Short Story Writers From England

"Pride and resentment are not indigenous in the human heart; and perhaps it is due to the gardener's innate love of the exotic that we take such pains to make them thrive."

"Without respite he is dragged by the two wild horses, memory and hope; and he is tormented by a secret that he never can tell."

"The year after ’s death Mirrlees converted to Catholicism, and for the next twenty or so years lived with her mother in , London and later . (TS Eliot staying with them during the war?) For many years Mirrlees worked on a Harrison biography that was never published. She also planned a many volume biography of the 17th century antiquarian , and published the first volume as A Fly in Amber (, 1962). After her mother’s death in 1948, Mirrlees moved to South Africa, a country she had visited as a child due to her father’s business interests, and lived there for fifteen years. She returned to England in 1963, settling in the Oxford suburb of , and published three slim poetry volumes in the sixties and early seventies, revised and expanded in Moods and Tensions (Amate Press, 1976). Mirrlees died in 1978 at the age of ninety-one."

"Paddington…has become a part of the folk-lore of childhood, not because he appears in a great or even a particularly good book, but because there is something in his personality which lodges permanently in the imagination."

"There aren't many of us left where I come from." "And where is that?" asked Mrs. Brown. The bear looked round carefully before replying. "Darkest Peru."

"The bear bent down to do up its case again. As he did so, Mrs. Brown caught a glimpse of the writing on the label. It said, simply, PLEASE LOOK AFTER THIS BEAR. THANK YOU."

"Paddington had a very persistent stare when he cared to use it. It was a very powerful stare. One which his Aunt Lucy had taught him and which he kept for special occasions."

"Hope Mirrlees's 1926 novel Lud-in-the-Mist, about the scandalous banishment of the Faerie folk by law-abiding conventional inhabitants of the town Lud-in-the-Mist, is sometimes characterized as "" in the manner of J.R.R. Tolkien's later, but more celebrated, work, The Hobbit (1937), for its "hobbit-ish" sounding names and settings. .... Perhaps, too, it is often assumed to lean that way because Mirrlees also coincidentally penned another obscure-but-brilliant text, Paris: A Poem (1919), published by Virginia Woolf's , written in what scholars consider a "" style. ... But, "high" can sometimes be too easy a critical reach, and, in the case of Lud-in-the-Mist, it's decidedly misleading."

"Makes Room at the Top look like a vicarage tea-party."

"Everybody thinks they'll never get married at your age. So did Jack, he told me. You think you can go on all your life being single, I remember he said, but you suddenly find out that you can't."

"Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not."

"Government wars aren't my wars; they've got nowt to do with me, because my own war's all that I'll ever be bothered about."

"I realized it might be possible to do such a thing, run for money, trot for wages on piece work at a bob a puff rising bit by bit to a guinea a gasp and retiring through old age at thirty-two because of lace-curtain lungs, a football heart, and legs like varicose beanstalks."

"You can always rely on a society of equals taking it out on the women."

"Few writers who have managed to acquire his reputation can have been so much at the mercy of crude emotion."

"His fiction – radical, satirical, polyvalent, sexually courageous, global – extended the mainstream novel, and led it somewhere else. Still not fully recognized, he was one of Britain's greatest late-twentieth-century writers."

"When was reviewing Doris Lessing's last two books from the Shikasta series, I found that she has discovered what I, to my great joy, had discovered a little earlier: that (a) if you're writing what they call science fiction, you're absolutely free-you can write anything you damn please, and (b) that if you take seriously the science fiction premise, you are furnished with an inexhaustable supply of absolutely beautiful and complex metaphors for our present situation, for who and where we are now, and I think it's not only women who have found this out. Angus Wilson was one of the first to do this with The Old Man in the Zoo years ago. That is a science fiction novel, if you look at it closely."

"Angus Wilson says in Wild Garden that most of his books begin with a visual image; one of them began when he saw these two people arguing and he had to find out what they were arguing about, who they were. That fits in beautifully with the kind of visual image that started The Left Hand of Darkness."

"Life can't be put on paper in all its complexity."

"But you mustn't be too sane, darlings. It really won't do in this family."

"I have no concern for the common man except that he should not be so common."

"Between Margaret's fine-edged art and Gladys's rough simplicity, where did the greater feminine solace lie? True art, after all, is simple."

"[T]he impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life."

"The roots of art and play lie very close together."

"Life isn't just to be found, you have to work for it."

"In writing novels I have never been able to place much importance upon the distinction between real and imagined. A novelist, it seems to me, makes as much or as little use of the real world as he needs to project his vision of life."

"April, April, laugh thy girlish laughter, and the moment after, Weep thy girlish tears, April."

"God knows how you Protestants can be expected to have any sense of direction," she said. "It's different with us, I haven't been to mass for years, I've got every mortal sin on my conscience, but I know when I'm doing wrong. I'm still a Catholic, it's there, nothing can take it away from me." "Of course, duckie," said Jeremy... "once a Catholic always a Catholic."

"The opportunities for heroism are limited in this kind of world: the most people can do is sometimes not to be as weak as they’ve been at other times."

"People are able to live with only half a heart, to live without real compassion, because they are able to use words that are only forms."

"All writers know aspects of life that they take very much for granted, that yet to their readers appear peculiar, special."

"Youth is the time for loving, So poets often say."

"There are some authors one wished one had never read in order to have the joy of reading them for the first time. For me, M. R. James is one of these."

"I heard one cry in the night, and I heard one laugh afterwards. If I cannot forget that, I shall not be able to sleep again."

"There was a man sitting or kneeling on Sampson's window-sill, and looking in, and I thought he was beckoning…He looked as if he was wet all over: and," he said, looking round and whispering as if he hardly liked to hear himself, "I'm not at all sure that he was alive."

"A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself: "If I'm not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!""

"Reticence may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it."

"At the opposite pole of genius from Lord Dunsany, and gifted with an almost diabolic power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily life, is the scholarly Montague Rhodes James, Provost of Eton College, antiquary of note, and recognised authority on mediæval manuscripts and cathedral history. Dr. James, long fond of telling spectral tales at Christmastide, has become by slow degrees a literary weird fictionist of the very first rank; and has developed a distinctive style and method likely to serve as models for an enduring line of disciples."

"Sly humorous vignettes and bits of lifelike genre portraiture and characterisation are often to be found in Dr. James's narratives, and serve in his skilled hands to augment the general effect rather than to spoil it, as the same qualities would tend to do with a lesser craftsman. In inventing a new type of ghost, he has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition; for where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairy—a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and man—and usually touched before it is seen."

"James is regularly cited as a – or the – founder of the ‘tradition’ of English ghost stories. It is commonplace to then wryly point out that James’s ghosts are in fact often not ghosts, but inhuman ‘demons’ of one sort or another."

"Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories by M. R. James. I don't believe in ghosts, but I'm frightened of them. They don't come any scarier than in these superb examples of the classic English ghost story."

"If I wrote a book about England I should call it What About Wednesday Week? which is what English people say when they are making what they believe to be an urgent appointment."

"A newspaper is always a weapon in somebody's hands."

"The hired journalist, I thought, ought to realize that he is partly in the entertainment business and partly in the advertising business – advertising either goods, or a cause, or a government. He just has to make up his mind whom he wants to entertain, and what he wants to advertise."

"Evidently there are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they liked nor quite grown to like what they get. They write pieces they do not much enjoy writing, for papers they totally despise, and the sad process ends by ruining their style and disintegrating their personality, two developments which in a writer cannot be separated, since his personality and style must progress or deteriorate together, like a married couple in a country where death is the only permissible divorce."

"Since becoming a journalist I had often heard the advice to "believe nothing until it has been officially denied"."

"He [Brendan Bracken] had been upset by my observation that a wartime Minister of Information was compelled, in the national interest, to such continuous acts of duplicity that even his natural hair must grow to resemble a wig."

"A devout and serious Christian, she was often bothered by what she read of socialists because she could not, instantly and absolutely, see where they were so wrong. To her horrified ear, they kept sounding as though they had ideas rather like Christ's."

"There is nothing quite so terrifying as a mad sheep."

"Someone [on the staff of The Times] had invented a game – a competition with a small prize for the winner – to see who could write the dullest headline. It had to be a genuine headline, that is to say one which was actually printed in the next morning's newspaper. I won it only once with a headline which announced: "Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many dead.""