Quotes from Laurie Lee

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

We were as merciless and cruel as most primitives are. But we learnt at that school the private nature of cruelty; and our inborn hatred for freaks and outcasts was tempered by meeting them daily.

The state of our fire became as important to us as it must have been to a primitive tribe. When it sulked and sank we were filled with dismay; when it blazed all was well with the world; but if – God save us – it went out altogether, then we were clutched by primeval chills.

But if you survived melancholia and rotting lungs it was possible to live long in this valley.

But our waking life, and our growing years, were for the most part spent in the kitchen, and until we married, or ran away, it was the common room we shared.

I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.

That last winter was a tragic story and I got no personal honour out of it but I was a witness to it.

For the first time I was learning how much easier it was to leave than to stay behind and love.

I don't know what idiocies drove me in those days, but they were naive, innocent idiocies in many ways.

What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry.

It never occurred to me that others had done this before me.

I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.

Ay, cómo trabajaban las chicas entonces; antes del amanecer ya estaban en pie, muertas de sueño, para disponer veinte o treinta fuegos. Barrer, fregar, limpiar y pulir se hacía sólo para volver a hacerlo. Lavar montañas de vajilla y cubertería, corretear escaleras arriba y abajo; y aquellas campanillas irascibles que empezaban a resonar como en una rabieta… Justo cuando lograbas sentarte un instante.

Sometimes, leaving the road, I would walk into the sea and pull it voluptuously over my head and stand momentarily drowned in the cool blind silence, in a salt-stung neutral nowhere.

When I judged it to be tea-time I sat on an old stone wall and opened my tin of treacle biscuits. As I ate them I could hear mother banging the kettle on the hob and my brothers rattling their tea-cups. The biscuits tasted sweetly of the honeyed squalor of home – still only a dozen miles away.

My theory is that a strong healthy man isn't likely to be creative. It is illness and pain that encourages him to live another life.

He held the landlordship of an inn to be the same as Shaw's definition of marriage – as something combining the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

I was at that age which feels neither strain nor friction, when the body burns magic fuels, so that it seems to glide in warm air, about a foot off the ground, smoothly obeying its intuitions. Even exhaustion, when it came, had a voluptuous quality, and sleep was caressive and deep, like oil. It was the peak of the curve of the body's total extravagance, before the accounts start coming in.

With her love of finery, her unmade beds, her litters of unfinished scrapbooks, her taboos, superstitions, and prudishness, her remarkable dignity, her pity for the persecuted, her awe of the gentry, and her detailed knowledge of the family trees of all the Royal Houses of Europe, she was a disorganized mass of unreconciled denials, a servant girl born to silk. Yet in spite of all this, she fed our oafish wits with steady, imperceptible shocks of beauty. Though

I expected to be shot at any moment and if they had done I would have understood, that they couldn't take risks with someone foolhardy or so unpredictable.