Countryside Quotes

“It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I

“Those shining stars, he liked to point out, were one of the special treats for people like us who lived out in the wilderness. Rich city folks, he'd say, lived in fancy apartments, but their air was so polluted they couldn't even see the stars. We'd have to be out of our minds to want to trade places with any of them.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn't raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

“The footpath curves right, and my home’s roof ridge is visible through the coconut fronds. A streak of happiness lights up in my heart. I know it’s just a building, but I hear its frantic call, reaching out to me like a mother cow that has lost its calf. Is this what differentiates a home from a house—the life in the former, the soul breathed in by my grandparents, my parents, and me?”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“How lucky country children are in these natural delights that lie ready to their hand! Every season and every plant offers changing joys. As they meander along the lane that leads to our school all kinds of natural toys present themselves for their diversion. The seedpods of stitchwort hang ready for delightful popping between thumb and finger, and later the bladder campion offers a larger, if less crisp, globe to burst. In the autumn, acorns, beechnuts, and conkers bedizen their path, with all their manifold possibilities of fun. In the summer, there is an assortment of honeys to be sucked from bindweed flowers, held fragile and fragrant to hungry lips, and the tiny funnels of honeysuckle and clover blossoms to taste.”
― Miss Read, Village Diary

“It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away from any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love the detail that Hampshire's 'New Forest' is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I'll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again.

This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named 'myxomatosis,' into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams's lapine masterpiece Watership Down is the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything since The Wind in the Willows, but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“WEATHERS
This is the weather the cuckoo likes,
And so do I;
When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,
And nestlings fly;
And the little brown nightingale bills his best,
And they sit outside at 'The Traveller's Rest,'
And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest,
And citizens dream of the south and west,
And so do I.

This is the weather the shepherd shuns,
And so do I;
When beeches drip in browns and duns,
And thresh and ply;
And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe,
And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I.”
― Thomas Hardy

“...but these backwaters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion... ("Afterward")”
― Edith Wharton, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

“High up on Monte Salvatore the window of some shepherd's hut opened a golden eye. The roses hung their heads and dreamed under the still September clouds, and the water plashed and murmured softly among the pebbles of the shore.”
― E.L. Voynich

“Is then no nook of English ground secure
From rash assault?”
― William Wordsworth

“There was so much time that marvelous summer. Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving back of the hills lifted away from the Plain. It was a sort of stage-magic.”
― J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country

“Dim loneliness came imperceivably into the fields and he turned back. The birds piped oddly; some wind was caressing the higher foliage, turning it all one way, the way home. Telegraph poles ahead looked like half-used pencils; the small cross on the steeple glittered with a sharp and shapely permanence.”
― A.E. Coppard, Dusky Ruth and Other Stories

“Sometimes in life you just have to take a leap of faith.”
― Abby Clements, Amelia Grey's Fireside Dream

“THE MEETING"

"Scant rain had fallen and the summer sun
Had scorched with waves of heat the ripening corn,
That August nightfall, as I crossed the down
Work-weary, half in dream. Beside a fence
Skirting a penning’s edge, an old man waited
Motionless in the mist, with downcast head
And clothing weather-worn. I asked his name
And why he lingered at so lonely a place.

“I was a shepherd here. Two hundred seasons
I roamed these windswept downlands with my flock.
No fences barred our progress and we’d travel
Wherever the bite grew deep. In summer drought
I’d climb from flower-banked combe to barrow’d hill-top
To find a missing straggler or set snares
By wood or turmon-patch. In gales of March
I’d crouch nightlong tending my suckling lambs.

“I was a ploughman, too. Year upon year
I trudged half-doubled, hands clenched to my shafts,
Guiding my turning furrow. Overhead,
Cloud-patterns built and faded, many a song
Of lark and pewit melodied my toil.
I durst not pause to heed them, rising at dawn
To groom and dress my team: by daylight’s end
My boots hung heavy, clodded with chalk and flint.

“And then I was a carter. With my skill
I built the reeded dew-pond, sliced out hay
From the dense-matted rick. At harvest time,
My wain piled high with sheaves, I urged the horses
Back to the master’s barn with shouts and curses
Before the scurrying storm. Through sunlit days
On this same slope where you now stand, my friend,
I stood till dusk scything the poppied fields.

“My cob-built home has crumbled. Hereabouts
Few folk remember me: and though you stare
Till time’s conclusion you’ll not glimpse me striding
The broad, bare down with flock or toiling team.
Yet in this landscape still my spirit lingers:
Down the long bottom where the tractors rumble,
On the steep hanging where wild grasses murmur,
In the sparse covert where the dog-fox patters.”

My comrade turned aside. From the damp sward
Drifted a scent of melilot and thyme;
From far across the down a barn owl shouted,
Circling the silence of that summer evening:
But in an instant, as I stepped towards him
Striving to view his face, his contour altered.
Before me, in the vaporous gloaming, stood
Nothing of flesh, only a post of wood.”
― John Rawson, From The English Countryside: Tales Of Tragedy: Narrated In Dramatic Traditional Verse

“Monfleury est en vente, je perds cinquante mille francs, s'il le faut, mais je suis tout joyeux, je quitte cet enfer d'hypocrisie et de tracasseries. Je vais chercher la solitude et la paix champêtre au seul lieu où elles existent en France, dans un quatrième étage donnant sur les Champs-Élysées.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“... the English landscape at its finest - such as I saw it this morning - possesses a quality that the landscapes of other nations, however more superficially dramatic, inevitably fail to possess.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“People in the city think their morning is morning! Go to the countryside for real mornings, go and see what a real morning is like!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Heed our advice, young man. Do not abandon your own plot of land for the allure of the court. A simple, honest life spent close to the earth keeps a man’s face bronzed and his eyes bright.”
― Avellina Balestri, All Ye That Pass By: Book 1: Gone for a Soldier

“When you live in a rural area, your 911 call is to your neighbors.”
― Steven Magee

“Living in the countryside is the dream of every person who wants to return to his essence!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Apparent simplicity best exemplifies coorie in the countryside.
Isolate the few component parts that come together to make the experience special and we can see they are the same threads that weave through the Scottish identity.”
― Gabriella Bennett, The Art of Coorie: How to Live Happy the Scottish Way

“Man is a gregarious being. He cannot live by bread alone. If he suffers in body, mind and soul from being crowded into too close contact with his fellows, so also does he suffer from being separated too far from them.....Yet as the cities grow, unwholesomely crowding people together till they are packed in tiers, family above family, so are they unwholesomely separated in the countryside.”
― Henry George

“Stella looked out at the passing countryside now. It was like England as it is depicted on exported biscuit tins, a country of little valleys and beech copses, of gilded fields and mellow, misted hollows. Green hills rolled evenly, as if they'd been landscaped by Capability Brown, and oak-framed vistas presented themselves for her approval. Even the sheep here appeared to have been shampooed and set. Stella thought that if she'd grown up in Gloucestershire, she might be painting watercolor landscapes and infinitely contemplating variations of green.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“Finches flashed in the tops of ancient elm trees and rooks lifted on gleaming wings, while the verdant landscape rippled sweetly all around her. Sheep bleated peacefully, cow parsley billowed at the roadside and celandines shone poetically. She really ought to be drinking it in; it was like benign nature was spreading its arms for her”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“Meanwhile, on Dudley Road, stalks of rhubarb grew behind the blue-painted shed and roses bloomed on a bush above the cellar window. The swing set creaked. The stones in the garden path wobbled underneath my feet and there were pink sprigged cushions on the white wicker chairs on the porch. Inside, everything was pink and green, green and pink: the walls in my bedroom the color of the center of a raspberry thumbprint cookie, the floors the color of the sliver of green in after-dinner mints; the floor in my parents' bedroom the same, and the walls a smudged baby pink.”
― Charlotte Silver, Charlotte Au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood

“English: "Laws designed for the big city destroy the rural areas."

Česky: „Zákony navržené pro velkoměsto likvidují venkov.”
― Sebastián Wortys

“Αλλά η επίμονη προσκόλληση αυτών των φτωχών ανθρώπων στο βράχο που τους έριξε η τύχη όταν έσπερνε πρίγκιπες αποδώ και δούκισσες αποκεί, αυτή η θαρραλέα εγκατάλειψη σε μια ζωή όλο μόχθο, αυτή η πίστη της οικογένειας που αντανακλάται στο επάγγελμα, στο σπίτι και στις πέτρες που το περιτριγυρίζουν, μου μοιάζουν πράγματα σοβαρότατα και πολύ σεβαστά. Μου φαίνεται ότι οι ανησυχίες ενός περιπλανώμενου πνεύματος θα αποκοιμούνταν γλυκά μέσα στη γαλήνη αυτών των ήπιων, απλών συναισθημάτων που κληροδοτούνται ήσυχα και αμετάβλητα από γενιά σε γενιά.”
― Giovanni Verga, Vita dei campi

“Το μελαγχολικό βούισμα των εντόμων της νύχτας, κι εκείνες οι δυο νότες από τη φλογέρα του Γέλι, πάντα ίδιες –ιού! ιού! ιού!-, που σ' έκαναν να σκέφτεσαι πράγματα μακρινά: τη γιορτή του Αϊ-Γιάννη, τη νύχτα των Χριστουγέννων, την αυγή της εκδρομής, όλα εκείνα τα σπουδαία γεγονότα που έχεις ζήσει, που μοιάζουν λυπητερά, τόσο μακρινά. Και σ' έκαναν να κοιτάζεις ψηλά, με τα μάτια υγρά, λες κι όλα τα αστέρια που άρχιζαν να ανάβουν στον ουρανό έριχναν βροχή μέσα στην καρδιά σου και την πλημμύριζαν!”
― Giovanni Verga, Vita dei campi