58 Quotes by Laurie Lee

The untarred road wound away up the valley, innocent as yet of motor-cars, wound empty away to other villages, which lay empty too, the hot day long, waiting for the sight of a stranger. We.

We carried cut hay from the heart of the rick, packed tight as tobacco flake, with grass and wild flowers juicily fossilized within – a whole summer embalmed in our arms.

Wilde said he felt sorry for those who never got their heart’s desire, but sorrier still for those who did.

Eight to ten loaves came to the house every day, and they never grew dry. We tore them to pieces with their crusts still warm, and their monotony was brightened by the objects we found in them – string, nails, paper, and once a mouse; for those were days of happy-go-lucky baking.

The borders of consciousness are anxious enough, raw and desperate places; we shouldn’t be dragged across them like struggling thieves as if sleep was a felony.

Night odours come drifting from woods and gardens; sweet musks and sharp green acids. In the sky the fat stars bounce up and down, rhythmically, as we trudge along. Glow-worms, brighter than lamps or candles, spike the fields with their lemon fires, while huge horned beetles stumble out of the dark and buzz blindly around our heads.

Eulalia turned and smiled at me brilliantly, showing her tongue, her face cracking open like a brown snake’s egg hatching.

A wasting memory is not only a destroyer; it can deny one’s very existence. A day unremembered is like a soul unborn, worse than if it had never been. What indeed was that summer if it is not recalled? That journey? That act of love? To whom did it happen if it has left you with nothing? Certainly not to you. So any bits of warm life preserved by the pen are trophies snatched from the dark, are branches of leaves fished out of the flood, are tiny arrests of mortality.

But spring in England is like a prolonged adolescence, stumbling, sweet and slow, a thing of infinitesimal shades, false starts, expectations, deferred hopes, and final showers of glory.