Women Authors From The United Kingdom

"Her eyes came back to Karen's face and fury again seized her. "And as for you, ungrateful girl—perfidious, yes, and insolent one—you deserve to be denounced to the world.""

"These insolent words, hurled at it, convulsed the livid face that fronted Karen. And suddenly, holding Karen's shoulders and leaning forward, Madame von Marwitz broke into tears, horrible tears—in all her life Karen had never pitied her as she pitied her then—sobbing with raking breaths: "No, no; it is too much. Have I not loved him with a saintly love, seeking to uplift what would draw me down? Has he not loved me? Has he not sought to be my lover? And he can spit upon me in the dust!""

"Karen has many privileges. She must learn not to take, always, the extra inch when the ell is so gladly granted."

"For most of the , tree cover is the normal condition. Any area below the five hundred metre contour that is left to itself and protected from vandalism, or other biotic factors, will revert to forest unless exposed to high s or ."

"Compare the appearance and social atmosphere of the average country village having a well-mixed community with those of a modern housing estate composed of all one type of house and garden. Monotony seems to make for squalor or genteel snobbery according to the class of house …"

"In our soft too many s become oppressive, and we need a very carefully balanced combination of evergreen and deciduous planting to give us the right degree of comfort, variety and satisfaction. But with a brighter light and greater extremes of temperature, a much higher proportion of evergreen is felt to be right."

"... the spread of urban conditions constitutes a terrible threat until we have learned to appreciate the real necessity for in the surroundings at every stage of human life. We must realize, in all its implications, the truth that , and the full development of intellectual or spiritual life, no less than mere existence, requires contact with nature and natural beauty."

"Brenda Colvin studied garden design at 1919–1920; set up her own practice in 1922; designed many gardens and estates, school grounds, university campus, cemeteries, also industrial landscapes, e.g. around power stations, and she published several books, including Land and Landscape ... When Colvin, together with , and others, co-founded the , she was a driving force in defining educational requirements. It seems, often Colvin first came up with the ideas (Annabel Downs, personal communication 2021). Colvin had travelled in the USA in 1931 and what she saw hugely influenced her later thinking (Gibson 2011, p. 35)."

"On the morning of my thirty-fifth birthday, I woke up to an ' newspaper article entitled 'Mass extinction of species is happening in Ireland'. The article stated that a third of the species groups examined are threatened with extinction, predominantly due to , , and . A number of species are, in fact, , and without urgent action being taken immediately, they will simply disappear entirely from this island. That morning, I spent so many hours researching what we have already lost — what we risk losing any day — that I nearly wept with the sadness of it all. Some of those creatures in most danger are the , the , the , the bumblebee, the , the and the ."

"... Cacophony of Bone is a record of days, a meditation on the passing of time, and a deep noticing of the world around us—trees, moths, birds, water, and the comfort of animals. ... Cacophony of Bone revisits similar topics from ní Dochartaigh’s first memoir, Thin Places, but with a new perspective—of sobriety, finding a partner to share life with, a home she may stay at longer than any other place, and the new longing to become a mother."

"As for , we are in a really good place now because we are acknowledging more and more how unfair the business has been in the past. There were really strong male voices at the forefront and now it seems like we are making room at the table for other people, and writers from places we never really allowed into the . That incorporates race and gender and , and class as well, so we are seeing people writing nature who we didn’t get to see before. We see mothers who just get an hour a day to write and they send off to a contest and they win and black writers and BIPOC writers who are writing and being recognized for their work. In the natural world we are all on the same level but that hasn’t happened in the publishing world. Seeing things change gives me such joy."

"In old , butterflies were the souls of the dead and it was unlucky to harm one. The , however, was thought to be the devil and was persecuted. The idea of the butterfly as the embodiment of the soul implies their ability to cross into the . My ancestors often saw no boundary at all between wild places and that Otherworld which we cannot see."

"Creating a lifelong love of learning was Mason’s goal. If children developed an early hunger for ideas, she reasoned, it would sustain them through life. Mason’s philosophy was that in addition to the proper nutrients needed to thrive, children require ideas to chew on, to properly grow. And the source of these ideas, she reasoned, was not typical textbooks. Rather than suggesting that these ideas originate in the mind of the teacher, administrator, or even the parent, Mason believed that the best resource for these ideas were books of “literary quality” or great books."

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

"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")"

"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)"

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

"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)"

"It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside yourself was different. Not just the difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey. But a difference in the way I was frightened and the way I was happy. (first lines of Part One)"

""...Money have pretty face for everybody, but for that man money pretty like pretty self, he can't see nothing else."

"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)"

"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)"

"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)"

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

"(How much in your books comes from personal experience?) RHYS: If you experience a thing you know you can write it so much more, but life's one thing, a book's another."

"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")"

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

"I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds — with God's help I catch some."

"I thought if I told no one it might not be true."

"She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it."

"...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)"

"One October afternoon Mrs Baker was having tea with Miss Verney and talking about the proposed broiler factory in the middle of the village where they both lived. Miss Verney, who had not been listening attentively, said, 'You know Letty, I've been thinking a great deal about death lately. I hardly ever do, strangely enough.' (beginning of the story "Sleep It Off, Lady")"

"There is no control over memory. Quite soon you find yourself being vague about an event which seemed so important at the time that you thought you'd never forget it. Or unable to recall the face of someone whom you could have sworn was there for ever. On the other hand, trivial and meaningless memories may stay with you for life. I can still shut my eyes and see Victoria grinding coffee on the pantry steps, the glass bookcase and the books in it, my father's pipe-rack, the leaves of the sandbox tree, the wallpaper of the bedroom in some shabby hotel, the hairdresser in Antibes. It's in this way that I remember buying the pink milanese silk underclothes, the assistant who sold them to me and coming into the street holding the parcel. (beginning of "On Not Shooting Sitting Birds")"

"He was intimately acquainted with the police of three countries, and he sat alone in a small restaurant not far from the Boulevard Montparnasse sipping an apéritif moodily, for he disliked Montparnasse and detested solitude. He had left his native Montmartre to dine with a lady and had arrived twenty minutes late. She was not of those usually kept waiting and she had already departed. 'Sacré Floriane', muttered the Chevalier. He looked at a Swedish couple at the next table, at the bald American by the door, and at the hairy Anglo-Saxon novelist in the corner, and thought that they were a strange-looking lot, and exceedingly depressing. (Quelles gueules qu'ils ont, was how he put it.)..."

"'Mein Lieb, Mon Cher, My Dear, Amigo,' the letter began (beginning of the story "Tigers Are Better-looking")"

"They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, ‘because she pretty like pretty self’ Christophine said. (first lines)"

"I woke the next morning knowing that nothing would be the same. It would change and go on changing."

"So it was all over, the advance and retreat, the doubts and hesitations. Everything finished, for better or for worse. (first lines)"

"It was a beautiful place - wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I'd find myself thinking, 'What I see is nothing - I want what it hides - that is not nothing'."

"Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow."

"'Quite like old times,' the room says. 'Yes? No?' There are two beds, a big one for madame and a smaller one on the opposite side for monsieur. The wash-basin is shut off by a curtain. It is a large room, the smell of cheap hotels faint, almost imperceptible. The street outside is narrow, cobble-stoned, going sharply uphill and ending in flight of steps. What they call an impasse. I have been here five days. I have decided on a place to eat in at midday, a place to eat in at night, a place to have my drink in after dinner. I have arranged my little life."

"I...think about being hungry, being cold, being hurt, being ridiculed, as if it were in another life than this. This damned room - it's saturated with the past. . . .It's all the rooms I've ever slept in, all the streets I've ever walked in. Now the whole thing moves in an ordered, undulating procession past my eyes. Rooms, streets, streets, rooms. . . ."

"It's a lovely feeling to know you can do exactly as you like."

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

"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)"

"...there is peace in despair in exactly the same way as there is despair in peace ("Outside the Machine")"