Short Story Writers From England

"If you didn't already know — and why should you? — "TERF" is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. ... Ironically, radical feminists aren't even trans-exclusionary — they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women."

"What I didn't expect in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful and supportive."

"'This isn't an easy piece to write, for reasons that will shortly become clear, but I know it's time to explain myself on an issue surrounded by toxicity. I write this without any desire to add to that toxicity."

"The long-term health risks of cross-sex hormones have been now been tracked over a lengthy period. These side-effects are often minimised or denied by trans activists."

"Many, myself included, believe we are watching a new kind of conversion therapy for young gay people, who are being set on a lifelong path of medicalisation that may result in the loss of their fertility and/or full sexual function."

"If sex isn't real, there's no same-sex attraction. If sex isn't real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn't hate to speak the truth."

"Never again will I spend another winter in this accursed Bucket shop|bucketshop of a refrigerator called England."

"From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than anyone has ever known it. Dickens knew its clothes and its comedy. Mr. Kipling knows its essence and its seriousness. He is our first authority on the second-rate, and has seen marvellous things through keyholes, and his backgrounds are real works of art."

"As one turns over the pages of his Plain Tales from the Hills, one feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity. The bright colours of the bazaars dazzle one's eyes."

"Kipling... brought a sense of religious destiny back into a disorganized world. He was able, in fact, to render an immense service to his age, and it is no wonder that in his later years, when it became apparent that that age had passed forever,he refused to recognize the change, and raised a disgruntled pretense that nothing was happening save an outburst of misconduct on the part of the intellectuals and the lower classes. It is no wonder that he should want to do so, human nature being as frail as it is; but it is surprising that the writer of the masterpiece Kim should have found himself able to do so."

"...still more would I like to know about the brain history of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, whom also I have never met. He is to me the most incomprehensible of my contemporaries, with phases of real largeness and splendour and lapses to the quality of those mucky little sadists, Stalky and Co. ... He has an immense vogue in the British middle-class and upper-class home ; he is the patron saint of cadet corps masters, an inexhaustive fount of sham manly sentiment, and one of the most potent forces in the shrivelling of the British political imagination during the past third of a century."

"He [Kipling] is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man — and I am the other one. Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known and I know the rest."

"I still keep beside me a whole anthology of all his poems and all his books, and this is one that just typifies every single thing about what liberty means to, to we British, although it's about the English. And it all goes back to Runnymede, because the history of liberty in this country is the history, as the baron said to the king, you've got too much power, we want it more widely distributed. And the barons to the squires and members of parliament, and then we've distributed the property and rights more and more widely. And this is the history how it started at Runnymede, and it's called The Reeds of Runnymede."

"Kipling has done more than any other since Disraeli to show the world that the British race is sound at core and that rust or dry rot are strangers to it."

"Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language."

"In the stupid early years of this century, the blimps, having at last discovered someone who could be called a poet and who was on their side, set Kipling on a pedestal, and some of his more sententious poems, such as ‘If’, were given almost biblical status. But it is doubtful whether the blimps have ever read him with attention, any more than they have read the Bible. Much of what he says they could not possibly approve. Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot."

"Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly."

"Mr. Kipling's world is a barrack full of oaths and clatter of sabres ; but his language is copious, rich, sonorous. One is tempted to say that none since the Elizabethans has written so copiously. Others have written more beautifully, but no one that I can call to mind at this moment has written so copiously. Shelley and Wordsworth, Landor and Pater, wrote with part of the language; but who else, except Whitman, has written with the whole language since the Elizabethans?"

"The social attitudes of an author writing about animals always emerge with exceptional clarity. Kipling's stories are imperialistic, his mongoose belongs to the white man, it is the Englishman's servant. Only a European with a highly developed sense of his own responsibility toward life, with a cautious and aroused conscience, could write animal stories in the style of Pergaud. The weasel, the crow, and the magpie are his heroes. They serve no one, instead they introduce us to the basic tenors and joys of existence."

"Vladimir Nabokov-to me, his is not a good prose style...But then a writer like Kipling comes to mind, whose style is very idiosyncratic, rather strange, and, particularly in his finest things, in some of the children's books, is deliberately rather splendid and very rhythmical and totally oral. I love it."

"There are certain writers-Kipling is a very good case in point-he is an embarrassment partly because of his politics, but also partly because his greatest books are for children. Kim is a child's book. It is and it isn't. I read it first at ten, and I've read it ever since. But Kipling is not really a novelist, is he? He's a tale-teller, and he doesn't fit in the canon any more than Tolkien does, for different reasons. I think you might find other writers like that. Of course, Kipling's subjects are often exotic, they're not the ordinary subjects of literature, he personifies ships, his tales partake of fantasy and science fiction and all kinds of things. He didn't write within the realist canon. His stuff was odd. There are writers whom we don't think of as "paraliterary" writers, but who have suffered nearly as much from ignorance or neglect or our inability to know how to criticize them, which I think is one of the main problems..."

"I believe that the three writers of the nineteenth century who had the greatest natural talents were D'Annunzio, Kipling and Tolstoy - it's strange that all three had semi-fanatic ideas about religion or about patriotism."

"Mr. Rudyard Kipling is distinguished above all things for his imperialistic views. Altho he has literary qualifications of the highest merit, it is to be regretted that he has devoted them to the propagation of warlike ideas and exhibited a most barbarous spirit of chauvinism during the Boer War."

"Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known."

"I can think of a number of poets who have written great poetry, only of a very few whom I should call great verse writers. And unless I am mistaken, Kipling's position in this class is not only high but unique."

"An immense gift for using words, an amazing curiosity and power of observation with his mind and with all his senses, the mask of the entertainer, and beyond that a queer gift of second sight, of transmitting messages from elsewhere, a gift so disconcerting when we are made aware of it that thenceforth we are never sure when it is not present: all this makes Kipling a writer impossible wholly to understand and quite impossible to belittle."

"His poems in their quantity, their limitation to one feeling at a time, have the air of brilliant tactical improvisations to overcome sudden unforeseen obstacles, as if, for Kipling, experience were not a seed to cultivate patiently and lovingly, but an unending stream of dangerous feelings to be immediately mastered as they appear."

"Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story."

"... it's always best to tell the truth."

"... scandals are only increased by hushing them up."

"I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all; to men and women so cut off by the snows, the desert, or the sea, that only voices out of the air can reach them."

"That's the secret. 'Tisn't beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just It. Some women'll stay in a man's memory if they once walk down a street."

"Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin' up and down again! There's no discharge in the war!"

"Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges— Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!"

"Who hath desired the Sea?—the sight of salt water unbounded— The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber wind-hounded?"

"God gave all men all earth to love, But since our hearts are small, Ordained for each one spot should prove Belovèd over all."

"Men, not children or servants, tempered and taught to the end; Cleansed of servile panic, slow to dread or despise, Humble because of knowledge, mighty by sacrifice."

"And what did ye look they should compass? Warcraft learned in a breath, Knowledge unto occasion at the first far view of Death? So? And ye train your horses and the dogs ye feed and prize? How are the beasts more worthy than the souls, your sacrifice? But ye said, “Their valour shall show them”; but ye said, “The end is close.” And ye sent them comfits and pictures to help them harry your foes: And ye vaunted your fathomless power, and ye flaunted your iron pride, Ere—ye fawned on the Younger Nations for the men who could shoot and ride! Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented your souls With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals."

"“True. True talk,” said Kim solemnly. “Fools speak of a cat when a woman is brought to bed, for instance. I have heard them.”"

"It was our fault, and our very great fault—and now we must turn it to use. We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse."

"Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should, We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good."

"Take up the White Man's burden— Send forth the best ye breed— Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need."

"A Nation spoke to a Nation, A Queen sent word to a Throne: ‘Daughter am I in my mother's house, But mistress in my own. The gates are mine to open, As the gates are mine to close, And I set my house in order,' Said our Lady of the Snows."

"When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre, He'd 'eard men sing by land an' sea; An' what he thought 'e might require, 'E went an' took—the same as me!"

"We pulled for you when the wind was against us and the sails were low. Will you never let us go?"

"When next he came to me he was drunk—royally drunk on many poets for the first time revealed to him. His pupils were dilated, his words tumbled over each other, and he wrapped himself in quotations—as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors."

"Ever the wide world over, lass, Ever the trail held true, Over the world and under the world, And back at the last to you."

"Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle the Aryan brown, For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the Christian down; And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear: "A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.""

"If I were damned of body and soul, I know whose prayers would make me whole, Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine."

"“Go back to Earth with a lip unsealed—go back with an open eye, “And carry my word to the Sons of Men or ever ye come to die: “That the sin they do by two and two they must pay for one by one— “And the God that you took from a printed book be with you, Tomlinson!”"