Flora Thompson Quotes

It is the fashion to talk of our changing climate and bewail the hot summers and hard winters of tradition, but how seldom we pause to marvel at the remarkable constancy of the weather from year to year.

"Coming events cast their shadows before" quoted the clergyman...

Unlike most great talkers, the rooks are good workers, too.

Any artwork needs time and patience and needs above all a quiet mind.

There was no Victoria in the school ... That great name was sacred to the Queen and was not copied by her subjects to the extent imagined by period novelists of today. <small>— (ch. 11, School)</small>

"I don't believe in folks making a sort of mystery of themselves. I believe in being neighbourly , I do".

I do not compare the past with the present without a prejudice for either, but, great as the improvement in country life is in many respects, it seems a pity the old cheap, wholesome dishes have gone to make way for tinned and preserved foods.

Words as to the inner emotions do not come readily to me, for I have led an isolated life mentally and spiritually.

What is charm, it is not a moral quality.. it is not intellectual for no man by much thinking is able to add a grain of it to his personality. One either has it or has it not, it cannot be acquired or even cultivated. It is not physical even.. it seems to be added to the human personality, an aura, a glow, the gold dust upon a butterfly's wing, the bloom upon a peach.

Pale purple as the bloom on a ripe plum, veined with the gold of late flowering gorse, set with small slender birches, just turning yellow, with red-berried rowans and thicket of bracken, the heath lay steeped in sunshine.

So quiet and subtle is the beauty of December that escapes the notice of many people their whole lives through.. Colour gives way to form. every branch distinct, in a delicate tracery against the sky.. new vistas obscured all Summer by leafage, now open up.

A grasshopper shrilled in a tuft at her feet and was answered by other shrillings among the gorse bushes; a solitary rook flapped heavily overhead, and a pair of goldfinches twittered among the thistle-down; there was no other sound except the scarcely perceptible never-ceasing sighing of the wind in the pines and its rustling of acres of heath-bells.

They didn't want votes, either. A vote wasn't going to raise wages or make bread cheaper. What did it matter to them what Government was in power.

Now, with the glamour of the past upon them we are inclined to look back on old world festivities with regret and consider present day dances as a poor substitute for the old. From an artistic point of view, they maybe, but in individual freedom and independence of spirit they mark a stage upward.

and so the shadows ripple on
until it's time to part