Novelists From England

"I had a mitherable childhood. Nobody loved me. I think I have a right to try again, looking pwettier, don't you?"

"I don't believe this!" Peter said. "Why is it respectable not to know how to do things? Is it respectable to light a fire with a bar of soap?" "That," Charmain said haughtily, "was an accident."

""Oh, what a sweet little doggie!" Mrs Baker cried out. "Is ooh hungwy, then?" She gave Waif the rest of the cake she was eating. Waif took it politely, ate it in one gulp and continued to beg. Mrs Baker gave her a whole cake from the plate. This caused Waif to beg more soulfully than ever. "I'm disgusted," Charmain told Waif."

"So you'll be wanting all these hydrangeas chopped down, then?" "Whatever for?" Charmain said. "I like to chop things down," the kobold explained. "Chief pleasure of gardening."

"Tell me of this Wizard Howl of yours." Sophie's teeth chattered, but she said proudly, "He's the best wizard in Ingary or anywhere else. If he'd only had time, he would have defeated that djinn. And he's sly and selfish and vain as a peacock and cowardly and you can't pin him down to anything." "Indeed?" asked Abdullah. "Strange that you should speak so proudly such a list of vices, most loving of ladies." "What do you mean — vices?" Sophie asked angrily. "I was just describing Howl."

"I never said my wishes were supposed to do anyone any good," said the genie. "In fact, I swore that they would always do as much harm as possible."

"Maybe," he said, "you should be more careful about whom you let your dog bite." "Not I!" said Jamal. "I am a believer of free will. If my dog chooses to hate the whole human race except myself, it must be free to do so."

"It is of course a magic carpet." Abdullah had heard that one before. He bowed over his tucked-up hands. "Many and various are the virtues said to reside in carpets," he agreed. "Which one does the poet of the sands claim for this? Does it welcome a man home to his tent? Does it bring peace to the hearth? Or maybe," he said, poking the frayed edge suggestively with one toe, "it is said to never wear out?"

"Please, your story, or I shall offend the dignitaries of my kingdom by yawning at holy things."

"Oh, thank goodness!" he babbled. "I didn't mean it - at least I did, but I don't mean it now, not any more!" He flung one arm around Yam and twisted the other into Mordion's rolled cloak. "They came. They rustled. Don't let them!"

""One person ought to treat another person properly, even if the person's himself." "What a strange idea!" Mordion said."

"It looks as if you need only enter the field for long enough to recognise the bannus and take hold of it. Then you order it to stop." "Fight my way through a mob of dancing girls and snatch the dulcimer off the leading damsel," Reigner Two said morbidly. "I can just see myself. I think the fools who invented this thing might have thought of a simpler way to stop it. What's wrong with a red switch?"

"Ann looked down at him, spread on the bank preparing to go to sleep, and lost her temper. "Then you should go and tell him! You should look after him! He's all alone in this wood, and he's quite small, and he doesn't even know he's not supposed to go out of it. He probably doesn't even know how to work the field to get food. You - you calmly make him up, out of blood and - and nothing, and you expect him to do your dirty work for you, and you don't even tell him the rules! You can't do that to a person!""

""Curse those two time-ghosts!" he almost shrieked. "They made me quite sure you were the Time Lady! But you're not, are you? I could tell you were a real Twenty Century person with every word you said. Mickey Mouse!" he yelled."

"It was very boring. Perhaps it was his job to be boring, Vivian thought, in which case he was very good at his job."

""If you call me V.S. once again," she said, "I shall scream - I warn you!" Sam patted her arm. "You need a butter-pie," he said kindly."

"But she's too big!" the anguished man said, still glaring at Vivian. "This girl is not the right size!" … "She was six when she went away, Father," Jonathan said. He did not seem in the least alarmed. "That was nearly six years ago. Think how much I've changed since then." "So you have," said this alarming man, turning his glare on Jonathan as if he did not think the change was for the better. "I see," he said. "She grew."

""Can I eat these?" he said. "No," said Vivian. "I'm hungry." "I'll give you half," Sam said, plainly thinking he was being generous."

"Vivian stared. Never had she seen a boy with such long hair! In fact, she had a vague notion that boys were born with their hair short back and sides and only girls had hair that grew long."

"To love someone enough to let them go, you had to let them go forever or you did not love them that much."

"Happiness isn't a thing. You can't go out and get it like a cup of tea. It's the way you feel about things."

"Dear Polly, Tom wishes you, for some reason I can't understand, to consider the human back. He says there are many other matters you should consider too, but that was a particularly glaring example. He invites you, he says, to walk along a beach this summer and watch the male citizens there sunning themselves. There you will see backs - backs stringy, backs bulging, and backs with ingrained dirt. You will find, he says, yellow skin, blackheads, pimples, enlarged pores and tufts of hair. This is making me ill, but Tom says go on. Peeling sunburn, warts, boils, moles and midge bites and floppy rolls of skin. Even a back without these blemishes, he claims, seldom or never ripples, unless with gooseflesh. In fact, he defies you to find an inch of silk or a single powerful muscle in any hundred yards of average sunbathers. I hope you know what all this is about, because I don't. I think you should stay away from the seaside if you can. Yours ever, Sam."

""Heroes see things like that," he said. "It's obviously an enchantment of some kind," Polly agreed, humouring him. "It must be," he said. It sounded as if he was humouring her."

"Pretending was like that. Things seemed to make themselves up, once you got going."

"If nothing happened, then there's nothing to remember," she told herself, trying to sound philosophical. "Of course there's nowhere to start."

"That was the trouble with Joris. He was nice. You ended up liking him, whatever you did. Even when you wanted to shake him till his head fell off."

"I was a thoroughly hardened Homeward Bounder. There seemed nothing I didn't know. Then I ran into Helen. My friendly neighbourhood enemy. There really was nothing like Helen on any world I'd ever been to. I sometimes didn't think she was human at all."

""Unprintable things!" I said - only I didn't say that. I really said them."

"You wouldn't believe how lonely you get."

"There was a little white statue there. Now I'm not artistic. I saw it was of a fellow with no clothes on - I always wonder why it's Art to take your clothes off: they never put in the goose pimples - and this fellow was wrapped in chains. He didn't look as if he was enjoying himself, and small wonder."

""This is a very old argument. The greatest happiness of the greatest number. If you think about it, you'll find it always works out that a few suffer for the good of the rest." "In stories," Gair agreed hopelessly. "brave men die defending the rest. But this isn't like that!" "Call it the modern version," Mr Claybury suggested kindly."

"Over scones round the kitchen table, it emerged that Aunt Mary thought Ayna, Gair and Ceri came from Malaysia. Brenda looked at their faces and breathed in half a scone. While Gerald was pounding Brenda on the back, Ceri leaned back from the vibrating table and looked at Aunt Mary limpidly in the eye. "I'm afraid we don't remember Masaylia at all." "Malaysia!" hissed Ayna. "Or that either," said Ceri."

""Look here," Gerald said, "what do you think of Giants?" There was the kind of pause that happens when people do not like to say what they really think."

"She was one of those who could talk and talk and talk. Gair listened to her harsh voice - "Just like a duck," Ayna described it - and hoped she would lose the argument. But Adara once said Kasta had never lost an argument in her life. She just talked everyone insensible."

"Adara was impressed. "How do you know that?" "I learnt it," said Hathil. "It pays to learn things.""

"One does not want glory accepted as a matter of course. One wants to shock and astonish people with it."

"The only good Dorig is a dead Dorig."

"Mitt did not quite forget his perfect land. He remembered it, though a little fuzzily, next time the wind dropped, but he did not set off to look for it again. It was plain to him that soldiers only brought you back again if you went. It made him sad. When an inkling of it came to him in silence, or in scents, or, later, if the wind hummed a certain note, or a storm came shouting in from the sea and he caught the same note in the midst of its noise, he thought of his lost perfect place and felt for a moment as if his heart would break."

"People may wonder how Mitt came to join in the Holand Sea Festival, carrying a bomb, and what he thought he was doing. Mitt wondered himself by the end."

"If you stood up and told the truth in the wrong way, it was not true any longer, though it might be as powerful as ever."

"Things we are accustomed to regard as myth or fairy story are very much present in people’s lives. Nice people behave like wicked stepmothers. Every day."

"Quite recently I was asked to write an article to be entitled, “How to Become a Good Scientist.” In communicating my refusal to the periodical in question I was tempted to end the argument in one sentence, “By not writing articles such as this,” and then demanding my fee."

"Not far from the meeting's venue, at one of the famed Observatory Club tea meetings, Fred once started a talk by saying, 'Oh, Ooh, basically a star is a pretty simple thing.' And from the back of the room was heard the voice of R. O. Redman, saying, 'Well, Fred, you'd look pretty simple too, from ten parsecs!'"

"In the popular mind, if Hoyle is remembered it is as the prime mover of the discredited Steady State theory of the universe. "Everybody knows" that the rival Big Bang theory won the battle of the cosmologies, but few (not even astronomers) appreciate that the mathematical formalism of the now-favoured version of Big Bang, called inflation, is identical to Hoyle's version of the Steady State model."

"Hoyle's enduring insights into stars, nucleosynthesis, and the large-scale universe rank among the greatest achievements of 20th-century astrophysics. Moreover, his theories were unfailingly stimulating, even when they proved transient."

"God was very much disappointed, and wanted first to contract the universe again, and to start all over from the beginning. But it would be much too simple. Thus being almighty, God decided to correct His mistake in a most impossible way. And God said: "Let there be Hoyle." And there was Hoyle. And God looked at Hoyle … and told him to make heavy elements in any way he pleased. And Hoyle decided to make heavy elements in stars, and to spread them around by supernovae explosions."

"One could conceive of other abstract systems, the consequences of which could be calculated, without it being necessary to provide a realization in actual material terms. We can conceive of other universes without those universes being compelled to exist. This indeed is the business of the pure mathematician."

"There is an important difference between an advance in science and achievements in the humanities. A great musician consumes intellectual capital, he does not supply it, or at least it is usual for him to consume more than he creates. It has been impossible to use the motto theme of the Fifth Symphony after Beethoven used it. In science, on the other hand, the situation is the other way round. A breakthrough invariably opens up more new problems to be solved. A Newton or an Einstein may leave the world with a century or more of clearing up to be done."

"But only gradually have I learned that such ultimate successes are not what the present-day authorities in Britain really want. What really delights them is extreme tidiness combined with a façade of everyday competence. This of course is why Britain plunges further and further downhill with every passing year. The truth is the opposite: it is the ultimate success that really counts."

"The correct procedure I am sure it is to learn by doing, not by being told what to do. The notion that one can learn by attending a course of lectures is as absurd as the notion that the way to learn to ride a bicycle would be to hire someone to ride it for you, and to sit hour after hour watching him. The only reason for attending a lecture is to acquire hints as to the right method of tackling some particular problem or other. And this would be almost unnecessary in a properly designed and graded system of examples."