Laurie Lee · 192 pages
Rating: (3.6K votes)
“For the first time I was learning how much easier it was to leave than to stay behind and love.”
― Laurie Lee, quote from As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
“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, quote from As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
“But I think my most lasting impression was still the unhurried dignity and noblesse with which the Spaniard handled his drink. He never gulped, panicked, pleaded with the barman, or let himself be shouted into the street. Drink, for him, was one of the natural privileges of living, rather than the temporary suicide it so often is for others. But then it was lightly taxed here, and there were no licensing laws; and under such conditions one could take one's time.”
― Laurie Lee, quote from As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
“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, quote from As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
“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, quote from As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
“There are brilliant evocations of intense heat (‘the brass-taloned lion which licks the afternoon ground ready to consume anyone not wise enough to take cover’) and sunlight (it ‘struck upwards, sideways and down, while the wheat went buckling across the fields like a solid sheet of copper’),”
― Laurie Lee, quote from As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
“I am the way into the city of woe,
I am the way into eternal pain,
I am the way to go among the lost.
Justice caused my high architect to move,
Divine omnipotence created me,
The highest wisdom, and the primal love.
Before me there were no created things
But those that last forever—as do I.
Abandon all hope you who enter here.”
― Dante Alighieri, quote from The Inferno
“And you will be quite on your own when you do all this. There is no academy where you can learn to be yourself; there is no line manager slowly urging you toward the correct answer. You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“Propose a theory to explain one of there eternal mysteries: Mona Lisa's smile, crop circles, or Velveeta.
Here is a theory of love:
you find a sister, you gain
a brother; you lose
a sister, you lose
a brother; you lose a cat,
you find a girl, you kiss
a girl, you find the cat,
you hope
that there is nothing left to lose, and
all there is, is there to find.”
― Laura Ruby, quote from Bone Gap
“Did you ever look out in that dark and fucked-up world out there and think, how do I let my daughter out into that? And how do i stop her? And the things you can’t stop because you’re … because-”
― Megan Abbott, quote from The Fever
“I’d prefer a debriefing by the professional,” Matthias said. “Rather than one of the idiot’s exhausting, million-words-in-one-breath babbling explanations.” “Hey,” I said. “That is a rare talent.” “Maybe your only talent.”
― A.E. Kirk, quote from Demons in Disguise
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