John Lewis-Stempel · 308 pages
Rating: (692 votes)
“you rise at dawn in May you can savour the world before the pandemonium din of the Industrial Revolution and 24/7 shopping.”
“To stand alone in a field in England and listen to the morning chorus of the birds is to remember why life is precious.”
“Almost all the things I love are to do with grass. Geese, sheep, cows, horses. Even dogs eat grass.”
“They killed farming a year or so later. And they killed it by putting cabs on tractors. No longer was the farmer alive to the elements, or even close to the earth.”
“I have decided to sleep under the stars... Tonight heaven is my roof, and the hedges my walls... The field folds me in soft wings.”
“And nothing in nature is wasted. The bodies of the dead meadow ants will go to nourish the soil of the meadow. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Flesh to flesh.”
“High summer and one can hear the universe; so overwhelming is e accumulated sound of growing in the meadow and in hedges, of pollen being released, of particles moving in the heat, that all the minute motions together create a continuous him: the sound of summer.”
“For some reason Canon Fenneau made me feel a little uneasy. His voice might be soft, it was also coercive. He had small eyes, a large loose mouth, the lips thick, a somewhat receding chin. The eyes were the main feature. They were unusual eyes, not only almost unnaturally small, but vague, moist, dreamy, the eyes of a medium. His cherubic side, increased by a long slightly uptilted nose, was a little too good to be true, with eyes like that. In the manner in which he gave you all his attention there was a taste for mastery.”
“The past--the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember.”
“She turned to the sunlight
And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbor:
"Winter is dead.”
“You're a terrible cook, Daniel."
"I know," he replied, "But it's the effort that counts."
"I hope that's not the slogan for your dental practice.”
“There are so many ways of escaping from that which one fears, and not the least of these is hatred.”
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