Quotes by British Authors - Page 811

Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will did it. I have no broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong.
Emily Brontë
Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in bewilderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer.
Jeanette Winterson
Her definition of romance was absentminded intimacy, the way someone else's hand stray to your plate of food.I replied: no, that's just friendship; romance is always knowing exactly where that someone else's hands are. She smiled and said, there was a time I thought that way, too. But at the heart of the romance is the knowledge that those hands may wander off elsewhere, but somehow through luck or destiny or plain blind groping they'll find a way back to you, and maybe you'll be smart enough then to be grateful for everything that's still possible, in spit of your own weaknesses- and his.
Kamila Shamsie
Is not general incivility the very essence of love?
Jane Austen
I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different and yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.
Graham Greene
Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.
Thomas Hardy
When a woman loves you she's not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she's weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her.
W Somerset Maugham
Elizabeth's spirit's soon rising to playfulness again, she wanted Mr. Darcy to account for his having ever fallen in love with her. 'How could you begin?' said she. begun.
Jane Austen
Take care. If you do not speak – I shall claim you as my own in some strange presumptuous way. Send me away at once, if I must go; – Margaret! –
Elizabeth Gaskell
Belinda stared into the fire for some time, thinking about what she had in her life, and what she had given up; and whether it would be worse to love someone who was no longer there, or not to love someone who was.
Neil Gaiman
Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.
George Eliot
I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.
Dodie Smith
Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she were the one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract.
Ian McEwan
to love means to realize there is a time to let the beloved one go
Tony Parsons
I love you. It hurts more than anything ever has, but I do. So don't you dare tell me I don't. Don't you ever say it again!
Jenny Downham
Loving you was like going to war I never came back the same.
Warsan Shire
People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two loves, but this, too, was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. Before the world existed, before it was populated, and before there were wars and jobs and colleges and movies and clothes and opinions and foreign travel -- before all of these things there had been only one person, Zora, and only one place: a tent in the living room made from chairs and bed-sheets. After a few years, Levi arrived; space was made for him; it was as if he had always been. Looking at them both now, Jerome found himself in their finger joints and neat conch ears, in their long legs and wild curls. He heard himself in their partial lisps caused by puffy tongues vibrating against slightly noticeable buckteeth. He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
Zadie Smith
It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.
Jeanette Winterson
Love me sweet With all thou art Feeling, thinking, seeing; Love me in the Lightest part, Love me in full Being.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn't rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup. As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never the destroyed.
Jeanette Winterson
The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.
Ian McEwan
The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.
Alan W. Watts
I imagine John Watson thinks love’s a mystery to me, but the chemistry is incredibly simple and very destructive. When we first met, you told me that a disguise is always a self portrait, how true of you, the combination to your safe – your measurements. But this is far more intimate. This is your heart, and you should never let it rule your head. You could have chosen any random number and walked out of here today with everything you worked for. But you just couldn’t resist it, could you? I’ve always assumed that love is a dangerous disadvantage. Thank you for the final proof.
Mark Gatiss
What will survive of us is love.
Philip Larkin
I've never wanted more, until I met you.
E.L. James
Love makes the world go round? Not at all. Whiskey makes it go round twice as fast.
Compton Mackenzie
Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse.
P.G. Wodehouse
I wanted to see the place where Margaret grew to what she is, even at the worst time of all, when I had no hope of ever calling her mine.
Elizabeth Gaskell
I would know you anywhere for my true love. Whoever I was and whoever you were, I would know you at once for my true love.
Philippa Gregory
You don't fall in love with someone because it's convenient.
Harriet Evans
Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.
Jeanette Winterson
Nothing of real worth can ever be bought. Love, friendship, honour, valour, respect. All these things have to be earned.
David Gemmell
I felt his other hand sear hot against my cheek. He bent his head, and in a voice that Jack couldn’t hear, said, “When you came down the stairs, and fell into me, that was the moment.” Then his lips pressed against mine.
Sarah Alderson
You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.
Jeanette Winterson
Far too many people opened their hearts and lives at the drop of a hat. Why give someone that power over you? Why endow them with the ability to hurt you that much? Let someone in and you were asking for an emotional kicking some day.
Dorothy Koomson
You must learn to forgive a man when he's in love. He's always a nuisance.
Rudyard Kipling
I've decided that I'm not going to try to squeeze myself into a friendship that hurts me anymore. I'm going to let her go and just be friends with people who make me feel good about myself.
Zoe Sugg
I know women are taught by other women that they must never admit the full truth to a man. But the highest form of affection is based on full sincerity on both sides. Not being men, these women don't know that in looking back on those he has had tender relations with, a man's heart returns closest to her who was the soul of truth in her conduct. The better class of man, even if caught by airy affectations of dodging and parrying, is not retained by them. A Nemesis attends the woman who plays the game of elusiveness too often, in the utter contempt for her that, sooner or later, her old admirers feel; under which they allow her to go unlamented to her grave.
Thomas Hardy
Traveling in the company of those we love is home in motion.
Leigh Hunt
In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.
C.S. Lewis
I can hate you more, but I'll never love you less.
Michael Morpurgo
Time is how you spend your love.
Zadie Smith
AnatasiaYou Are My More My Love, My LifeChristian
E.L. James
It is impossible to manufacture or imitate love.
J.K. Rowling
I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?
Graham Greene
Why me?" she asked, holding on to him."Because you cared," he whispered. "You cared so much for your people, it broke your heart to see the pack in ruins. You cared so much for your mother, you risked your life for hers. You cared enough to save someone who wanted you dead. And because you walk like a queen.
Annette Curtis Klause
No you sick, stupid creep, I love you. I shouldn't. I shouldn't. You're sick inside, Caine, sick! But I love you. - Diana
Michael Grant
Sometimes I turn around and catch the smell of you and I cannot go on I cannot fucking go on without expressing this terrible so fucking awful physical aching fucking longing I have for you. And I cannot believe that I can feel this for you and you feel nothing. Do you feel nothing?
Sarah Kane
How far have you walked for men who’ve never held your feet in their laps?
Warsan Shire
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.
David Mitchell
Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could be absolutely certain that my love would never be returned: how much more simple life would be. One could plod through the Siberian salt mines of existence without being bothered about happiness. Unfortunately the happiness is there. There is always the chance (about eight hundred and fifty to one) that another heart will come to mine. I can't help hoping, and keeping faith, and loving beauty. Quite frequently I am not so miserable as it would be wise to be.
T.H. White
He didn't mind how he looked to other people, because the nursery magic had made him Real, and when you are Real shabbiness doesn't matter.
Margery Williams Bianco
Kisses open doors, I've noticed. That one gesture can unlock secrets, ease open feelings. It can't be prevented--these kisses just are. It's how they work. They break into basements you never knew you had.
Susan Fletcher
Then she was kissing him as she had never kissed him before...and it was blissful oblivion, better than firewhisky; she was the only real thing in the world.
J.K. Rowling
He didn't realize that love as powerful as your mother's for you leaves its own mark.
J.K. Rowling
To love makes one solitary.
Virginia Woolf
Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death.
Jane Austen
Ah me, but where are now the songs I sangWhen life was sweet because you call’d them sweet?
Christina Rossetti
To love someone enough to let them go, you had to let them go forever or you did not love them that much.
Diana Wynne Jones
When I talk about unrequited love, most of you probably think about romantic love, but there are many other kinds of love that are not adequately returned, if they are returned at all. An angry adolescent may not love her mother back as her mother loves her; an abusive father doesn't return the innocent open love of his young child. But grief is the ultimate unrequieted love. However hard and however long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels...
Rosamund Lupton