Novelists From England

"'Twas a hand White, delicate, dimpled, warm, languid, and bland. The hand of a woman is often, in youth, Somewhat rough, somewhat red, somewhat graceless in truth; Does its beauty refine, as its pulses grow calm, Or as sorrow has cross'd the life-line in its palm."

"We are what we must, And not what we would be. I know that one hour Forestalls not another. The will and the power Are diverse."

"No true love can be without Its dread penalty—jealousy."

"Unseen hands delay The coming of what seems close in ken, And, contrary, the moment when we say "'Twill never come!" comes on us even then."

"Let any man show the world that he feels Afraid of its bark and ’t will fly at his heels: Let him fearlessly face it, ’t will leave him alone: But ’t will fawn at his feet if he flings it a bone."

"Whene'er I hear French spoken as I approve, I feel myself quietly falling in love."

"We may live without poetry, music and art; We may live without conscience and live without heart; We may live without friends; we may live without books; But civilized man can not live without cooks. He may live without books,—what is knowledge but grieving? He may live without hope—what is hope but deceiving? He may live without love,—what is passion but pining? But where is the man that can live without dining?"

"Ah, well! when time is flown, how it fled It is better neither to ask nor tell. Leave the dead moments to bury their dead."

"And the jasmin-flower in her fair young breast: (O the faint, sweet smell of that jasmin-flower!) And the one bird singing alone in his nest: And the one star over the tower."

"The world is fill'd with folly and sin, And Love must cling where it can, I say: For Beauty is easy enough to win; But one isn't loved every day."

"Oh, moment of sweet peril, perilous sweet! When woman joins herself to man."

"In the lives of most women and men There's a moment when all would go smooth and even, If only the dead could find out when To come back and be forgiven."

"There is a pleasure which is born of pain."

"Love thou the rose, yet leave it on its stem."

"The unknown Is life to love, religion, poetry."

"A night of tears! for the gusty rain Had ceased, but the eaves were dripping yet; And the moon look'd forth, as tho' in pain, With her face al white and wet."

"Then did I feel as one who, much perplext, Led by strange legends and the light of stars Over long regions of the midnight sand Beyond the red tract of the Pyramids, Is suddenly drawn to look upon the sky From sense of unfamiliar light, and sees Reveal'd against the constellated cope The great cross of the South."

"The ages roll Forward; and, forward with them, draw my soul Into Time’s infinite sea. And to be glad or sad I care no more: But to have done, and to have been, before I cease to do and be!"

"Words, however, are things: and the man who accords To his language the license to outrage his soul Is controll'd by the words he disdains to control."

"The man who seeks one thing in life and but one May hope to achieve it before life is done; But he who seeks all things, wherever he goes Only reaps from the hopes which around him he sows A harvest of barren regrets."

"Who can undo What time hath done? who can win back the wind? Beckon lost music from a broken lute? Renew the redness of a last year's rose? Or dig the sunken sunset from the deep?"

"We are but as the instrument of heaven. Our work is not design, but destiny."

"Art is Nature made by Man To Man the interpreter of God."

"For only by knowledge of that which is not Thyself shall thyself be learn'd."

"Far up the wave The clouds that lay piled in the golden heat Were turn'd into types of the ancient mountains In an ancient land."

"The thing which must be, must be for the best."

"Since we parted, yester eve, I do love thee, love, believe, Twelve times dearer, twelve hours longer, One dream deeper, one night stronger, One sun surer,—thus much more Than I loved thee, love, before."

"Priestley became in the months after Dunkirk a leader second only in importance to Mr. Churchill. And he gave us what our other leaders have always failed to give us – an ideology."

"Priestley's broadcasts are excellent. I am astonished that the BBC allow them. He says insistently that this war is not to restore the old order, that we must not return to the old muddle and injustices. It is in our order to commence a period of reconstruction and new activity, so exciting and absorbing that Hitler and his Nazis will be forgotten in a few years. Already, he says, he has had letters telling him to get off the air before the government puts him where he belongs."

"During the war after the 9 o'clock news on Sundays there was Postscripts, a short talk on a topical subject, often by J. B. Priestley, who had a unique gift of cloaking left-wing views as solid, down to earth, Northern homespun philosophy."

"Then, above all, the English people have a curious sense of humour, rather than wit. Humour comes from the heart; wit comes from the brain. We can laugh at ourselves. ... Well, laughter is one of the best things that God has given us, and with hearty laughter neither malice nor indecency can exist. And of all men who have shown us what that laughter can mean, none was like Dickens, every one of whose characters is English to the marrow; and if I might mention a living writer, I think the truest Englishmen are found in Mr. Priestley's novels."

"Because most children are highly imaginative, it is supposed by some that to reach maturity we ought to leave imagination behind, like the habit of smearing our faces with jam or chocolate. But an adult in whom imagination has withered is mentally lame and lopsided, in danger of turning into a zombie or a murderer. It is the creative imagination that has given our ruthless bloodthirsty species its occasional gleams of nobility, its hope of rising above the muck it spreads."

"I am not an atheist, but I cannot agree with men who talk about God as if He had once attended a Speech Day at their theological college."

"Lor’, but women’s rum cattle to deal with, the first man found that to his cost, And I reckon it’s just through a woman the last man on earth’ll be lost."

"So Tom was left alone again, this time for quite a spell. The place had filled up now and he was gradually pushed back from the bar counter until he found himself closely ringed round by men and girls, nearly all talking hard. They were wildly different in appearance, ranging from the slovenly to the excessively smart, but they were all alike, it seemed to him as he listened to them, in being on the edge of things. They were nearly doing a television series, almost about to have a play done at the Arts, just missing a commission to photograph Sicily for a coffee-table book, possibly writing two songs for a new musical, being asked to try again for that super modelling job. And while they might be all on their way towards ultimate disillusion and misery, just now they were gay and excited, full of enthusiasm for themselves, their work, their enchanting style of life. Tom had met a few men and women of great and widely-recognised talent, large personalities a long way from these edges, people bang in the centre, and they had displayed little or none of this enthusiasm, often seeming dubious, disenchanted, melancholy, weighed down by the sense of responsibility a great talent and reputation bring. But these types, with fuzzy little talents at best and with only the faintest glimmer of reputation, were still enchanted - at least at this hour with drinks in their hands. And not for the first time, Tom wondered about the drinks, which demanded a constant passing of pound notes. Nobody he had overheard so far appeared to have earned any money recently, yet here they were buying double gins and whiskies."

"It is, of course, men who are more likely to inhibit themselves for the sake of appearing to be sensible and dependable.[…] If pressed, I will agree that more women than men wish to appear wonderfully sensitive and intuitive, and may stop being realistic […] in order to deceive themselves and other people. On the other hand, women in general tend to be more realistic and yet in certain matters more open-minded than men, more ready to resist that pressure of opinion. They are less likely to be put into blinkers by ideas. Moreover […] as a rule the average woman notices far more than the average man; she has a better eye for detail than he has; she makes a more alert witness."

"[I]f self-deception has to be risked anyhow, it might be better to risk it to take a broad view than a narrow view. It may be foolish, perhaps even dangerous, to wander too far from the highway and then be the dupe of fantasies; but it may be even more foolish, even more dangerous in the end, to be so determined to keep to the well-tested road that you wear blinkers, see nothing of the surrounding landscape, and find the road itself, all that you can see, more and more wearisome and detestable."

"In our secret depths, wherever we do our unspoken wishing, either we want life to be tidy, clear, fully understood, contained within definite limits, or we long for it to seem larger, wilder, stranger. Faced with some odd incident, either we wish to cut it down or to build it up. On this level, below that of philosophies and rational opinions, either we reject or ignore the unknown, the apparently inexplicable, the marvellous and miraculous, or we welcome every sign of them. At one extreme is a narrow intolerant bigotry, snarling at anything outside the accepted world-picture, and at the other is an idiotic credulity, the prey of any glib charlatan. At one end the world becomes a prison, at the other a madhouse."

"Science can function only by abstracting from the reality in which the scientist has his being. In spite of the astonishing complications it discovers, with which it dazzles and almost blinds us, science is compelled by its own terms of reference to be a drastic simplification."

"The very newspapers that celebrate the latest conquest in their largest print also keep asking us what is the matter with Woman nowadays, when she has so much she never had before. The answer is that she is tired of having to live with neurotic, immature conquerors."

"[A] man must be either conscientiously scientific in his approach or frankly speculative. What he must not do is present his speculative untested ideas in a manner and style of dogmatic certainty that they are not entitled to claim. This is being pseudo-scientific."

"I […] thoroughly detest [novels that] fasten on to some historical figure, offering me bogus biography, an unpleasant mixture of fact and fiction."

"Fully to appreciate a play we have to maintain a delicate balance between what is taking place apparently on two different levels of the mind. On one level we are involved in the drama, are living imaginatively with its characters. On the other level we are enjoying a performance by actors on a stage, being fully aware that we are in a theatre."

"In the same way, the dramatist has a double task, creating the imaginary life of his characters and at the same time writing for a certain number of players on a certain kind of stage. It is this mixture of sheer creation and a highly skilled technique that makes playwriting difficult. Even in plays considered worth a production, nine times out of 10 there is an obvious deficiency on one side or the other."

"If what we are all trying to do is to describe reality, an intuitive interpretation of actual experience, however loose the terms it employs, may bring us closer to it than the most rigorous linguistics and the severest logic. These last may leave so little room to manœuvre that they cannot capture any experience outside an accepted narrow pattern; and indeed they may operate (for philosophers do not live in a vacuum) to insist upon that pattern and to deny everything outside it."

"The appalling difficulty of examining the Time problem seems to me to be chiefly due to the fact that Time either changes into something else or quietly disappears from the examination room. Trying to keep it fixedly in view is like playing Wonderland croquet."

"[P]ursuing Time, we are like a knight on a quest, condemned to wander through innumerable forests, bewildered and baffled, because the magic beast he is looking for is the horse he is riding."

"We tend quite rightly to associate an age with its newest and most original ideas, and there is no harm in this as long as we remember that only a few men, at that time, may have actually held those ideas, and that many decades, often amounting to centuries, may pass before those ideas have seeped down to wider and commoner levels of belief, thought, and feeling. So many 'hard-headed and realistic' men of today repeat what scientists were saying 100 years ago, and may know nothing about the outlook and prevailing moods of scientists today. And men in the street now assert beliefs originally found among the intellectuals of the 18th century. We may expect time-lags of various lengths."

"Fifty years ago I seemed to myself older than other people assumed me to be; now I seem younger."

"But then we assume on our paper that nobody thinks. Which is all right. But where we're wrong—and of course I'm not really including myself but mean the top boys—is in thinking that our readers, dumb as they are, take us seriously."