4 Quotes by Adam Thorpe

What turned me on far more than the flickery silhouette of a bunting or a shrike was a general feeling of well-being: lofty tree-crowns blurred and waving in fresh gusts; the edge of a meadow darkened into mystery by a straggly blackthorn hedge; the intimacy of a single cornflower that no one else would ever notice; the scuffles of secret little beasts through dead leaves or grass, untainted by the absurdity of human institutions.

I was, I suppose, a child of Wordsworth, not so keen on 'getting' and 'spending'.

Normality for me was not a brooding monolith or eerie hummock but a cosy beechwood or a meadow with horses in it or, to my slight embarrassment, the residential streets around town. There you could see into people's back gardens and glimpse their messy kitchens or sitting rooms; I'd walk there incessantly, supping on homely ordinariness.

So a life builds up in layers, piecemeal, a kind of haphazard engineering that has elements of skill and cunning - the previous layers mostly hidden, as are the smaller mounds within, the clumps of different-coloured earth, the burnt offerings, the nodules of pain and the delight. The hard graft of the chopped-off antlers, picking and stabbing and scraping. The embers of old fires, old flames, in mute fragments of charcoal.