Short Story Writers From The United Kingdom

"I don't know how people live when they know exactly what's going to happen to them each day. (Part One, 7th section)"

"...There's fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world. (Part One, 9th section)"

"It's funny when you feel as if you don't want anything more in your life except to sleep, or else to lie without moving. That's when you can hear time sliding past you, like water running. (Part two, 1st section)"

"She seemed to be contemplating a future at once monotonous and insecure with an indifference which was after all a sort of hard-won courage. (chapter 3)"

"It was the darkness that got you. It was heavy darkness, greasy and compelling. It made walls round you, and shut you in so that you felt like you could not breathe. (chapter 3)"

""It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong." (chapter 4)"

"She said 'darling' with her lips, but her heart was dead. (chapter 5)"

"When you were nineteen, and it was the first time you had been let down, you did not make scenes. You felt as if your back was broken, as if you would never move again. But you did not make a scene. That started later on, when the same thing had happened five or six times over, and you were supposed to be getting used to it. (chapter 6)"

"The last time you were happy about nothing; the first time you were afraid about nothing. Which came first? (chapter 12)"

"When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul. (chapter 12)"

"'They touch life with gloves on. They're pretending about something all the time. Pretending quite nice and decent things, of course. But still...' 'Everybody pretends,' Marya was thinking..."

"She spent the foggy day in endless, aimless walking, for it seemed to her that if she moved quickly enough she would escape the fear that hunted her. It was a vague and shadowy fear of something cruel and stupid that had caught her and would never let her go. She had always known that it was there - hidden under the more of less pleasant surface of things. Always. Ever since she was a child. You could argue about hunger or cold or loneliness, but with that fear you couldn't argue. It went too deep. You were too mysteriously sure of its terror. You could only walk very fast and try to leave it behind you."

"no good ever comes from being too polite. (p40)"

"They sat at a corner table in the little restaurant, eating with gusto and noise after the manner of simple-hearted people who like their neighbours to see and know their pleasures. (beginning of "Trio")"

"One of those cold, heavy days in spring - a hard sky with a glare behind the cloud, all the new green of the trees hanging still and sullen. (beginning of "The Grey Day")"

"Funny how it's slipped away, Vienna. Nothing left but a few snapshots. (beginning of "Vienne")"

"the search for illusion a craving, almost a vice, the stolen waters and the bread eaten in secret of [her] life. ("Illusion")"

"It was obvious that this was not an Anglo-Saxon: he was too gay, too dirty, too unreserved and in his little eyes was such a mellow comprehension of all the sins and the delights of life. He was drinking rapidly one glass of beer after another, smoking a long, curved pipe, and beaming contentedly on the world. The woman with him wore a black coat and skirt; she had her back to us. I said: 'Who's the happy man in the corner? I've never seen him before.'"

"One shuts one's eyes and sees it written: red letters on a black ground: Le Saut dans l'Inconnu. . . . Le Saut... Stupidly I think: But why in French? Of course it must be a phrase I have read somewhere. Idiotic. I screw up my eyes wildly to get rid of it: next moment it is back again. Red letters on a black ground. One lies staring at the exact shape of the S."

"I wonder too if I am terribly excited about something that has been done ages ago (1964)"

"Very few people change after well say seven or seventeen. Not really. They get more this or more that and of course look a bit different. But inside they are the same. (1955)"

"I don't believe in the individual Writer so much as in Writing. It uses you and throws you away when you are not useful any longer. But it does not do this until you are useless and quite useless too. Meanwhile there is nothing to do but plod along line by line. (1953)"

"Everyone does seem very pessimistic about the future of writing and art in general. But hasn't it always been a fight? I remember how very bitter most of the English in Paris were about that very subject ages ago. (1953)"

"I usually dislike my books, sometimes, don't want to touch them. But the Next One will be a bit better. I am always excited and forget all failures and all else. (1953)"

"Writing can be (among other things), a safety valve. (1949)"

"I like emotion, I approve of it-in fact am capable of wallowing in it. (1946)"

"I think that the Anglo-Saxon idea that you can be rude with impunity to any female who has written a book is utterly damnable. You come and have a look out of curiosity and then allow the freak to see what you think of her. It's only done to the more or less unsuccessful and only by Anglo-Saxons. Well... if it were my last breath I'd say HELL TO IT and to the people who do it- (1936)"

"Yes, let Art go, if it must be That with it men must starve — If Music, Painting, Poetry Spring from the wasted hearth.Nay, brothers, sing us battle songs With clear and ringing rhyme; Nay, show the world its hateful wrongs, And bring the better time!"

"It’s one thing to be looked at, and another to be seen."

"You have always thought if you opened your mouth in open water you would drown, but if you didn't open your mouth you would suffocate. So here you are, drowning."

"What you're trying to say is that it's easier for you to hide in your own darkness, than emerge cloaked in your own vulnerability. Not better, but easier. However the longer you hold it in, the more likely you are to suffocate. At some point, you must breathe."

"Every time you remember something, the memory weakens, as you’re remembering the last recollection, rather than the memory itself. Nothing can remain in tact. Still, it does not stop you wanting, does not stop you longing."

"You ache. You ache all over. You are aching to be you, but you're scared of what it means to do so."

"You know that to love is both to swim and to drown. You know to love is to be a whole, partial, a joint, a fracture, a heart, a bone. It is to bleed and heal. It is to be in the world, honest. It is to place someone next to your beating heart, in the absolute darkness of your inner, and trust they will hold you close. To love is to trust, to trust is to have faith. How else are you meant to love? You knew what you were getting into, but taking the Underground, returning home with no certainty of when you will see her next, it is terrifying."

"It's easier to hide in your own darkness, than to emerge, naked and vulnerable, blinking in your own light."

"But while India fixed her eyes on the Ultimate she did not forget that objective science is the beginning of wisdom. There the foundations of mathematical and mechanical knowledge were well and truly laid by the Noble Race."

"Whereas in India the soul was free from the beginning to choose what it would, ranging from the dry bread of atheism to the banquets offered by many-colored passionate gods and goddesses, each shadowing forth some different aspect of the One whom in the inmost chambers of her heart India has always adored. Therefore the spiritual outlook was universal. Each took unrebuked what he needed. The children were at home in the house of their father, while Europe crouched under the lash of a capricious Deity whose ways were beyond all understanding."

"There is a place uplifted nine thousand feet in purest air where one of the most ancient tracks in the world runs from India into Tibet."

"India has had a spiritual freedom never known until lately to the West. Christianity when it came offering its spiritual philosophy of life imposed an iron dogma upon the European peoples. Those who could not accept this dogma, whatever it happened to be at the moment, paid so heavy a penalty that the legend of the Car of Juggernaut (Jagannath) is far truer of Europe than Asia.""

"In this vast and little-known epic — a series of gorgeously colored romances of lovely queens and mighty kings, full of a fascination that only those who care for true romance can realize — lies embedded a pearl of whose beauty and luster the world is aware. It is known as the Lord’s Song — or the Song Celestial — and it represents one of the highest flights of the conditioned spirit to its unconditioned Source ever achieved. It is assigned to the fifth century B.C. though opinions as to dates vary."

"And the Mahabharata and Ramayana may in consequence be said to be the Bibles of the people as well as their inexhaustible treasure-houses of story... A treasury of story indeed! I read almost daily in both, marveling at the vast fertility, the tropic splendor of romance unfolded in either, but still more at the nobil- ity of ideals set forth, the great passion for the Unseen, the Beautiful, and Entirely Desirable, both in man and woman, which has always been the soul of India."

"It is the philosophies of this great race that I propose to examine. It is interesting to wonder along what lines it might have developed later if its ancestral heritage had been less diffused and intermingled with other such different stocks as it found in India on arrival, or were forced by many invasions and conquests to accept later."

"Many centuries ago the Ranipur Kingdom was ruled by the Maharao Rai Singh a prince of the great lunar house of the Rajputs. Expecting a bride from some far away kingdom (the name of this is unrecorded) he built the Hall of Pleasure as a summer palace, a house of rare and costly beauty. A certain great chamber he lined with carved figures of the Gods and their stories, almost unsurpassed for truth and life. So, with the pine trees whispering about it the secret they sigh to tell, he hoped to create an earthly Paradise with this Queen in whom all loveliness was perfected. And then some mysterious tragedy ended all his hopes. It was rumoured that when the Princess came to his court, she was, by some terrible mistake, received with insult and offered the position only of one of his women. After that nothing was known. Certain only is it that he fled to the hills, to the home of his broken hope, and there ended his days in solitude, save for the attendance of two faithful friends who would not abandon him even in the ghostly quiet of the winter when the pine boughs were heavy with snow and a spectral moon stared at the panthers shuffling through the white wastes beneath."