Novelists From England

"One grievous failing of Elizabeth’s was her occasional pretty and picturesque use of dialect words—those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel."

"And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened; and little things a' didn't wish seen, anybody will see; and her wishes and ways will all be as nothing!"

"She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fair play."

"See what deceits love sows in honest minds!"

"If you are cheerful, and wish to remain so, leave the study of astronomy alone. Of all the sciences, it alone deserves the character of the terrible."

"Human beings, in their generous endeavour to construct a hypothesis that shall not degrade a First Cause, have always hesitated to conceive a dominant power of lower moral quality than their own; and, even while they sit down and weep by the waters of Babylon, invent excuses for the oppression which prompts their tears."

"How bewitched I was! How could there be any good in a woman that everybody spoke ill of?"

"There's reason for ghastliness. Eustacia, you have held my happiness in the hollow of your hand, and like a devil you have dashed it down!"

"When that half-burnt log and those cinders were alight she was alive! Little has been changed here yet. I can do nothing. My life creeps like a snail."

"The heath and changes of weather were quite blotted out from their eyes for the present. They were enclosed in a sort of luminous mist, which hid from them surroundings of any inharmonious colour, and gave to all things the character of light. When it rained they were charmed, because they could remain indoors together all day with such a show of reason; when it was fine they were charmed, because they could sit together on the hills. They were like those double stars which revolve round and round each other, and from a distance appear to be one."

"A well proportioned mind is one which shows no particular bias; one of which we may safely say that it will never cause its owner to be confined as a madman, tortured as a heretic, or crucified as a blasphemer. Also, on the other hand, that it will never cause him to be applauded as a prophet, revered as a priest, or exalted as a king. Its usual blessings are happiness and mediocrity."

"The rural world was not ripe for him. A man should be only partially before his time—to be completely to the vanward in aspirations is fatal to fame. Had Philip's warlike son been intellectually so far ahead as to have attempted civilization without bloodshed, he would have been twice the godlike hero that he seemed, but nobody would have heard of an Alexander."

"Ah," she said to herself, "want of an object to live for—that's all is the matter with me!"

"To dwell on a heath without studying its meanings was like wedding a foreigner without learning his tongue. The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours. An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine."

"Above the plain rose the hill, above the hill rose the barrow, and above the barrow rose the figure. Above the figure was nothing that could be mapped elsewhere than on a celestial globe."

"The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained."

"It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's nature—neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities."

"The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank blooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen."

"In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn; then, and only then, did it tell its true tale."

"Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor."

"I have seldom known a man cunning with his brush who was not simple with his tongue; or, indeed, any skill in particular that was not allied to general stupidity."

"You calculated how to be uncalculating, and are natural by art!"

"A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all. Circumspection and devotion are a contradiction in terms."

"Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle."

"Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them."

"Work hard and be poor, do nothing and get more."

"It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs."

"A nice unparticular man."

"And at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be — and whenever I look up, there will be you."

"Love is a possible strength, in an actual weakness. Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants."

"To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction — every kind of evidence in the logician's list — have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation."

"The sovereign brilliancy of Sirius pierced the eye with a steely glitter, the star called Capella was yellow, Aldebaran and Betelgueux shone with a fiery red. To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement."

"Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture."

"For of all the miseries attaching to miserable love, the worst is the misery of thinking that the passion which is the cause of them all may cease."

"Good, but not religious-good."

"To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall."

"It is commonly said that no man was ever converted by argument, but there is a single one which will make any Laodicean in England, let him be once love-sick, wear prayer-books and become a zealous Episcopalian – the argument that his sweetheart can be seen from his pew."

"With all, the beautiful things of the earth become more dear as they elude pursuit; but with some natures utter elusion is the one special event which will make a passing love permanent for ever."

"To discover evil in a new friend is to most people only an additional experience."

"The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It is not good for the little books. And really valuable books have been allowed to go out of print. In the old days, the publishers knew that these difficult books, the books that appeal only to a minority, were very productive in the long run. Because they're probably the books that will be read in the next generation. It's heart-breaking how often I have to say when I'm giving talks, "This book is out of print. This book is out of print." It's a roll call of dead books."

"...The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, the extraordinary novel that changed my life and the lives of so many other young women in the 1960s."

"Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing and the Children of Violence series. That again was actually a very positive influence upon me. I particularly liked her writing in the Children of Violence series: so down-to-earth and real! It made me think that this is the material that I have. It just relates to ordinary people that live ordinary lives, but, if Doris Lessing thinks it's important enough to record and the world agrees with her, then maybe I can use that same kind of material as well to make the points that I think should be made."

""Everything’s cracking up", says Anna, the protagonist of Lessing’s masterpiece, a novel that takes its place in this list for its odd, visionary engagement with the issues and anxieties of its time and also for its extraordinary grip on the literary imagination of the late 20th century, when Lessing (who lived to November 2013) was in her prime. The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes this novel as “one of the key texts of the women’s movement of the 1960s", a reductive description that would have infuriated Lessing, partly because she hated to be pigeonholed, and also because she understood fiction to be infinitely more varied and complex than one “movement". Lessing’s work has always been difficult to define: a mix of classical realism, science-fiction, parable, memoir, fantasy and polemic. The Golden Notebook has many of these elements."

"If there were a Mount Rushmore of twentieth-century authors, Doris Lessing would most certainly be carved upon it. Like Adrienne Rich, she was pivotal, situated at the moment when the gates of the gender-disparity castle were giving way, and women were faced with increased freedoms and choices, as well as increased challenges."

"I have read a lot of Doris Lessing, and her interrogation of human behavior and history always makes a big impression on me."

"I have found it to be true that the older I've become the better my life has become."

"For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying."

"Trust no friend without faults, and love a maiden, but no angel."

"Man, whence is he? / Too bad to be the work of a god, too good for the work of chance."

"Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing."