Henry Williamson > Quotes

“Whatv is this life, if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?”
― Henry Williamson

“For within himself, be he clairvoyant and articulate, he will find latent the divisions of the mind of European man, and their opposing impulses.”
― Henry Williamson, Lucifer Before Sunrise

“When the bees’ feet shake the bells of the heather, and the ruddy strings of the sap-stealing dodder are twined about the green spikes of the furze, it is summertime on the commons. Exmoor is the high country of the winds, which are to the falcons and the hawks: clothed by whortleberry bushes and lichens and ferns and mossed trees in the goyals, which are to the foxes, the badgers, and the red deer: served by rain-clouds and drained by rock-littered streams, which are to the otters.”
― Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter

“The old self must die. He had always known it, but had so seldom acted it. He felt strangely glad that he was at the front. It was the only life; the only death.”
― Henry Williamson, Love and the Loveless: A Soldier's Tale

“Whatv is thisnlife, if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?”
― Henry Williamson

“Though the birds scolded, the foxes snarled, and his own kind drove him away, Tarka had many friends, whom he played with and forgot – sticks, stones, water-weeds, slain fish, and once an empty cocoa-tin, a bright and curious thing that talked strangely as it moved over the shallows, but sank into the pool beyond, sent up three bubbles, and would play no more.”
― Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter

“Pity acts through the imagination, the higher light of the world, and imagination arises from the world of things, as a rainbow from the sun.”
― Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter

“Would the day come when scientists accepted that the ancients, who gave personalities to all natural phenomena, had divined the actual truth?”
― Henry Williamson, The Gale of the World

“..my feelings for the countryside…the beauty and the wildness, the enchantment of so much colour and life and warmth of the sun. Most people are restless in the country, they feel a vacancy, and want to get back to the shops and pavements and traffic; what they call life. Sometimes this war seems to have come directly out of that restlessness.”
― Henry Williamson, The Golden Virgin

“Life is big business, fornication, and death. Civilisation is ... the sterilising of truth ... Civilisation is world-citizenship and freedom from tradition, based on rootless eternal wandering in the mind that had nothing to lose and everything to gain including the whole world.”
― Henry Williamson, The Phoenix Generation

“The rising sun silvered the mist lying low and dense on the meadow, where cattle stood on unseen legs. Over the mist the white owl was flying, on broad soft wings. It wafted itself along, light as the mist; the sun showed the snowy feathers on breast and underwings and lit the tallow-gold and grey of its back. It sailed under the middle arch of the bridge and pulled itself by its talons into one of the spaces left in the stone-work by masons. Throughout the daylight it stood among the bones and skulls of mice, often blinking, and sometimes yawning.”
― Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter

“There is a paradise, and all true artists work to the glory of its existence, even if they do not always believe with conventional or organised faith.”
― Henry Williamson, The Phoenix Generation

“The first otter to go into deep water had felt the same fear that Tarka felt that night; for his ancestors, thousands of years ago, had been hunters in woods and along the banks of rivers, running the scent of blooded creatures on the earth, like all the members of the weasel race to which they belonged. This race had several tribes in the country of the Two Rivers. Biggest were the brocks, a tribe of badgers who lived in holts scratched among the roots of trees and bushes, and rarely went to water except to drink. They were related to the fitches or stoats, who chased rabbits and jumped upon birds on the earth; and to the vairs or weasels, who sucked the blood of mice and dragged fledgelings from the nest; and to the grey fitches or polecats, so rare in the forests; and to the pine-martens, a tribe so harried by men that one only remained, and he had found sanctuary in a wood where a gin was never tilled and a gun was never fired, where the red deer was never roused and the fox never chased. He was old; his canine teeth worn down. Otters knew the ponds in this wood and they played in them by day, while herons stalked in the shallows and nothing feared the old lady who sometimes sat on the bank, watching the wild creatures which she thought of as the small and persecuted kinsfolk of man.”
― Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter

“In his mind he was a spirit, feeling the radiant heat of the chalk of the trenches; cooling himself in the flicker-rippling Ancre. O, to be able to see it all again, a ghost world of gun-flashes at night. O to see it all, to grasp all of it, without violence, without pain; to share the marching and the singing of the living that were part of the great dream of life and death.”
― Henry Williamson, The Golden Virgin

“They were among birds what the Irish are among men, always ready in a merry and audacious life to go where there is trouble and not infrequently to be the cause of it.”
― Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter

“The whole of the Universe is run by God, which is one vast Imagination, struggling against the almost irresistible brute forces of the cosmos.”
― Henry Williamson, The Gale of the World

“The fundamental love that a man needs in his life, if he is to have steady spiritual ease is the love of place where he was a child, and first became aware of the light, and the objects which the light illumined ... It is the hurt child become man that seeks the wilderness, wherein to rebuild himself.”
― Henry Williamson, A Clear Water Stream

“The tarn is deep and brown and still, reflecting rushes and reeds at its sides, the sedges of the hills, and the sky over them.”
― Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter

“Hu-ee-ic!

The sky was growing grey. Tarka could not catch a carp, and he was hungry. He went back to the brook.

Hu-ee-ic!

Only his echo replied, and he wandered on.”
― Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter

“... but in nearly all those who through necessity of life till fields, herd beasts, and keep fowls, these remaining wildings of the moors have enemies who care nothing for their survival. The farmers would exterminate nearly every wild bird and animal of prey, were it not for the land-owners, among whom are some who care for the wildings, because they are sprung from the same land of England, and who would be unhappy if they thought they country would know them no more. For the animal they hunt to kill in its season, or those other animals or birds they cause to be destroyed for the continuance of their pleasure in sport - which they believe to be natural - they have no pity; and since they lack this incipient human instinct, they misunderstand and deride it in others. Pity acts through imagination, the higher light of the world, and imagination arises from the world of things, as a rainbow from the sun. A rainbow may be beautiful and heavenly, but it will not grow corn for bread.”
― Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter

“Well, we're all in this together, boys. Each one of us must think, not of himself, but of his pals. We must stick by our pals, which means our country. Our country is our people, remember. It took a war like this one to bring that home to everybody.”
― Henry Williamson, A Test to Destruction

“The icy casings of leaves and grasses and blades and sprigs were glowing and hid in a mist of sun-fire. Moor-folk call this morning glory Ammil.”
― Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter

“...poets have the spiritual fire within them; they are of the aetherial force, perhaps of the after-life. Who knows?”
― Henry Williamson, A Test to Destruction

“The grace of God is poetry...”
― Henry Williamson, Lucifer Before Sunrise

“Like most young officers who were not nervously or physically broken by it, I enjoyed the War, or rather let me hasten to say, that part of it that was hectically lived out of gunshot. I was entirely thoughtless and prejudiced; accepted everything that came; reviling those whom the majority reviled; hating those I had never seen simply because everyone else did so; doing towards those I did not hate acts which were considered glorious and noble. After the Armistice, in an existence of inactivity and disintegration, I began to believe that this same attitude of mind which endowed glory and nobility to the acts which helped to make the World War was the very mental attitude that had made such a thing possible.
This may appear mere sophistry, and a far jump from the logic of hunting to kill. Personally, I feel that the animals we hunt to kill are so near us in sense-feeling and joy of life, that it distresses me to see, for instance, an otter swimming slower and slower in shallow water between two lines of sportsmen barring the way up or down river. My feeling is then to join myself with the fatigued beast, and help him break a way to freedom. This feeling is of course thwarted, and my feelings are concealed: the feelings that a little creature is being bullied, shortly to be broken before my eyes, and, silent with cowardice, I do nothing to help him. My friends may say, ‘If you feel like that, why do you go otter-hunting?’ If I were candid I would reply that I went otter-hunting to see a certain girl, and talk to her, and try and convince her that I was a nice person, but very lonely. (12–14)”
― Henry Williamson, The Wild Red Deer Of Exmoor - A Digression On The Logic And Ethics And Economics Of Stag-Hunting In England To-Day

“Such was life; everything passed away; the fields and woodlands of boyhood became built upon; streets and pavements and lamp posts arose where warblers and willow wrens had sung; nothing ever remained the same.”
― Henry Williamson, The Golden Virgin

“All things of the visible world are by their material forms archaic; whereas the Imagination is the spirit of evolution to higher forms.”
― Henry Williamson, The Gale of the World

“When a bullet broke the store-house of the self, inside the skull, how could those myriads of photographs survive, or the personality that they made up? Why should they survive, what use were they to life?”
― Henry Williamson, The Golden Virgin

“...waves are the tears of Christ breaking on the stones of the world.”
― Henry Williamson, The Gale of the World

“A man of genius truly matched in the companionship of mated love was the brightest being of creation, his genius was held in balance. Alone, he overworks, his mind runs upon its own circles, its own horrific convolutions”
― Henry Williamson, A Solitary War