British Literature Quotes

Collection of famous quotes and sayings about British Literature.

Quotes About British Literature

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I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he's snoozeworthy at the best of times. ~ Jo Walton
British Literature quotes by Jo Walton
I did my BA in English lit, and hated the restriction - I'd always read more in translation than not; coming from a working-class background, what I knew of as British literature - the writers who made big prize lists and/or were stocked in WH Smith, Doncaster's only bookshop until I was 17 - seemed incredibly, alienatingly middle-class. Then in 2009, just after the financial crash, I graduated with no more specific skill than 'can analyse a bit of poetry'. ~ Deborah Smith
British Literature quotes by Deborah Smith
My flesh and blood...when it rises against me, is not my flesh and blood. I discard it. ~ Charles Dickens
British Literature quotes by Charles Dickens
Men call you fayre, and you doe credit it,
For that your self ye daily such doe see:
But the trew fayre, that is the gentle wit,
And vertuous mind, is much more praysd of me.
For all the rest, how ever fayre it be,
Shall turne to nought and loose that glorious hew:
But onely that is permanent and free
From frayle corruption, that doth flesh ensew.
That is true beautie: that doth argue you
To be divine and borne of heavenly seed:
Deriv'd from that fayre Spirit, from whom al true
And perfect beauty did at first proceed.
He onely fayre, and what he fayre hath made,
All other fayre lyke flowres untymely fade. ~ Edmund Spenser
British Literature quotes by Edmund Spenser
My wisdom is for my friends, my folly for myself. ~ Frederick Marryat
British Literature quotes by Frederick Marryat
I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town. ~ T.C. Boyle
British Literature quotes by T.C. Boyle
Men have been in charge of according value to literature, and ... they have found the contributions of their own sex immeasurably superior. ~ Dale Spender
British Literature quotes by Dale Spender
People used to draw dragons on the edges of old maps. When the world hadn't been fully explored, mapmakers imagined dragons living at the far ends. ~ Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
British Literature quotes by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
I miss my grandmother every day. I miss her vitality, her interest in the lives of others, her courage and determination, her perceptive wisdom, her calm in the face of all difficulties, her steadfast belief in the British people and above all her unstoppable sense of mischievous humour. ~ Prince Charles
British Literature quotes by Prince Charles
But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women. ~ Audre Lorde
British Literature quotes by Audre Lorde
The young British players need to take responsibility themselves for their form and ability. ~ Tim Henman
British Literature quotes by Tim Henman
Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
British Literature quotes by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived. ~ Gertrude Stein
British Literature quotes by Gertrude Stein
The United States can tell you all about what's wrong with the British, to say nothing of the Russians. ~ Arthur Hays Sulzberger
British Literature quotes by Arthur Hays Sulzberger
When we are all in a culture together, we share a secret with each other, and this is true of every civilization down through time. Not even their art, not even their laws, their artifacts, their literature, their philosophies, their wars, their stone bowls can ever reveal that civilization's secret. Even today, with all we've built that will outlast us, we will not leave behind the secret that binds us. In this way, we are like any family at the core of which there is a secret that, even if someone asked, one one in that family
not even the snitchy, untrustworthy types
could ever reveal. In this way, we are all like a family together in the present, and no future civilization will every know our secret - the secret of our existence together
just as we do not know the secrets that have lived and died with the past. ~ Sheila Heti
British Literature quotes by Sheila Heti
We have a hieroglyphical inscription in the British Museum as early as the reign of Sevechus of the eighth century before the Christian era, showing that the doctrine of Trinity in Unity already formed part of their religion and that ... the three gods only made one person. ~ Samuel Sharpe
British Literature quotes by Samuel Sharpe
British researchers found that one smile can generate the same level of brain stimulation as up to 2,000 bars of chocolate. The same study found that smiling is as stimulating as receiving up to 16,000 pounds Sterling in cash. That's like 25 grand a smile. ~ Ron Gutman
British Literature quotes by Ron Gutman
Before he went away, he had heard all about the self-made girl, and there was something in the picture that strongly impressed him. She was possible doutbless only in America; American life had smoothed the way for her. She was not fast, nor emancipated, nor crude, nor loud, and there wasn't in her, of necessity at least, a grain of the stuff of which the adventuress is made.
She was simply very successful, and her success was entirely personal. She hadn't been born with the silver spoon of social opportunity, she had grasped it by honest exertion. You knew her by many different signs, but chiefly, infallibly, by the appearance of her parents. It was her parents who told her story; you always saw how little her parents could have made her. Her attitude with regard to them might vary in different ways. As the great fact on her own side was that she had lifted herself from a lower social plane, done it all herself, and done it by the simple lever of her personality, it was naturally to be expected that she would leave the authors of her mere material being in the shade.
(…)
But the general characteristic of the self-made girl was that, though it was frequently understood that she was privately devoted to her kindred, she never attempted to impose them on society, and it was striking that, though in some of her manifestations a bore, she was at her worst less of a bore than they. They were almost always solemn and portentous, and they were for the most part of a d ~ Henry James
British Literature quotes by Henry James
I read, I think, I play, I work. And all that thinkingand playing and reading comes into my art. I couldn't really sithere and delineate for you what the thought process is. I can perhapssay that literature, psychoanalysis and theater have been very valuableexperiences that have informed and nourished me along the way. ~ Harvey Keitel
British Literature quotes by Harvey Keitel
My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea. ~ David Brin
British Literature quotes by David Brin
We are all women you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these – 'Chloe liked Olivia …' Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women. 'Chloe liked Olivia,' I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And how completely Antony and Cleopatra would have been altered had she done so! As it is, I thought, letting my mind, I am afraid, wander a little from Life's Adventure, the whole thing is simplified, conventionalized, if one dared say it, absurdly. Cleopatra's only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller than I am? How does she do her hair? The play, perhaps, required no more. But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. There is an attempt at it in Diana of the Crossways. They are confidantes, of course, in Racine and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. ~ Virginia Woolf
British Literature quotes by Virginia Woolf
I once asked a hermit in Italy how he could venture to live alone, in a single cottage, on the top of a mountain, a mile from any habitation? He replied, that Providence was his next-door neighbor. ~ Laurence Sterne
British Literature quotes by Laurence Sterne
Sometimes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are presented as a hunting expeditions ("As British close in on Basra, Iraqis scurry away"; "Terror hunt snares twenty-five"; and "Net closes around Bin Laden") with enemy bases as animal nests ("Pakistanis give up on lair of Osama"; "Terror nest in Fallujah is attacked") from which the prey must be driven out ("Why Bin Laden is so difficult to smoke out"; "America's new dilemma: how to smoke Bin Laden out from caves"). We need to trap the animal ("Trap may net Taliban chief"; "FBI terror sting nets mosque leaders") and lock it in a cage ("Even locked in a cage, Saddam poses serious danger"). Sometimes the enemy is a ravening predator ("Chained beast - shackled Saddam dragged to court"), or a monster ("The terrorism monster"; "Of monsters and Muslims"), while at other times he is a pesky rodent ("Americans cleared out rat's nest in Afghanistan"; "Hussein's rat hole"), a venomous snake ("The viper awaits"; "Former Arab power is 'poisonous snake'"), an insect ("Iraqi forces find 'hornet's nest' in Fallujah"; "Operation desert pest"; "Terrorists, like rats and cockroaches, skulk in the dark"), or even a disease organism ("Al Qaeda mutating like a virus"; "Only Muslim leaders can remove spreading cancer of Islamic terrorism"). In any case, they reproduce at an alarming rate ("Iraq breeding suicide killers"; "Continent a breeding ground for radical Islam"). ~ David Livingstone Smith
British Literature quotes by David Livingstone Smith
Part of my methodological approach is made explicit when I discuss ways in which literature can have philosophical significance. Literature doesn't typically argue - and when it does, it's deadly dull. But literature can supply the frame within which we come to observe and reason, or it can change our frame in highly significant ways. That's one of the achievements I'd claim for Mann, and for Death in Venice. ~ Philip Kitcher
British Literature quotes by Philip Kitcher
Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore rescinded the state's European Heritage Month proclamation for fear it would sound racist. It's too bad. Thus ends a month of celebrating the 400-year progression of our nation's British culture from wood to steel to graphite shafts. ~ Argus Hamilton
British Literature quotes by Argus Hamilton
When statistics come in saying that only 29 percent of American women would describe themselves as feminist - and only 42 percent of British women - I used to think, What do you think feminism IS, ladies? What part of 'liberation for women' is not for you? Is it freedom to vote? The right not to be owned by the man you marry? The campaign for equal pay? 'Vogue' by Madonna? Jeans? Did all that good shit GET ON YOUR NERVES? Or were you just DRUNK AT THE TIME OF SURVEY? ~ Caitlin Moran
British Literature quotes by Caitlin Moran
Successful people recognize crisis as a time for change - from lesser to greater, smaller to bigger. ~ Edwin Louis Cole
British Literature quotes by Edwin Louis Cole
A she-wolf teaches her cubs: "Bite like I do," and that's enough. A she-rabbit teaches her offspring: "Run like I do," and that's also enough. But a man teaches his children: "Think like I do," and that's a crime. ~ Brothers Strugatsky
British Literature quotes by Brothers Strugatsky
Donald Maclean, a British diplomat who had spied for the KGB. "Maclean said: 'People who read Pravda every day are invincible.' People who are well informed and get their information from different sources inevitably start thinking," Kalugin ~ Arkady Ostrovsky
British Literature quotes by Arkady Ostrovsky
The gift of literature is the grace of knowledge. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita
British Literature quotes by Lailah Gifty Akita
Her pretty name of Adina seemed to me to have somehow a mystic fitness to her personality.

Behind a cold shyness, there seemed to lurk a tremulous promise to be franker when she knew you better.

Adina is a strange child; she is fanciful without being capricious.

She was stout and fresh-coloured, she laughed and talked rather loud, and generally, in galleries and temples, caused a good many stiff British necks to turn round.

She had a mania for excursions, and at Frascati and Tivoli she inflicted her good-humoured ponderosity on diminutive donkeys with a relish which seemed to prove that a passion for scenery, like all our passions, is capable of making the best of us pitiless.

Adina may not have the shoulders of the Venus of Milo...but I hope it will take more than a bauble like this to make her stoop.

Adina espied the first violet of the year glimmering at the root of a cypress. She made haste to rise and gather it, and then wandered further, in the hope of giving it a few companions. Scrope sat and watched her as she moved slowly away, trailing her long shadow on the grass and drooping her head from side to side in her charming quest. It was not, I know, that he felt no impulse to join her; but that he was in love, for the moment, with looking at her from where he sat. Her search carried her some distance and at last she passed out of sight behind a bend in the villa wall.

I don't pretend to be s ~ Henry James
British Literature quotes by Henry James
The firm of Brotherhood's believed in ideal conditions for their staff. It was their pet form of practical Christianity; in addition to which, it looked very well in their advertising literature and was a formidable weapon against the trade unions. Not, of course, that Brotherhoods' had the slightest objection to trade unions as such. They had merely discovered that comfortable and well-fed people are constitutionally disinclined for united action of any sort - a fact which explains the asinine meekness of the income-tax payer. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
British Literature quotes by Dorothy L. Sayers
He swung it open and presented me with a single red rose.
"For you," he said.
"Very gallant," I replied. "Of course you do realize I have the same cut flower in my room."
Ben glanced over his shoulder at the now empty bud vase sitting on his table. "Hmm. Didn't really think that out. Still gallant?"
"Very."
"You happen to look ravishing tonight." He said it with a British accent that made me laugh out loud.
"As do you, sir," I responded in kind.
"Excellent. Shall we go, then?" He extended his arm and I linked my own through it, first shifting my camera bag to my other shoulder so it wouldn't bang between us. ~ Hilary Duff
British Literature quotes by Hilary Duff
The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much! ~ Jane Austen
British Literature quotes by Jane Austen
Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else. ~ Henry David Thoreau
British Literature quotes by Henry David Thoreau
The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration. ~ Allan Bloom
British Literature quotes by Allan Bloom
If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
British Literature quotes by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
When I'm critical of modern approaches to ecology, I'm really trying to remind my reader of the long relationship that Western civilization has had to these forests that define the fringe of its place of habitation, and that this relationship is one that has a rich history of symbolism and imagination and myth and literature. So much of the Western imagination has projected itself into this space that when you lose a forest, you're losing more than just the natural phenomenon or biodiversity; you're also losing the great strongholds of cultural memory.

(Source: discussing "Deforestation in a Civilized World.") ~ Robert Pogue Harrison
British Literature quotes by Robert Pogue Harrison
Thank you to everybody who voted for me, and to the British public for their encouragement over the last 17 years ~ Christopher Eccleston
British Literature quotes by Christopher Eccleston
Hold your pen and spare your voice. ~ Dorothy Parker
British Literature quotes by Dorothy Parker
I ask you to pass through life at my side - to be my second self, and best earthly companion. ~ Charlotte Bronte
British Literature quotes by Charlotte Bronte
History must be documented; every moment is a sacred history. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita
British Literature quotes by Lailah Gifty Akita
I don't believe in competition in literature. One star or five doesn't matter. It's the words that count, not the opinion. ~ ML Buck
British Literature quotes by ML Buck
Theories about world literature, of which fairy tale is a fundamental part, emphasize the porousness of borders, geographical and inguistic: no frontiercan keep a good story from roaming. It will travel, and travel far, and travel back again in a different guise, a changed mood, and, above all, a new meaning. ~ Marina Warner
British Literature quotes by Marina Warner
My first jailbreak began when a coarse-toothed mechanic's file crashed through the window of the Deeper Harbour Police
Station at two in the morning. The file bounced three or four times before clattering to a halt among a scatter of shattered glass. The file spun a little and came to rest, like a compass needle pointing somewhere far off the edge of the map. Looking back from right here and right now I believe I would like to start this story right then - three days after I had just turned fourteen - spending my birthday in jail. - SINKING DEEPER ~ Steve Vernon
British Literature quotes by Steve Vernon
Thus, while not all Scripture is generically narrative, it can reasonably be claimed that the story Scripture tells, from creation to new creation, is the unifying element that holds literature of other genres together with narrative in an intelligible whole. ~ Ellen F. Davis
British Literature quotes by Ellen F. Davis
Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith. ~ Salman Rushdie
British Literature quotes by Salman Rushdie
Twas noontide of summer,
And mid-time of night;
And stars, in their orbits,
Shone pale, thro' the light
Of the brighter, cold moon,
'Mid planets her slaves,
Herself in the Heavens,
Her beam on the waves.
I gazed awhile
On her cold smile;
Too cold–too cold for me-
There pass'd, as a shroud,
A fleecy cloud,
And I turned away to thee,
Proud Evening Star,
In thy glory afar,
And dearer thy beam shall be;
For joy to my heart
Is the proud part
Thou bearest in Heaven at night,
And more I admire
Thy distant fire,
Than that colder, lowly light. ~ Edgar Allan Poe
British Literature quotes by Edgar Allan Poe
Throw away thy rod, throw away thy wrath; O my God, take the gentle path. ~ George Herbert
British Literature quotes by George Herbert
Dante is certainly not, as one sometimes hears said, vindictive, spiteful, sadistic. He is not merely engaged in score settling with old adversaries by assigning them to hell. The punishments in hell are horribly cruel, but the world in which he lived was horribly cruel. He had been sentenced to death both by burning and decapitation. Such sentences were almost routine. We think of the modern world as more civilised than his, but who could seriously argue that this is so, bearing in mind events on the world stage in the twentieth century? ~ Prue Shaw
British Literature quotes by Prue Shaw
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