John Lewis-Stempel > Quotes

“To stand alone in a field in England and listen to the morning chorus of the birds is to remember why life is precious.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field

“I have decided to sleep under the stars... Tonight heaven is my roof, and the hedges my walls... The field folds me in soft wings.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field

“And I wonder, is it really so difficult to enter, in some slight degree, into the mind-frame of an animal? Are we not all beasts?”
― John Lewis-Stempel

“you rise at dawn in May you can savour the world before the pandemonium din of the Industrial Revolution and 24/7 shopping.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, Meadowland: the private life of an English field

“Wordsworth once wrote of ‘spots of time’, experiences so intense they expand and inform existence ever after. They have a ‘renovating virtue’.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, The Running Hare: The Secret Life of Farmland

“[Tacitus] noted that the penalty for someone who dared peel the bark of a living tree (and thus kill the tree) was to have his navel cut out and nailed to the tree and then be driven around the tree until all his guts were wound about its trunk.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, The Wood: The Life & Times of Cockshutt Wood

“And nothing in nature is wasted. The bodies of the dead meadow ants will go to nourish the soil of the meadow. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Flesh to flesh.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field

“You look at the dark and the dark looks at you.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, Nightwalking: Four Journeys Into Britain After Dark

“Despite all the seen and unseen motion of summer, there is a stillness in the landscape, as though it was trapped in a glass jar.”
― John Lewis-Stempel

“Hares have the chiselled head of horses, the legs of lurchers – and the eyes of lions; the ancient Chinese considered the animal so other-worldly they decided its ancestor lived in the moon.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, The Running Hare: The Secret Life of Farmland

“They killed farming a year or so later. And they killed it by putting cabs on tractors. No longer was the farmer alive to the elements, or even close to the earth.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field

“what is a hedge other than linear woodland?”
― John Lewis-Stempel, Meadowland: the private life of an English field

“Nothing conserves like poverty”
― John Lewis-Stempel, Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field

“Almost all the things I love are to do with grass. Geese, sheep, cows, horses. Even dogs eat grass.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field

“High summer and one can hear the universe; so overwhelming is e accumulated sound of growing in the meadow and in hedges, of pollen being released, of particles moving in the heat, that all the minute motions together create a continuous him: the sound of summer.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field

“The drawback of brood parasitism is that, over evolutionary time, the victim erects ever more defences. To break these defences down requires effort. The cuckoo now has to work hard to be lazy.”
― John Lewis-Stempel

“One day he disappears. I hope he has joined a murder – the collective noun for crows – and not become a meal for a predator. I never really find out, but either way it’s a murder. One thing I do know: one of the greatest privileges in my life has been my bond with Crow Crow. I would so like Crow Crow to come back to bite the hand that fed it, and eat the grain in the wheatfield. I think every crow I see is Crow Crow. Of course, in a sense every crow is.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, The Running Hare: The Secret Life of Farmland

“Nothing conserves like poverty.”
― John Lewis-Stempel

“He may well build other nests, which he will display to any female who enters his territory. If she likes any of his pads she will move in, decorate, and bear his children. A slapper seeking a Premier League husband could not be more shallow. Mind you, he is no moral giant. As soon as he has ensconced one female, he will try to tempt another Jenny Wren into one of his spare nests, where she too will give birth to his progeny. The little cock then travels between his families, a bigamous commercial traveller in a 1930s thriller.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, Meadowland: the private life of an English field

“I suddenly realize that the swifts have gone. No fanfare. Just a prestidigitator's trick, a disappearance into the morning's mist. Inside I sigh a little. One of life's allotment of summers is over.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field

“Magpies are singular, excitable birds. Watch them in the examining sunlight: they split three ways. One stays in the field; he walks left, runs right, zig-zags, tires of his erratic pedestrianism, then flies for thirty yards, lands, starts over. He”
― John Lewis-Stempel, The Running Hare: The Secret Life of Farmland

“Actually, there are two oaks native to Britain. The English, common or pendunculate oak (Quercus robur), and the durmast or sessile oak (Quercus petraea). The trees are similar in appearance and grow to roughly the same height (20m to 25m average). They can be differentiated so: the pendunculate bears its acorns on long stalks – elves use them for their tobacco pipes in fairy stories – while its leaves have little lobes at the base. The sessile has a short stalk for the acorn and a long stalk for the leaf, which lacks lobes. That said, a British oak is a British oak.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, The Glorious Life of the Oak

“I read the birds, like a priest of Ancient Rome.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, La Vie: A year in rural France

“He may well build other nests, which he will display to any female who enters his territory. If she likes any of his pads she will move in, decorate, and bear his children. A slapper seeking a Premier League husband could not be more shallow.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, Meadowland: the private life of an English field

“November is one of my favourite months, with its faded afternoons of cemetery eeriness, and its churchy smell of damp musting leaves.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field

“Eternity would not be long enough to contain all the summer eves one could enjoy if they were like this”
― John Lewis-Stempel

“Wood Music: A Playlist
Foals, ‘Birch Tree’, 2015
Arnold Bax, November Woods, 1917
The Beatles, ‘Norwegian Wood’, 1965
Igor Stravinsky, ‘Berceuse’, from The Firebird, 1910
A Woodland Reading List
William Boyce and David Garrick, ‘Heart of Oak’, 1760 George Butterworth, The Banks of Green Willow, 1913 ——, ‘Loveliest of Trees’, from ‘A Shropshire Lad’, 1911 Editors, ‘I Want a Forest’, 2009
Edward Elgar, String Quartet in E minor, Op. 83, 1919 ——, Quintet in A minor, Op., 84, 1918
——, Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85, 1919
——, Owls: An Epitaph, Op. 27, 1907
Keane, ‘Somewhere Only We Know’, 2004
Lindisfarne, Dingly Dell, 1972
Oasis, ‘Songbird’, 2002
Pink Floyd, ‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene’, 1969
Camille Saint-Saëns, ‘Le Coucou au Fond des Bois’ (‘The Cuckoo in the
Depths of the Wood’), 1886
Pablo Casals, ‘El Cant dels Ocells’ (‘Song of the Birds’), 1961
Antonín Dvořák, Waldesruhe (‘Silent Woods’) for cello and orchestra, Op.
68, no. 5, 1894
Edvard Grieg, Lyric Pieces, Op. 43, no. 4, ‘Little Bird’, 1886
Franz Liszt, Legende S.175 no. 1, St Francis of Assisi preaching to the
birds, 1863
Monty Python, ‘The Lumberjack Song’, 1975
Van Morrison, ‘Redwood Tree’, 1972
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, ‘Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja’ (‘The Bird-
catcher, that’s me’), from Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), 1791 George Perlman, ‘A Birdling Sings’, from ‘Ghetto Sketches’, 1931 Pulp, ‘The Trees’, 2001
Radiohead, King of Limbs, 2011
Robert Schumann, ‘Jäger auf der Lauer’ (‘Hunters on the Lookout’), from Waldszenen (Forest Scenes), Op. 82, no. 2, 1850–51
——, ‘Freundliche Landschaft’ (‘Friendly Landscape’), from Waldszenen (Forest Scenes), Op. 82, no. 5, 1850–51
Jean Sibelius, ‘The Aspen’, no. 3, ‘The Birch’, no. 4, ‘The Spruce’, no. 5, from Op. 75, ‘The Trees’, 1914–19
Trad., ‘The Trees They Do Grow High’
——, ‘The Willow Tree’
The Verve, ‘Sonnet’, from Urban Hymns, 1997 Paul Weller, ‘Wild Wood’, 1993”
― John Lewis-Stempel, The Wood: The Life & Times of Cockshutt Wood

“In a wood the only things you should meet are abundant nature and antique tranquility, the present and past tenses combined.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, The Wood: The Life & Times of Cockshutt Wood

“Such are the inconsistences of humans in uniform, that the same endothermic vertebrates, which were believed a blessing, an aid to nostalgia, a sign from God, could also be shot for food (see p281-88) and employed as tools.”
― John Lewis-Stempel

“Anyone who tells you nature is endlessly lovely is someone who endlessly fails to go out into nature.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, Night Life