Quotes by British Authors - Page 716

The red firelight glowed on their two bonny heads and revealed their faces, animated with the eager interest of children; for, though he was twenty-three and she eighteen, each had so much of novelty to feel, and learn, that neither experienced nor evinced the sentiments of sober disenchanted maturity.
Emily Brontë
But I want to see Clara, Charlie's friend, who's right up my street. I want to see her because I don't know where my street is; I don't even know which part of town it's in, which city, which country, so maybe she'll enable me to get my bearings.
Nick Hornby
But nearly every woman I know has a roughly similar story - in fact, dozens of them: stories about being obsessed with a celebrity, work colleague or someone they vaguely knew for years; living in a parallel world in their head; conjuring up endless plots and scenarios for this thing that never actually happened.
Caitlin Moran
Joe Spork opens the door. The man departs. Joe turns to Polly to say something about how they’re obviously not going to Portsmouth, and finds an oyster knife balanced on his cheek, just under his eye.“Can we be very clear,” Polly Cradle murmurs, “that I am not your booby sidekick or your Bond girl? That I am an independent supervillain in my own right?”Joe swallows. “Yes, we can,” he says carefully.“There will therefore be no more ‘Say hello, Polly’?”“There will not.
Nick Harkaway
The Auden/Kallman relationship had this to be said for it: It affirmed that it's better to be blatant than latent.
Christopher Hitchens
I never told her the other story, in which she stars, in which she is always the heroine – a romanticized story full of cliché images in which I am telling her all the things there has not been enough time for, in which we are doing all the things there has not been time for…
Penelope Lively
Men, being accustomed to act on reflection themselves, are a great deal too apt to believe that women act on reflection, too. Women do nothing of the sort. They act on impulse; and, in nine cases out of ten, they are heartily sorry for it afterward.
Wilkie Collins
I have produced no children of my own and my husband is dead," she replied, an acid tone in her voice. "Thus I am more to be pitied than revered. I am expected to give up the shop to my nephew, who will then be able to afford to bring a very good wife from Pakistan. In exchange, I will be given houseroom and no doubt, the honor of taking care of several small children of other family members."The Major was silent. He was at once appalled and also reluctant to hear any more. This was why people usually talked about the weather.
Helen Simonson
The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me.
Tom Stoppard
Many aspects of our screen-bound lives are bad for our social skills simply because we get accustomed to controlling the information that comes in, managing our relationships electronically, deleting stuff that doesn't interest us. We edit the world; we select from menus; we pick and choose; our social 'group' focuses on us and disintegrates without us. This makes it rather confusing for us when we step outdoors and discover that other people's behaviour can't be deleted with a simple one-stroke command or dragged to the trash icon.
Lynne Truss
Some cynical Frenchman has said that there are two parties to a love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated.
William Makepeace Thackeray
And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.
Jeanette Winterson
I think it's the same with all the relationships between a man and a woman. They can survive anything so long as some kind of basic humanity exists between the two people. When all kindness has gone, when one person obviously and sincerely doesn't care if the other is alive or dead, then it's just no good.-- from Quantum of Solace
Ian Fleming
I shall now explain my plan. You may then speak, but only to amend the detail. The broad outline is not subject to negotiation. Are you ready? Good … I propose to have sex with you. I believe it will be excellent sex. Your obedience on one particular issue of timing it will be required to make it unforgettable sex. I will explain that issue as we go. At the moment, I wish to hear your inevitable objection to the general sex part of this plan.
Nick Harkaway
It was the impatience of the way he tore my panties from my body, that really turned me on: I was all he could think of, as his lust got the better of
Fiona Thrust
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
Alain de Botton
most men know what they hate few what they love
Charles Caleb Colton
...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues.
Alain de Botton
Yes,” said Mamma, “this is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way of losing it. We love people, and we say that we are going to do more for them than friendship, but it makes such fools of us that we do far less, indeed sometimes what we do could be mistaken for the work of hatred.
Rebecca West
The truth is, that one doesn't really know anything about anybody. Not even the people who are nearest to you...''Isn't that going a little too far--exaggerating too much?''I don't think it is. When you think of people, it is in the image you have made of them for yourself.
Agatha Christie
A while back, when Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for prospective partners.
Nick Hornby
Bloody men are like bloody buses —You wait for about a yearAnd as soon as one approaches your stopTwo or three others appear.You look at them flashing their indicators,Offering you a ride.You’re trying to read the destinations,You haven’t much time to decide.If you make a mistake, there is no turning back.Jump off, and you’ll stand there and gazeWhile the cars and the taxis and lorries go byAnd the minutes, the hours, the days.
Wendy Cope
And if insight were sufficient, if the inner life were the whole of life, their happiness has been assured.
E.M. Forster
There was a warmth of fury in his last phrases. He meant she loved him more than he her. Perhaps he could not love her. Perhaps she had not in herself that which he wanted. It was the deepest motive of her soul, this self-mistrust. It was so deep she dared neither realise nor acknowledge. Perhaps she was deficient. Like an infinitely subtle shame, it kept her always back. If it were so, she would do without him. She would never let herself want him. She would merely see.
D.H. Lawrence
The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same.
George Eliot
To be honest, going out with Ed after Josh is like moving on to Duchy Originals super-tasty seeded loaf after plastic white bread. (I don't mean to be rude about Josh. And I didn't realize it at the time. But it is. He is. Plastic white bread.)
Sophie Kinsella
When I was your age, if a boy behaved badly, one simply scored his name out from one's dance card.(Sadie Lancaster - to Lara Lington)
Sophie Kinsella
Guilt is a feeble emotion. It surrenders too easily
Deborah McKinlay
To know other people thought he'd made a mistake vindicated me. I wasn't a bad girlfriend, he was simply going through a period of temporary insanity and he'd come to his senses soon.
Dorothy Koomson
Darling, whose book is this to be?""Ostensibly yours, my sweet""I see -- rather like my life since I met you?""Yes darling
John Wyndham
I have never understood why a woman must have a man to take her into dinner.
Jude Morgan
Pubic hair is proof of sexual maturity and if your partner finds that a turn-off, you should probably reconsider that partner.
Hadley Freeman
We are responsible for our own relationships, their successes, their failures, the good times, the bad times. Take responsibility for creating the relationships that you desire.
Sam Owen
Sex can lead to nasty things like herpes, gonorrhea, and something called relationships.
Sacha Baron Cohen
It's early days. A few skeletons are bound to keep jumping out of the closet.
Alan Moore
When she had failed once or twice to respond to some conversational gambit or other, Bond also relapsed into silence and occupied himself with his own gloomy thoughts.
Ian Fleming
No relationship is without its difficulties and this is certainly true when one or both of the persons involved has an autistic spectrum disorder. Even so, I believe what is truly essential to the success of any relationship is not so much compatibility, but love. When you love someone, virtually anything is possible.
Daniel Tammet
The Heart of Gold fled on silently through the night of space, now on conventional photon drive. Its crew of four were ill as ease knowing that they had been brought together not of their own volition or by simple coincidence, but by some curious perversion of physics- as if relationships between people were susceptible to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules
Douglas Adams
When women are secret they are secret indeed and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.
Thomas Hardy
Because that’s what unfaithfulness is, isn’t it? A cancer that’s always there in the back of your mind, eating away at the foundations of the relationship. It’s happened once, it could happen again, so you’re always looking for telltale signs or symptoms to show that it’s reappeared...
Matt Dunn
My God, these folks don't know how to love -- that's why they love so easily.
D.H. Lawrence
First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him. Then, the moment he was asleep, cut his throat. The synopsis of the ideal marriage.
J.G. Ballard
A girl should set her sights on a man who has money; or if not, who can expect to come into money; or if not, who has moneyed connections.
Jude Morgan
He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought "Am I led; am I leading?" Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.
E.M. Forster
I can only do what's easy. I can only entice and be enticed. I can't, and won't, attempt difficult relations. If I marry it will either be a man who's strong enough to boss me or whom I'm strong enough to boss. So I shan't ever marry, for there aren't such men. And Heaven help any one whom I do marry, for I shall certainly run away from him before you can say 'Jack Robinson.
E.M. Forster
I have to wonder if you're not being slightly naive here. I mean, are you saying that you want nothing for people? You have no motives? Everybody has motives. Name the person, the circumstances, I'll name the motive. Even saints have motives -- to feel like saints, probably. ... But still, the point of any relationship is obtaining something from another person.
Tom Rachman
With him everything is a test, affection is measured, that given weighed against that which has been received, and the balance, more often than not, disappointing him.
S.J. Watson
As I’ve said, it wasn’t until a long time afterwards—long after I’d left the Cottages—that I realized just how significant out little encounter in the churchyard had been. I was upset at the time, yes. But I didn’t believe it to be anything so different from other tiffs we’d had. It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven could unravel and separate over a thing like that.But the fact was, I suppose, there were powerful tides tugging us apart by then, and it only needed something like that to finish the task. If we’d understood that back then—who knows?—maybe we’d have kept a tighter hold of one another.
Kazuo Ishiguro
A man to whom a woman cannot look up, she cannot love. Yet, it is marvelous how a woman contrives to find something to look up to in a man.
Arnold Haultain
He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contact with the real world.
Arthur C. Clarke
The conventional parabola--sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness--was to him shameful and hypocritical.
Ian Fleming
for to have a deep attachment for a person (or a place or thing) is to have taken them as the terminating object of our instinctual responses."Separation anxiety. International Journal of Psycho-Analysts, XLI, 1-25 (1959(
John Bowlby
Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.
Thomas Hardy
Relationship doesn’t remain, We resonate on different flames, I could cut you down again, If you were like all other men, If you were like all other men, I know that I could shut you down again
Amy Winehouse
This is the whole stupid thing about all these unblood relationships. They depend on people staying the same, standing in the same spot they were in over a decade ago, when they first met. Surely the reality is that connections between people aren't permanent, but fleeting and random, like a solar eclipse or clouds meeting in the sky. They exist in a constantly moving universe full of constantly moving objects.
Matt Haig
I'm always looking for meaningful one-night stands
Dudley Moore
You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn't force your way into someone else's, because then it wouldn't be a bubble any more.
Nick Hornby
He opened his mouth to say that she looked extremely beautiful and deserved armfuls of roses, but the words were lost in committee somewhere, shuffled aside by the parts of his head that worked full-time at avoiding ridicule.
Helen Simonson
If someone tries to use you as a tool, you shouldn't mind it, because it is their choice and folly, not yours.
Jude Morgan
Men want a girl who looks like a boy. They want to protect her but she must be a survivor. And she must come...like a train...but with...elegance.
Patrick Marber