Quotes from Henry Williamson

Since childhood she had walked the Devon rivers with her father looking for flowers and the nests of birds, passing some rocks and trees as old friends, seeing a Spirit everywhere, gentle in thought to all her eyes beheld.

Music comes from an icicle as it melts, to live again as spring water.

I must return to my old comrades of the Great War - to the brown, the treeless, the flat and grave-set plain of Flanders - to the rolling, heat-miraged downlands of the Somme - for I am dead with them, and they live in me again.

Every gesture is a gesture from the blood, every expression a symbolic utterance... Everything is of the blood, of the senses.

The eldest and biggest of the litter was a dog cub, and when he drew his first breath he was less than five inches long from his nose to where his tail joined his back-bone.

Every country in every war fights for freedom.

If salt ocean is the Great Mother from whom all life has sprung, fresh water is the Nurse entrusted to nourish life within her wanderings and around her wave-lapped margins.

The slow rhythm of the body, the insistent rhythm of the wit, were they becoming irreconcilable in modern civilisation? The sedentary life, frustration and irritability; work with the body, fatigue - and peace of mind.

All the experience of the greatest city in the world could not withhold me.

The tides which flow and lapse in the Bristol Channel are often distained by the freshets of many streams falling through wooded coombes below the moor.

True idealists are rare; they are the dedicated workers, who would, if need be, die at the stake.

Regeneration can come only through a change of heart in the individual.

Yet otters have not been hunters in water long enough for the habit to become an instinct.

The bells cease, and the power goes from me, and I descend again to the world of the living; and if in some foolish confiding moment I try to explain why I want to re-live those old days, to tear the Truth out of the past so that all men shall see plainly, perhaps someone will say to me, 'Oh, the War! A tragedy - best forgotten.'

All beauty is truth, and all truth is compassionate. Few know that; fewer still can express it.

In future, lots of things will be made from beans and fibres grown on the farmers' fields. This new science is called chemurgy. Plastics, for industry, will come from the soil.

Peace in Europe can only come through union in one economic system. The United States of Europe are overdue.

Whatv is this life, if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?

For within himself, be he clairvoyant and articulate, he will find latent the divisions of the mind of European man, and their opposing impulses.

Whatv is thisnlife, if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?

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.

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.

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.

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.