Novelists From England

"[O]ver the past few decades, the quality of human sperm has declined massively... Pollution... is one possible factor. Another might be stress... triggered by living in close proximity..."

"The cause of extinction is usually a delayed reaction to habitat loss. ...H. sapiens might ...already be a dead species walking."

"It's evident that Darwin saw evolution not as progressive or improving, but as an activity that happens moment by moment. From this it is clear that evolution has no plan. It has neither memory nor foresight. No vestige of cosmic strivings from some remote beginning; no prospect of revelatory culmination in some transcendent end."

"[T]he human population is set not just for shrinkage but collapse—and soon. To paraphrase Lehrer, if we are going to write about human extinction, we’d better start writing now."

"The intervals of time that separate the fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent."

"To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific."

"There is more genetic variation in a few troupes of wild chimpanzees than in the entire human population. Lack of genetic variation is never good for species survival."

"No riches from his scanty store My lover could impart He gave a boon I valued more— He gave me all his heart !"

"Expression, child of soul! I fondly trace Thy strong enchantment, when the poet's lyre, The painter's pencil cathch thy sacred fire, And beauty wakes for thee her touching grace"

"Pale moon ! thy mild benignant light May glad some other's captive sight Where are the years with pleasure gay How bright their course ! How short their stay !"

"All human archives in this truth accord, That feeble man is Ruin’s mighty lord; States rise and fall as ages roll away, But vice survives, the passions ne’er decay; New tyrants start, where conquest once has been, The drama constant, tho’ transposed the scene."

"On the same sod, where (Rapine’s helpless prey,) The plumed Indian, pin’d his life away, Enslav’d, degraded, doom’d to vile employ, Deploring still the rifled hive of joy, There the poor Negro, shackled with the chain, Rears, by his sweltering toil, the nectar’d cane; And, wretched exile from his brighter skies, Breathes o’er the native’s grave complaining sighs, Unconscious on what dust he treads, nor knows Whose place he takes, whose heritage of woes."

"To him the heavens a fearful aspect wear, Strange are the accents murmur’d in his ear. He steals no balm from pity’s lenient breath Hope sheds no gleam, but through the vale of death: An alien, far from nature’s bosom cast, He broods on wrongs, the present and the past; And asks what vengeance shall the wretches wait, Who bade him mourn within the stranger’s gate."

"Devoted victim of the crimes accurst, By hatred cherish’d, and by av’rice nurs'd; Crimes that with Europe’s sordid sons began, The rude barbarian’s gift from polished man."

"Christianity also owes me an explanation... For the bigotry, the wickedness, the inhumanity and the wilful ignorance which has also characterized much of its history."

"I OWE Christianity a debt, and so, I believe, does the world we have lived in for the last 2000 years."

"The life of a journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style."

"The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living."

"Flora inherited, however, from her father a strong will and from her mother a slender ankle. The one had not been impaired by always having her own way nor the other by the violent athletic sports in which she had been compelled to take part, but she realized that neither was adequate as an equipment for earning her keep."

"...whereas there still lingers some absurd prejudice against living on one's friends, no limits are set, either by society or by one's own conscience, to the amount one may impose upon one's relatives."

"By god, D. H. Lawrence was right when he had said there must be a dumb, dark, dull, bitter belly-tension between a man and a woman, and how else could this be achieved save in the long monotony of marriage?"

"Each wave of men in turn grew peaceful as it grew to know and love the land, so that the Light flourished again. But always the Dark was there, swelling and waning, gaining a new Lord of the Dark whenever a man deliberately chose to be changed into something more dread and powerful than his fellows. Such creatures were not born to their doom, like the Old Ones, but chose it."

"Nothing is what it seems, boy. Expect nothing and fear nothing, here or anywhere. There’s your first lesson."

"All knowledge is sacred, but it should not be secret."

"When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back, Three from the circle, three from the track; Wood, bronze, iron; water, fire, stone; Five will return, and one go alone."

"Nearly every tale that men tell of magic and witches and such is born out of foolishness and ignorance and sickness of mind—or is a way of explaining things they do not understand."

"“But why Latin?” demanded Barney. “I don’t know, the monks just always used it, that’s all, it was one of their things. I suppose it’s a religious-sounding kind of language.”"

"Will saw the cruelty now as the fierce inevitability of nature. It was not from malice that the Light and the servants of the Light would ever hound the Dark, but from the nature of things."

"“You have heard me talk of Logres. It was the old name for this country, thousands of years ago; in the old days when the struggle between good and evil was more bitter and open than it is now. That struggle goes on all round us all the time, like two armies fighting. And sometimes one of them seems to be winning and sometimes the other, but neither has ever triumphed altogether. Nor ever will,” he added softly to himself, “for there is something of each in every man.”"

"Never dismiss anyone’s value until you know him."

"“For remember,” he said, “that it is altogether your world now. You and all the rest. We have delivered you from evil, but the evil that is inside men is at the last a matter for men to control. The responsibility and the hope and the promise are in your hands—your hands and the hands of the children of all men on this earth. The future cannot blame the present, just as the present cannot blame the past. The hope is always here, always alive, but only your fierce caring can fan it into a fire to warm the world.” His voice rang out over the mountain, more impassioned than any of them had ever heard a voice before, and they stood quiet as standing stones, listening. “For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you. Now especially since man has the strength to destroy this world, it is the responsibility of man to keep it alive, in all its beauty and marvellous joy.”"

"Strong as a young lion, pliant as a loving woman, and bitter to the taste, as all enchantment in the end must be."

"He made the quick apologetic grimace that seemed to be as near as he ever came to a smile."

"No, he is not of the Dark. But he is very useful. A man so wrapped in his own ill-will is a gift to the Dark from the earth. It is so easy to give him suitable ideas...Very useful, indeed."

"At the very heart, that is. Other things, like humanity, and mercy, and charity, that most good men hold more precious than all else, they do not come first for the Light. Oh, sometimes they are there; often, indeed. But in the very long run the concern of you people is with the absolute good, ahead of all else. You are like fanatics. Your masters, at any rate. Like the old Crusaders—oh, like certain groups in every belief, though this is not a matter of religion, of course. At the centre of the Light there is a cold white flame, just as at the centre of the Dark there is a great black pit bottomless as the Universe."

"Only the creatures of the earth take from one another, boy. All creatures, but men more than any. Life they take, and liberty, and all that another man may have—sometimes through greed, sometimes through stupidity, but never by any volition but their own. Beware your own race, Bran Davies—they are the only ones who will ever harm you, in the end."

"Jane clutched her mug like a talisman of reality."

"The mindless ferocity of this man, and all those like him, their real loathing born of nothing more solid than insecurity and fear...It was a channel. Will knew that he had been gazing into the channel down which the powers of the Dark, if they gained their freedom, could ride in an instant to complete control of the earth."

"He was not for that moment a human being, but a frenzied creature possessed by rage, turned into an animal. All that could be seen in him was the urge to hurt, and it was, as it will always be, the most dreadful sight in the world."

"That one is so sharp he will cut himself."

"“All life is theatre,” he said. “We are all actors, you and I, in a play which nobody wrote and which nobody will see. We have no audience but ourselves....” He laughed gently. “Some players would say that is the best kind of theatre there can be.”"

"Bran said, “Why should some of the riders of the Dark be dressed all in white and the rest all in black?” “Without color....” Will said reflectively. “I don’t know. Maybe because the Dark can only reach people at extremes—blinded by their own shining ideas, or locked up in the darkness of their own heads.”"

"The Land is neither of the Dark nor the Light, nor ever was. Its enchantment was of a separate kind, the magic of the mind and the hand and the eye, that owes no allegiance because it is neither good nor bad. It has no more to do with the behaviour of men, or the great absolutes of the Light and the Dark, than does the blossom of a rose or the curving leap of a fish."

"She watched the lights upon the shore. The glare that was Plymouth in the distance. She thought, the dance is over. The girls are going out of the overheated hall into the cold air. They shiver; their young men hurry after them. Some have got home and find their dresses stained or torn; yet they've enjoyed themselves. Which is the more important? Wallflowers think of the young men who haven't danced with them; probably each has a dream-day hero. Remember the lieutenant to whom I never spoke a word; yet I married him and had children and grandchildren, though he never knew it. And there are others, madly happy, look in their mirrors and smile and wonder. Even the latest home has a warm bed to go to."

"The police case was very simple, because the robbers had been caught in the act of shifting the bullion; and as gold bars are more valuable than human lives, the robbers were given longer sentences than if they had been murderers."

"We were also misled by M. Michelin's use of the word "impracticable". "Impracticable," we argued with a careful exercise in semantics, leaves just a chance. More than that. As we thought about it, it seemed to give a broad hint that the road was passable to the young and the determined in sturdy motor cars. "Impracticable" — scratched paintwork, discomfort, difficult finding petrol stations, shortage of good restaurants — these it seemed were the sort of hazards the urbane Michelin was trying to convey to us. Alas, he was not."

"Men are always far more shocked by the vulgarities of women then women are by the vulgarities of men. It is one of the few monopolies which men consider should be theirs after the emancipation of women."

"The trouble is, Richard, that you always think you can alter people. You say, Oh, yes, he's a little weak and I can't stand the way he hums to himself when he's shaving but when we live together I'll change that, we'll grow together, but you never do. All that happens is that the little things are symptomatic of bigger things and they become more and more important."

"I really am interested but I find it hard to make the proper helpful noises. I'm terrible inadequate when it comes to sympathy. I feel things but I can't express them in words."

"Hubert Ronson, as I was to discover later, is the sort of European you are always coming across in Africa. I never made up my mind whether such men leave Europe because their talents are unappreciated in the politer civilisations, or whether they develop them after they arrive. Bullies, thugs, warm-hearted layabouts, at heart they are all the same sentimental, anxious extroverts, with the same endless fund of dirty stories, and the same secret loathing and longing for the cultures they have escaped."