Laurie Lee > Quotes

“Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn't raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“At best, love is simply the slipping of a hand in another's, of knowing you are where you belong at last, and of exchanging through the eyes that all-consuming regard which ignores everybody else on earth.”
― Laurie Lee, I Can't Stay Long

“For the first time I was learning how much easier it was to leave than to stay behind and love.”
― Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

“She was too honest, too natural for this frightened man; too remote from his tidy laws. She was, after all, a country girl; disordered, hysterical, loving. She was muddled and mischievous as a chimney-jackdaw, she made her nest of rags and jewels, was happy in the sunlight, squawked loudly at danger, pried and was insatiably curious, forgot when to eat or ate all day, and sang when sunsets were red.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“She leaned out of the window slow and sleepy, and the light came through her nightdress like sand through a sieve.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“I felt once again the unease of arriving at night in an unknown city--that faint sour panic which seems to cling to a place until one has found oneself a bed.”
― Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

“The prospect Smiler was a manic farmer. Few men I think can have been as unfortunate as he; for on the one hand he was a melancholic with a loathing for mankind, on the other, some paralysis had twisted his mouth into a permanent and radiant smile. So everyone he met, being warmed by his smile, would shout him a happy greeting. And beaming upon them with his sunny face he would curse them all to hell.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“I felt it was for this I had come: to wake at dawn on a hillside and look out on a world for which I had no words, to start at the beginning, speechless and without plan, in a place that still had no memories for me.”
― Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

“But I think my most lasting impression was still the unhurried dignity and noblesse with which the Spaniard handled his drink. He never gulped, panicked, pleaded with the barman, or let himself be shouted into the street. Drink, for him, was one of the natural privileges of living, rather than the temporary suicide it so often is for others. But then it was lightly taxed here, and there were no licensing laws; and under such conditions one could take one's time.”
― Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

“The Welsh are not like any other people in Britain, and they know how separate they are. They are the Celts, the tough little wine-dark race who were the original possessors of the island, who never mixed with the invaders coming later from the east, but were slowly driven into the western mountains.”
― Laurie Lee, I Can't Stay Long

“In London, Man is the most secret animal on earth.”
― Laurie Lee, I Can't Stay Long

“Granny Trill and Granny Wallon were traditional ancients of a kind we won’t see today, the last of that dignity of grandmothers to whom age was its own embellishment. The grandmothers of those days dressed for the part in that curious but endearing uniform which is now known to us only through music-hall. And our two old neighbours, when setting forth on errands, always prepared themselves scrupulously so. They wore high laced boots and long muslin dresses, beaded chokers and candlewick shawls, crowned by tall poke bonnets tied with trailing ribbons and smothered with inky sequins. They looked like starlings, flecked with jet, and they walked in a tinkle of darkness.

Those severe and similar old bodies enthralled me when they dressed that way. When I finally became King (I used to think) I would command a parade of grandmas, and drill them, and march them up and down - rank upon rank of hobbling boots, nodding bonnets, flying shawls, and furious chewing faces. They would be gathered from all the towns and villages and brought to my palace in wagon-loads. No more than a monarch’s whim, of course, like eating cocoa or drinking jellies; but far more spectacular any day than those usual trudging guardsmen.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“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.”
― Laurie Lee, Village Christmas and Other Notes on the English Year

“At first there was nothing - a profound blue darkness running running deep, laced by skeins of starlight and pale phosphorescent flashes. This four o-clock hour was a moment of utter silence, the indrawn breath of dark, the absolute, trance-like balance between night and day. Then, when it seemed that nothing would ever move or live or know the light again, a hot wind would run over the invisible water. It was like a fore-blast of the turning world, an intimation that its rocks and seas and surfaces still stirred against the sun. One strained one's eyes, scarce breathing, searching for a sign. Presently it came. Far in the east at last the horizon hardened, an imperceptible line dividing sky and sea, sharp as a diamond cut on glass. A dark bubble of cloud revealed itself, warmed slowly, flushing from within like a seed growing, a kernel ripening, a clinker hot with locked-in fire. Gradually the cloud throbbed red with light, then suddenly caught the still unrisen sun and burst like an expanding bomb. Flares and streamers began to fall into the sea, setting all things on fire. After the long unthinking darkness everything now began to happen at once. The stars snapped shut, the sky bled green, vermillion tides ran over the water, the hills around took on the colour of firebrick, and the great sun drew himself at last raw and dripping from the waves. Scarlet, purple, and clinker-blue, the morning, smelling of thyme and goats, of charcoal, splintered rock and man's long sojourn around this lake”
― Laurie Lee, A Rose for Winter

“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.”
― Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

“All civilizations at some time have fallen into this total terror, when the mystery of life was a kind of panic only to be assuaged by the spilling of blood.”
― Laurie Lee, I Can't Stay Long

“So with the family gone, Mother lived as she wished ... Slowly, snugly, she grew into her background, warm on her grassy bank, poking and peering among the flowery bushes, dishevelled and bright as they. Serenely unkempt were those final years, free from conflict, doubt or dismay, while she reverted gently to a rustic simplicity as a moss-rose reverts to a wild one.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“I have got a daughter, whose life is already separate from mine, whose will already follows its own directions, and who has quickly corrected my woolly preconceptions of her by being something remorselessly different. She is the child of herself and will be what she is. I am merely the keeper of her temporary helplessness.”
― Laurie Lee, The Firstborn

“Eulalia turned and smiled at me brilliantly, showing her tongue, her face cracking open like a brown snake's egg hatching.”
― Laurie Lee, A Moment of War

“And as I lay there listening, with the sun filtering across me, I thought this was how it should always be. To be charmed from sleep by a voice like this, eased softly back into life, rather than by the customary brutalities of shouts, knocking, and alarm-bells like blows on the head. 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.”
― Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

“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.”
― Laurie Lee

“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.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“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.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie: A Memoir

“Not everyone requires, nor seeks, the stimulus of the recurring image. They are content to be without directions. But for those of us who are branded by this particular mark, at least we know where we're going.
We are going, as it were, on a series of seasonal journeys, the climax of which is simply returning home.”
― Laurie Lee, Village Christmas and Other Notes on the English Year

“But if you survived melancholia and rotting lungs it was possible to live long in this valley.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“She could grow them anywhere, at any time, and they seemed to live longer for her. She grew them with rough, almost slap-dash love, but her hands possessed such an understanding of their needs they seemed to turn to her like another sun. She could snatch a dry root from field or hedgerow, dab it into the garden, give it a shake and almost immediately it flowered. One felt she could grow roses from a stick or chair-leg, so remarkable was this gift. Our”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie: A Memoir

“Yo era aún lo bastante pequeño para dormir con mi madre, lo cual me parecía el único objetivo de la vida. Dormíamos los dos juntos en el dormitorio de la primera planta, en una cama con barrotes de latón, cortinas y colchón de borra (…) Tras la separación del día y la amplitud de la casa, yacíamos allí los dos solos y unidos. Aquella oscuridad me parecía el fruto del endrino, blando y denso al tacto, pero era una oscuridad de beatitud y languidez sencilla, en que todas las aristas parecían redondeadas, propias y ajustadas; y resultaba que aquella presencia por la que habías gemido y suspirado no había huido, después de todo.”
― Laurie Lee

“Our terraced strip of garden was Mother’s monument, and she worked it headstrong, without plan. She would never control or clear this ground, merely cherish whatever was there; and she was as impartial in her encouragement to all that grew as a spell of sweet sunny weather. She would force nothing, graft nothing, nor set things in rows; she welcomed self-seeders, let each have its head, and was the enemy of very few weeds. Consequently our garden was a sprouting jungle and never an inch was wasted.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“The stooping figure of my mother, waist-deep in the grass and caught there like a piece of sheep's wool, was the last I saw of my country home as I left it to discover the world.”
― Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

“My theory is that a strong and healthy man isn't likely to be creative. It is illness and pain that encourages him to live another life. (pp24)”
― Laurie Lee, Village Christmas and Other Notes on the English Year