Laurie Lee

“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.”

“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.”

“The faint cinder-smell of trains, that smell of travel and departure.”

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

“A man's country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle; and patriotism is loyalty to that principle.”

“We are all of us born in moral bedlam, and the tumbled world we live in is the only world we shall ever know.”

“The sun, a fiery orange, was balancing on the edge of the hills, and the sky was a bruised purple.”

“The landscape was sketching itself in shadow and light.”

“So with a new suit of clothes, a few shillings in my pocket, and a violin under my arm, I walked out of the village one midsummer morning.”

“The first day of the opening of the new school was splendid. It was the finest building in the village, and we all went up to it like a flock of sheep.”

“That was the day of the first cider, made from the first apples of the year.”

“Appetite is the greatest evil. You can have it all, but you can't have it forever.”