Best 13 quotes of Ronald Blythe on MyQuotes

Acceptance of death when it arrives is one thing, but to allow it to upstage the joys of living is ingratitude.

As for the British churchman, he goes to church as he goes to the bathroom, with the minimum of fuss and no explanation if he can help it.

Death used to announce itself in the thick of life but now people drag on so long it sometimes seems that we are reaching the stage when we may have to announce ourselves to death. It is as though one needs a special strength to die, and not a final weakness.

I sometimes think that God will ask us, 'That wonderful world of mine, why didn't you enjoy it more?

Jane Austen can in fact get more drama out of morality than most other writers can get from shipwreck, battle, murder, or mayhem.

Old age is - a lot of crossed off names in an address book.

One of the reasons why old people make so many journeys into the past is to satisfy themselves that it is still there.

The ordinariness of living to be old is too novel a thing to appreciate.

To be old is to be part of a huge and ordinary multitude... the reason why old age was venerated in the past was because it was extraordinary.

I have seen young boys in this village get married. They think it all bed, poor fellows. I see it quite different to this. I’m in no hurry at all. I must work. I mustn’t be worried or distracted. Not yet. I couldn’t spend time on my work if I was married.

My father worked on a farm - and his father. They both got very near to ninety, I believe. They were hardy old sorts. They never had a thing amiss with them. They worked and lived, and then kind of toppled over at the end. I should have been like them but my accident made the difference to me. The horses ran away with me on the farm. It was only two fields away from this house. It was a terrible accident; it jagged me all to pieces. The horses bolted in the field and ruined me. We were using the self-binder at the time. It was the second year I was in this village and thirty-eight year ago or more. I was at the top of the field whole and then at the bottom of the field, broken, and all in minutes. I should not have come here.

There is something treasonable about a child that does well. A market gardener I know, who is now about twenty, is a lonely person because he went to the grammar school and the village women say, ‘Didn’t get him far did it? All that schooling and he’s still on the land.’ Perhaps they know there is nothing like education for breaking up an ordinary country family.

We set to work to bury people. We pushed them into the sides of the trench but bits of them kept getting uncovered and sticking out, like people in a badly made bed. Hands were the worst; they would escape from the sand, pointing, begging - even waving! There was one which we all shook when we passed, saying, 'Good morning', in a posh voice. Everybody did it. The bottom of the trench was springy like a mattress because of all the bodies underneath.