Countryside Quotes

“She was too honest, too natural for this frightened man; too remote from his tidy laws. She was, after all, a country girl; disordered, hysterical, loving. She was muddled and mischievous as a chimney-jackdaw, she made her nest of rags and jewels, was happy in the sunlight, squawked loudly at danger, pried and was insatiably curious, forgot when to eat or ate all day, and sang when sunsets were red.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“From then on, it was even twistier B-roads through a country so photgenically rural that I half expected to meet Bilbo Baggins around the next corner - providing he'd taken to driving a Nissan Micra.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Foxglove Summer

“The real world, in my opinion, exists in the countryside, where Nature goes about her quiet business and brings us greatest pleasure.”
― Fennel Hudson, A Meaningful Life - Fennel's Journal - No. 1

“Country things are the necessary root of our life - and that remains true even of a rootless and tragically urban civilization. To live permanently away from the country is a form of slow death.”
― Esther Meynell

“Swamps where cedars grow and turtles wait on logs but not for anything in particular; fields bordered by crooked fences broken by years of standing still; orchards so old they have forgotten where the farmhouse is. In the north I have eaten my lunch in pastures rank with ferns and junipers, all under fair skies with a wind blowing.”
― E.B. White, Stuart Little

“She grew up in the ordinary paradise of the English countryside. When she was five she walked to school, two miles, across meadows covered with cowslips, buttercups, daisies, vetch, rimmed by hedges full of blossom and then berries, blackthorn, hawthorn, dog-roses, the odd ash tree with its sooty buds.”
― A.S. Byatt, Ragnarok

“I could see every pebble on the path, and every blade of grass, by that splendid moon.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“The moon was coming slowly up over the hill in front of them. The countryside was bathed in light, pale and cold and silvery. Everything could be seen quite plainly, and Lotta and Jimmy thought it was just like daytime with the colours missing.”
― Enid Blyton, Mr Galliano's Circus

“It was getting dark by the time I went out, and nobody who knows the country will need to be told how black is the darkness of a November night under high laurel bushes and yew-trees. I walked into the heart of the shrubberies two or three times, not seeing a step before me, till I came out upon the broader carriage-road, where the trees opened a little, and there was a faint grey glimmer of sky visible, under which the great limes and elms stood darkling like ghosts; but it grew black again as I approached the corner where the ruins lay. ("The Open Door")”
― Margaret Oliphant, The Gentlewomen of Evil: An Anthology of Rare Supernatural Stories from the Pens of Victorian Ladies

“The moon grew plump and pale as a peeled apple, waned into the passing nights, then showed itself again as a thin silver crescent in the twilit western sky. The shed of leaves became a cascade of red and gold and after a time the trees stood skeletal against a sky of weathered tin. The land lay bled of its colors. The nights lengthened, went darker, brightened in their clustered stars. The chilled air smelled of woodsmoke, of distances and passing time. Frost glimmered on the morning fields. Crows called across the pewter afternoons. The first hard freeze cast the countryside in ice and trees split open with sounds like whipcracks. Came a snow flurry one night and then a heavy falling the next day, and that evening the land lay white and still under a high ivory moon.”
― James Carlos Blake, Wildwood Boys

“Townsfolk have no conception of the peace that mother nature bestows, and as long as that peace is unfound the spirit must seek to quench its thirst with ephemeral novelties. And what is more natural that that of the townsman's feverish search for pleasure should mould people of unstable, hare-brained character, who think only of their personal appearance and their clothes and find momentary comfort in foolish fashions and other such worthless innovations? The countryman, on the other hand walks out into the verdant meadows, into an atmosphere clear and pure, and as he breaths it into his lungs some unknown power streams through his limbs, invigorating body and soul. The peace in nature fills his mind with calm and cheer, the bright green grass under his feet awakens a sense of beauty, almost of reverence. In the fragrance that is borne so sweetly to his nostrils, in the quietude that broods so blissfully around him, there is comfort and rest. The hillsides, the dingles, the waterfalls, and the mountains are all friends of his childhood, and never to be forgotten.”
― Halldór Laxness, Independent People

“In the country, especially, there are such a lot of entertaining things. I can walk over everybody's land, and look at everybody's view, and dabble in everybody's brook; and enjoy it just as much as though I owned the land--and with no taxes to pay!”
― Jean Webster

“I was struck again by the deep quiet of the countryside, the absence of any human sounds; my mind still expected the clamor of cars, voices, all the clatter of nonstop human movement. Here was only the hushed patter of the drizzle, the call of birds in faraway trees. The air was impossibly sweet, like wine. A crow called from somewhere, its voice dark and throaty.”
― Simone St. James, The Haunting of Maddy Clare

“Every step of the road was just as she'd dreamt it all the time she'd been away. Every step took her further away from the smoke and the noise and the loneliness and fear of the city she'd left behind. Every step drew her deeper into the hollows of the landscape, the green hills and shining rivers and mist-tangled treetops.”
― Jon McGregor, So Many Ways to Begin

“The train whistled, and chuffed out of the station. The children pressed their noses to the window and watched the dirty houses and the tall chimneys race by. How they hated the town! How lovely it would be to be in the clean country, with flowers growing everywhere, and birds singing in the hedges! Pg 5”
― Enid Blyton

“We live, all of us, in sprung rhythm. Even in cities, folk stir without knowing it to the surge in the blood that is the surge and urgency of season. In being born, we have taken seisin of the natural world, and as ever, it is the land which owns us, not we, the land. Even in the countryside, we dwell suspended between the rhythms of earth and season, weather and sky, and those imposed by metropolitan clocks, at home and abroad.
When does the year begin? No; ask rather, When does it not? For us – all of us – as much as for Mr Eliot, midwinter spring is its own season; for all of us, if we but see it, our world is as full of time-coulisses as was Thomas Mann’s.
Countrymen know this, with the instinct they share with their beasts. Writers want to know it also, and to articulate what the countryman knows and cannot, perhaps, express to those who sense but do not know, immured in sad conurbations, rootless amidst Betjeman’s frightful vision of soot and stone, worker’s flats and communal canteens, where it is the boast of pride that a man doesn’t let the grass grow under his feet.
As both countryman and writer, I have a curious relationship to time.”
― G.M.W. Wemyss

“The Sussex lanes were very lovely in the autumn . . . spendthrift gold and glory of the year-end . . . earth scents and the sky winds and all the magic of the countryside which is ordained for the healing of the soul.”
― Monica Baldwin

“Growing up where she did, Beatrix had developed a romantic and adventurous nature, and she had no outlet for it any more. The happiest times I can remember spending with them were when we drove out - twice, I think - to the Long Mynd for a picnic. Roger had long since traded in his motorbike and scraped together enough money to buy a second-hand Morris Minor. Somehow we all squeezed into this (I seem to recall sitting in the front passenger seat, Beatrix sitting behind me with the baby on her lap) and drove out for the afternoon to those wonderful Shropshire hills. I wonder if you have ever walked on them yourself, Imogen. They are part of your story, you know. So many things have changed, changed beyond recognition, in the almost sixty years since the time I'm now recalling, but the Long Mynd is not one of them. In the last few months I have been too ill to walk there, but I did manage to visit in the last spring, to offer what I already sensed would be my final farewells. Places like this are important to me - to all of us - because they exist outside the normal timespan. You can stand on the backbone of the Long Mynd and not know if you are in the 1940s, the 2000s, the tenth or eleventh century... It is all immaterial, all irrelevant. The gorse and the purple heather are unchanging, and so are the sheeptracks which cut through them and criss-cross them, the twisted rocky outcrops which surprise you at every turn, the warm browns of the bracken, the distant greys of the conifer plantations, tucked far away down in secretive valleys. You cannot put a price on the sense of freedom and timelessness that is granted to you there, as you stand on the high ridge beneath a flawless sky of April blue and look across at the tame beauties of the English countryside, to the east, and to the west a hint of something stranger - the beginnings of the Welsh mountains”
― Jonathan Coe, The Rain Before it Falls

“The first sight of the Rapstone Valley is of something unexpectedly isolated and uninterruptedly rural; a solitary jogger is the only outward sign of urban pollution.”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“Our stomachs live in towns," said Mma Potokwani, patting the front of her dress. 'That is where the work is. Our stomachs know that. But our hearts are usually somewhere else.”
― McCall Smith, Alexander

“I do not like war, because war happens in the countryside, and the countryside bores me.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline

“Which was what she hated about the countryside, no distraction from the dirty messed-up workings of the heart.”
― Mark Haddon, The Red House

“At all times and in all places, in season and out of season, time is now and England, place is now and England; past and present inter-penetrate. The best days an angler spends upon his river – the river which is Heraclitus’ river, which is never the same as the angler is never the same, yet is the same always – are those he recollects in tranquillity, as wintry weather lashes the land without, and he, snug and warm, ties new patterns of dry-fly, and remembers the leaf-dapple upon clear water and the play of light and the eternal dance of ranunculus in the chalk-stream. A cricket match between two riotously inexpert village Second XIs is no less an instance of timeless, of time caught in ritual within an emerald Arcadia, than is a Test at Lord’s, and we who love the greatest of games know that we do indeed catch a fleeting glimpse of a spectral twelfth man on every pitch, for in each re-enactment of the mystery there is the cumulation of all that has gone before and shall come after. Et ego in Arcadia.”
― G.M.W. Wemyss

“Being in the country is like being in a dream—one doesn't quite know who one is. There is an anonymity to it all—that strange human creature that is me, one among all.”
― Meia Geddes, Love Letters to the World

“You know (to adopt the easy or conversational style) that you and I belong to a happy minority. We are the sons of the hunters and the wandering singers, and from our boyhood nothing ever gave us greater pleasure than to stand under lonely skies in forest clearings, or to find a beach looking westward at evening over unfrequented seas. But the great mass of men love companionship so much that nothing seems of any worth compared with it. Human communion is their meat and drink, and so they use the railways to make bigger and bigger hives for themselves.”
― Hilaire Belloc, On Nothing and Kindred Subjects

“You should enjoy the freedom. Sometimes a bit of time helps you see what matters.”
― Abby Clements, Amelia Grey's Fireside Dream

“During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a practical knowledge of the construction of small lakes was part of the equipment of most countrymen. Many of the holes they dug and dams they built still hold water and are now often regarded as 'natural.' They are of immeasurable value in the landscape.”
― Elisabeth Beazley, Designed for recreation: A practical handbook for all concerned with providing leisure facilities in the countryside;

“Angling is just a way of relaxing and escaping in the countryside.”
― Fennel Hudson, A Meaningful Life - Fennel's Journal - No. 1

“We get so used to the gregarious nature of our towns and villages that we forget how crowded our existence has become.”
― Fennel Hudson, Wild Carp: Fennel's Journal No. 4

“In New York, I would walk down shadowy sidewalks dreaming of the openness of central Ohio, yearning for roads flanked by fields, for their freedom and isolation. These roads cradled me. I realized this now. I’d been trying to hate Ohio, because it was so hard to be at home. But the land had actually always been there for me all along. As a child, the moon had lit my room on sad nights. I’d wandered cornfields and puttered around at Lehman’s Pond. Those were some of my best childhood memories.”
― Julie Barton, Dog Medicine