Best 42 quotes in «country life quotes» category

And if the world went to hell in a handbasket-as it seemed to be doing-you could say good-bye to everyone and retreat to your land, hunkering down and living off it.

I prefer the country life. I live in Kingston, but there is lots of trees.

The true India resides in its villages.

But, in Moon Cottage, they are still asleep. I let myself in quietly and make a pot of tea, and take it outside, to sit under the apple tree and feel pleased. In the Buttercup field, one of the newest calves born a couple of nights ago, feeds and nuzzles and then wanders a yard or two away from its mother. It is white as milk, huge-eyed. The wrens are flying in and out of the woodshed and the bluetits in and out of a hole in the wall, by some guttering. Over the fields and farms and rooftops of Barley, the sun climbs and climbs. The dew has almost dried. The best of the day is done.

Aside from forest fire, there's nothing to be afraid of in the woods, except yourself. If you've got sense, you can keep out of trouble. If you haven't got sense, you'll get into trouble, here or anywhere else.

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.

Arcady, like Death its denizen with us, is all around us, if we – stalled beasts who want to be set forth – but see it. Forth, then, with Dan Geoffrey upon the heye wey: Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste, out of thy stal! Know thy contree, look up, thank God of all; Hold the heye wey, and lat thy gost thee lede; And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede.

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.

...but these backwaters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion... ("Afterward")

Every nation must have prayerful men and women to intercede for the country’s well-being.

For the author as for God, standing outwith his creation, all times are one; all times are now. In mine own country, we accept as due and right – as very meet, right, and our bounden duty – the downs and their orchids and butterflies, the woods and coppices, ash, beech, oak, and field maple, rowan, wild cherry, holly, and hazel, bluebells in their season and willow, alder, and poplar in the wetter ground. We accept as proper and unremarkable the badger and the squirrel, the roe deer and the rabbit, the fox and the pheasant, as the companions of our walks and days. We remark with pleasure, yet take as granted, the hedgerow and the garden, the riot of snowdrops, primroses, and cowslips, the bright flash of kingfishers, the dart of swallows and the peaceful homeliness of house martins, the soft nocturnal glimmer of glow worm and the silent nocturnal swoop of owl.

I come here for the solitude. I come to soak myself in memories before they evaporate, before they float so far from my memory that I can't catch them.

How you live your life is up to you. You have to go out and grab the world by the horns. Rope it before it ties you down and decides for you.

If you constantly talk negative about your country, you'll never become the light in, or to your country.

I go from flying to drowning as I slide down the soul-deadening slippery slope I realize I’m on. I can’t breathe, can’t talk, suddenly realizing I’m an imposter. I’ve crossed the line. Wronged my girl. And in that few seconds of thought I feel fate strong-arm me, forcing me to turn and walk away like a helpless idiot needing to be put out of his misery.

In East Sussex, let us say, an old farm sleeps in sun-dapple, its oast-house with its cowls echoing the distant steeple of SS Andrew and Mary, Fletching, where de Montfort had prayed and Gibbon now sleeps out a sceptic’s eternity. The Sussex Weald is quiet now, its bows and bowmen that did affright the air at Agincourt long dust. A Chalk Hill Blue spreads peaceable wings upon the hedge. Easter is long sped, yet yellow and lavender yet ornament the land, in betony and dyer’s greenweed and mallows. An inquisitive whitethroat, rejoicing in man’s long opening of the Wealden country, trills jauntily from atop a wall.

I know perfectly well that it is impossible, according to arithmetic and scholarly books, to live in a far valley off a handful of ewes and two low yield cows. But we live, I say. You children all lived; your sisters now have sturdy children in far-off districts. And what you are now carrying under your heart will also live and be welcome, little one, despite arithmetic and scholarly books.

I’ll save a spot for you on the hood of my truck.

In a city the multiplicity of threads forced a whirling confusion on the loom but here the simple pattern and the slow weaving made purpose more discernible.

I jump on Lane’s back. He catches my legs around his sides, holding on tight, and I wrap my arms around his neck. Mmmmm. “You smell good.” My heart thrums inside my chest, purring like a kitten. The gang’s ahead of us. It’s safe to sneak a peck on the cheek. I brush my nose against his jaw line so I can inhale his cologne again. “That was so smooth. Where’d you get moves like that?” He snickers.

I think, probably, whether your're better off in the country or in the city depends, in the final analysis, on where you'd rather be. You're best off where you're the happiest.

I saw a pair of great tits some days ago. (Massingham Major, you are a dirty-minded boy, and if you snigger again, you will do five hundred lines.) The squeaking-wheel song of Parus major is always gladsome, a precursor to interesting scenes at the bird table. On this occasion, however, what hearing and seeing the two greenery-yallery Paridæ first called up in me was a memory from last year’s early Springtide: an ærial near-collision. A very young squirrel – native red, I am rejoiced to say – was leaping from one tree trunk to another, adjacent, just as a great tit was exploding outwards in flight from the second tree. You never saw a more indignant bird or a more startled squirrel in your life.

I think it's my memory of this period that makes me fantasise about living in the country. In reality I know there would be no shops and I would kill myself.

Puttin’ on a cowboy hat & a pair of boots doesn’t make you country; Like puttin’ on a ball gown & glass heels won’t make me Cinderella.

Little girl, little boy If love has a way Fill their fields with laughter And scatter the sun on their day And if it should happen to rain Make their raindrops kisses Straight from heaven above That touch their hands and faces And that fill them with love And make the moon reflect their smiles And their stars plenty And, above all, keep them together And hold them as you may Forever and ever Until their last day.

Not by human dwellings--not in crowded cities alone, are the sights and sounds of life. The wildest places of the earth are full of them.

Or awa’ upon Islay, in January, the wind was honed to a cutting edge across the queer flatness of Loch Gorm and the strand and fields ’round. The roe deer had taken shelter in good time and the brown trout had sought deeper waters. An auld ram alone huddled against the wind, that had swept clear the skies even of eagle, windcuffer, and goose. The scent of saltwater rode the wind over the freshwater loch, and the dry field-grasses rattled, and there was the memory of peat upon the air: a whisky wind in Islay. The River Leòig was forced back upon itself as the wind whipped the loch to whitecaps; only the cairn and the Standing Stones stood unyielding in the blast as of old.

So you’ve been capturing mice and releasing them here?” “Yes, anything wrong with that?” “The thing is, if they’re house mice, they’ll just go on back home. You’ve probably been catching the same ones each day.” She considered for a moment and he tried very hard not to laugh. “I doubt it. The place is overrun with them. It’s really not up to standard. I suspect the landlord’s name is Rackman.

That's the mark of true friends. That we might not see each other for a year but when we do it's as if we were never apart.

The air was fresh and crisp and had a distinct smell which was a mixture of the dried leaves on the ground and the smoke from the chimneys and the sweet ripe apples that were still clinging onto the branches in the orchard behind the house.

The milking machines sounded tranquilizing, and there was the collegiality of seventy animal spirits thriving, warming the barn with cud-chewing, nose-snuffling, and sisterly mammalhood.

We move, all of us, in sprung rhythm: for our world – whether we conceive it as broad or as cosy – is, not to out-Manley Fr Hopkins, as ringèd and streakèd and specklèd as the cattle of Laban.

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.

Warm familiar scents drift softly from the oven, And imprint forever upon our hearts That this is home and that we are loved.

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.

The three weapons to use against axe cuts are: (a) sense enough not to get cut, (b) a good working knowledge of how to apply a tourniquet, if the worst occurs, and (c) a philosophical attitude.

We need only to close our eyes and we are back on the Third Line, walking up the lane, through the yard and entering the bright, warm kitchen. We are home again.

...when I offered to either stay and help or go bake a pie, it was the pie that was most needed. It took six pies to finish the roof. I had not known that pies were such an important part of construction.

We was just kids, we did kid stuff. And we didn’t have things to do like people in the city. We couldn’t catch the bus to the beach or the movies or hang out in big shopping malls. We had to ride everywhere or shanks it. Go for a milkshake at the roadhouse, check out the tip. Because there was no KFC or Subway. We’d walk along the highway looking for eagle feathers.

What a happy woman I am living in a garden, with books, babies, birds, and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment, and I don't know what besides, and would rend the air with their shrieks if condemned to such a life. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find my happiness so easily. I believe I should always be good if the sun always shone, and could enjoy myself very well in Siberia on a fine day. And what can life in town offer in the way of pleasure to equal the delight of any one of the calm evenings I have had this month sitting alone at the foot of the verandah steps, with the perfume of young larches all about, and the May moon hanging low over the beeches, and the beautiful silence made only more profound in its peace by the croaking of distant frogs and hooting of owls?

What use cities have for us? Their greatest use is to make us to realise the beauties of the rural life!

When does the year begin? Well: that rather depends: on who you are, and where. The Church kalendar – like the academic, which is hewn of the ecclesiastical – begins after the harvest-tide, with Advent, a time of preparation, light kindling and shining forth even as darkness gathers. The countryman’s calendar is governed by the rhythms of the earth, of sowing and of harvest. The angler’s year, the shooting man’s, the hunter’s, all these are in the disposition of God – or Nature, if you fancy yourself allergic to God – even as is the countryman’s.