Laurie Lee Quotes

#1. I shared a compartment with a half-dozen muffled-up soldiers who had only arrived the day before, including an ill-favoured young Catalan whose pox-pitted cheeks sprouted stubble like a grave in May.

Laurie Lee

#2. I felt once again the unease of arriving at night in an unknown city
that faint sour panic which seems to cling to a place until one has found oneself a bed.

Laurie Lee

#3. 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

#4. 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.

Laurie Lee

#5. Such a morning it is when love leans through geranium windows and calls with a cockerel's tongue. When red-haired girls scamper like roses over the rain-green grass, and the sun drips honey.

Laurie Lee

#6. Effie M. was a monster. Six foot high and as strong as a farm horse.No sooner had she decided that she wanted UncleTom than she knocked him off his bicycle and told him.

Laurie Lee

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

Laurie Lee

#8. I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.

Laurie Lee

#9. The borders of consciousness are anxious enough, raw and desperate places; we shouldn't be dragged across them like struggling thieves as if sleep was a felony.

Laurie Lee

#10. She leaned out of the window slow and sleepy, and the light came through her nightdress like sand through a sieve.

Laurie Lee

#11. It came out sparkling like liquid sky.

Laurie Lee

#12. I felt it was for this I had come: to wake at dawn on a hillside and look out on a world for which I had no words, to start at the beginning, speechless and without plan, in a place that still had no memories for me.

Laurie Lee

#13. Eulalia turned and smiled at me brilliantly, showing her tongue, her face cracking open like a brown snake's egg hatching.

Laurie Lee

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

Laurie Lee

#15. 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.

Laurie Lee

#16. Country schooling was little more than a cane-wacking interlude in which boys picked up facts like bruises and the girls scarcely counted at all ...

Laurie Lee

#17. God's codpiece, you're very kind

Laurie Lee

#18. The untarred road wound away up the valley, innocent as yet of motor-cars, wound empty away to other villages, which lay empty too, the hot day long, waiting for the sight of a stranger. We

Laurie Lee

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

Laurie Lee

#20. Dorothy scratched her dark head, yawning wide, and white feathers floated out of her hair.

Laurie Lee

#21. Wilde said he felt sorry for those who never got their heart's desire, but sorrier still for those who did.

Laurie Lee

#22. In London, Man is the most secret animal on earth.

Laurie Lee

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

Laurie Lee

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

Laurie Lee

#25. But spring in England is like a prolonged adolescence, stumbling, sweet and slow, a thing of infinitesimal shades, false starts, expectations, deferred hopes, and final showers of glory.

Laurie Lee

#26. At best, love is simply the slipping of a hand in another's, of knowing you are where you belong at last, and of exchanging through the eyes that all-consuming regard which ignores everybody else on earth.

Laurie Lee

#27. 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.

Laurie Lee

#28. All civilizations at some time have fallen into this total terror, when the mystery of life was a kind of panic only to be assuaged by the spilling of blood.

Laurie Lee

#29. For the first time I was learning how much easier it was to leave than to stay behind and love.

Laurie Lee

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

Laurie Lee