
Elizabeth Cooke
I wondered straightaway how he could sit at peace there, of an evening, with the row of heads staring down at him. There were no pictures, no flowers: only the heads of chamois. The concession to melody was the radiogram and the stack of records of classical music.Foolishly, I had asked, "Why only chamois?"He answered at once, "They fear Man."This might have led to an argument about animals in general, domestic, wild, and those which adapt themselves to the whims and vagaries of the human race; but instead he changed the subject abruptly, put on a Sibelius record, and presently made love to me, intently but without emotion. I was surprised but pleased. I thought, "We are suited to one another. There will be no demands. Each of us will be self-contained and not beholden to the other."All this came true, but something was amiss. There was a flaw - not only the nonappearance of children, but a division of the spirit. The communion of flesh which brought us together was in reality a chasm, and I despised the bridge we made. Perhaps he did as well. I had been endeavouring for ten years to build for my self a ledge of safety. ("The Chamois")
Daphne du Maurier
The self is constituted within a variety of arenas and in relation to multiple traditions. Self-hood, on this understanding, is both provisional and open-ended, and critically depends on the configuration of relationships between one’s own groups and those cultures and values that are deemed ‘other’. The regulation of alterity becomes a defining attribute of self-hood, as my sense of who I am is crucially mediated by an understanding of that which I am not (paraphrasing William Connolly).
Michael Kenny
...Next thing I know you've run off to Paris and thrown yourself under the nearest Frenchman-
Nicholls David
Christ, they’d be getting a cat next. He mentally recoiled from the idea: the day they did that, he’d cut off his dick and call himself a lesbian.
Kate Aaron
...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
Lionel Shriver