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.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, quote from Meadowland: the private life of an English field
“To stand alone in a field in England and listen to the morning chorus of the birds is to remember why life is precious.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, quote from Meadowland: the private life of an English field
“Almost all the things I love are to do with grass. Geese, sheep, cows, horses. Even dogs eat grass.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, quote from Meadowland: the private life of an English field
“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.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, quote from Meadowland: the private life of an English field
“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.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, quote from Meadowland: the private life of an English field
“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.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, quote from Meadowland: the private life of an English field
“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.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, quote from Meadowland: the private life of an English field
“Alex smiled at Andy's words and then joined in the sudden biscuit battle that broke out. Thrang yelled madly at them for wasting food, but that only made him a target for everyone else.”
― M.L. Forman, quote from Slathbog's Gold
“Richards and Maureen Sherbondy, also contributed their ideas at various points in the story, as did my sister, Joann Scanlon, and my assistant,”
― Diane Chamberlain, quote from The Midwife's Confession
“Do not call up that which you cannot put down.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
“An observer who is sitting eccentrically on the disc K' is sensible of a force which acts outwards in a radial direction, and which would be interpreted as an effect of inertia (centrifugal force) by an observer who was at rest with respect to the original reference-body K. But the observer on the disc may regard his disc as a reference body which is “at rest”; on the basis of the general principle of relativity he is justified in doing this. The force acting on himself, and in fact on all other bodies which are at rest relative to the disc, he regards as the effect of a gravitational field.”
― Albert Einstein, quote from Relativity: The Special and the General Theory
“Werther identifies himself with the madman, with the footman. As a reader, I can identify myself with Werther. Historically, thousands of subjects have done so, suffering, killing themselves, dressing, perfuming themselves, writing as if they were Werther (songs, poems, candy boxes, belt buckles, fans, colognes a' la Werther). A long chain of equivalences links all the lovers in the world. In the theory of literature, "projection" (of the reader into the character) no longer has any currency: yet it is the appropriate tonality of imaginative readings: reading a love story, it is scarcely adequate to say I project myself; I cling to the image of the lover, shut up with his image in the very enclosure of the book (everyone knows that such stories are read in a state of secession, of retirement, of voluptuous absence: in the toilet).”
― Roland Barthes, quote from A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
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