Penelope Lively Quotes

Growing up in the country, you're left to the wilds of your imagination.

Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.

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

It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.

I want my children to live in the country, to be a part of nature.

I really do love being outdoors - I mean, you'd never think it in my high heels and pencil skirt! But I really do miss the smell of hay and farms, and I like milking a cow.

I'm a country girl. I have to be in nature, so my daughter is exposed to it a lot.

My life is the land, the dogs, the car, the motorcycle, the pond, the canoe, going to pick up mail. It's just a rural retreat that I enjoy.

The magic of living life for me is, and always has been, the magic of living on the land, not in the magic of money.

I grew up as a country boy.

I was brought up in a very open, rural countryside in the middle of nowhere. There were no cell phones. If your lights went out, you were lit by candlelight for a good four days before they can get to you. And so, my imagination was crazy.

The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.

I can't wait to get back to the ranch and go back to easy living.

I am a country boy at heart.

Small places intrigue me. Whenever I tried moving to a larger city, I ran back to the hills.

Country life is different from city life, but I think it was good for me. Working on the farm, I got a balance in my life.

I always turn to Wendell Berry for inspiration on food, community, agriculture, and, well, just being a human.

In our bones we need the natural curves of hills, the scent of chaparral, the whisper of pines, the possibility of wildness.

I suppose the pleasure of the country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live. That is a truism when said, but anything but a truism when daily observed. Nothing shows up the difference between the thing said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.

... Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, 'so far from everything?' When I hear this question over the phone, I'm usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.

There's something about living in the country that I think makes you inventive, because nature is full of miracles and wonder and surprises, and if you don't have much money, you have to make things if you want things.

A Song of the good green grass! A song no more of the city streets; A song of farms - a song of the soil of fields. A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork; A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk'd maize.

I consider it the best part of an education to have been born and brought up in the country.

One day in the country Is worth a month in town

I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live.