Exmoor Quotes

He stared at Avery's socks and felt an odd sense of wonder. Socks were so normal. So mundane. How could someone who pulled on socks in the morning be a serial killer? Socks were not hard or dangerous. Socks were funny; foot mittens, that's what socks were. They made a knobbly hinge of your toes and became comical sock-puppets. Surely anyone who wore socks could not truly be a threat to him or anyone else?

When the bees’ feet shake the bells of the heather, and the ruddy strings of the sap-stealing dodder are twined about the green spikes of the furze, it is summertime on the commons. Exmoor is the high country of the winds, which are to the falcons and the hawks: clothed by whortleberry bushes and lichens and ferns and mossed trees in the goyals, which are to the foxes, the badgers, and the red deer: served by rain-clouds and drained by rock-littered streams, which are to the otters.

People say that certain sounds can melt a heart of stone. If there is anyone who has that sort of a heart―which I doubt (as far as I am aware hearts are made of fibrous materials, fluid sacs and pumping mechanisms)―if anyone does have a heart composed of granite or flint and therefore not at all prone to melting but just conceivably meltable when exposed to very beautiful sounds, then the sounds made by my cherrywood harp, I am confident, would do it. However, I had a feeling the heart of Ellie the Exmoor Housewife was completely lacking in stony components. I had a feeling it was made of much softer stuff.

Least said soonest mended, because less chance of breaking.

for boys of twelve are not yet prone to note the shapes of women;

With a cold barren weariness that quenched the dry glow of anger, he thought, What can you do about these people? The terrible thing is, there are such a lot of them. There are so many, they expect to meet each other wherever they go. Not wicked, he thought: that’s not the word, that’s sentimentality. These are just runts. Souls with congenitally short necks and receding brows. They don’t sin in the sight of heaven and feel despair: they only throw away lighted cigarettes on Exmoor, and go on holiday leaving the cat to starve, and drive on after accidents without stopping. A wicked man nowadays can set millions of them in motion, and when he’s gone howling mad from looking at his own face, they’ll be marching still with their mouths open and their hands hanging by their knees, on and on and on. …

Be-or, be-or, be-or, all day long, with you Englishmen!' 'Nay,' I replied, 'not all day long, if madam will excuse me. Only a pint at breakfast-time, and a pint and a half at eleven o'clock, and a quart or so at dinner. And then no more till the afternoon; and half a gallon at supper-time. No one can object to that.

It was Draven. He’d come up behind me. I jumped for a second time that morning, unable to help myself, then glared up at him. “How did you even do that?” “I have the ears of an exmoor and the tread of a fenrir,” he said with a smirk. “I’d say comparing yourself to wild animals was fitting, except the exmoor seems highly intelligent,” I muttered.

Avery adapted so fast he'd have blown a hole straight through Darwinism.

Decide what you want and then work out how to get it.

Steven was writing to the Devil and asking for mercy.

It was true that he was weary after having spent the last seven days traveling from Kent to the shadowed edges of the Exmoor Forest. It was also true that the wilds of Somerset and Cornwall were said to breed wraiths and other netherworld creatures, and Dunster was right in the middle of dark and mysterious lands. But being a man of logic, Sir Gart Forbes wasn’t one to believe in ghosts or phantoms or fairies. Still, he wasn’t quite sure what he had seen.

For nine women out of ten must have some kind of romance or other, to make their lives endurable; and when their love has lost this attractive element, this soft dew-fog (if such it be), the love itself is apt to languish; unless its bloom be well replaced by the budding hopes of children.

I for my part was most thankful that I had not killed. For to have the life of a fellow-man laid upon one's conscience—deserved he his death, or deserved it not—is to my sense of right and wrong the heaviest of all burdens; and the one that wears most deeply inwards, with the dwelling of the mind on this view and on that of it.

On the right-hand side was a mighty oven, where Betty threatened to bake us; and on the left, long sides of bacon, made of favoured pigs, and growing very brown and comely. Annie knew the names of all, and ran up through the wood-smoke, every now and then, when a gentle memory moved her, and asked them how they were getting on, and when they would like to be eaten. Then she came back with foolish tears, at thinking of that necessity; and I, being soft in a different way, would make up my mind against bacon. But, Lord bless you! it was no good. Whenever it came to breakfast-time, after three hours upon the moors, I regularly forgot the pigs, but paid good heed to the rashers.

He looked like a circus acrobat who had been reassigned to bedpans and taken to them like a duck to water. He didn't miss a beat while they talked and his military bed-making was hypnotic to watch (...) He stripped beds, bundled dirty sheets, shook out fresh ones and then wound mattresses in them as neat and as tight as if he ws working in the gift-wrap department of the Great Pyramid at Giza. M. wondered how the hell the old folk managed to fight their way between the top and bottoms sheets every night, and had a mental image of residents spending years shivering above the covers, too frail to gain entry to their won beds.

Too late we know the good from bad; the knowledge is no pleasure then; being memory's medicine rather than the wine of hope

Hope of course is nothing more than desire with a telescope, magnifying distant matters, overlooking near ones; opening one eye on the objects, closing the other to all objections. And if hope be the future tense of desire, the future of fear is religion—at least with too many of us.

Now this may seem very strange to us who live in a better and purer age—or say at least that we do so—and yet who are we to condemn our fathers for teaching us better manners, and at their own expense?

I for my part was nothing loath, and preferred to see London by daylight. And after all, it was not worth seeing, but a very hideous and dirty place, not at all like Exmoor.

to suffer his share of the discipline pool. It wasn't a deep pool, or a dangerous one, but what the hell; his mother had a short fuse and a punishment shared was a punishment halved in Steven's eyes. Maybe even a punishment escaped altogether.

The thought of three wasted years stretching out behind him was as shocking as if they were still to come.

But he was a tease. Like a woman! Like a Child! In fact, he wouldn't be surprised if SL was a woman after all!

He was sincere in his request, but he sure as hell wasn't Yours.

Like most young officers who were not nervously or physically broken by it, I enjoyed the War, or rather let me hasten to say, that part of it that was hectically lived out of gunshot. I was entirely thoughtless and prejudiced; accepted everything that came; reviling those whom the majority reviled; hating those I had never seen simply because everyone else did so; doing towards those I did not hate acts which were considered glorious and noble. After the Armistice, in an existence of inactivity and disintegration, I began to believe that this same attitude of mind which endowed glory and nobility to the acts which helped to make the World War was the very mental attitude that had made such a thing possible. This may appear mere sophistry, and a far jump from the logic of hunting to kill. Personally, I feel that the animals we hunt to kill are so near us in sense-feeling and joy of life, that it distresses me to see, for instance, an otter swimming slower and slower in shallow water between two lines of sportsmen barring the way up or down river. My feeling is then to join myself with the fatigued beast, and help him break a way to freedom. This feeling is of course thwarted, and my feelings are concealed: the feelings that a little creature is being bullied, shortly to be broken before my eyes, and, silent with cowardice, I do nothing to help him. My friends may say, ‘If you feel like that, why do you go otter-hunting?’ If I were candid I would reply that I went otter-hunting to see a certain girl, and talk to her, and try and convince her that I was a nice person, but very lonely. (12–14)

Louis’s twin brother Calvin was the white sheep of the family. At nineteen he had run away and joined the police. It made things awkward between them, of course, but Louis still loved his brother and each turned a blind eye to the other’s unfortunate career choices, and once a year they went camping together on Exmoor.

A View of Exmoor,

Dumb people were a breeze and Lynne Twitchett was right up there with the breeziest he’d encountered