Women Authors From England

"According to one of my correspondents, Jessica Mitford was overheard to remark, "I have nothing against undertakers personally. It's just that I wouldn't want one to bury my sister.""

"Rundell spent her formative years in wild spaces. At age 7, she moved to Zimbabwe, where her mother had family and her father worked as a diplomat, paying the young Rundell 50 pence for every poem she memorized (and extra if it came from the Renaissance)."

"as quoted by Zoe Perzo,"

"She is best known as the author of prizewinning children’s books (her only book for grown-ups, until now, is the slim and slyly titled “Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise”). While she keeps one foot in the academic world as a fellow of , she has the other planted elsewhere, engaging in and — as good a preparation as any for rendering Donne’s precarious life."

"… I write about s, because it was probably a hermit crab who ate . And I write about s, because there was once a ."

"I come from a family of pilots. Both my grandfathers flew s in the Second World War, and my uncle can fly a plane. And, so, about five years ago, I started learning for the huge pleasure of being above the world and being given a vision of the sweep of it."

"... Spending hours in libraries, reading old Latin manuscripts and the many brilliant encyclopaedias of mythical creatures: there are few things more wonderful."

"... I think stories of transformations, of wild glories and everyday glories, of magic both real and imaginary, can act like a map. They give us a push toward hope. Real true hope isn't the promise that everything will be all right — but it's a belief that the world has so many strangenesses and possibilities that giving up would be a mistake; that we live in a universe shot through with the unexpected. There's never been a single decade in human history when we have not taken ourselves by surprise: we, the ungainly, wonky-toothed human species, have an endless potential for change. I am not an optimist, or a pessimist; I am a possibilityist. The possibilities out there for discovery, for knowledge, for transforming the world, are literally — there are spectacular ideas that we will have in the next ten years that we can't even begin to dream of now."

"No time like the present."

"However healthy a love one may have of civilization and all its fleshpots, the best thrill of the year is when one leaves them all behind, and sets off for the unknown with a lot of lumpy luggage that contains hardly any clothes at all. It is good to feel that one has left one's little niche in the every­day world, where each one of us is assessed and tabulated to a nicety; to slough off one's everyday accepted self, and to loose oneself in the anonymity of a strange country and people, among whom one has to make good solely by the leverage of one's personality and will to win. The thrill increases till the last vestige of civilization is gone and one is at grips with the unknown, when it comes down to earth, and settles into a hard absorbing fight with primitive conditions; with the problems of health and climate and transport, with the daily struggle for food, water and trans­port, and the groping after understanding of the strange and sometimes antagonistic people one is among. All the complexities of life disappear, and one is reduced to the state, mental and physical, of a healthy animal. As long as one's "tummy" is reasonably full, and there is a prospect of somewhere safe and dry to sleep, one is perfectly, almost stupidly happy. The creature comforts of life no longer matter. For the first few days one misses one's bath most terribly, but in a short time, I am ashamed to say, one doesn't mind if one never had a bath again! Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but in the wilds it comes a long way after food and sleep, or even a good camel."

"The Final Nightmare, For the Boys, Die Hard, Truly, Madly, Deeply."

"Word of the day is ‘recrudescence’ (17th century): the return of something terrible after a time of reprieve"

"[A] real kindness is so far beyond all compliment, that it never appears more than when there is least of t'other mingled with it."

"I am not apt to suspect without just cause, but in earnest if I once find anybody faulty towards me, they lose me for ever; I have forsworn being twice deceived by the same person."

"'[T]is a sad thing when all one's happiness is only that the world does not know you are miserable."

"I had rather agree to what you say than tell you that Dr Taylor (whose devote you must know I am) says there is a great advantage to be gained in resigning up one’s will to the command of another, because the same action which in itself is wholly indifferent if done upon our own choice, becomes an act of duty and religion if done in obedience to the command of any person whom nature, the laws, or our selves have given a power over us."

"The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and about six or seven o’clock, I walk out into a common that lies hard by the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows and sit in the shade singing of ballads. [...] I talk to them, and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world, but the knowledge that they are so."

"All letters, methinks, should be as free and easy as one’s discourse, not studied as an oration, nor made up of hard words like a charm."

"I shall never be persuaded that marriage has a charm to raise love out of nothing, much less out of dislike."

"[F]or me 'tis a better-natured and a less fault to believe too much than to distrust where there is no cause."

"What no one ever quite gets used to is the brutalizing effect of the wind. The average wind speed at McMurdo is ten miles per hour (12 knots). Extremely high winds, common all over Antarctica and terrifyingly swift to arrive, can freeze exposed flesh in seconds. That, effectively, is what constitutes frostbite, not initially a highly dangerous injury but one that can soon become fatal if untreated."

"... Throughout my writing life, travel has lent a vehicle in which to explore the inner terrain of fears and desires we stumble through every day. Writing about travel allowed flexibility and freedom within a rigid frame of train journeys, weather, and a knackered tent. The creative process is an escape from personality (T. S. Eliot said that), and so is the open road. And a journey goes in fits and starts, like life."

"... One scholar says Tolstoy tells us to give away our money; Dostoevsky tells us to go to church; Chekhov says "I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do"; Gogol says "To hell with it." But they all deal with a fumbling search for certainties with which we all engage. And they are failures in one sense or another, as we all are."

"The travel writer Sara Wheeler prefers to travel alone. If she didn’t, you’d instantly volunteer to be her travelling companion. She’s an absolute hoot. But also deadly serious, fabulously well-read, thoughtful, self-deprecating – everything you’d want while slowly crossing some vast continent by bus or by train."

"... The Arctic is the lead player in the drama of , and s are its poster boys."

"I am very much a generalist as opposed to a specialist. It's rather unfashionable, but I feel someone's got to be one. So every book is a new departure."

"She was a gentlewoman, a scholar, and a saint, and after having been three times married, she took a vow of celibacy. What more could be expected of any woman?"

"If all the good people were clever, And all clever people were good, The world would be nicer than ever We thought that it possibly could.But somehow, ’tis seldom or never The two hit it off as they should; The good are so harsh to the clever, The clever so rude to the good!"

"Hot on Sunday, Cold on Monday, Hashed on Tuesday, Minced on Wednesday, Curried Thursday, Broth on Friday, Cottage pie Saturday."

"Blackbirds are the cellos of the deep farms."

"Woman, a pleasing but a short-lived flower, Too soft for business and too weak for power: A wife in bondage, or neglected maid: Despised, if ugly; if she’s fair, betrayed."

"It is well within the order of things That man should listen when his mate sings; But the true male never yet walked Who liked to listen when his mate talked."

"The family—that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape."

"The greatest Heroes that the World can know, To Women their Original must owe."

"In spite of all romantic poets sing, This gold, my dearest, is an useful thing."

"[E]xtreme happiness invites religion almost as much as extreme misery."

"Though we all day with care our work attend, Such is our fate, we know when ’twill end. When evening’s come, you homeward take your way. We, till our work is done, are forced to stay"

"So the industrious bees do hourly strive To bring their loads of honey to the hive; Their sordid owners always reap the gains, And poorly recompense their toils and pains."

"The jokes in Bridget come from something quite painful, which was her perception that she was in her thirties and she'd somehow made a mistake by not getting married yet and there's this ticking clock. But also there were good reasons why she was still single."

"I really wanted to smash the idea with this movie that there's a sexual sell-by-date for women and not for men, and stick it to the awful cougar stereotype. It makes me think of a woman in animal print leering over a friend of my son's, going, "Do you want a sherry, darling?" [...] It's got to stop because it's really not reflecting what's happening. For years and years we've seen Hollywood show men 40 years older than their partners, and it's not even discussed. Now movies are finally exploring a desire between younger men and older women that's reciprocal, not transactional. Bridget and Roxster both see something they want in each other — and Bridget having sex and being sexy is to be celebrated."

"I think that if you're not a fan of irony as a form of expression, then a book that contains the line, "There's nothing so unattractive to a man as strident feminism" is going to make you cross. I also think that if we can't have a comic female character, if we can't laugh at ourselves without having a panic attack about what it says about women, we haven't got very far with our equality."

"I never imagined it would last more than a few weeks. I didn’t tell any of my colleagues it was me who was writing Bridget. I was working alongside a lot of very clever, seasoned journalists who were writing about New Labour and Chechnya and I felt stupid writing about calories and alcohol units and why it takes three hours between waking up and leaving the house in the morning, Then we started getting letters praising the column, I started boasting, "It's by me, meeeee!" and things snowballed from there."

"Sometimes the best person to listen to is the person who did exactly what you don’t want to do. Don’t let what your grandparents or your mother or anyone else wants or wanted influence you now. I mean, history is important and all that, but at some point, you have to stop blaming other people."

"You’ve got your career and all she’s got is a ball in her stomach, lemons everywhere and a bossy mother-in-law."

"It was like a contract signed as a basic human right:You shall never perspire for long."

"Why I ran at all or with what purpose in mind is beyond my answering, but when I had no specific destination I always ran as fast as I could in the hope of finding one--and I always found one."

"So far as I know I was the only professional woman pilot in Africa at that time period I had no freelance competition in Kenya, man or woman."

"Moreover, it seemed that the printers of the African maps had a slightly malicious habit of including, in large letters, the names of town, junctions, and villages which, while most of them did exist in fact, as a group of thatched huts may exist or a water hole, they were usually so inconsequential as completely to escape discovery from the cockpit."

"Always the weed returns; the cultured plant retreats before it. Racial purity, true aristocracy, devolve not from edict, nor from rote, but from the preservation of kinship with the elemental forces and purposes of life whose understanding is not further beyond the mind of a Native shepherd than beyond the cultured fumblings of a mortar-board intelligence."

"The girl Markham was left to run wild with Kipsigis boys, wearing a cowrie shell on a leather thong around her wrist to ward off evil spirits. She ate with her hands, her first language was Swahili, and she could hurl a spear […] Markham practically grew up in the saddle; she told a friend that she felt better on a horse than on her feet."