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
“Learn humility, while there's yet time--': those were the last of the abbot's words he had waited to hear. All very well, he thought, to be humble in accepting one's own pain and deprivation, perhaps, but what right have I, what right has he, to make a virtue of meekness when it will be Adam who suffers? I call that cheap humility.”
― Edith Pargeter, quote from The Heaven Tree Trilogy
“I’ve learned that it’s fine to have expectations, and dreams are wonderful, but once in a while, it would be good to have something come my way without having to fight for it.”
― Adriana Trigiani, quote from The Shoemaker's Wife
“She wanted to touch him, to throw her arms around him — but something held her back. Maybe it was the fear that her arms would pass right through him, that she would have come all this way only to find a ghost after all.
As though he’d been able to read her thoughts, he slowly angled toward her. He raised his hands and held his palms out to her. Isobel lifted her own hands to mirror his. He pressed their palms together, his fingers folding down to lace through hers. She felt a rush of warmth course through her, a relief as pure and sweet as spring rain.
He was real. This was real. She had found him. She could touch him. She could feel him. Finally they were together. Finally, finally, they could forget this wasted world and go home.
"I knew it wasn’t true," she whispered. "I knew you wouldn’t stop believing." He drew her close.
Leaning into him, she felt him press his lips to her forehead in a kiss. As he spoke, the cool metal of his lip ring grazed her skin, causing a shudder to ripple through her.
"You..." His voice, low and breathy, reverberated through her, down to the thin soles of her slippers. "You think you’re different," he said. She felt his hands tighten around hers, gripping hard, too hard.
A streak of violet lightning split the sky, striking close behind them.
The house, Isobel thought. It had been struck. She could hear it cracking apart. She looked for only a brief moment, long enough to watch it split open.
"But you’re not," Varen said, calling her attention back to him. Isobel winced, her own hands surrendering under the suddenly crushing pressure of his hold. A face she did not recognize stared down at her, one twisted with anger — with hate.
"You," he scarcely more than breathed, "are just like every. Body. Else."
He moved so fast. Before she could register his words or the fact that she had once spoken them to him herself, he jerked her to one side. Isobel felt her feet part from the rocks. Weightlessness took hold of her as she swung out and over the ledge of the cliff.
As he let her go.
The wind whistled its high and lonely song in her ears. She fell away into the oblivion of the storm until she could no longer see the cliff — could no longer see him.
Only the slip of the pink ribbon as it unraveled from her wrist, floating up and away from her and out of sight forever.”
― Kelly Creagh, quote from Enshadowed
“Never judge a man until you walk a mile in his shoes. That way, you're a mile away and you've got his shoes.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit
“WE THINK, sometimes, there's not a dragon left. Not one brave knight, not a single princess gliding through secret forests, enchanting deer and butterflies with her smile. We think sometimes that ours is an age past frontiers, past adventures. Destiny, it's way over the horizon; glowing shadows galloped past long ago, and gone. What a pleasure to be wrong.”
― Richard Bach, quote from The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
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