Flora Thompson Quotes

Afterwards, they always had tea in the kitchen, much the nicest room in the house.

There Laura spent many happy hours, supposed to be picking fruit for jam, but for the better part of the time reading or dreaming. One corner, overhung by a Samson tree and walled in with bushes and flowers, she called her 'green study'.

Twas a still, calm night and the moon's pale light Shone over hill and dale When friends mute with grief stood around the deathbed Of their loved, lost Lily Lyle. Heart as pure as forest lily Never knowing guile, Had its home within the bosom Of sweet Lily Lyle.

When I am dead and in my head And all my bones are are rotten, Take this book and think of me And mind I'm not forgotten.

For myself I would desire a combination of old romance and modern machinery.

One boy's a boy; two boys be half a boy, and three boys be no boy at all', ran the old country saying.

Traditions and customs which had lasted for centuries did not die out in a moment.

Candleford Green was but a small village and there were fields and meadows and woods all around it. As soon as Laura crossed the doorstep, she could see some of these. But mere seeing from a distance did not satisfy her; she longed to go alone far into the fields and hear the birds singing, the brooks tinkling, and the wind rustling through the corn, as she had when a child. To smell things and touch things, warm earth and flowers and grasses, and to stand and gaze where no one could see her, drinking it all in.

No, I be-ant expectin' nothin', but I be so yarnin

Brains were no good to a working man; they only made him discontented and saucy and lose his jobs. She'd seen it happen again and again.

People were poorer and had not the comforts, amusements, or knowledge we have today; but they were happier.

they liked to fancy themselves bubbles of earth. When alone in the fields, with no one to see them, they would hop, skip and jump, touching the ground as lightly as possible and crying ‘We are bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth!’ —Flora Thompson, Lark Rise

There is something exhilarating about pay-day, even when the pay is poor and already mortgaged for necessities. With

to make up in an hour for all their wasted yesterdays.

No book's too old for anybody who is able to enjoy it, and none too young, either, for that matter. Let her read what she likes.

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The singers were rude and untaught and poor beyond modern imagining; but they deserve to be remembered, for they knew the now lost secret of being happy on little.

A little later, remembering man’s earthly origin, ‘dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return,’ they liked to fancy themselves bubbles of earth. When alone in the fields, with no one to see them, they would hop, skip and jump, touching the ground as lightly as possible and crying ‘We are bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth!’ —Flora Thompson, Lark Rise

Many of the great eaters grew very stout in later life; but this caused them no uneasiness; they regarded their [Pg 390] expanding girth as proper to middle age. Thin people were not admired. However cheerful and energetic they might appear, they were suspected of 'fretting away their fat' and warned that they were fast becoming 'walking miseries'.

The human eye loves to rest upon wide expanses of pure colour: the moors in the purple heyday of the heather, miles of green downland, and the sea when it lies calm and blue and boundless, all delight it; but to some none of these, lovely though they all are, can give the same satisfaction of spirit as acres upon acres of golden corn. There is both beauty and bread and the seeds of bread for future generations.

And all the time boys were being born or growing up in the parish, expecting to follow the plough all their lives or, at most, to do a little mild soldiering or go to work in a town. Gallipoli? Kut? Vimy Ridge? Ypres? What did they know of such places? But they were to know them, and when the time came they did not flinch. Eleven out of that tiny community never came back again. A brass plate on the wall of the church immediately over the old end house seat is engraved with their names. A double column, five names long, then, last and alone, the name of Edmund.

Over To Candleford Chapter XXVIII: Growing Pains "This accumulated depression of months slid from her at last in a moment. She had run out into the fields one day in a pet and was standing on a small stone bridge looking down on brown running water flecked with cream-coloured foam. It was a dull November day with grey sky and mist. The little brook was scarcely more than a trench to drain the fields; but overhanging it were thorn bushes with a lacework of leafless twigs; ivy had sent trails down the steep banks to dip in the stream, and from every thorn on the leafless twigs and from every point of the ivy leaves water hung in bright drops, like beads. A flock of starlings had whirred up from the bushes at her approach and the clip, clop of a cart-horse's hoofs could be heard on the nearest road, but these were the only sounds. Of the hamlet, only a few hundred yards away, she could hear no sound, or see as much as a chimney-pot, walled in as she was by the mist. Laura looked and looked again. The small scene, so commonplace and yet so lovely, delighted her." It was so near the homes men and yet so far removed from their thoughts. The fresh green moss, the glistening ivy, and the reddish twigs with their sparkling drops seemed to have been made for her alone and the hurrying, foam-flecked water seemed to have some message for her. She felt suddenly uplifted. The things which had troubled her troubled her no more. She did not reason. She had already done plenty of reasoning. Too much, perhaps. She simply stood there and let it all sink in until she felt that her own small affairs did not matter. Whatever happened to her, this, and thousands of other such small, lovely sights would remain and people would come suddenly upon them and look and be glad. A wave of pure happiness pervaded her being, and, although it soon receded, it carried away with it her burden of care. Her first reaction was to laugh aloud at herself. What a fool she had been to make so much of so little.

It sometimes seems to us that some impression of those now dead must be left upon their familiar earthly surroundings. We saw them, on such a day, in such a spot, in such an attitude, smiling - or not smiling - and the impression of the scene is so deeply engraved upon our own hearts that we feel they must have left some more enduring trace, though invisible to mortal eyes.

After her husband died, she went away to live with her eldest son, and the round house shared the fate of Sally's. Where it stood is now a ploughed field. The husband's sacrifices, the wife's romance, are as though they had never been - 'melted into air, into thin air.

When Laura visited the hamlet just before the war, the roof had fallen in, the yew hedge had run wild and the flowers were gone, excepting one pink rose which was shedding its petals over the ruin. Today, all has gone, and only the limey whiteness of the soil in a corner of a ploughed field is left to show that a cottage once stood there.

Lo extrañé mucho. Más que cualquier otra cosa de la que me haya visto obligado a desprenderme, lo que no es poco decir, y aún lo echo de menos ahora y siempre lo haré. Pero fue por una buena causa y en este mundo no podemos tener todo lo que queremos. No sería bueno para nosotros.

La gente era más pobre entonces y carecía de las comodidades, las diversiones y los conocimientos que tenemos hoy en día; y a pesar de todo, eran más felices. Lo que parece sugerir que la felicidad depende en mayor medida del estado de la mente —y quizás del cuerpo— que de las circunstancias y eventos que nos rodean.

You don't want to be poor and look poor, too,' they would say; and 'We've got our pride. Yes, we've got our pride.