Quotes from William Henry Hudson

Now that we are cool, he said, and regret that we hurt each other, I am not sorry that it happened.

There are many Green Dragons in this world of wayside inns, even as there are many White Harts, Red Lions, Silent Women and other incredible things...

Of all the people I have ever known you are the only one I don't know.

Boys are always inarticulate where their deepest feelings are concerned; however much they may desire it they cannot express kind and sympathetic feelings.

It was only one of a dozen or twenty vocations which he had taken up at various times, only to drop them again as soon as he made the discovery that they one and all entailed months and even years of hard work if he was ever to fulfil his ambitious desire of doing and being something great in the world.

In going back we must take our present selves with us: the mind has taken a different colour, and this is thrown back upon our past.

In the evening of that day, after completing my preparations, I supped on the remaining portions of the sloth, not suitable for preservation, roasting bits of fat on the coals and boiling the head and bones into a broth; and after swallowing the liquid I crunched the bones and sucked the marrow...

I could yet always feel that it was infinitely better to be than not to be. THE

My feathered friends were so much to me that I am constantly tempted to make this sketch of my first years a book about birds and little else.

When the religious Cowper confesses in the opening lines of his address to the famous Yardley oak, that the sense of awe and reverence it inspired in him would have made him bow himself down and worship it but for the happy fact that his mind was illumined with the knowledge of the truth, he is but saying what many feel without in most cases recognizing the emotion for what it is—the sense of the supernatural in nature.

The most dreadful scenes, the worst in Dante's Inferno, for example, can be visualized by the inner eye; and sounds, too, are conveyed to us in a description so that they can be heard mentally; but it is not so with smells.

This report inflamed my mind to such a degree that I could not rest by night or day for dreaming golden dreams, and considering how to get to that rich district, unknown to civilized men.

the mystical faculty in me which produced those strange rushes or bursts of feeling

The British boy suffers the greatest restraint during the period when the call of nature, the instincts of play and adventure, are most urgent. Naturally, he looks eagerly forward to the time of escape, which he fondly imagines will be when his boyhood is over and he is free of masters.

The puma is, with the exception of some monkeys, the most playful animal in existence.

We know that our senses are subject to decay, that from our middle years they are decaying all the time; but happily it is as if we didn't know and didn't believe.

You cannot fly like an eagle with the wings of a wren.

Now that we are cool, he said, and regret that we hurt each other, I am not sorry that it happened.

Animals of all classes, old and young, shrink with instinctive fear from any strange object approaching them.