Cider with Rosie Quotes

“Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn't raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“She was too honest, too natural for this frightened man; too remote from his tidy laws. She was, after all, a country girl; disordered, hysterical, loving. She was muddled and mischievous as a chimney-jackdaw, she made her nest of rags and jewels, was happy in the sunlight, squawked loudly at danger, pried and was insatiably curious, forgot when to eat or ate all day, and sang when sunsets were red.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“She leaned out of the window slow and sleepy, and the light came through her nightdress like sand through a sieve.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“The prospect Smiler was a manic farmer. Few men I think can have been as unfortunate as he; for on the one hand he was a melancholic with a loathing for mankind, on the other, some paralysis had twisted his mouth into a permanent and radiant smile. So everyone he met, being warmed by his smile, would shout him a happy greeting. And beaming upon them with his sunny face he would curse them all to hell.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“Granny Trill and Granny Wallon were traditional ancients of a kind we won’t see today, the last of that dignity of grandmothers to whom age was its own embellishment. The grandmothers of those days dressed for the part in that curious but endearing uniform which is now known to us only through music-hall. And our two old neighbours, when setting forth on errands, always prepared themselves scrupulously so. They wore high laced boots and long muslin dresses, beaded chokers and candlewick shawls, crowned by tall poke bonnets tied with trailing ribbons and smothered with inky sequins. They looked like starlings, flecked with jet, and they walked in a tinkle of darkness.

Those severe and similar old bodies enthralled me when they dressed that way. When I finally became King (I used to think) I would command a parade of grandmas, and drill them, and march them up and down - rank upon rank of hobbling boots, nodding bonnets, flying shawls, and furious chewing faces. They would be gathered from all the towns and villages and brought to my palace in wagon-loads. No more than a monarch’s whim, of course, like eating cocoa or drinking jellies; but far more spectacular any day than those usual trudging guardsmen.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“So with the family gone, Mother lived as she wished ... Slowly, snugly, she grew into her background, warm on her grassy bank, poking and peering among the flowery bushes, dishevelled and bright as they. Serenely unkempt were those final years, free from conflict, doubt or dismay, while she reverted gently to a rustic simplicity as a moss-rose reverts to a wild one.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“Night odours come drifting from woods and gardens; sweet musks and sharp green acids. In the sky the fat stars bounce up and down, rhythmically, as we trudge along. Glow-worms, brighter than lamps or candles, spike the fields with their lemon fires, while huge horned beetles stumble out of the dark and buzz blindly around our heads.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie: A Memoir

“We carried cut hay from the heart of the rick, packed tight as tobacco flake, with grass and wild flowers juicily fossilized within – a whole summer embalmed in our arms.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“She could grow them anywhere, at any time, and they seemed to live longer for her. She grew them with rough, almost slap-dash love, but her hands possessed such an understanding of their needs they seemed to turn to her like another sun. She could snatch a dry root from field or hedgerow, dab it into the garden, give it a shake and almost immediately it flowered. One felt she could grow roses from a stick or chair-leg, so remarkable was this gift. Our”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie: A Memoir

“The village in fact was like a deep-running cave still linked to its antic past, a cave whose shadows were cluttered by spirits and by laws still vaguely ancestral. This cave that we inhabited looked backwards through chambers that led to our ghostly beginnings; and had not, as yet, been tidied up, or scrubbed clean by electric light, or suburbanized by a Victorian church, or papered by cinema screens.

It was something we just had time to inherit, to inherit and dimly know - the blood and beliefs of generations who had been in this valley since the Stone Age. That continuous contact has at last been broken, the deeper caves sealed off forever. But arriving, as I did, at the end of that age, I caught whiffs of something old as the glaciers. There were ghosts in the stones, in the trees, and the walls, and each field and hill had several. The elder people knew about these things and would refer to them in personal terms, and there were certain landmarks about the valley - tree clumps, corners in the woods - that bore separate, antique, half-muttered names that were certainly older than Christian.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider With Rosie

“I was at that age which feels neither strain nor friction, when the body burns magic fuels, so that it seems to glide in warm air, about a foot off the ground, smoothly obeying its intuitions. Even exhaustion, when it came, had a voluptuous quality, and sleep was caressive and deep, like oil. It was the peak of the curve of the body’s total extravagance, before the accounts start coming in.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie: A Memoir

“When I judged it to be tea-time I sat on an old stone wall and opened my tin of treacle biscuits. As I ate them I could hear mother banging the kettle on the hob and my brothers rattling their tea-cups. The biscuits tasted sweetly of the honeyed squalor of home – still only a dozen miles away.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie: A Memoir

“With her love of finery, her unmade beds, her litters of unfinished scrapbooks, her taboos, superstitions, and prudishness, her remarkable dignity, her pity for the persecuted, her awe of the gentry, and her detailed knowledge of the family trees of all the Royal Houses of Europe, she was a disorganized mass of unreconciled denials, a servant girl born to silk. Yet in spite of all this, she fed our oafish wits with steady, imperceptible shocks of beauty. Though”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie: A Memoir

“He held the landlordship of an inn to be the same as Shaw’s definition of marriage – as something combining the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“Our village was clearly no pagan paradise, neither were we conscious of showing tolerance. It was just the way of it. We certainly committed our share of statutory crime. Manslaughter, arson, robbery, rape cropped up regularly throughout the years. Quiet incest flourished where the roads were bad; some found their comfort in beasts; and there were the usual friendships between men and boys who walked through the fields like lovers. Drink, animality, and rustic boredom were responsible for most. The village neither approved nor disapproved, but neither did it complain to authority. Sometimes our sinners were given hell, taunted, and pilloried, but their crimes were absorbed in the local scene and their punishment confined to the parish.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“But if you survived melancholia and rotting lungs it was possible to live long in this valley.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“The state of our fire became as important to us as it must have been to a primitive tribe. When it sulked and sank we were filled with dismay; when it blazed all was well with the world; but if – God save us – it went out altogether, then we were clutched by primeval chills.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“We were as merciless and cruel as most primitives are. But we learnt at that school the private nature of cruelty; and our inborn hatred for freaks and outcasts was tempered by meeting them daily.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“Vivir allí abajo era como vivir en una vaina de habichuela. Sólo veías el lecho en el que estabas. Nuestro horizonte de bosques era el límite de nuestro mundo. El viento agitaba los árboles semanas sin fin, con un seco rugido que parecía la expresión natural del paisaje. En invierno nos cercaban con púas congeladas, y en verano se derramaban sobre los bordes de los cerros como capas de densa lava verde. Por la mañana, humeaban cubiertos de niebla o de sol y al atardecer arrojaban siempre sobre nosotros haces de luz, reflejo de crepúsculos que no podíamos ver porque estábamos demasiado hundidos.”
― Laurie Lee, Sidra con Rosie (Otras Latitudes nº 46)

“Our terraced strip of garden was Mother’s monument, and she worked it headstrong, without plan. She would never control or clear this ground, merely cherish whatever was there; and she was as impartial in her encouragement to all that grew as a spell of sweet sunny weather. She would force nothing, graft nothing, nor set things in rows; she welcomed self-seeders, let each have its head, and was the enemy of very few weeds. Consequently our garden was a sprouting jungle and never an inch was wasted.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“Ay, cómo trabajaban las chicas entonces; antes del amanecer ya estaban en pie, muertas de sueño, para disponer veinte o treinta fuegos. Barrer, fregar, limpiar y pulir se hacía sólo para volver a hacerlo. Lavar montañas de vajilla y cubertería, corretear escaleras arriba y abajo; y aquellas campanillas irascibles que empezaban a resonar como en una rabieta… Justo cuando lograbas sentarte un instante.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie