Laurie Lee Quotes

"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."

"Here we lived and fed in a family fug, not minding the little space, trod on each other like birds in a hole, elbowed our ways without spite, all talking at once or silent at once, or crying against each other, but never I think feeling overcrowded, being as separate as notes in a scale."

"I crossed the Pyrenees in December, nearly got frozen to death in a blizzard and arrived carrying a violin, a camera and books."

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

"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."

"I have been sitting watching that ever since I came back, the continuous variations of light and shadow."

"I remember trying to impress her by writing an essay about the Rocky Mountains and the bears and it was the first bad review I ever had - shameful!"

"I wanted to communicate what I had seen, so that others could see it."

"I was last among the long grass and I'd never seen long grass and never been on my own and out of sight of humans before."

"I was reminding them of their lives and I think that was why it was read so much, but this was quite unintentional and unpredictable."

"It was a world that I wanted to record because it was such a miracle visitation to me."

"It was the end of a semi-feudal life and it was also the beginning of one's own life."

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

"The house is still down the bank, still very unchanged, except that there are new people, nice people living there."

"The sun sets down at the end of the valley over the Severn and there's this afterglow which catches those quarries and it just sits there glowing when the light is gone from everywhere else in the valley - it holds the light to the last drop."

"This is only a small story, it can only interest my family and a few neighbours."

"We were living in the Slad Road when my father left us. I was about three."

"Well, he was trying to get home - aren't we all, really, in the end?"

"What happened was unpredictable but it also reminded many readers of their beginnings and their family recollections."

"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."