“I found my mind wandering at games; loved boxing and was good at it; and in summer, having chosen rowing instead of cricket, lay peacefully by the Stour, well upstream of the rhythmic creaking and the exhortation, reading Lily Christine and Gibbon and gossiping with kindred lotus-eaters under the willow-branches.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“[Poetry] is a field where England can take on all challengers.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees. Dank walls rose between towers that were topped with cones of moulting shingle. Weeds throve in every cranny. Moss mottled the walls. Fissures branched like forked lightning across damp masonry which the rusting iron clamps tried to hold together, and buttresses of brick shored up the perilously leaning walls. The mountains, delaying sunrise and hastening dusk, must have halved again the short winter days. Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation. But, in tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came? Immured in those six-foot-thick walls, overgrown outside with the conquering ivy and within by genealogical trees all moulting with mildew? My thoughts flew at once to solitary figures…a windowed descendant of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Charlemagne, alone with the Sacred Heart and her beads, or a family of wax-pale barons, recklessly inbred; bachelors with walrus moustaches, bent double with rheumatism, shuddering from room to room and coughing among their lurchers, while their cleft palates called to each other down corridors that were all but pitch dark.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“I fell asleep among the beer mugs and when I woke, I couldn’t think where I was.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“The notion that I had walked twelve hundred miles since Rotterdam filled me with a legitimate feeling of something achieved. But why should the thought that nobody knew where I was, as though I were in flight from bloodhounds or from worshipping corybants bent on dismemberment, generate such a feeling of triumph? It always did.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“My mother was filled with apprehension to begin with; we pored over the atlas, and, bit by bit as we pored, the comic possibilities began to unfold in absurd imaginary scenes until we were falling about with laughter; and by the time I caught the train to London next morning, she was infected with my excitement.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“I found it impossible to tear myself away from my station and plunge into Hungary. I feel the same disability now; a momentary reluctance to lay hands on this particular fragment of the future; not out of fear, but because, within arm's reach and still intact, this future seemed, and still seems, so full of promised marvels.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
Patrick Leigh Fermor
Born place: in London, The United Kingdom
Born date February 11, 1915
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“I was just going to stand here and watch it happen. I wasn’t going to say a fucking thing. Why? Because what did it matter? What did any of it matter?”
― Joe Meno, quote from Hairstyles of the Damned
“God doesn't create suffering Claire, we do. We make the world and then we break it.”
― quote from Comeback: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back
“Perhaps that was the genuine siren’s song of legend, the temptation to jettison the ballast of the past and rush weightless and unencumbered down a dark tunnel of rebirth. Perhaps that was the soul’s destiny regardless.”
― quote from The List of Seven
“What advice would I give the average homeowner to protect himself against burglars? Well, the first thing is to keep a light on in the house when you go out. It must be at least a sixty-watt bulb; anything less and the burglar will ransack the house, out of contempt for the wattage.”
― Woody Allen, quote from Side Effects
“I’m going to play,’ says Armand, lacing his fingers and cracking the knuckles. ‘A pair of these lads can pump for me.’
‘Is this a time for playing?’ asks Jean Baptiste. Then, ‘You are right. You have never been more so.”
― Andrew Miller, quote from Pure
Excess of Being
Candy
All In
The Stars Never Rise
Atlantis On the Shor...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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