Quotes from Flora Thompson

The singers were rude and untaught and poor beyond modern imagining; but they deserve to be remembered, for they knew the now lost secret of being happy on little.

La gente era más pobre entonces y carecía de las comodidades, las diversiones y los conocimientos que tenemos hoy en día; y a pesar de todo, eran más felices. Lo que parece sugerir que la felicidad depende en mayor medida del estado de la mente —y quizás del cuerpo— que de las circunstancias y eventos que nos rodean.

You don't want to be poor and look poor, too,' they would say; and 'We've got our pride. Yes, we've got our pride.

It sometimes seems to us that some impression of those now dead must be left upon their familiar earthly surroundings. We saw them, on such a day, in such a spot, in such an attitude, smiling - or not smiling - and the impression of the scene is so deeply engraved upon our own hearts that we feel they must have left some more enduring trace, though invisible to mortal eyes.

After her husband died, she went away to live with her eldest son, and the round house shared the fate of Sally's. Where it stood is now a ploughed field. The husband's sacrifices, the wife's romance, are as though they had never been - 'melted into air, into thin air.

When Laura visited the hamlet just before the war, the roof had fallen in, the yew hedge had run wild and the flowers were gone, excepting one pink rose which was shedding its petals over the ruin. Today, all has gone, and only the limey whiteness of the soil in a corner of a ploughed field is left to show that a cottage once stood there.

Lo extrañé mucho. Más que cualquier otra cosa de la que me haya visto obligado a desprenderme, lo que no es poco decir, y aún lo echo de menos ahora y siempre lo haré. Pero fue por una buena causa y en este mundo no podemos tener todo lo que queremos. No sería bueno para nosotros.

Unlike most great talkers, the rooks are good workers, too.

Alas! in nature, as in art, we gain only according to our capacity. You cannot put an ocean in a pint pot.