Laurie Lee

Quotes

1. I was propelled, of course, by the traditional forces that had sent many generations along this road - by the small tight valley closing in around one, stifling the breath with its mossy mouth, the cottage walls narrowing like the arms of an iron maiden, the local girls whispering, ‘Marry, and settle down.’

2. 

   Now we go off to the office and come home in the evenings to cheap chicken and frozen peas. Very nice, but too much of it, too easy and regular, served up without effort or wanting. We eat, we are lucky, our faces are shining with fat, but we don't know the pleasure of being hungry any more.

   p. 65

3. 

   Love is also disquiet, the brooding pleasures of doubt, midnights wasted by speculation, the frantic dance round the significance of the last thing she said, the need to see her to have life confirmed.

   p. 57

4. 

   The last days of my childhood were also the last days of the village.  I belonged to that generation which saw, by chance, the end of a thousand years' life.

   p. 262

5. 

   At other times the daughter, heart-stoppingly voluptuous in her tight Californian pants, would lead me by the hand through the ruined garden, to the last clump of still rooted myrtles, then crouch, bare-kneed, and pull me down beside her, and demand to know my ideological convictions. Beautiful Cleo; she never knew what she did to me, her eyes slanting under the myrtle leaves, her coiled russet limbs like something from a Rousseau jungle, her chatter never still for a moment. But not of what I expected; never a word about love, or my hunger, or the summer night.

6. 

   They [Lee’s uncles] were the horsemen and brawlers of another age, and their lives spoke its long farewell.  Spoke too, of campaigns on desert marches, of Kruger’s cannon and Flanders mud; of a world that still moved at the same pace as Caesar’s and of that Empire greater than his – through which they had fought, sharp-eyed and anonymous, and seen the first outposts crumble….

   p. 221

7. 

   Of course, there is one great virtue in size; and of course, London is the greatest show on earth, for never have so many human characters been gathered together in one place.  Here, in a day, you can see the world.  Stand at the entrance to a main-line railway station, during the rush-hour, and you see every possible human species scurrying past.  One becomes amazed and transported by the multiplicity of the human face, by its infinite differences, by its almost prismatic graduations from ugliness to beauty, evil to good.

   p. 45

8. 

   Charm is the ultimate weapon, the supreme seduction, against which there are few defences.  If you've got it, you need almost nothing else, neither money, looks, nor pedigree.  It's a gift, only to be given away, and the more used the more there is.  It is also a climate of behaviour set for the perpetual summer and thermostatically controlled by taste and tact.

   p. 67

9. 

   It is a long time now since I knew that acute moment of bliss that comes from putting parched lips to a cup of cold water. The springs are still there to be enjoyed - all one needs is the original thirst.

   p. 66

10. 

    It was then I began to on my bed and stare out at the nibbling squirrels, and to make up poems from intense abstraction, hour after unmarked hour, imagination scarcely faltering once, rhythm hardly skipping a beat, while my sisters called me, suns rose and fell, and the poems I made, which I never remembered, were the first and last of that time….

    p. 280

11. 

    This London, of course, with its hollow, drum-like name, is neither England nor abroad but something on its own, a walled fantasy of remembered tales.

    p. 26

12. 

    She is of course just an ordinary miracle, but is also the particular late wonder of my life.

    p. 77