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
“In one sense, (Duchamp's) “The Large Glass” is a glimpse into Hell; a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness.”
― Robert Hughes, quote from The Shock of the New
“In breve, e come sempre, in Shakespeare un lettore attento può trovare sostegno per quasi qualsiasi posizione voglia prendere. (O come lo stesso Shakespeare ha scritto in una battuta citata spesso a sproposito: «Il diavolo può citare le Sacre Scritture per i propri fini».)”
― Bill Bryson, quote from Shakespeare: The World as Stage
“Why didn't you become a sorcerer, Geralt? Weren't you ever attracted by the Art? Be honest.'
'I will. I was.'
'Why, then, didn't you follow the voice of that attraction?'
'I decided it would be wiser to follow the voice of good sense.'
'Meaning?'
'Years of practice in the witcher's trade have taught me not to bite off more than I can chew. Do you know, Vilgefortz, I once knew a dwarf, who, as a child, dreamed of being an elf. What do you think; would he have become one had he followed the voice of attraction?”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, quote from Time of Contempt
“You can't run away from who you are, but what you can do is run toward who you want to be.”
― Jason Reynolds, quote from Ghost
“There is no mystery-- that's the beauty of it. We are entirely explicable to each other, and yet we stay. What a miracle that is.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Broken Verses
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