Novelists From England

"Shelley styles his new poem "Prometheus Unbound," And 'tis like to remain so while time circles round; For surely an age would be spent in the finding A reader so weak as to pay for the binding!"

"An arch wag has declar'd, that he truly can say Why the Prince did not lay the first stone t'other day: The Restrictions prevented — the reason is clear; The Regent can't meddle in making a pier."

"When Anacreon would fight, as the poets have said, A reverse he display'd in his vapour, For while all his poems were loaded with lead, His pistols were loaded with paper. For excuses, Anacreon old custom may thank, Such a salvo he should not abuse, For the cartridge, by rule, is always made blank, That is fired away at Reviews."

"Smart soldiers like to be well tightened in: Loose habits would destroy all discipline."

"My dog, who picks up everything one teaches, Has got "three heads," like Mr. Gladstone's speeches, But, as might naturally be expected, His are considerably more connected."

"Two Miltons in separate ages were born: The cleverer Milton 'tis clear we have got, Though the other had talents the world to adorn, This lives by his mews, which the other could not!"

"This gardener's rule applies to youth and age, When young sow wild oats, but when old grow sage."

"Life's too short for chess."

"Love levels all,—it elevates the clown, And often brings the fattest people down."

"The least drop in the world I do not mind: "Cognac"'s a noun I never yet declin'd."

"Mr. Montague has written a very fine book. He has extenuated nothing and set down nothing in malice. I have seen no book about the war so temperate or so human. He was in the war, and being a man of fine intelligence must have suffered more than most from the fools from whom men then had to suffer, but the book is without any littleness or bitterness.... It is one of the very best of the books which have been written about the war."

"Nothing in language is immutably fixed: the best writers are constantly changing it. Absolute government by dictionary would mean the arrest of this healthy process of change and growth."

"The true delight of travel, the one that is going to print itself unaccountably and indelibly on you, seems to prefer to come as a thief in the night, and not at the hours you specially fix for its entertainment."

"What I mean by reading is not skimming, not being able to say as the world saith, "Oh, yes, I've read that!," but reading again and again, in all sorts of moods, with an increase of delight every time, till the thing read has become a part of your system and goes forth along with you to meet any new experience you may have."

"All of ourselves, with our boastful chatter about “the public school spirit”, our gallant, robust contempt for “swats” and “smugs” and all who invented new means to new ends and who trained and used their brains with a will – we had arranged for these easy battues of thousands of Englishmen, who, for their part, did not fail. To-morrow you would see it again – a few hundred square yards of ground gained by the deaths, perhaps of twenty thousand men."

"It was the fault of the war, the outlandish, innovatory war that did not conform to the proper text-books as it ought to have done; an unimagined war of flankless armies scratching each other's faces across an endless thorn hedge, not dreamt of in Staff College philosophy; a war that was always putting out of date the best that had been known and thought and invented, always sending everyone to school again."

"We all see more of architecture than of any other art. Every street is a gallery of architects’ work, and in most streets, whatever their age, there is good work and bad. Through these amusing shows many of us walk unperceivingly, all our days, like illiterates in a library, so richly does the fashionable education provide us with blind sides ."

"Patriotism has served, at different times, as widely different ends as a razor, which ought to be used to keep your face clean and yet may be used to cut your own throat or that of some more innocent person."

"War hath no fury like a non-combatant."

"Mr. Justice Cocklecarrot began the hearing of a very curious case yesterday. A Mrs. Tasker is accused of continually ringing the doorbell of a Mrs. Renton, and then, when the door is opened, pushing a dozen red-bearded dwarfs into the hall and leaving them there."

"Dr. Strabismus (Whom God Preserve) of Utrecht has patented a new invention. It is an illuminated trouser-clip for bicyclists who are using main roads at night."

"Hush, hush, Nobody cares! Has Fallen Down- Stairs."

"Rush hour: that hour when traffic is almost at a standstill."

"The Doctor is said also to have invented an extraordinary weapon which will make war less brutal. It is described as a very powerful liquid which rots braces at a distance of a mile."

"One disadvantage of being a hog is that at any moment some blundering fool may try to make a silk purse out of your wife's ear."

"The man with the false nose had gone to that bourne from which no hollingsworth returns."

"Erratum. In my article on the price of milk, 'horses' should have read 'cows' throughout."

"[E]xtreme happiness invites religion almost as much as extreme misery."

"The family—that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape."

"Nothing really wrong with him—only , but that's the most fatal complaint of all, in the end."

"I had never had a piece of toast Particularly long and wide, But fell upon the sanded floor, And always on the buttered side."

"He was no coward, but it had suddenly struck him that the present was a very ill-chosen time for a row with his younger relative, however successful might be the issue. Such violence should not go unpunished, but vengeance is a dish that can be eaten cold."

"To the truly benevolent mind, indeed, nothing is more satisfactory than to hear of a miser denying himself the necessaries of life a little too far and ridding us of his presence altogether."

"May he perish, inch by inch, within reach of the aid that shall never come, ere the God of the poor take him into his hand."

"I kenned yer partner: a good man—a very good man, a man o' ten thousand. He was put down up north. A bad job—a very bad job! Ye gat terrible vengeance, though. Ye hewed Agag in pieces! T' Governor up there to Sydney was wild angry at what ye did, but he darena' say much. He knew that every free man's heart went with ye. It were the sword of the Lord and of Gideon that ye fought with! Ye saved many good lives by that raid of yours after Stockbridge was killed. The devils wanted a lesson, and ye gar'd them read one wi' a vengeance!"

"Now that broad cool verandah of Captain Brentwood's, with its deep recesses of shadow, was a place not to be lightly spoken of. Any man once getting footing there, and leaving it, except on compulsion, would show himself of weak mind. Any man once comfortably settled there in an easy chair, who fetched anything for himself when he could get any one else to fetch it for him, would show himself, in my opinion, a man of weak mind. One thing only was wanted to make it perfect, and that was niggers. To the winds with "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and "Dred" after it, in a hot wind! What can an active-minded, self-helpful lady like Mrs. Stowe, freezing up there in Connecticut, obliged to do something to keep herself warm,—what can she, I ask, know about the requirements of a southern gentleman when the thermometer stands at 125 degrees in the shade? Pish! Does she know the exertion required for cutting up a pipe of tobacco in a hot north wind? No! Does she know the amount of perspiration and anger superinduced by knocking the head off a bottle of Bass in January? Does she know the physical prostration which is caused by breaking up two lumps of hard white sugar in a pawnee before a thunderstorm? No, she doesn't, or she would cry out for niggers with the best of us! When the thermometer gets over 100 degrees in the shade, all men would have slaves if they were allowed. An Anglo-Saxon conscience will not, save in rare instances, bear a higher average heat than 95 degrees."

"Oh, but the sabres bit deep that autumn afternoon! There were women in Minsk, in Moglef, in Tohernigof, in Jitenier, in Polemva, whose husbands were Hussars—and women in Taganrog, in Tcherkask, in Aarepta, which lies under the pleasant slate mountains, whose husbands and sons were Cossacks—who were made widows that day. For that day's work there was weeping in reed-thatched hovels of the Don, and the mud-built shanties of the Dnieper. For the 17th Lancers, the Scots-Greys, the 1st Royals, and the 6th Enniskillens—"these terrible beef-fed islanders" (to use the words of the Northern Bee)—were upon them; and Volnyia and Hampshire, Renfrewshire and Grodno, Podolia and Fermanagh, were mixed together in one common ruin. Still, they say, the Princess Petrovitch, on certain days, leaves her carriage, and walks a mile through the snow barefoot, into Alexandroski, in memory of her light-haired handsome young son, whom Hornby slew at Balaclava. And I myself know the place where Lady Allerton makes her pilgrimage for those two merry boys of hers who lie out on the Crimean hill. Alas! not side by side. Up and down, in all weathers, along a certain gravel walk, where the chalk brook, having flooded the park with its dammed-up waters, comes foaming and spouting over a cascade, and hurries past the smooth-mown lawns of the pleasance. In the very place where she stood when the second letter came. And there, they say, she will walk at times, until her beauty and her strength are gone, and her limbs refuse to carry her."

"They have found gold here, and gold in abundance, and hither have come, by ship and steamship, all the unfortunate of the earth. The English factory labourer and the farmer-ridden peasant; the Irish pauper; the starved Scotch Highlander. I hear a grand swelling chorus rising above the murmur of the evening breeze; that is sung by German peasants revelling in such plenty as they never knew before, yet still regretting fatherland, and then I hear a burst of Italian melody replying. Hungarians are not wanting, for all the oppressed of the earth have taken refuge here, glorying to live under the free government of Britain; for she, warned by American experience, has granted to all her colonies such rights as the British boast of possessing."

"[W]hile I was learning the Latin grammar, I learnt other things besides, of more use than the construction of any languages, living or dead. First, I learnt that there were certain things in this world that must be done. Next, that there were people in this world, of whom the Masters of Eton were a sample, whose orders must be obeyed without question. Third, I found that it was pleasanter in all ways to do one's duty than to leave it undone. And last, I found out how to bear a moderate amount of birching without any indecent outcry."

"I see a vision of a nation, the colony of the greatest race on the earth, who began their career with more advantages than ever fell to the lot of a young nation yet. War never looked on them. Not theirs was the lot to fight, like the Americans, through bankruptcy and inexperience towards freedom and honour. No. Freedom came to them, Heavensent, red-tape-bound, straight from Downing-street."

""I see," began the Major, "the Anglo-Saxon race—" "Don't forget the Irish, Jews, Germans, Chinese, and other barbarians," interrupted the Doctor. "Asserting," continued the Major, scornfully, "as they always do, their right to all the unoccupied territories of the earth." ("Blackfellow's claims being ignored," interpolated the Doctor.)"

"A new heaven and a new earth! Tier beyond tier, height above height, the great wooded ranges go rolling away westward, till on the lofty sky-line they are crowned with a gleam of everlasting snow. To the eastward they sink down, breaking into isolated forests, fringed peaks, and rock-crowned eminences, till with rapidly straightening lines they disappear gradually into broad grey plains, beyond which the Southern Ocean is visible by the white reflection cast upon the sky."

"Those whose knowledge of the pastoral regions is drawn from a course of novels of the Geoffrey Hamlyn class, cannot fail to hold a most erroneous notion of the squatter. Of course, we use the term 'squatter' indifferently to denote a station-owner, a managing partner, or a salaried manager. Lacking generations of development, there is no typical squatter. Or, if you like, there are a thousand types. Hungry M'Intyre is one type; Smythe—petty, genteel, and parsimonious—is another; patriarchal Royce is another; Montgomery-kind, yet haughty and imperious—is another; Stewart is another. My diary might, just as likely as not, have compelled me to introduce, instead of these, a few of the remaining nine-hundred and ninety-five types—any type conceivable, in fact, except the slender-witted, virgin-souled, overgrown schoolboys who fill Henry Kingsley's exceedingly trashy and misleading novel with their insufferable twaddle."

"I think that if you're not a fan of irony as a form of expression, then a book that contains the line, "There's nothing so unattractive to a man as strident feminism" is going to make you cross. I also think that if we can't have a comic female character, if we can't laugh at ourselves without having a panic attack about what it says about women, we haven't got very far with our equality."

"I never imagined it would last more than a few weeks. I didn’t tell any of my colleagues it was me who was writing Bridget. I was working alongside a lot of very clever, seasoned journalists who were writing about New Labour and Chechnya and I felt stupid writing about calories and alcohol units and why it takes three hours between waking up and leaving the house in the morning, Then we started getting letters praising the column, I started boasting, "It's by me, meeeee!" and things snowballed from there."

"The jokes in Bridget come from something quite painful, which was her perception that she was in her thirties and she'd somehow made a mistake by not getting married yet and there's this ticking clock. But also there were good reasons why she was still single."

"I really wanted to smash the idea with this movie that there's a sexual sell-by-date for women and not for men, and stick it to the awful cougar stereotype. It makes me think of a woman in animal print leering over a friend of my son's, going, "Do you want a sherry, darling?" [...] It's got to stop because it's really not reflecting what's happening. For years and years we've seen Hollywood show men 40 years older than their partners, and it's not even discussed. Now movies are finally exploring a desire between younger men and older women that's reciprocal, not transactional. Bridget and Roxster both see something they want in each other — and Bridget having sex and being sexy is to be celebrated."

"Sometimes the best person to listen to is the person who did exactly what you don’t want to do. Don’t let what your grandparents or your mother or anyone else wants or wanted influence you now. I mean, history is important and all that, but at some point, you have to stop blaming other people."

"It was like a contract signed as a basic human right:You shall never perspire for long."

"You’ve got your career and all she’s got is a ball in her stomach, lemons everywhere and a bossy mother-in-law."