Quotes by British Authors - Page 717

I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover.
Tom Stoppard
When a clandestine couple kisses, it is much more likely that sex will immediately follow. This is because there is much more risk. Once you have kissed secretly, it is very difficult not to have sex. It would be impolite not to have sex. You have to show that you are serious about each other.
Adam Thirlwell
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.
Matt Dunn
We might have coupledIn the bed-ridden monopoly of a momentOr broken flesh with one anotherAt the profane communion tableWhere wine is spill'd on promiscuous lipsWe might have given birth to a butterflyWith the daily-newsPrinted in blood on its wings
Mina Loy
We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes.How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right—in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable—given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearnt. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.
Alain de Botton
Because two people in love don't make a hive mind. Neither should they want to be a hive mind, to think the same, to know the same. It's about being separate and still loving each other, being distinct from each other. One is the violin string one is the bow.
Graham Joyce
If she does not respect you, she will replace you.
Habeeb Akande
All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms.
J.G. Ballard
No people find each other more absurd than lovers
C.S. Lewis
As they embrace, she kisses him full on the mouth. And suddenly sticks her tongue right in. She has done this before, often. It’s one of those drunken long shots which just might, at least theoretically, once in ten thousand tries, throw a relationship right out of its orbit and send it whizzing off on another. Do women ever stop trying? No. But, because they never stop, they learn to be good losers.
Christopher Isherwood
He had known so much about her once -what she thought, how she felt, the reasons for her actions. And now he only knew that he loved her, and all the other knowledge seemed passing from him just as he needed it most.
E.M. Forster
There is a soul-jealousy that can be as frantic as any body-jealousy.
Arthur Conan Doyle
If you never left anything or anyone there would be no room for the new. Naturally, to move on is an infidelity -- to others, to the past, to old notions of oneself. Perhaps every day should contain at least one essential infidelity or necessary betrayal. It would be an optimistic, hopeful act, guaranteeing belief in the future -- a declaration that things can be not only different but better.
Hanif Kureishi
Some people are oil and water.
John Christopher
A relationship needs constant attention. It’s a living thing, not just a habit. You’ve got to keep on top of it.
Matt Dunn
She seemed to think that one of the perks of marriage was that it gave you rights of comment and intrusion over single people's love lives.
J.K. Rowling
Is it not the great end of religion, and, in particular, the glory of Christianity, to extinguish the malignant passions; to curb the violence, to control the appetites, and to smooth the asperities of man; to make us compassionate and kind, and forgiving one to another; to make us good husbands, good fathers, good friends; and to render us active and useful in the discharge of the relative social and civil duties?
William Wilberforce
Everyone disliked their partners at some time or another, she knew that. But she’d spent her hours in the dark wondering whether she’d ever liked him. Would it really have been so much worse to spend those years alone? Why did there have to be someone else in the room while she was eating, watching TV, sleeping?
Nick Hornby
The day he moved out was terrible – That evening she went through hell.His absence wasn’t a problemBut the corkscrew had gone as well.
Wendy Cope
When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.
George Eliot
A while back, when Dick & Barry & I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you *are* like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for potential partners, a 2 or 3 page multiple-choice document that covered all the music/film/TV/book bases. It was intended: a) to dispense with awkward conversation, and b) to prevent a chap from leaping into bed with someone who might, at a later date, turn out to have every Julio Iglesias record ever made. It amused us at the time... But there was an important & essential truth contained in the idea, and the truth was that these things matter, and it's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.
Nick Hornby
You wouldn't believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended.
Nick Hornby
Hereafter she is only my sister in name; not because I disown her, but because she has disowned me.
Emily Brontë
When a girl uses six derogatory adjectives in her attempt to paint the portrait of the loved one, it means something. One may indicate a merely temporary tiff. Six is big stuff.
P.G. Wodehouse
It is the mind which creates the world around us, and even though we stand side by side in the same meadow, my eyes will never see what is beheld by yours, my heart will never stir to the emotions with which yours is touched.
George Gissing
There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped' growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.
Graham Greene
A break up is the closest thing to bereavement
Lindsey Kelk
I wish I hadn't. I wish I'd fought for you. I was weak and stupid.
S.J. Watson
Sometimes, if she simply remained quiet, and let the inadequacy of his excuses reverberate on the air, he became ashamed and backtracked.
J.K. Rowling
You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them.
Hanif Kureishi
We had been friends. We could not become strangers. It left only one thing: we must be enemies.
John Christopher
All's fair in love and war," said Ron brightly, "and this is a bit of both.
J.K. Rowling
He feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them.
Julian Barnes
It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can’t afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You’ve got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you’ve got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you’re compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.
Nick Hornby
Was it necessary to tell me that you wanted nothing in the world but me?'The corners of his mouth drooped peevishly.Oh, my dear, it's rather hard to take quite literally the things a man says when he's in love with you.'Didn't you mean them?'At the moment.
W Somerset Maugham
There is no mystery-- that's the beauty of it. We are entirely explicable to each other, and yet we stay. What a miracle that is.
Kamila Shamsie
Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding.
Graham Greene
I hate the way, once you start to know someone, care about them, their behavior can distress you, even when it's unreasonable and not your fault, even if you were really trying to be careful, tactful.
Tanith Lee
Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love--it's being unhappy together.
Graham Greene
I used to think--and given the way we ended up, maybe I still do--that all relationships need the kind of violent shove that a crush brings, just to get you started and to push you over the humps. And then, when the energy from that shove has gone and you come to something approaching a halt, you have to look around and see what you've got. It could be something completely different, it could be something roughly the same, but gentler and calmer, or it could be nothing at all.
Nick Hornby
Share too much and someone can hurt you.
Dorothy Koomson
People are islands,' she said. 'They don't really touch. However close they are, they're really quite separate. Even if they've been married for fifty years.
Ian Fleming
But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
Graham Greene
Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
Alain de Botton
Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who'll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness? It means you're in the wrong house, that's what it means.
Henny Youngman
We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
T.S Eliot
Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.
J.K. Rowling
It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.
Nick Hornby
There is obviously something wrong with our educational system. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that there might even be something wrong with at least some of our schoolteachers. But heaven help anyone daring to express such heretical views.
J. Paul Getty
The conformist is not born. He is made. I believe the brainwashing process begins in the schools and colleges.
J. Paul Getty
I would rather see a school produce a happy street cleaner than a neurotic scholar.
A.S. Neill
An educator...a good one that is, inspires others to be even better than herself.
Jill Telford
If the nineteenth century was a time of education for women, it was no less a time of education for men.
Millicent Garrett Fawcett
Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined?...Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side?...And when you think of this, and think that most of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees, have you ever felt a certain sinking of the heart?...Is not the great defect of our education today---a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned---that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils "subjects," we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Obciously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself.
G.K. Chesterton
But though I might fill the world with dragons I never had the slighest real doubt that heroes ought to fight with dragons. I must stop to challenge many child-lovers for cruelty to children. It is quite false to say that the child dislikes the fable because it is moral. Very often he likes the moral more than the fable. Adults are reading their own weary mockery into a mind still vigorous enough to be entirely serious.
G.K. Chesterton
Schools are made for the average. The holes are all round, and whatever shape the pegs are they must wedge in somehow. One hasn't time to bother about anything but the average.
W Somerset Maugham
Singapore is now in the top five. Its income per person even tops oil-rich and scarcely populated Kuwait. Having realized that the country had no natural resources, the government of founding father Lee Kuan Yew directed massive investment in human capital. Kids who were eight or ten or thirteen several decades ago are now some of the most productive citizens of today's economy.A tiny nation-state with no natural resources and a large number of people living in a relatively small physical space has managed to outearn a country with some of the largest oil deposits ever found. That is the power of investing in and nurturing young brains.Education alone may not be enough to guarantee economic success. There are other success factors that matter, like good governance, rule of law, and access to trading routes and partners. But if you were challenged to assemble a prosperous society from scratch, education would be the first building block you'd want to develop.
John Wood
Education means Independence and Independence means liberty!
Lily Amis
...literacy is as vital as food, security, limiting population growth, and control of the environment.Education, after all, is the one issue that affects every other one. I think of it in the same way as dropping a pebble into a pond and getting a ripple effect. Educated people make more money and are more likely to escape poverty. Educated parents raise healthier children....The list goes on, just as ripples in a body of water emanate outward.
John Wood