Laurie Lee Quotes

I was a town child, it is true, but that did not prevent me enjoying open-air life, with plants and animals.

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.

A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

In simple hearts the feeling for the beauty and grandeur of nature is a hundred-fold stronger and more vivid than in us, ecstatic composers of narratives in words and on paper.

All men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes.

Teach the children! It is painting in fresco.

Poetry is what makes my toenails twinkle.

That, lad," he said proudly, "was some of the worst poetry I have heard for a long time. It was offensive to the ear and a torrrture to the soul....We'll make a gonnagle out of ye yet!

The seeming significance of nature's appearances, their unchanging strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they awaken in the mind of man . . . If we could only write near enough to the facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transfer the glamour of reality direct upon our pages.

Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.

To see the Summer Sky Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie— True Poems flee—

Every living person and thing responds to beauty. We all thirst for it. We receive strength and renewal by seeing stirring and satisfying sites.

Poetry fettered fetters the human race.

There is but one poetry,--true poetry.

All in green went my love riding

Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

What makes poetry? A full heart, brimful of one noble passion.

Ultimately I have learned more about poetry, from music and magic than from literature.

The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs.

Language is the machine of the poet.

I went out under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal.

Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.

I have found by experience that they who have spent all their lives in cities contract not only an effeminacy of habit, but of thinking.